Isn’t a Deist God a little less troublesome?

I got this question from John:

Perry, I am a former Christian turned deist. I could not believe in the god of the Bible because of the Bible’s flaws and because of morality problems with how the Old Testament Yahweh is portrayed but I could not give up my belief that an Intelligence had to have jump-started all this and then put natural laws into place to guide it to where we are today.

I read your thesis and would like to comment on how much I enjoyed it. I think your strength is to take a basically simple message–cell design/replication is intelligently designed–and explain it in simple, no-nonsense, no-frills terms.

I liken what you say to the belief by some atheist biologists arguing that chance could explain billions of English letters floating in a giant bowl of soup and then spelling out the complete works of Shakespeare when it is poured onto a table, given enough time.

Just curious: have you ever been drawn to deism as a better explanation for the origins of life–an Intelligence that has no note of or concern about the unspeakable levels of suffering that goes on down here regardless of how many prayers are sent up to Him?

My Reply:

John,

I can well relate to the

disappointment that leads one to prefer a deist God over a personal one. And I can understand the scientific logic that nonetheless indicates a supreme level of order in the universe.

But even if I were to try very hard, I’m not sure it would be possible for me to be a deist. Because I have had too many direct personal spiritual experiences. Ignorance is bliss but you can’t un-learn a truth.

Just two trails you can follow for now, of my personal story:

www.coffeehousetheology.com/miracles

www.perrymarshall.com/34766/the-story-behind-the-story/

Re: the Bible…

I think the Old Testament makes a great deal more sense if you look at it from an evolutionary viewpoint. The pivot point is the modern notion of equality, which I describe here:

evo2.org/faq/#equality

The notion of equality of human beings simply did not exist anywhere in the human race before Jesus. I flesh this out in the link above.

I would argue that before Jesus the very possibility of equality didn’t even exist. It was a Darwinian world. Period. There was no law or rule that said when you fight your enemies you should not kill them dead and take whatever you want.

There was no equality between the Jews and the Canaanites. None whatsoever. Not in theory, not in practice. A person from 1000 BC listening to our horror at those wars would be utterly mystified.

The only reason that you have this notion of “Old Testament Genocide” is from New Testament equality and visions of peace.

For those reasons, you can’t hold Old Testament God to New Testament morality, because before 30 AD there was no basis for spiritual equality of human beings in the first place.

Human equality is entirely a metaphysical construct (it’s manifestly false from an experiential point of view after all), and it comes from Christianity. 

In Christianity, ALL men (not just kings and queens and religious figures) can be literally regarded as sons of God; which suddenly causes “evolution” to mean something incomprehensibly different than it ever did before.

Equality post-Jesus might even mean that we attempt to provide free health care for everyone on earth.

No one in 1000 BC would have begun to imagine such a thing.

Download The First 3 Chapters of Evolution 2.0 For Free, Here – https://evo2.org/evolution/

Where Did Life And The Genetic Code Come From? Can The Answer Build Superior AI? The #1 Mystery In Science Now Has A $10 Million Prize. Learn More About It, Here – https://www.herox.com/evolution2.0

90 Responses

  1. Philip Strand says:

    Agree with the belief that New Testament was the new beginning, Christianity is different than the religion of the old teatament.

    • Charles Palm says:

      Animal Algorithms and Evolution and the INFORMATION of the INSTINCT BEHAVIOR of the COOPERATION among unrelated species for the PURPOSE of mutual survival, growth, and proliferation —- needs a new word to address the TRUTH of where “It is written” in Genesis. https://www.discovery.org/b/animal-algorithms/

      INSTINCT BEHAVIOR of ECOSYSTEMS is not learned and is not inherited from unrelated species.

      November 1, 2021, has the latest verifiable descriptions for the ORIGIN and DIVERSITY of life. ALL ECOSYSTEMS originated FULLY FORMED and have DEVOLVED ever since. In MY OPINION, Genesis is CORRECT: the Creation of INSTINCT ECOSYSTEMS happened only THOUSANDS of years ago.

      Biosphere 2 and the RAPID EVOLUTION of COVID into DEVOLVED variants are verifiable PROOF that no species can survive ALONE. Our Creator put GENETIC INFORMATION OUTSIDE DNA and GENETIC CODES IN DNA.

      As of November 1, 2021, in MY OPINION, ANIMAL ALGORITHMS require INFORMATION between SENDER and RECEIVER by using agreed upon symbols. Genesis tells us the ORIGIN of INFORMATION.

