Conquer Club

crispybits wrote:I can't believe you keep coming back. You said "So unless we too are supernatural and our free will transcends the natural world, then what you're saying doesn't matter for this argument." I reminded you that in the premises of the argument we have souls, and now you're wriggling around saying something about our supernatural souls being governed by natural laws.

Keep digging

crispybits wrote:I can't believe you keep coming back. You said "So unless we too are supernatural and our free will transcends the natural world, then what you're saying doesn't matter for this argument." I reminded you that in the premises of the argument we have souls, and now you're wriggling around saying something about our supernatural souls being governed by natural laws.

crispybits wrote:Unless we are supernatural your argument fails

We are supernatural

Well nyerr your argument still fails because our supernatural souls are governed by natural laws

What did I miss?

crispybits wrote:Our souls transcend the natural world. Our free will is a function of our souls.

It's entirely internally consistent with the other christian premises, which are themselves entirely separate from natural principles.

To defeat the argument you ither have to show why our souls, our very being, is not the bit of us that makes choices, or that somehow the other premises are not internally consistent. I've seen neither so far.

BigBallinStalin wrote:I had some really great coffee the other night. Therefore, there is a God.

crispybits wrote:God might know everything about the natural world, but that knowledge is supernatural. That's the entire point. If a natural being knew then I'd be agreeing with you, but we're not talking about something being naturally known. If the knowledge of the natural world is outside of the natural world and doesn't have influence on the natural world, then it doesn't cause a paradox in natural laws in the way you describe.

Premise: A natural paradox happens when a natural thing breaks a natural law
Premise: A supernatural thing is not a natural thing
Conclusion: Supernatural things cannot cause natural paradoxes

oss spy wrote:I typed out a long post to explain supernatural things, but I realized that I can do it better with a few questions:

If something is supernatural, and if this something exists, then doesn't that make it natural and therefore bound by some laws? Furthermore, why are we assuming that anything is supernatural and why does it matter?

Let's say that God is supernatural. What does that have to do with him knowing the future, and why would it make a difference? If we are to assume that he is supernatural, why would that change his omniscience? What does being supernatural have to do with knowing all outcomes? What difference does it make?

None. None at all. You're putting dots everywhere but you're not actually connecting them...it's honestly not worth the effort to get involved in this specific part of the debate if you're not going to make points and link them together. Although tzor was using faulty arguments, they at least responded to the issue at hand.

Metsfanmax wrote:

crispybits wrote:Indeed - there are much stronger arguments for a lack of God than that one.

For example (and this is just a quick one as I'm back to work today so haven't got a lot of time - boo!) if I know that you're both rational and hungry and I have a bucket full of sand and a bucket full of doughnuts, I know if I offer you the choice you're going to pick the doughnuts. But I haven't removed your free will, you have the ability to pick the sand.

If a person is perfectly rational and picking the doughnuts is the rational choice (debatable given the unclear health benefits of baked goods which are high in sugar and fat), then they have no free will. They are making the choice that rationality dictates that they make. They don't have the ability to pick the sand; if they do, then your original assumption was wrong.

crispybits wrote:No, you did the opposite, you assumed that God is natural. If he is not natural then he cannot cause natural paradoxes

crispybits wrote:What is logic Mets? (serious question though it may seem spurious - I would say that just like causality all those pages back logic cannot be said to be definitely true outside of a logical universe - supernatural things could easily be entirely illogical)

Is God perfect? You often hear philosophers describe “theism” as the belief in a perfect being — a being whose attributes are said to include being all-powerful, all-knowing, immutable, perfectly good, perfectly simple, and necessarily existent (among others). And today, something like this view is common among lay people as well.

There are two famous problems with this view of God. The first is that it appears to be impossible to make it coherent. For example, it seems unlikely that God can be both perfectly powerful and perfectly good if the world is filled (as it obviously is) with instances of terrible injustice. Similarly, it’s hard to see how God can wield his infinite power to instigate alteration and change in all things if he is flat-out immutable. And there are more such contradictions where these came from.

