Evidence for God from Science

Proinsias wrote:

B. W. wrote:
I think you finally got it!

Sorry, I think I missed it.

How can you be so sure?
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Proinsias wrote: If God knows that you will do something, then it is surely predetermind that you will do it, no?

No.

He knows everyone would reject him if left alone with no knowledge about him, or his standards, his character, nature, so he calls because he is just…to himself and to all...

Proinsias wrote:If God calls you and doesn't know what your reaction will be then God does not have the ability to know, God just has the ability to call.

God calls, foresaw all our full personal reactions to his own initiative too call, either our accepting or rejecting of it. From there he can do with a person howsoever he wants too with no violation to the person, and no denying anything given to the person (intelligence, reason, life) as well.

How could God really be just (to himself or you), if he makes your choice to accept or reject for you? Such use of force negates justice.

Knowing the final outcome God can work through all things justly as well as can orchestrate through every beings hindrances, rebellion, and attempts to thwart his will and stain his name toward his desired end, will, and goals impartially.

Only God can do this — we can't.

Like youself, people find it easier to bemoan…
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Proinsias wrote:

If God can know things "ahead of time," that doesn't mean that things are determined by Him somehow. It just means He has the ability to know. In the theology that I accept as biblical, God knows followers somehow ahead of time. He knows who will choose to be with Him, but He does not determine it for them. Those He knows who will choose to be with Him, He calls.

If God knows that you will do something, then it is surely predetermind that you will do it, no? If God calls you and doesn't know what your reaction will be then God does not have the ability to know, God just has the ability to call.

It seems to me that you didn't read my post. I just read a concise article on this issue (logic related), and I'll try to reproduce it here - but not tonight.

Proinsias wrote: If God knows that you will do something, then it is surely predetermind that you will do it, no?

Where is the correlation between "knowledge" and "predetermination".

Does my knowing what some people did in the past necessarily mean their actions were predetermined? If not, then why does a person's knowing what someone will do in the future necessarily mean their actions are predetermined?

Not sure, am I? How can one know?

Like CSLL said, I don't think you read my post.

Well I would assume that you have a life time of experience making decisions based on your preferences, no?
What to wear, what to eat, where to go, etc.
And I would also assume that you have experience where your own will was thwarted by a higher authority, such as a parent or teacher. Surely you know the difference between getting what you want, and not. Or perhaps you are more stubborn than I thought. (And I think you are pretty stubborn, BTW.)
No one here will deny that there are contraints to free will. You can only exercise your will within the limits of reality and possibility. But will is always at work, even though we are shaped by cultural influence, parental influence, etc.
But that is not really the question. You are saying that if God knows the future, then free will doesn't exist. Like I said, I don't like the term free will. I would say, limited free will. (LFW) But, I've yet to see you offer any proof of how foreknowledge excludes LFW. I understand this is what you think, but what are the reasons? "Because I think so," doesn't cut if for me.

If I choose not to think, I end up thinking about not thinking.

This is another example of stubborness. Again, no one is saying that FW is not without constraints. Is choosing not to think a possible thing? No. No more than choosing not to obey the laws of gravity. You are using logical absurdities. IMO, you are exercising your free will to NOT think rationally. (Stubborn) You are willing to embrace the absurd to avoid the rational. Because the realities are a big wet blanket on your world view.

Marc Breedlove (crazy name, ker-razy guy), Professor of Neuroscience at the University of California, makes the hypothetical analogy of a thrown rock suddenly developing sentient/intelligent consciousness, mid-air. He reckons it would look in the direction it was travelling and decide 'I want to go there'.

Even PHDs can be wrong. Number one, it is absurd. It is not a possibility, and a flawed analogy at best.
So let's take his own absurd example. Let's say the rock develops a consciousness. The rock sees that it is heading towards a wall where it will be shattered into pieces. It conciously realizes this, and decides it doesn't want to be destoyed. But it hits the wall anyway. LFW was still exercised. Because we will something, doesn't mean it will be. Obviously the reality we are born into, has influence on why we want certain things, and how we exercise our will.

As is mentioned in the link below, if God knows what I'm having for breakfast it kinda invalidates the notion of free will.

How? Did you read my previous post?

cslewislover wrote: It seems to me that you didn't read my post. I just read a concise article on this issue (logic related), and I'll try to reproduce it here - but not tonight.