  2. Michael Champion says:

    Christianity is far worse morally speaking in explaining the problem of evil. You cannot have an omnipotent and omnibenevolent god at the same time while also having this world we live in exist in its current state. It is an absolute and obvious double standard of morality to say that God cannot intervene to fix the world without violating free will, but human beings with limited power are morally obligated to do good things and try to improve the world. The simple fact of the matter is that using power to help people, whether it’s omnipotent power or lesser forms of power, is not a violation of free will and is undeniably a good thing in all sorts of situations. Let’s say someone shoots a mass murderer who’s on a killing spree because they had an opening, that is seen as obviously good by the society and an action that saves lives, a good use of power. The more power you have available and the easier it is for you to safely save the day the more common sense dictates that you are obligated to save the day. Leading to the only logical conclusion, if you have Omnipotent power and there is literally nothing you can’t do, you are obligated to stop every form of violence from inflicting harm on any being in existence, full stop. To make this easier to understand I will give you a question, what would you do if you had the power of God? Would you sit around and say that intervening is a violation of free will, or would you very actively intervene to try to help everyone? Given that you believe in free universal healthcare you have no choice but to say you would click the Free Healthcare button to magically heal everyone from their injuries and illnesses if you had Omnipotent power like God supposedly does. To say otherwise would be a violation of your beliefs as you believe free healthcare should be established by humans even with their limited power and capabilities, so it’s the only logical conclusion. And if you say “Yes, of course i would do that” you must then say that God is worse at being God than you would be, as he obviously is not doing this and is letting millions of people die of starvation disease murder and all sorts of horrible things. With that example if you read the whole thing you should be able to see that ultimately an Omnipotent God cannot be omni benevolent at the same time and sit by and allow the world we are living in today since even a limited human brain that does not have perfect knowledge of what is morally right can conclude that this should happen and God is not doing it. Please note that just because the God character has perfect knowledge does not mean that human intuition is incorrect about what would be a better world, it just doesn’t know all the full details beyond what it has already figured out to be true.

    There is another important issue with the Christian belief in God, it doesn’t have an objective foundational basis. You will cite spiritual experiences and i will tell you those do not require a God to function, if you have seen people healed by the power of prayer that does not mean God did it, it means those people praying for the person to be healed from cancer did it. Although I predict these people would be more effective at healing and other things if they did not always believe God to be responsible for everything and always think they are powerless. The Judeo-Christian idea of God is not part of observable reality and should not be presupposed when there’s an observable source of these psychic healings, the people praying/wishing for them to happen.

    Also even when people have spiritual experiences where they say they see or talk to God, that doesn’t mean that the Judeo Christian God you’re imagining actually exists and the Bible is accurate. Since people’s reports of seeing God vary a lot it is good evidence there isn’t a real existing being there and if anything it might just be a thought form created by the mass mind. And they are just imagining their version of God when they have these spiritual experiences.

    What you might say is that God has to have existed otherwise DNA couldn’t have come to be, as you have basically implied in your book Evolution 2.0. This isn’t very logically coherent. As we look at the progression through evolution from cell all the way to human we see a dramatic rise in complexity and intelligence. It would be a lot more coherent to say that this trend of Less Intelligence->More remains the same with the origin of life and the original consciousness ‘designing’ the original primordial ancestor to DNA and self replication, that it was as simple a form of consciousness as is possible. We probably still need to know more about how DNA works to calculate how simpler self replicating molecules evolved into it but it’s clear from the trend that’s observable that God does not make sense to presume here.

    I agree with the principle of your book that the evidence of ordered and controlled cell activity is very indicative of intelligence behind it, and that basically the atheists have not set any goal posts for what level of noticably ordered behavior would prove to them that intelligence exists since it’s a dogma to them that no intelligence exists. However, your presumption of God seems very much based on your Christian indoctrination. And let’s be frank it is indoctrination, ‘if you don’t believe you will burn in hell forever or stop existing’, this is mainstream Christianity. Even the ‘Christianity Lite’ versions where people say they don’t believe in hell are the same thing, they all thank their Omnipotent God for everything good and don’t question the total stupidity of that assumption, and how much they debase and deprive everyone really responsible for good things by always crediting God. In the most extreme cases, this leads to them being Predestination Believers just like the Atheists are. As in Atheism all is random chance, therefore Predestination is true, there are no decision making agents that can change the outcome of any event and whether we can observe the pattern of this random events in the universe fully or not it was bound to happen one sole way from the beginning according to Atheists.

