Free will, perfection and limits on god

The way you typed this it seems that you seperate people from animals but the words seem to claim that people are just animals. The way I see it, people are animals but god gave us a soul so we are seperate from animals and the 'rules' are different for us. I don't think animals can sin and I think people have to actively chose to sin. What religion are you? Do you think people(humans) are very different from the other animals? I've thought about this also. Its wierd to me that some of the laws that people get punished for seem like very animalistic behaviors and belonging to this society requires you to drop all those instincts you recieve from being an animal. Its like its not really the persons fault but their behavior is not acceptable to the society and punishment is required because of the society. it sucks when that happens, but thats what must happen when a very large group of people coexist and a consensus results

I've posted my defensive messages and now its your turn.If predetermination is right, as I've said before, I lose my respect for god. I think that predetermination ruins god's benevolence. Unless you don't think that god is benevolent?For example...god created adam and eve so that the Fall would happen, and he populated the planet only to Flood them and he had man be bad so he could have his son murdered, blah blah blah...It seems to me that these these thing are a result of the happenings, an after-the-fact response, not something that was planned the whole time. What do you think?and don't say that god works in mysterious ways

So you're saying that if somebody senses "red" from something that is actually emiting "blue," but they call it blue because that's what they've been told that it is, then it's ok?Isn't color-blindness an error?

quote:

---

So you're saying that if somebody senses "red" from something that is actually emiting "blue," but they call it blue because that's what they've been told that it is, then it's ok?

​

Isn't color-blindness an error?

---

No, and no.You had it back right in Message 197.

So what do you call concepts if not things? Things can be ideas as well as physical objects. Thus, everything (meaning every single thing you can think of or sense) is included in everything. It is all-inclusive (meaning nothing is left out, even the future). The future eventually becomes the past (which exists as much as the future), but if the future does not exist, how do we get existance from something that does not exist? You can believe whatever you want, but this is a logical relm now. You say that God can know the future if God wants to. You say that God is omniscient (which means God can know anything that exists). So how can God know the future if the future is not a thing, and thus outside of God's omniscience (knowing everything)?Also, how is the future outside of "all?" What, then, does "all" mean if not all is included in it? Also, as I noted above, the past doesn't exist anymore than the future, so according to your view God shouldn't know the past either. When has the past existed? The past exists as much as the future. Also, when is the present?I gather that your view has God bound by time and getting older as we get older? How can something go from the future to the past if the future doesn't exist? In your linear view of time, things can only flow from the past to the future or else there is no flow at all. I see God as being separate from (not bound by) time. This way, God can walk up to the painting and see all of time laid out before God. This makes sense because the past you are living now is the future someone else was talking about 200 years ago. In 200 years your life will be the past. In a linear view of time, everything is the past. I don't make humans into anything; they are what they are. You say that animals don't have free will. That means that they cannot be deciding how they react. This leaves a program to tell them how to react in response to stimuli in various combinations. The code for the program would ultimately most likely be their genes.Each individual animal's genetic makeup determines how it will respond to stimuli combinations. It does not matter if the stimuli combinations are random or not. This is because the stimuli combinations will still be what they are when the animal encounters them. If I was the cause of some of the stimuli or whether they were all "random" does not change the fact that the animal was stimulated. (I cannot be random according to your view because I have free will, and decide what to do for myself). So it doesn't matter how the stimuli got there because they are still there eliciting a response.This means that animals have no free will. They are programed (predetermined) by their genes to react in a certain way. They are predetermined because their genes have a set response to each stimuli combination. It is predetermined by that code how they will respond. The stimuli are part of the program since the program can't run without stimuli. Every other stimulus has its own program that it is following (genes and ultimately the principles of physics). Those programs interact, and it can then be seen as large program that everything is a part of.You and I are the same way with stimuli. We react to stimuli and "make decisions" (or react) based on that stimuli, our genes and the principles of physics. When we look back on the past, we have done things only one way. That is the only way we could have done things because at the time of our "decisions," the stimuli were just right to elicit a given response. And I've already said that the stimuli are reacting based on their programs to reveal one big program.What is so wrong with humans as predetermined, or robots? Are we really that much better than everything else? Evolution is not a hierarchy and evolution is still going on, so we are not the prized product of that process. But we are animals, afterall.

