The actual truth if you believe Christian theology. Angels AND God are fully capable of changing things, but free will is sort of like the Prime Directive in Star Trek if you want to be charitable. Uncharitably, we’re God’s play things and only a tiny fraction of the most loyal will see true reward.
The vast field of ambiguity between those two points is … kinda’ the point in why there has been so much quarrel even between Christian sects.
free will is sort of like the Prime Directive in Star Trek
That’s a really apt comparison because they play fast and loose with the prime directive all the time, using it as an excuse for inaction while flagrantly disregarding it whenever it suits them
The great irony is, the Prime Directive is to try and control the emotional overreaction of humans and is indeed often ignored by Star Trek for supposedly moral reasons… It is terribly ironic that it makes such a perfect analogy to how God, a supposedly far superior being, is described as acting in the Bible.
In Star Trek, it’s ignored to help people. In the Bible, it’s ignored because God is having a bad day and needs to lay down some punishment without being labeled a massive hypocrite because daddy do no wrong.
No, the christian god its not just capable of changing things, it is omnipotent. That means it could change things without interfering with the free will.
The point about being omnipotent vs free will is… if he does ANYTHING to change our fate, he’s corrupting free will, which is supposed to be our greatest gift.
The entire concept of an omniprescient and all powerful being is nonsensical as described by Christians. A being LITERALLY CANNOT be all knowing, all kind, and omnipotent. Not if our reality is involved.
That is why there is so much debate over the nature of god and “good”. As described, it is literally impossible, so it becomes incredibly subjective.
Strictly talking the logic of it, if you’re omnipotent, then you have the power do do anything, and that includes the power to do flagrantly self contradictory things, defy logic and still be logically consistent.
The “if you’re omnipotent” part is a pretty big “if”, but it’s not inconsistent to say that “anything” includes the ridiculous.
I mean… Not really. Paradoxes don’t actually exist. Causality itself would fail to work if literally inconsistent things could be magically made consistent. It’s fundamentally not how the universe works. Literally. What you ask for could exist, but not in a universe that behaves like ours. It is fundamentally incompatible with what is observed.
Yes, completely and fundamentally incompatible. Even if God could start up a billion universes with a billion rules … ours doesn’t work like that. It’s like a game character saying, “yea well the devs could totally make this RPG a FPS game!”
Is the possibility true? Yes. Though for no reason the game character will ever comprehend nor be able to ever observe. It is fundamentally a pointless point that adds no new information to the equation.
We’re discussing logical consequences of a thing, not if the thing is possible in the first place.
You don’t have to talk logical consistency to rule out “all knowing and all powerful” if you’re just looking at how things work in reality.
In reality, you can’t be all powerful or all knowing. Done, end of story. It’s impossible on the face of it.
In the hypothetical where something can be all powerful, then the power to do whatever, even in a universe that behaves like ours does, is consistent.
The power to do anything includes the absurd, inconsistent, and contradictory.
Logic requires cause and effect. If you break cause and effect, logic means nothing.
If you keep logic, then again: Paradoxes don’t actually exist. At the end of the day, something is true or it’s not. If you’re dealing with something both true and not true, you are literally and quite directly dealing with something unresolved. We fundamentally do not observe unresolved things.
It is conceptually, definitionally, not compatible with observed reality. “Observed reality” literally cannot reference such things. The question itself is nothing but a thought experiment that far too many people fail to execute.
Yes, but such a universe is still fundamentally incompatible with Christian (and most other) religious teachings.
There would be absolutely NO point in praying or asking for help in a universe with absolute free will, yet that is exactly what Christians (and many others) teach. It shows up all over in how they treat others and civil policy.
It’s why they’re so pro punishment: You make a choice to do bad things, you had free will to choose not to, so you must be bad. It’s not completely broken logic that they use, but it is absolutely not a self-consistent set of rules.
if he does ANYTHING to change our fate, he’s corrupting free will, which is supposed to be our greatest gift.
Not really, unless you consider that every interaction with anything interferes or “corrupts” our free will. If I plan on playing a game, but a friend of mine says “dude, don’t, you’ll regret it, it fucking sucks”, and I decide to not play, did this friend corrupt my free will?
Your analogy is a little broken. God wouldn’t be simply telling you not to. God is literally changing what you want to do, or any other number of “omnipotent” actions that are not possible by someone not omnipotent.