    There is no reason to assume an Omnipotent being exists. It is not just because of the problem of evil but because it doesn’t even make any logical sense, any conscious being has a limit to how much energy and matter they control, “Omnipotence” is an idea that only exists as something people make up. Let me try to make this clear by turning it into a question:How much energy, precisely, is God controlling right now? No matter what it’s always going to be a set amount and this is undeniable really. So if God has X amount of power there is obviously a limit to the power. Omnipotence as a concept makes no sense and philosophers have proved this for ages. Not only does it not make sense but the origin of it also makes no sense. Christians take the First Cause argument to immediately assume an infinitely powerful omniscient being which is really the most ridiculous thing ever. Think about it. Just because a first cause may be necessary does NOT mean that first event requires a God, there just has to be an original event at the start of the universe and that is it.

    I hope from this you understand how your reasoning process is being twisted by Christianity and logical reasoning concludes christianity is false. Or at least give some clear answers on what your fundamental attachment to Christianity is and why you are persisting in the non logical reasoning where your thought process looks like this:

    Christianity must be true->Try to find proof of God->Find something that proves consciousness drove evolution->OK God Must Have been responsible, no more thinking needed

    Instead of this:
    Find proof of consciousness driving evolution and being more primary than matter->Conclude consciousness must have originated at some point or another->How did it originate?->From less complex consciousness as it has throughout all of history, possibly some fundamentally least complex version of consciousness that is the basic nature of intelligence and caused the first DNA ancestor to originate through an as of yet unknown trait of natural law

    I know you mentioned natural law possibly creating consciousness in your book but you still are fixated on God as shown in your writing, where you use God as your Primary Assumption, not some natural emergence of consciousness which is more coherent and logical. You’re still stuck in the God of the Gaps mentality and your version of God of the Gaps is that God created the universe and planned everything so DNA would arise and create intelligent beings. You’re still trying to jam God into your thought process in an unnatural way IMO.

    Anyway to summarize:
    1)Please say what you would do if you had Omnipotence like God is supposed to
    2)Please say why you are still attached to the idea of Chrisitanity, and how many Christian ideas you believe in( Being good means obeying God like an obedient slave, you must believe in Jesus to be Saved/You are saved by someone else and have no power over your fate, Jesus will return and gladly send everyone who doesn’t submit to his rule to eternal torture)
    3)Please answer why you think God must have designed DNA and how God is supposed to have originated, and why you are presupposing a God instead of something much less complex
    4)Please be specific, and say if you believe morality is what God dictates(divine command theory) or if you accept the conclusion of Euthryphro’s Dilemma, that even if God exists he can only be a messenger reporting what is objectively right and wrong, regardless of what he says. By the way, the inevitable conclusion of the latter is that what is right and wrong for humans to do is the same as what is right and wrong for God to do, so my point on moral double standards becomes a big problem for your belief system, if you believe in an omnipotent god.
    5)Please set the goal posts for what would make you not believe in your idea of God.

    I will set the goal posts for what would convince me of God, if you could somehow overturn the logical reasoning process I’m using and convince me that things like Omnipotence are possible, and that I should have a reason to assume an infinitely complex God was the first being to exist instead of far less complex beings growing to more complex ones as evolution is indicating.

    All that aside your book is great proof of evolution and makes it far simpler to understand and shows a lot of interesting mechanisms. But these issues just make me cringe hard, seeing the Christian logical loops and circular reasoning spread throughout your book with the correct rebuttals of them not included in the book.

    • You are clearly very angry and you are being insulting.

      Here, you pile on all kinds of reasons why you think I’m irrational and frankly it seems like you have emotional issues and assumptions about Christianity that are far too complex and numerous for me to address on a blog.

      I do not really think you have rebutted anything here. You have just made assertions. You dismiss real documented events like miracles with a mere wave of your hand.

      You’ll have to do a lot better than that for me to take you seriously.

      Let’s start with just one issue, because this seems to be the starting point.

      You are assuming that an omnipotent loving God would intervene and solve our problems.

      Where do you get this assumption?

      I fully, totally get the emotional reaction when a child drowns or some other tragedy, that God could have prevented it.

      This is a question that Christianity does not flinch from. Not in the slightest. The question is written all over scripture and Christian history.

      But just because that question exists, doesn’t address the possibility that God has left humans in charge.

      You are assuming that if God loved us, God would fabricate a totally safe environment for all of us. We would be fed and clothed and God would prevent all accidents and life would be safe and comfortable at all times.

      Or… maybe you think it would be mostly safe and mostly comfortable and God would allow minor accidents but step in to stop the severe ones?

      Please explain. In detail. What your conception of God would actually do. Because this is certainly not my conception of God.

      I say this is a straw man version of God and if you actually go ahead and attempt to describe a world in which God does this, you will end up with a world that makes no sense.

      Tell me:

      What events and catastrophes would God prevent?

      And which ones would God allow?