The second problem is that while this “theist” view of God is supposed to be a description of the God of the Bible, it’s hard to find any evidence that the prophets and scholars who wrote the Hebrew Bible (or “Old Testament”) thought of God in this way at all. The God of Hebrew Scripture is not depicted as immutable, but repeatedly changes his mind about things (for example, he regrets having made man). He is not all-knowing, since he’s repeatedly surprised by things (like the Israelites abandoning him for a statue of a cow). He is not perfectly powerful either, in that he famously cannot control Israel and get its people to do what he wants. And so on.

Philosophers have spent many centuries trying to get God’s supposed perfections to fit together in a coherent conception, and then trying to get that to fit with the Bible. By now it’s reasonably clear that this can’t be done. In fact, part of the reason God-bashers like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are so influential (apart from the fact they write so well) is their insistence that the doctrine of God’s perfections makes no sense, and that the idealized “being” it tells us about doesn’t resemble the biblical God at all.

So is that it, then? Have the atheists won? I don’t think so. But it does look like the time has come for some rethinking in the theist camp.

I’d start with this: Is it really necessary to say that God is a “perfect being,” or perfect at all, for that matter? As far as I can tell, the biblical authors avoid asserting any such thing. And with good reason. Normally, when we say that something is “perfect,” we mean it has attained the best possible balance among the principles involved in making it the kind of thing it is. For example, if we say that a bottle is perfect, we mean it can contain a significant quantity of liquid in its body; that its neck is long enough to be grasped comfortably and firmly; that the bore is wide enough to permit a rapid flow of liquid; and so on. Of course, you can always manufacture a bottle that will hold more liquid, but only by making the body too broad (so the bottle doesn’t handle well) or the neck too short (so it’s hard to hold). There’s an inevitable trade-off among the principles, and perfection lies in the balance among them. And this is so whether what’s being judged is a bottle or a horse, a wine or a gymnastics routine or natural human beauty.

What would we say if some philosopher told us that a perfect bottle would be one that can contain a perfectly great amount of liquid, while being perfectly easy to pour from at the same time? Or that a perfect horse would bear an infinitely heavy rider, while at the same time being able to run with perfectly great speed? I should think we’d say he’s made a fundamental mistake here: You can’t perfect something by maximizing all its constituent principles simultaneously. All this will get you is contradictions and absurdities. This is not less true of God than it is of anything else.

The attempt to think of God as a perfect being is misguided for another reason as well. We can speak of the perfection of a bottle or a horse because these are things that can be encompassed (at least in some sense) by our senses and understanding. Having the whole bottle before us, we feel we can judge how close it is to being a perfect instance of its type. But if asked to judge the perfection of a bottle poking out of a paper bag, or of a horse that’s partly hidden in the stable, we’d surely protest: How am I supposed to know? I can only see part of it.

Yet the biblical accounts of our encounters with God emphasize that all human views of God are partial and fragmentary in just this way. Even Moses, the greatest of the prophets, is told that he can’t see God’s face, but can only catch a glimpse of God’s back as he passes by. At another point, God responds to Moses’ request to know his name (that is, his nature) by telling him “ehi’eh asher ehi’eh” —“I will be what I will be.” In most English-language Bibles this is translated “I am that I am,” following the Septuagint, which sought to bring the biblical text into line with the Greek tradition (descended from Xenophanes, Parmenides and Plato’s “Timaeus”) of identifying God with perfect being. But in the Hebrew original, the text says almost exactly the opposite of this: The Hebrew “I will be what I will be” is in the imperfect tense, suggesting to us a God who is incomplete and changing. In their run-ins with God, human beings can glimpse a corner or an edge of something too immense to be encompassed, a “coming-into-being” as God approaches, and no more. The belief that any human mind can grasp enough of God to begin recognizing perfections in him would have struck the biblical authors as a pagan conceit.