Sorry if this sounds harsh. With all due respect, I say the following:I don't think God needs your respect. Why is it not benevolent to predetermine something? To know that predetermination is not benevolent means you must know something about why God might be predetermining things. If this is so, please tell me: why does God predetermine or not predetermine things (and don't answer out of the Bible, since that is the same to me as saying "God works in mysterious ways" is to you). How can you even begin to presume to know so certainly why God does what God does?I think that God is what God is, and benevolent and malignant as you are using them are relative to human values. Human values are not by any means equivocal to any absolute such as truth. Just because you don't think that God is being benevolent does not in any way mean that God is not benevolent. Nor does it mean that God is benevolent. Why in the world should God conform to what you think is right?God is what God is regardless of what you or I or anyone else believes. Therefore, predetermination should not be pushed aside simply because you don't like it. That is not a logical argument, and you did agree to a logical arena. I think it is not a reaction, but that it was planned (or set, if God did not create the universe) for whatever reason. This is because God is omniscient, and in your view God at least could have known that these things were going to happen and chose not to do anything about it. Who is to say that God didn't know about these events beforehand? Who is to say that God didn't change things so that those events WOULD happen? God works the way God works

Alright. Then there can't be an error because nothing that I can see is changing. I'm sorry to get hung up on that, and I feel like I'm missing one thing that will make this make sense to me. I agree, though, that there is no error because I don't see anything changing in the situation. That's as far as I am now. Help!EDIT: How is color-blindness not an error?This message has been edited by QBert14000, 05-06-2005 06:57 PM

The future is ouside of "knowledge". The "all" comes in with the word everything. The future doesn't have things in it that exist. The past does exist more than the future because the past has existed and the future has not. God's age is infinite and it cannot increase. The future comes into existance when it passes through the present into the past. The present is a point on the time line and it is an infinately small amount of time. Right after it happens it becomes the past. See Message 11 and Message 227. Still waiting on a response from either of these posts and would rather take the discussion in that direction. yes, god gave us a soul.

how could god be imperfect? this flys in the face of reason.

CharismaniacWhat do you suppose perfection means as pertains to god?

Colour-blindness is simply being unable to distinguish between (usually) two colours. It's a disability compared to "normal" sight but it isn't "wrong" - simply a less fine ability to discriminate.

Qbert14000 If we take two colors of pure light and shine them on a screen then overlap them we find a new color is produced.If the photons energy in the two light beams is what produces the color sensations we have then how does the third color sensation arise?

So basically, any deviation from the "norm" cannot be an error because it is the way it is? You are saying that we should not call something an error just because it isn't "normal?" Is this similar to saying that if God created everything exactly the way God wanted it, that everything is necessarily perfect, even the things some people consider "sins" or "evil?"

I am not a physicist, but I would say that the photons from the two sources had some sort of interference interaction with each other to produce the third color, resulting from the overlap.Do you have another answer for your question?Edited to fix quotes by AdminJarThis message has been edited by AdminJar, 05-07-2005 07:14 PM

Yet you said earlier that if God chose to, God could know events in the future and could also predetermine them. How can this be if the future is outside of knowledge? In your view of "divided time" (as I call it), the past could never have existed. It could never have even happened. It is merely a memory of what did happen. What did happen is the infinitely small amount of time that is the present, as you define it. We do not exist in the past, only the present. The future does not exist either, according to your view.We can't even say when the present begins or ends, so how do we make a distinction between the past, present, and future? Thus, I think that these divisions are not actually there, just like many in our classification systems. In this way, all there is is the past, present, and future at the same time. We live in all of them because these are relative terms and the divisions are not actually there. So God is timeless? In your view, the future does not exist (is nothing), yet the present (which does exist) comes from it. The past then follows infinitely quickly from the present. So how do you get something from nothing (the present from the future)? I have answered 227. What is a soul? And how do you know God gave one only to us?