      Can you explain to me how humans would have freedom if God was the constantly intervening helicopter parent?

      Can you explain to me how anyone would grow up into a mature responsible human being if God prevented all of our problems?

      • Michael Champion says:

        Yes, it’s partly an emotional post. What can I say, these are my emotions on the subject, and it is difficult to filter them out from time to time. Sorry if that made it too emotionally charged to read the main points.You say you understand this reaction and after that you decided to be really defensive and focusing on questioning my model of God. With yours being the default for now. OK, I accept that your version of God that doesn’t do much is the status quo in your mind, but hopefully I can convince you to change that status quo.

        “Can you explain to me how humans would have freedom if God was the constantly intervening helicopter parent?”
        It is not violating people’s freedom to intervene, it safeguards it. Just as it is with humans intervening for humans. I think most people would be pretty grateful if someone stepped in and suddenly stopped someone from violently raping or killing them, whether that was through omnipotent power or not. If I was God I would not make it so i have to intervene over and over again. Actually I do believe that this theoretical intervention would soon become obsolete.If I was God, first I would set up a post scarcity civilization where the humans have a resource abundance and don’t need to fight anymore, then the humans would at one point or another agree with me and realize how irrational fighting and violating each other’s freedom is. It’s a parasitic behavior, while a post scarcity civilization that operates from the bottom up without a top down hierarchy would be a Symbiotic system where nobody needs to get manipulated like a peon. Similar to the symbiotic nature of the human body where all the cells work together harmoniously for the benefit of the whole. And unlike in nature, you would have enough to go around for everyone so you don’t need to sacrifice the individual’s needs for the group.

        The goal of every parent is to do their best to help their children become independent and self sufficient. So the goal of every Omnipotent God should be helping everyone to become independent and self sufficient in essentially every way, rendering violence and conflict obsolete. But since a parent has limited time and resources they can only help to a limited degree. A God does not have limited time or power. This is a really important difference.

        “Can you explain to me how anyone would grow up into a mature responsible human being if God prevented all of our problems?”
        What you seem to be arguing is that people always require hardship to become mature people. That if someone grows up in a safe environment they cannot become self sufficient and good as a person. I don’t really believe that is true, there are quite a few cases where an easier and more secure environment facilitates development. Such as with the internet, people are now able to access all sorts of information for free, this environment enables them to do things they couldn’t before. Given that you believe in universal healthcare, this is the same idea, creating a safety net, just a more effective one. I agree that people in tough environments sometimes surpass their environmental obstacles and manage to become more disciplined and independent. But a safe environment is more reliable overall as a concept, it leaves the individual free to choose. People who overcome tough environments generally do it through their own willpower, but many do not break out of these environments. Said willpower could still be used in a safer and easier environment where they have all sorts of options available to them to pursue with their intrinsic motivation. In a society where their needs were met unconditionally i think most people would eventually gain quite a lot of intrinsic motivation to expand their knowledge. I’ll ask what you would do if you lived in a society where your needs would met unconditionally and you were basically safe from all violence as well. Would you decide to be a lazy bum? I doubt it. Even though a lot of people say that humans have no intrinsic motivation and must be manipulated by punishments and rewards, I do not believe any of that to be true. Not saying you’re saying it, but it is a commonly said objection to meeting people’s needs unconditionally, and i think it is worth pointing out that people would have plenty of motivation to become mature and responsible individuals even if their needs were met already.

        • It sounds like you’re saying that if God were a loving omnipotent God he would swoop in and rescue people from disasters. He’d be what the government is intended to be but more powerful.

          But how do you know he would let you do what YOU want to do?

          I could make a very strong argument that if everyone simply obeyed the 10 commandments, earth would be 1000% better overnight. It seems self-evident.

          But if I tried to enforce that with might, most people (especially those who lean left) would start riots.

          And if there were a “dotted line” beyond which God would not allow people to go, people would tow that line constantly.

          How exactly do you propose that God’s enforcement of safety should work? Please be specific.

          And yes my life experience at age 49 is that if people don’t have hardship and challenge they become undisciplined and flaccid. We have animals who have their needs met unconditionally. They’re called pets. Or they live in a zoo. I don’t know too many humans who aspire to that. I believe man is intended to accomplish far greater things than be fed and cared for by some external entity. Man is intended to mature and work out his problems and that includes getting along with each other and taking care of the poor.

          You said:

          The goal of every parent is to do their best to help their children become independent and self sufficient. So the goal of every Omnipotent God should be helping everyone to become independent and self sufficient in essentially every way, rendering violence and conflict obsolete.

          Bingo. I think that is exactly right. We agree. And INDEPENDENT and SELF SUFFICIENT are not possible if the parents constantly show up and solve the problems.