So if it’s not a bundle of “perfections” that the prophets and scholars who wrote the Hebrew Bible referred to in speaking of God, what was it they were talking about? As Donald Harman Akenson writes, the God of Hebrew Scripture is meant to be an “embodiment of what is, of reality” as we experience it. God’s abrupt shifts from action to seeming indifference and back, his changing demands from the human beings standing before him, his at-times devastating responses to mankind’s deeds and misdeeds — all these reflect the hardship so often present in the lives of most human beings. To be sure, the biblical God can appear with sudden and stunning generosity as well, as he did to Israel at the Red Sea. And he is portrayed, ultimately, as faithful and just. But these are not the “perfections” of a God known to be a perfect being. They don’t exist in his character “necessarily,” or anything remotely similar to this. On the contrary, it is the hope that God is faithful and just that is the subject of ancient Israel’s faith: We hope that despite the frequently harsh reality of our daily experience, there is nonetheless a faithfulness and justice that rules in our world in the end.

The ancient Israelites, in other words, discovered a more realistic God than that descended from the tradition of Greek thought. But philosophers have tended to steer clear of such a view, no doubt out of fear that an imperfect God would not attract mankind’s allegiance. Instead, they have preferred to speak to us of a God consisting of a series of sweeping idealizations — idealizations whose relation to the world in which we actually live is scarcely imaginable. Today, with theism rapidly losing ground across Europe and among Americans as well, we could stand to reconsider this point. Surely a more plausible conception of God couldn’t hurt.

Metsfanmax wrote:

crispybits wrote:What is logic Mets? (serious question though it may seem spurious - I would say that just like causality all those pages back logic cannot be said to be definitely true outside of a logical universe - supernatural things could easily be entirely illogical)

Did you mean to direct that question to MeDeFe?

crispybits wrote:No, you did the opposite, you assumed that God is natural. If he is not natural then he cannot cause natural paradoxes

(and remember the whole natural / supernatural argument revolves around "exists under natural conditions and obeys natural laws", just because he exists doesn't make him natural, he has to exist within the confines of nature for that to hold, which is pretty difficult when he created it)

(also remember I'm not trying to argue for something I actually believe when I say God is this or God is that, I'm just pointing out that your argument is flawed)

If God is supernatural, and we have supernatural immortal souls, then it is entirely consistent that these supernatural agents can act other than by natural principles, and them doing so doesn't break any natural principles, those laws simply do not apply. Determinism is a natural principle based on both causality and the uniformity of natural laws.

Or, if I'm wrong and you're not arguing against a specifically christian God. can you tell me where you got the idea that God is omniscient that didn't also involve the idea of souls, or a creator God (because without that source you're simply creating a straw man).

oss spy wrote:

crispybits wrote:No, you did the opposite, you assumed that God is natural. If he is not natural then he cannot cause natural paradoxes

(and remember the whole natural / supernatural argument revolves around "exists under natural conditions and obeys natural laws", just because he exists doesn't make him natural, he has to exist within the confines of nature for that to hold, which is pretty difficult when he created it)

(also remember I'm not trying to argue for something I actually believe when I say God is this or God is that, I'm just pointing out that your argument is flawed)

If God is supernatural, and we have supernatural immortal souls, then it is entirely consistent that these supernatural agents can act other than by natural principles, and them doing so doesn't break any natural principles, those laws simply do not apply. Determinism is a natural principle based on both causality and the uniformity of natural laws.

Or, if I'm wrong and you're not arguing against a specifically christian God. can you tell me where you got the idea that God is omniscient that didn't also involve the idea of souls, or a creator God (because without that source you're simply creating a straw man).

I'm not assuming anything about God other than that he has omniscience. My argument is centered around his knowledge and that's it; I don't understand why you're introducing him being natural or supernatural. If God knows everything, then we don't have free will. Did I say how he obtained his knowledge? No. Did I assume anything about him other than his knowledge? No.