The concept itself is incompatible with reality that operates like ours. Ours has clear, obvious, demonstrable, and repeatable rules. If those rules change, we literally cannot tell.
Omnipotence is quite literally a pointless point when there is literally NOTHING that demonstrates power beyond the existing rules. There is literally nothing that breaks causality in our reality. Our reality and existence is quite literally incompatible with omnipotence as described in the bible.
Literally any plans, any kind of tweaks, no matter how small or how far in advance he’s playing it. If you alter events or shift things to your end goals, you have destroyed free will.
free will is sort of like the Prime Directive in Star Trek if you want to be charitable
This is a hilarious way of putting it, and as someone who hasn’t been all that steeped in christianity to be very familiar with it, that actually told me a lot 😄
That’s only the kind and charitable interpretations. There are ample stories of God directly murderizing people just for disobeying a direct order.
IMO, it’s all complete codswallop that’s been misconstrued off of the simple recordings of history and an attempt at passing on wisdom about which rulers were good and why.
After all, all it takes is some narcissistic piece of shit emperor to declare they shall be referred to as “god”, and no other rulers will even be recorded as having a similar honorific … and bam. God as described in the Bible suddenly makes perfect sense being a fickle piece of shit because he’s just a bastardized history of seemingly good rulers dealing with completely different problems in completely different ways.
Now, I don’t think that’s all of it. There is obviously much spirituality and baby’s first philosophy wrapped up in there, too.
God as described in the Bible suddenly makes perfect sense being a fickle piece of shit because he’s just a bastardized history of seemingly good rulers dealing with completely different problems in completely different ways.
This isn’t even all that far from the popular hypotheses about the history behind some of the stuff in the Bible, but the reason why the God of the Bible seems so damn fickle is that it’s likely an amalgamation of two different early Israelite / Canaanite gods: El and YHWH aka. Yahweh (and that name probably sounds familiar. Guess why!) If you’re interested in history, check out the book A History of God by Karen Armstrong, a nun-turned-atheist-historian. It’s an extremely interesting look into the prevailing hypotheses about the history of the 3 Abrahamic religions.
Now, it’s been a while since I read that book or about this in general so I’m not 100% sure I’m not mixing Yahweh and El up, but I think in general the ones where God goes all “FUCK YOU IN PARTICULAR” to some person or nation are El. In general in the “Elohist” passages that descend from stories of El, God is described as something really abstract or non-human, such as the burning bush. Also, interestingly the name still pops up in the (Hebrew-language) Bible in various forms.
In the “Yahwist” passages, God is described in a more personal and intimate way, and again if I remember right Yahwew is the more laid-back “facet” of the Biblical God. Interestingly the OG YHWH really hated farming and farmers, and there’s a general theme that farming and soil are somehow connected to evil, and you can see some that in the Bible; Cain was a farmer, for example. My own pet hypothesis for this is that that dates back to the agricultural revolution, when conservatively minded people would absolutely have thought that that newfangled woke farming bullshit is going to destroy society, and this sense of farming as a source of evil could have gotten incorporated into religion. Yahweh is also why depictions of God are forbidden.
Historical regional rulers did, however, affect eg. which god was favored, or what was part of the official religion, and on top of that a lot of the stories of different rulers and even some of the prophets in the Bible are essentially self-insert fanfic for some king or another.
If we’re going to take the Bible as stories that are somewhat partially true, I’d like to imagine that God as described was or is a supernatural nth dimensional being that allows for the manifestation of the human conscience in our moments of greatest suffering, but upholds a disassociative desire for a greater justice or harmony that can appear to many as an almost alien destructive nature and the tendency to punish, while another aspect or being above us, perhaps the same one, is basically a chilled out stoner who enjoys being lazy, exploring mushrooms as food, but doesn’t like the idea of farming and sedentary lifestyle.
Depends entirely on the religious sect. Some believe we live happily ever after in a similar condition but in paradise, some believe the believers get ascended to godhood, literally able to create universes.
It is an entire spectrum of fantasy, and that’s just the Christian sects.
The actual truth if you believe Christian theology. Angels AND God are fully capable of changing things, but free will is sort of like the Prime Directive in Star Trek if you want to be charitable. Uncharitably, we’re God’s play things and only a tiny fraction of the most loyal will see true reward.
