Nick Soapdish
Secret Agent
I am sorry Willamena, your posts are usually easy to understand, but the more I read this the more difficulty I have in trying to understand what you are saying.
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Challenge to Evolutionsts
- Thread starter supersport
- Start date
I am sorry Willamena, your posts are usually easy to understand, but the more I read this the more difficulty I have in trying to understand what you are saying.
camanintx
Well-Known Member
You do agree that God's knowledge is dependent on the choice I make, correct?
If God "remembers" what choice I will make then that choice has already been made and I don't have any free will to change it, do I? If I do have the free will to change my mind, then God's "memory" could be wrong, couldn't it?
I think these paradoxes are natural as long as you assume time is something fundamental to the universe, like an extra dimension, that God can exist "outside" of. If instead time is merely an intellectual construct, like mathematics or logic, with which we measure change, then there is nothing for God to exist outside of. The past is just a memory, the future is only a probability, and all that really exists is now.
Nick Soapdish
Secret Agent
Here is another example. Suppose you have two choices: A and B. Tomorrow night, John will know which one you had chosen. Does this mean that since he will know which choice you will make that your choice was not free? Of course not. The same is with God. God is not sitting in a chair across the Internet like you and me. He is outside of space and time and sees all points of time at once.
I'm not sure I follow. Certainly time has an ontological component and is not merely in our imagination?
camanintx
Well-Known Member
If I have free will to choose between A and B tomorrow, then tomorrow cannot exist until I make that choice. Once I have made the choice, then it is only a memory and I no longer have the option of changing it. If you accept these statements, then doesn't it follow that tomorrow is only probability, yesterday is only a memory, and right now is all that really exists? If all points of time exist in such a way that God can see them all at once, then how can I have any more free will than the point of a line drawn on paper?
logician
Well-Known Member
So you say your god is omniscient, yet we see much needless suffering, which it could have prevented.
Does this make your god a monster?
Smoke
Done here.
Why would you say that?
Look at how humans behave. Wouldn't any loving parent allow his child to burn down the house or beat a sibling to death or dismember a puppy? After all, the overriding concern is that your child must have free will. That's why good parents never discipline their children or make them go to school or clean their rooms. A good parent says, "Johnny, I wish you wouldn't hit that old lady with a baseball bat. Someday, if you don't say you're sorry, I'm going to punish you worse than you can imagine."
camanintx
Well-Known Member
Are you directing that question at me or Nick?
Nick Soapdish
Secret Agent
Why would that be? You have shown that God's knowledge depends on our choices, but you have not shown that our choices depend on God's knowledge. As I have pointed out, we can have knowledge of a choice and it still is free. By your analogy with the line drawn on a paper, you are assuming that our choices are dependent on God's knowledge.
Nick Soapdish
Secret Agent
camanintx
Well-Known Member
By saying God can have knowledge of an action independently of the action itself, you are trying to separate cause and effect. What happens to God's memory of my choosing A if I decide to choose B instead?
Nick Soapdish
Secret Agent
FIrst off, I am not sure God has memory, since that is a concept that we have being in time. But I am not trying to separate cause and effect. I am simply pointing out the direction of cause and effect. Your decision is the cause, God's knowledge is the effect. It is not the other way around.
camanintx
Well-Known Member
So we both agree that God's knowledge is dependent on my decision. But if God exists outside of time and knows what my decision is before I make it, what prevents that information from affecting my decision? Say that your God appears to me today and says that tomorrow I will choose A. If I have free will, what prevents me from changing my mind and choosing B instead? If I do this, what happens to God's knowledge that I chose A? These are the paradoxes you need to resolve.
Nick Soapdish
Secret Agent
Is it just me or are we talking in circles?
I will try a different angle in hopes it progresses our discussion. Our freewill is not random. It defines who we are, and God knows what we will choose under all circumstances, in the same way we understand that by letting go of a ball, it will fall to the ground. In stating we have freewill, means that we have our own agent which is not enslaved to external laws of nature. It is our own identity. Every decision we make through our life defines who we are. God understands this identity and how it will act under any circumstance.
Evolution_Not
Member
Another “missing link” takes flight
Piltdown Man
As was mentioned earlier in this post re frauds here are a couple.
What does a fossil tell us? Something died, does not tell us whether it had
offspring or different off spring.
Piltdown Man
As was mentioned earlier in this post re frauds here are a couple.
What does a fossil tell us? Something died, does not tell us whether it had
offspring or different off spring.
Papersock
Lucid Dreamer
Good thing scientists, while doing what good scientists do, realized that those two fossils were fake.
McBell
mantra-chanting henotheistic snake handler
Then why do Creationists keep asking for fossils?
Evolution_Not
Member
That's correct, problem is that media sources who hype it will usually not do retractions. Case in point is when the ozone hole was discovered in Antartic.
Soon hole was discovered in midwest. Turned out to be crap science and congess was
p.o. After hyping on the front page the retraction turned up in the back about the size
of a small want add. I'll bet I can find other crap in text books.
Evolution_Not
Member
A single fossil can tell us a bit about the physiology of an individual creature that lived and died some time ago; dating methods can even tell us when it lived and died.
Multiple bones or a complete or partial skeleton from the same animal can tell us even more: a closer-to-complete physiology of the animal, which can tell us the animal's size, how it moved, what it ate, etc... as you gather more and more data, you get closer to the level of information you could gather by studying a living animal.
Fossils from many different animals in the same species can tell us the range of the species (both geographically and temporally), tell us more about how the animal lived (did they live alone or in packs? Did they lay their eggs and leave, or did they rear their young? Did they migrate?) and provide more data for the sorts of things I mentioned above.
Fossils from many different species can help us understand how the species related to each other: which ones were predators, which ones were prey, which ones competed against each other, and which ones are descended from which other ones.
Also, context is very important; where a fossil is found can give information as well. I remember a line in a Steven Jay Gould book where he quoted the geologist who trained the Apollo astronauts on how to take soil and rock samples: "If you bring me a dead cat, all I can tell you is that it's a cat and it's dead. But if you tell me that you found it at the side of the highway, I'll reach a completely different set of conclusions than if you tell me you found it in the kitchen of your favourite restaurant."
Really, saying "what's the point of collecting fossils to learn about the history of life?" is a lot like saying "what's the point of collecting evidence to learn about a crime?" Fossils can tell us a lot.