          We have all the moral instructions anyone needs in order to solve most of society’s problems. But people use their FREEDOM to do otherwise.

          God ostensibly values freedom far more than God values safety.

          • Michael Champion says:

            “But how do you know he would let you do what YOU want to do?

            I could make a very strong argument that if everyone simply obeyed the 10 commandments, earth would be 1000% better overnight. It seems self-evident.

            But if I tried to enforce that with might, most people (especially those who lean left) would start riots.

            And if there were a “dotted line” beyond which God would not allow people to go, people would tow that line constantly.

            How exactly do you propose that God’s enforcement of safety should work? Please be specific.”

            The idea is that God would stop aggression, not things considered to be a ‘vice’ that don’t actually harm others. So your example that everyone should follow the 10 commandments is not a match to the logical principle i’m arguing for. A few commandments partially follow this rule like “Thou shalt not kill”, although that should really be amended to “Thou shalt not murder”, but most of them don’t. And some of them partially work as ideals for model behavior, but not as enforcable laws.

            The other side of the coin from stopping aggression is providing resource abundance as a temporary measure until the humans have it under control and their post scarcity civilization is fully set up with no further intervention required. Needless suffering is obviously possible even without direct aggression. AKA in the modern world you could starve to death if you fail to get a job. Or simply if you’re born in a poor country in Africa you are likely to get malaria or die to the AIDS epidemic over there.

            Since there’s a chance you may not have heard of the general concept of an open source post scarcity society I recommend this informative documentary describing how it is supposed to work:
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z9WVZddH9w
            Essentially the idea is to localize everything in the economy as much as possible so individual people and individual towns and areas are as self sufficient as possible without relying on extensive wasteful supply chains as modern capitalism does today. Food and other needs would be supplied for free and many pointless jobs would be eliminated. Rather than relying on a network of manipulatory incentives and punishments to push people into action like machines, intrinsic motivation would be the primary psychological motivator for the population.

            “And yes my life experience at age 49 is that if people don’t have hardship and challenge they become undisciplined and flaccid. We have animals who have their needs met unconditionally. They’re called pets. Or they live in a zoo. I don’t know too many humans who aspire to that. I believe man is intended to accomplish far greater things than be fed and cared for by some external entity. Man is intended to mature and work out his problems and that includes getting along with each other and taking care of the poor.”

            Pets are not that smart. No offense to pets but they just don’t have the cognitive and physical capabilities to function in a human civilization in any way other than just sitting around eating. Humans are different in a lot of ways. The first thing I noticed about your response was that you responded to my specific question about what you would do with a generalization about (other) people. Do you count yourself into the group as someone who would get lazy if you knew you would be supported? If so please explain why you would be lazy to whatever degree you would be.

            It’s important to analyze the full context of why people become lazy. And why others do not get lazy at all, even when they are rich enough that they could easily live off their money the rest of their life. Research has shown very well that extrinsic motivation can undermine intrinsic motivation. When people get used to doing something only for a reward or only to avoid punishments, and you take away the incentives/punishments, they stop wanting to do it. There have been all sorts of studies on the subject but if you want a place to start check out this video which references a few:
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

            The implications of motivation research like this are wide ranging, showing that not only is our 1800s era schooling system wholly undermining students potential but the same can be said of our modern capitalistic system of work as a whole.

            Safety and freedom are not really conflicting. When people are safe they tend to have more room to be free, as long as safety is about defending liberties and not enforcing external control on people. People should not have the freedom to successfully murder each other but they can engage in self destructive behaviors if they really wish, as irrational as these behaviors are.

            Yes, I agree with self sufficiency as an ideal, but you may not realize how much modern capitalism runs counter to that goal. Capitalism necessitates cyclical consumption of goods regardless of whether this is actually necessary or healthy for the environment. That leads to goods being designed to be replaced the next year by a new one, rather than let’s say designing it to last 30 years and be easily updatable as new technologies emerge for improving it. Here are some examples.