Dr. William Lane Craig has an article in the Apologetics Study Bible that addresses your issue, entitled "How Can the Bible Both Affirm Divine Sovereignty and Human Freedom?" Instead of typing up the whole thing, I found this on his website http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/New ... le&id=5633, which covers some of the same material.


Subject: The Difference between Possible and Feasible Worlds

Hello, Dr. Craig,

I recently listened to your debate with Dayton: “Does Evil Disprove God?” While I have a clear understanding of why God cannot do that which is intrinsically (or logically) impossible (i.e., create a world in which He forced people to freely choose good over evil), I am unclear as to what you meant by saying that it might not be feasible for God to create a world in which evil did not exist, even when it could be logically possible for Him to do so. As I try to conceive of such situations, they always seem to reduce to intrinsic impossibilities. Please explain and illustrate what you mean by God allowing that which is evil and preventable and yet unfeasible for God to prevent?

Martin


Dr. Craig responds:

The distinction between possible worlds and feasible worlds is one that lies at the heart of the doctrine of middle knowledge and may have very important theological implications, such as the one that you note. The terminological distinction was first drawn by the philosopher Thomas Flint, but the conceptual distinction is inherent in Luis Molina's theory of middle knowledge formulated in the sixteenth century.

According to Molina, logically prior to the divine decree to create a world, God possesses not only knowledge of everything that could happen (His natural knowledge) but also everything that would happen contingently in any appropriately specified set of circumstances (His middle knowledge). God's natural knowledge is His knowledge of all necessary truths. By means of it God knows what is the full range of possible worlds, or as you put it, worlds that are intrinsically possible. He knows, for example, that in some possible world Peter freely denies Christ three times and that in another possible world Peter freely affirms Christ under identical circumstances, for both are possible.

God's middle knowledge is His knowledge of all contingently true conditional propositions in the subjunctive mood, including propositions about creaturely free actions. For example, logically prior to His creative decree, God knew that if Peter were in circumstances C, he would freely deny Christ three times. Such subjunctive conditionals are often called counterfactuals. These counterfactuals serve to delimit the range of possible worlds to worlds which are feasible for God to actualize. For example, there is an intrinsically possible world in which Peter freely affirms Christ in precisely the same circumstances in which he in fact denied him; but given the counterfactual truth that if Peter were in precisely those circumstances he would freely deny Christ, then the possible world in which Peter freely affirms Christ in those circumstances is not feasible for God. God could force Peter to affirm Christ in those circumstances, but then his confession would not be free. By means of His middle knowledge, God knows what is the proper subset of possible worlds which are feasible for Him, given the counterfactuals that are true.

God then decrees to create certain free creatures in certain circumstances and, thus, on the basis of his middle knowledge and His knowledge of His own decree, God has foreknowledge of everything that will happen (His free knowledge). In that way, He knows, simply on the basis of His own internal states and without any need of any sort of perception of the external world, that Peter will freely deny Christ three times.

Thus on the Molinist scheme, we have the following logical order:

Moment 1: . . . O O O O O O . . .

Natural Knowledge: God knows the range of possible worlds

Moment 2: . . . O O O . . .

Middle Knowledge: God knows the range of feasible worlds

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Divine Creative Decree

_____________________________________________________________

Moment 3: O

Free Knowledge: God knows the actual world

So there are worlds which are intrinsically possible but which God, given the counterfactuals that happen to be true, is not capable of actualizing and which are therefore, in Flint's terminology, infeasible for God. Notice that because counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are contingently true, which worlds are feasible for God and which are infeasible is also a contingent matter. It all depends on how creatures would freely behave in various circumstances, which is beyond God's control.

Alvin Plantinga was the first contemporary philosopher to apply this scheme to the problem of evil. In response to J. L. Mackie's claim that since a world in which everyone always chooses to do the morally right thing is intrinsically possible, an omnipotent God should be able to create it, Plantinga pointed out that for all we know such a world may not be feasible for God. Indeed, for all we know, all the worlds which are feasible for God and which involve as much good as the actual world also involve as much evil. Hence, although a world with as much good as the actual world but with less or no evil in it may be intrinsically possible, it may not be within God's power to create such a world. Hence, God cannot be indicted for not having created such a world. The atheist who pushes the problem of evil would have to show that worlds with as much good but less evil are feasible for God, which is beyond anyone's power to prove; it is sheer speculation. Thus, the atheist has failed to bear his burden of proof.

In my own work I've tried to exploit the distinction between possible and feasible worlds in dealing with such questions as perseverance of the saints, biblical inspiration, and Christian particularism (see “Scholarly Articles: Omniscience; Christian Particularism”).

copypasta is boring, who cares what Mr. Craig thinks, we would prefer to know what you think.

