Hi all,
I would like to start a spin-off thread from "Does Immunity Disprove the Fall?" thread. Certain posts with Faith were getting off-topic, so a new thread seems the best solution.
It started with this statement as regards the Fall:
Faith writes:
Yes, of course. God is omniscient and omnipotent. He would have planned for all contingencies down to the last moment on earth.
I replied:
If he's all-knowing then he knew man would screw up, he knew the fall would happen. He knew it couldn't be any other way, or the notion that god is omniscient is falsified. The logical corollary of an omniscient god is that he knew he was making men flawed, & the fall is falsified. How can man "fall" further in god's view, when he knew they were made fallen?
But this raises another point, why not start with the "fall" already in effect? Why go through the motions of setting someone up in a situation that they have to fail in (the forbidden fruit)?
I'll start my response with Faith's last message:
He did not make men flawed but perfect, and with free will. This is the consistent error so many of you commit. It is not a flaw to have free will and therefore the nearly inevitable ability to disobey God, but it is only inevitable because we are creatures. So many here will insist that this is a flaw against all argument, so I don't argue it often, but I strongly disagree with that idea.
What consistent error? You haven't shown one.
Free will is a red-herring, an irrelevance. If god is omniscient, then he
must have known that the forbidden fruit would be eaten, it simply cannot be any other way & still have god being omniscient. So, I repeat, god knew he was making flawed men who would eat the fruit, he therefore knew that the fall was inevitable. So why bother with a pre-fall period? Why not just start out with carnivores, death etc if the fall of man was an absolute certainty, & it must have been an absolute certainty to god, because he's omniscient.
It is impossible to start with the Fall in place since it is the result of the action of disobedience. The Fall was simply what eventually happens to a creature given free will. We cannot resist disobeying at some point. God's plan still gives us a choice -- to choose His method of salvation or not, so that it is still up to us. In the end only those who really want God will have Him, and God will have people who truly love Him and worship Him.
It's
impossible to start with the fall in place? So he's not omnipotent, now, either?
God knew with absolute certainty that the forbidden fruit was going to be eaten, he knew with absolute certainty that this would result in the fall, he knew this before he created anything, so why bother with the pre-fall period? Not to labour the point, but free-will is an irrelevance. You can have free-will, or the illusion of it, but the outcome of any decision you make
must be known in advance to an omniscient being. It cannot be any other way. It is not therefore impossible (logically speaking) for that being to stop things happening before they do.
Mark
There are 10 kinds of people in this world; those that understand binary, & those that don't
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