            In electronics there is a new Iphone every year, with only tiny new features, and every one is designed with glued in batteries to make it break more easily so people have to buy a new one. Advertising is designed to induce artificial wants, like the ad campaigns to get people addicted to smoking by making it sound ‘cool’, since causing mass numbers of cancers and deaths this way is profitable and creates dependent addicted consumers. You can see this to a lesser degree in the video game industry which is designed to get people addicted. Software and video are copyrighted because it would be easy to mass-copy it and make it widely available for no resource cost, so software companies like Microsoft need to keep it all locked up under a patent so they can maintain profits. Even though if all software patents were removed sharing of information would be possible allowing far more innovation and preventing redundant research of the exact same thing by each different company, wasting a lot of time.
            Medical research is heavily impacted by cyclical consumption as taking the effort to research a cure that you may not find is a potential waste of money compared to guaranteed profit from cyclical treatments . Also, if you actually managed to find a cure that would be bad for profit too since curing everyone for free destroys your cyclical treatment industry. Which is a major influence on companies not putting far more effort into researching cures regardless of how many lives that might save. Plenty of people dislike the oil industry, but the reason we are stuck on a completely unsustainable energy infrastructure is inherent in capitalism. If everyone got efficient solar that handled their energy needs enough to provide a full charge for their car whenever they wanted they wouldn’t need to buy gas anymore, removing a huge industry. This is also why you don’t see America building mag rail systems across the country to let everyone get wherever they want easily, if that happened it would be a major profit loss for the oil and automobile industries.

            In all these examples the same trend can be observed, the more you try to meet people’s needs permanently the more that goes contrary to capitalism and is heavily discouraged by the system. Hopefully these examples may start to convince you that our modern system of capitalism isn’t that great an idea. I know this discussion might seem like it’s off topic but it is important to mention to bring into full context this question of what an Omnipotent God should do since it answers what is a more ideal society and what isn’t, and how a more ideal society like this is fully compatible with an Omnipotent God trying to get it established.

            • If God prevented all acts of aggression, how would freedom exist?

              Please define the line at which an act would be considered aggression. Please be extremely detailed so we understand what God would allow and not allow.

              • Michael Champion says:

                Of course freedom would still exist. Freedom isn’t defined by aggression. It’s the same as how society operates today deeming certain types of behavior not allowed.

                Certain things are very obviously aggression and would never happen again if an Omnipotent and even semi benevolent God existed, even a normal human could figure out that preventing all rape and murder is a good thing to do. Theft would disappear since everyone would have the resources needed anyways but if someone still wanted to do it and threatened violence if someone didn’t hand over their resources or whatever then sure, an all powerful God might do something. If he even needs to and the people aren’t already going to handle it on their own without dying or getting shot. All these instances of aggression are just proceeding from the same logical principle of what violence is so it’s not really that hard to understand. When you use force directly or use the threat of force to make someone do something that’s aggression. No being prepared to use force on someone if they themselves use force does not count as aggression it’s just a reaction to aggression.

                Direct prevention of violence would mostly become obsolete though if you just prevent structural violence and meet people’s needs after which they won’t have reason to be violent. As I went over with the discussion about capitalism and linking those documentaries that i guess you have not had time to watch yet.

                • “When you use force directly or use the threat of force to make someone do something that’s aggression.”

                  Is it OK for God to use aggression to prevent people from using aggression?

                  • Michael Champion says:

                    I explained 1 line below that how the logic is coherent for God, and more importantly normal people, to use the threat of force in self defense against other people using the threat of force. To be more specific initiation of force is what is wrong here not the use of it reactively and defensively. As a disclaimer I will mention that vast numbers of Americans who use this argument are Anarcho Capitalists and do not realize that Capitalism is pretty inconsistent with anarchism in general. And i’m not an AnCap. But nonetheless it’s a true statement on its own, just not in the context of the Anarcho Capitalist worldview which is inconsistent.

                    Normally this would lead to veganism too, but i do believe this to be objectively unhealthy as shown with science. To resolve the contradiction my personal solution would be more research in developing artificially meat growing technologies which doesn’t require killing animals, and once that’s well researched enough and able to be done on a mass level factory farming can be gotten rid of. As to whether it’s actually right to still eat animals in the meantime, that’s debatable, but i personally view it as close enough to being right when not doing that means having a very unhealthy diet and potentially dying.

                    • Michael,

                      The rationale you would invoke to reason through what kind of force is reasonable for anybody to use would be “just war theory” which is a very well developed body of work. Many scholars have written about this.

                      So you could try to apply just war theory to what God could or should do.

                      But it is painfully obvious that God, if God exists, doesn’t work that way. We obviously do not live in a world where God blocks bullets and stops rapists.

                      But now I’m going to take a turn you may not expect and point out that God does such things OCCASIONALLY and supernatural events do occur for which no skeptic has any plausible explanation.