The vast field of ambiguity between those two points is … kinda’ the point in why there has been so much quarrel even between Christian sects.
That’s a really apt comparison because they play fast and loose with the prime directive all the time, using it as an excuse for inaction while flagrantly disregarding it whenever it suits them
The great irony is, the Prime Directive is to try and control the emotional overreaction of humans and is indeed often ignored by Star Trek for supposedly moral reasons… It is terribly ironic that it makes such a perfect analogy to how God, a supposedly far superior being, is described as acting in the Bible.
In Star Trek, it’s ignored to help people. In the Bible, it’s ignored because God is having a bad day and needs to lay down some punishment without being labeled a massive hypocrite because daddy do no wrong.
No, the christian god its not just capable of changing things, it is omnipotent. That means it could change things without interfering with the free will.
The point about being omnipotent vs free will is… if he does ANYTHING to change our fate, he’s corrupting free will, which is supposed to be our greatest gift.
The entire concept of an omniprescient and all powerful being is nonsensical as described by Christians. A being LITERALLY CANNOT be all knowing, all kind, and omnipotent. Not if our reality is involved.
That is why there is so much debate over the nature of god and “good”. As described, it is literally impossible, so it becomes incredibly subjective.
Morals are subjective, and so is God.
Strictly talking the logic of it, if you’re omnipotent, then you have the power do do anything, and that includes the power to do flagrantly self contradictory things, defy logic and still be logically consistent.
The “if you’re omnipotent” part is a pretty big “if”, but it’s not inconsistent to say that “anything” includes the ridiculous.
I mean… Not really. Paradoxes don’t actually exist. Causality itself would fail to work if literally inconsistent things could be magically made consistent. It’s fundamentally not how the universe works. Literally. What you ask for could exist, but not in a universe that behaves like ours. It is fundamentally incompatible with what is observed.
Yes, completely and fundamentally incompatible. Even if God could start up a billion universes with a billion rules … ours doesn’t work like that. It’s like a game character saying, “yea well the devs could totally make this RPG a FPS game!”
Is the possibility true? Yes. Though for no reason the game character will ever comprehend nor be able to ever observe. It is fundamentally a pointless point that adds no new information to the equation.
We’re discussing logical consequences of a thing, not if the thing is possible in the first place.
You don’t have to talk logical consistency to rule out “all knowing and all powerful” if you’re just looking at how things work in reality.
In reality, you can’t be all powerful or all knowing. Done, end of story. It’s impossible on the face of it.
In the hypothetical where something can be all powerful, then the power to do whatever, even in a universe that behaves like ours does, is consistent.
The power to do anything includes the absurd, inconsistent, and contradictory.
Logic requires cause and effect. If you break cause and effect, logic means nothing.
If you keep logic, then again: Paradoxes don’t actually exist. At the end of the day, something is true or it’s not. If you’re dealing with something both true and not true, you are literally and quite directly dealing with something unresolved. We fundamentally do not observe unresolved things.
It is conceptually, definitionally, not compatible with observed reality. “Observed reality” literally cannot reference such things. The question itself is nothing but a thought experiment that far too many people fail to execute.
Can an omnipotent god microwave a burrito so hot that even he cannot eat it?
Yep, omnipotence is logically impossible. But try tell that a christian. That’s my point, the christian god is logically impossible.
To be fair, if he sets the board and knows the dice rolls he can create a universe that has both free will and only peeps that go to heaven.
Yes, but such a universe is still fundamentally incompatible with Christian (and most other) religious teachings.
There would be absolutely NO point in praying or asking for help in a universe with absolute free will, yet that is exactly what Christians (and many others) teach. It shows up all over in how they treat others and civil policy.
It’s why they’re so pro punishment: You make a choice to do bad things, you had free will to choose not to, so you must be bad. It’s not completely broken logic that they use, but it is absolutely not a self-consistent set of rules.
Save yourself the trouble; free will as we normally conceive of it is entirely an illusion.
He seemed to be happy to intervene in the Bible. Many times. So hasn’t he already corrupted free will?
Not really, unless you consider that every interaction with anything interferes or “corrupts” our free will. If I plan on playing a game, but a friend of mine says “dude, don’t, you’ll regret it, it fucking sucks”, and I decide to not play, did this friend corrupt my free will?