Kristoffer wrote:copypasta is boring, who cares what Mr. Craig thinks, we would prefer to know what you think.

I've already written what I think about it a couple of times on the board. I was answering to Pronsias, who seems to like reading more in-depth philosophical things.

Anyway, I did write this short post earlier in this thread:

In another post, you [pronsias] ask again about God knowing, but you said it in such a way that you equate knowing with determining. If God can know things "ahead of time," that doesn't mean that things are determined by Him somehow. It just means He has the ability to know. In the theology that I accept as biblical, God knows followers somehow ahead of time. He knows who will choose to be with Him, but He does not determine it for them. Those He knows who will choose to be with Him, He calls.

Kristoffer wrote:copypasta is boring, who cares what Mr. Craig thinks, we would prefer to know what you think.

Referencing information is perfectly valid...stop the diversion and actually read and debate the material.

Oh, I didn't say DO NOT do it, i mean that do it properly, use elipses to cut out redundant or extra information(NOT TO MAKE THINGS AGREE WITH WHAT YOU THINK.) and add your thoughts in too. Its the case of fortifying your argument to prove that you actually care.

Kristoffer wrote:Oh, I didn't say DO NOT do it, i mean that do it properly, use elipses to cut out redundant or extra information(NOT TO MAKE THINGS AGREE WITH WHAT YOU THINK.) and add your thoughts in too. Its the case of fortifying your argument to prove that you actually care.

This is silly, Kristoffer. The item I posted is short, and if I cut stuff out you could then accuse me of manipulating the data, like you keep bringing up. You want it both ways! I have posted long things in the past - some things I'd still leave in their entirety, some things I should take more time to edit. However, one reason I post some things is that people don't always want to go to a link to read them. If I post it, there's no excuse about seeing it. Otherwise, we're volunteers here and don't have all the time in the world.

Why don't YOU try reading the threads and actually responding a bit more, instead of cutting people down? You keep saying (and others say it too), that studies and data can be manipulated. Well, that can go both ways, can't it? I could say the same about anything you put up. Anyway, I put that up for Pronsias, as I already said, and if you read the thread you'd know that; let him read it and decide if he wants. And I posted what I thought earlier, and in response to you (so . . . how can you say no thoughts were added???), yet no response from you about that. And the way you responded about laws and obeying them just showed that you either didn't understand the point at all, or you decided to ignore it. So, overall, why do you think posters will want to spend time responding to you? As another poster has already opined, they don't view you as sincere. You act like you don't understand so much, then you tell us how we can fortify OUR arguments? So, we should believe that you care?

You act like you don't understand so much

I want to understand more.

So, we should believe that you care?

How, do I be gentle? I really do feel empathy, I Just need to stop being so blunt. Its a hard lesson to learn but how can I simply becmoe more gentle?

Is sincerity like seriousness? Because I view myself In serious light, if yet a bit critically. Not that I have any reasonable excuse to hate myself, just something feels wrong and I don't know what it is.

PS.Also if you provided the source as well as your edited version, I would have to check the source before accusing you of anything.

Kristoffer wrote:

You act like you don't understand so much

I want to understand more.

So, we should believe that you care?

How, do I be gentle? I really do feel empathy, I Just need to stop being so blunt. Its a hard lesson to learn but how can I simply becmoe more gentle?

Is sincerity like seriousness? Because I view myself In serious light, if yet a bit critically. Not that I have any reasonable excuse to hate myself, just something feels wrong and I don't know what it is.

PS.Also if you provided the source as well as your edited version, I would have to check the source before accusing you of anything.

You don't have to be "gentle," as far as my understanding of gentle goes, but it would be good to stand back and not respond if something we say seems "out there" to you. Ask more questions about it, or go read about it, before just saying it's absurd or whatever. That's all it takes. I want to respond to you on the thread where Anita and Dayage are posting, since you really think the ages of the first humans is absurd. It's in the bible that way, so we need to address it rationally somehow. There are explanations for it, and I want to reference some; it's good to just not give blasting opinions of something we discuss that's in the bible, without looking into it more first.

Blasting opinions are a good(if it can be called so) way to end discussion that much is true. really we should put aside personal bias and question things. Maybe extended life lengths can be rational without modern medical know-how, maybe it was ancestor worship. Who knows?

Anyway if you think I might need some more research I would be happy to find the right things