                      There is a very well documented story from George Washington, for example:

                      https://colonialquills.blogspot.com/2015/03/george-washington-bullet-proof.html Indian chief says:

                      “I am a cheif and ruler over my tribes. My influence extends to the waters of the great lakes and to the far blue mountains. I have traveled a long and weary path that I might see the young warrior of the great battle. It was on the day when the white man’s blood mixed with the streams of our forest that I first beheld this chief [Washington]. I called to my young men and said, mark yon tall and daring warrior? He is not of the red-coat tribe–he hath an Indian’s wisdom, and his warriors fight as we do–himself is alone exposed. Quick, let your aim be certain, and he dies. Our rifles were leveled, rifles which, but for you, knew not how to miss–’twas all in vain, a power mightier far than we, shielded you. Seeing you were under the special guardship of the Great Spirit, we immediately ceased to fire at you. I am old and soon shall be gathered to the great council fire of my fathers in the land of shades, but ere I go, there is something bids me speak in the voice of prophecy. Listen! The Great Spirit protects that man [pointing at Washington], and guides his destinies–he will become the chief of nations, and a people yet unborn will hail him as the founder of a mighty empire. I am come to pay homage to the man who is the particular favorite of Heaven, and who can never die in battle.”

                      You can search history books to your heart’s content and verify that this conversation really did happen, and you can investigate the context and who the Indian chief was etc etc. Skeptics may dismiss this but I’ve seen all kinds of miraculous things in my life. In the blog post above I link to a lengthy article where I describe a whole series of miraculous events that I’ve personally witnessed. http://www.coffeehousetheology.com/miracles I’ve been in the room TWICE when people deaf for 30+ years got their hearing back. The second time I was sitting right next to the woman, Dierdre, when the hearing in a deaf ear came back.

                      Now what skeptics will always say is (in a mocking whiny voice, usually) “But why did God heal THAT lady and he didn’t heal _____??? He didn’t prevent the tsunami. He didn’t stop the earthquake. He didn’t heal uncle Carl. Doesn’t he love THOSE people?”

                      Two years ago some friends of mine Jordan and Erica lost their 10 week old baby to crib death.

                      A few months later I stopped by their house and we spent the whole evening talking about their loss. One of the things we talked about was that in the New Testament you have two very interesting stories which juxtapose.

                      You have the story of John the Baptist being arrested, being thrown in prison. (Matthew 11) He sends his disciples to Jesus and asks if he’s actually the real deal:

                      2 Now when John heard in prison about the deeds Christ had done, he sent his disciples to ask a question: 3 “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?” 4 Jesus answered them, “Go tell John what you hear and see: 5 The blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news proclaimed to them. 6 Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”

                      In Matthew 14 a girl asks Herod for the head of John the Baptist and it gets served to him on a platter.

                      Contrast this with Peter being let out of prison in Acts 12. An angel comes, his chains drop, and he walks out the door unimpeded.

                      WHY DID GOD RESCUE PETER AND NOT JOHN????

                      We are not given an answer.

                      But life is like that.

                      Why did Jordan and Erica’s baby die, yet you can EASILY find stories of children that were miraculously saved? Chronicles of very well documented miracles are absolutely rampant. All you have to do is start looking for them and you will find volumes and volumes of them.

                      So what is going on here?

                      AND here’s the rub:

                      When you finally realize that miraculous events DO happen, and God does intervene in the world, then you have in some sense an even more disappointing problem than you had before.

                      If God NEVER shows up then you maybe live in a deist world and you have to just deal with it.

                      But if God SOMETIMES shows up then you have this ugly thorny question about why sometimes and not others. Why some people and not others.

                      Well the starting point is that I myself simply CANNOT deny the reality that these things happen. The only way I could possibly do so would be to slip into a level of denial that is inconceivable. I have seen so many synchronicities and miraculous events in my life it’s a daily or weekly experience.

                      But neither can I deny that it’s NOT 100%.

                      I can make the observation that people who diligently pursue a relationship with God do experience a LOT more miracles in their life than people who don’t. I can absolutely assure you of that.

                      What I can also say is the notion of a God who shows up every time anything bad happens in the world has nothing whatsoever to do with Christianity or Judaism. If you think God is “supposed to” show up and prevent all your problems and stop thieves in their tracks, you’re talking about a god that has no relationship to real theology or Judeo Christian scholarship or life experience.

                      Practically speaking I find that the miraculous stopping of bullets such as reported with George Washington is rare. And it only happens when people put themselves in the line of fire in the first place. (By the way I believe the George Washington stories because I’ve seen deaf people get their hearing back. I don’t find the Washington story difficult to believe at all, it comports with my experience of the world.) But practically speaking I know people who listen to God and obey God all the time, and more and more blessings come into their lives. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Washington was well known to be a man of prayer.

                • Matthew Blair says:

                  Do you believe lustful and greedy desires of man would just disappear under a socialist society? That is basically what you’re saying and history has proven it wrong over and over again.