Your analogy is a little broken. God wouldn’t be simply telling you not to. God is literally changing what you want to do, or any other number of “omnipotent” actions that are not possible by someone not omnipotent.
The concept itself is incompatible with reality that operates like ours. Ours has clear, obvious, demonstrable, and repeatable rules. If those rules change, we literally cannot tell.
Omnipotence is quite literally a pointless point when there is literally NOTHING that demonstrates power beyond the existing rules. There is literally nothing that breaks causality in our reality. Our reality and existence is quite literally incompatible with omnipotence as described in the bible.
Literally any plans, any kind of tweaks, no matter how small or how far in advance he’s playing it. If you alter events or shift things to your end goals, you have destroyed free will.
This is a hilarious way of putting it, and as someone who hasn’t been all that steeped in christianity to be very familiar with it, that actually told me a lot 😄
That’s only the kind and charitable interpretations. There are ample stories of God directly murderizing people just for disobeying a direct order.
IMO, it’s all complete codswallop that’s been misconstrued off of the simple recordings of history and an attempt at passing on wisdom about which rulers were good and why.
After all, all it takes is some narcissistic piece of shit emperor to declare they shall be referred to as “god”, and no other rulers will even be recorded as having a similar honorific … and bam. God as described in the Bible suddenly makes perfect sense being a fickle piece of shit because he’s just a bastardized history of seemingly good rulers dealing with completely different problems in completely different ways.
Now, I don’t think that’s all of it. There is obviously much spirituality and baby’s first philosophy wrapped up in there, too.
This isn’t even all that far from the popular hypotheses about the history behind some of the stuff in the Bible, but the reason why the God of the Bible seems so damn fickle is that it’s likely an amalgamation of two different early Israelite / Canaanite gods: El and YHWH aka. Yahweh (and that name probably sounds familiar. Guess why!) If you’re interested in history, check out the book A History of God by Karen Armstrong, a nun-turned-atheist-historian. It’s an extremely interesting look into the prevailing hypotheses about the history of the 3 Abrahamic religions.
Now, it’s been a while since I read that book or about this in general so I’m not 100% sure I’m not mixing Yahweh and El up, but I think in general the ones where God goes all “FUCK YOU IN PARTICULAR” to some person or nation are El. In general in the “Elohist” passages that descend from stories of El, God is described as something really abstract or non-human, such as the burning bush. Also, interestingly the name still pops up in the (Hebrew-language) Bible in various forms.
In the “Yahwist” passages, God is described in a more personal and intimate way, and again if I remember right Yahwew is the more laid-back “facet” of the Biblical God. Interestingly the OG YHWH really hated farming and farmers, and there’s a general theme that farming and soil are somehow connected to evil, and you can see some that in the Bible; Cain was a farmer, for example. My own pet hypothesis for this is that that dates back to the agricultural revolution, when conservatively minded people would absolutely have thought that that newfangled woke farming bullshit is going to destroy society, and this sense of farming as a source of evil could have gotten incorporated into religion. Yahweh is also why depictions of God are forbidden.
Historical regional rulers did, however, affect eg. which god was favored, or what was part of the official religion, and on top of that a lot of the stories of different rulers and even some of the prophets in the Bible are essentially self-insert fanfic for some king or another.
Oh excellent, sounds like a book I’ll have to pick up so I can put some real substance behind my hunches. Thanks for the recommend.
If we’re going to take the Bible as stories that are somewhat partially true, I’d like to imagine that God as described was or is a supernatural nth dimensional being that allows for the manifestation of the human conscience in our moments of greatest suffering, but upholds a disassociative desire for a greater justice or harmony that can appear to many as an almost alien destructive nature and the tendency to punish, while another aspect or being above us, perhaps the same one, is basically a chilled out stoner who enjoys being lazy, exploring mushrooms as food, but doesn’t like the idea of farming and sedentary lifestyle.
Please enjoy my verbal diarrhoea haha
So the playthings
with dunning-krugerwho are loyal are still playthings after?Depends entirely on the religious sect. Some believe we live happily ever after in a similar condition but in paradise, some believe the believers get ascended to godhood, literally able to create universes.
It is an entire spectrum of fantasy, and that’s just the Christian sects.
Gnosticism is another old collection of beliefs that’s quite interesting to read about