It's simple: omniscience removes free will, and that's the only point I'm trying to make. You're attacking a point that isn't even there.

crispybits wrote:God might know everything about the natural world, but that knowledge is supernatural. That's the entire point. If a natural being knew then I'd be agreeing with you, but we're not talking about something being naturally known. If the knowledge of the natural world is outside of the natural world and doesn't have influence on the natural world, then it doesn't cause a paradox in natural laws in the way you describe.

Premise: A natural paradox happens when a natural thing breaks a natural law
Premise: A supernatural thing is not a natural thing
Conclusion: Supernatural things cannot cause natural paradoxes

AAFitz wrote:

oss spy wrote:

crispybits wrote:No, you did the opposite, you assumed that God is natural. If he is not natural then he cannot cause natural paradoxes

(and remember the whole natural / supernatural argument revolves around "exists under natural conditions and obeys natural laws", just because he exists doesn't make him natural, he has to exist within the confines of nature for that to hold, which is pretty difficult when he created it)

(also remember I'm not trying to argue for something I actually believe when I say God is this or God is that, I'm just pointing out that your argument is flawed)

If God is supernatural, and we have supernatural immortal souls, then it is entirely consistent that these supernatural agents can act other than by natural principles, and them doing so doesn't break any natural principles, those laws simply do not apply. Determinism is a natural principle based on both causality and the uniformity of natural laws.

Or, if I'm wrong and you're not arguing against a specifically christian God. can you tell me where you got the idea that God is omniscient that didn't also involve the idea of souls, or a creator God (because without that source you're simply creating a straw man).

I'm not assuming anything about God other than that he has omniscience. My argument is centered around his knowledge and that's it; I don't understand why you're introducing him being natural or supernatural. If God knows everything, then we don't have free will. Did I say how he obtained his knowledge? No. Did I assume anything about him other than his knowledge? No.

It's simple: omniscience removes free will, and that's the only point I'm trying to make. You're attacking a point that isn't even there.

Actually, it really isnt simple, and your point is not there because of it.

If you assume he is omniscient, then you must also accept he is omnipotent, in which case, anything is possible, so its just a matter of not understanding the exact logic of it.

I agree, the logic of all of it is insane, but calling it simple and that you've made your point, is just wishful thinking.

oss spy wrote:

AAFitz wrote:

oss spy wrote:

crispybits wrote:No, you did the opposite, you assumed that God is natural. If he is not natural then he cannot cause natural paradoxes

(and remember the whole natural / supernatural argument revolves around "exists under natural conditions and obeys natural laws", just because he exists doesn't make him natural, he has to exist within the confines of nature for that to hold, which is pretty difficult when he created it)

(also remember I'm not trying to argue for something I actually believe when I say God is this or God is that, I'm just pointing out that your argument is flawed)

If God is supernatural, and we have supernatural immortal souls, then it is entirely consistent that these supernatural agents can act other than by natural principles, and them doing so doesn't break any natural principles, those laws simply do not apply. Determinism is a natural principle based on both causality and the uniformity of natural laws.

Or, if I'm wrong and you're not arguing against a specifically christian God. can you tell me where you got the idea that God is omniscient that didn't also involve the idea of souls, or a creator God (because without that source you're simply creating a straw man).

I'm not assuming anything about God other than that he has omniscience. My argument is centered around his knowledge and that's it; I don't understand why you're introducing him being natural or supernatural. If God knows everything, then we don't have free will. Did I say how he obtained his knowledge? No. Did I assume anything about him other than his knowledge? No.

It's simple: omniscience removes free will, and that's the only point I'm trying to make. You're attacking a point that isn't even there.

Actually, it really isnt simple, and your point is not there because of it.

If you assume he is omniscient, then you must also accept he is omnipotent, in which case, anything is possible, so its just a matter of not understanding the exact logic of it.

I agree, the logic of all of it is insane, but calling it simple and that you've made your point, is just wishful thinking.

I still don't see why that has anything to do with omniscience removing free will.