                  You act as if capitalism is the root of all evil and don’t even acknowledge the fact that capitalism has brought more people out of poverty than any other economic system. No, it’s nowhere near perfect, but socialism is too easily manipulated by those “in power” even though on paper it looks perfect. In order for it to work, people would have to magically lose every inherent flaw, such as greed, envy, lust, pride, etc.

                  Your take on God and humans appears to be the same idea that Satan and 1/3 of the angels had. FORCE humanity to worship. If God was always saving us from the problems WE create and/or ignore, would we really love and respect him? Think of a parent that always bails their punk kid out of jail. An enabling God makes no sense to me.

                  Let’s say for a moment that there WAS a supernatural force that created everything in existence, is intelligent enough to create everything with a 4 digit genetic “code”, and set the mathematical laws of the universe into place. Do you think even the most wise and intelligent “philosopher” to have ever lived even comes close to the intelligence of this supernatural force? You, and all the philosophers you cite, are mere cockroaches to a being like this. I highly doubt he will ever try to explain himself, or his dealings with humanity, to you. But you’re more than welcome to sit around and believe that you are wise and intelligent enough to understand it if he did.

                  Socialism does not work. The rich get even richer, while the poor get even poorer. This have been proven time and time again. It is OUR obligation, NOT Gods, to love and help one another. If we did what God told us to do, in MOST cases he wouldn’t have to step in.

          • Michael Champion says:

            It’s been 5 days, so you have had a lot of time to approve and respond to my comment in this thread from August 11th. Don’t mean to be picky here but it helps if you respond within a certain time frame so i do not have to keep checking to see if there was a response. Also keeps the rate of information exchange fast enough that conveying all the ideas and addressing concerns gets way faster. At this point with my yet to be approved post I conveyed the most key ideas about capitalism but have yet to do the critical stage of addressing your response. Maybe after 3-4 more posts I will run out of key concepts to relay over to you and be mostly done saying all the main ideas but that is why it would help if you respond. Most especially you addressing the August 11th response which is at least 3x more important than any later responses I may make and probably even the ones before it as it gets to the core of the issues.

            • I have a lot on my plate. I respond as I am able.

              • Michael Champion says:

                Ok. I guess you are very busy. But at least you have time now.

                • Michael,

                  I think we’re dancing around the real question here.

                  I think the real question is: If there is a “loving God” out there somewhere, why is there so much f***ing pain and suffering and confusion and husbands beating their wives and savagery and unemployment and starvation.

                  And you’re very angry about it and you’re just putting your anger out there.

                  I get that.

                  Well, so here’s perhaps the real problem with a blog like this, if I may just be transparent with you:

                  The real problem is that I’m trying to have a logical rational discussion because I believe that belief in God is entirely logical and rational. But DIS-belief in God comes from anger, frustration, rage, disappointment, sadness, trauma… and it’s real hard to get people to talk openly about what is REALLY bothering them – when it’s in public in front of everyone, on a blog where everything you say might be here or somewhere on the internet for the next 20 years.

                  I mean really, are people going to cut a vein and bleed? Isn’t it a lot easier to hide behind “scientific” facts and argue about fossils or something?

                  Well you’re welcome to tell your story here and if you’re willing I’ll respect that. Your story is your story is your story and I don’t think anybody can argue with it.

                  Or we can argue about scientific facts. Well I’ve done this for a very long time (about 20 years) and I’ve never met an atheist who can ground their disbelief in God with a scientific fact. (Although they can certainly argue against an excessively literal interpretation of Genesis, I’ll grant them that!) At the end of the day the only logical conclusion you can possibly make is that there HAS to be an uncaused cause. But they’re always angry and they don’t want to accept that so [while I am trying to have a logical discussion] they always change the subject and go on yet another rant about the old testament or a tsunami or whatever.

                  Maybe a good question to ask might be: Despite the fact that I was a pastors kid growing up in a VERY abusive church environment, why am I still a Christian? I tell a rather chilling story here:

                  http://www.coffeehousetheology.com/anne-rice-leaves-the-church/

                  Video version if you prefer:
                  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wIraVtNfe8

                  Now these stories are only 0.1% of the pain I’ve experienced in my life but they do give you an idea. I totally get that the world is hard and capitalism puts a gun to your head every day and you have to go out and win some bread. As a consultant to entrepreneurs I get that more than most people.

                  I’m not angry about these things any more…. but I was for a long time. I do not believe that erasing God from the picture would have helped my anger. I think there are other ways.

                  • Michael Champion says:

                    Yes, there is a big emotional component to any talk about the existence or non existence of God, but it’s not like that means it’s incompatible with the logical argument. There are plenty of cases where logic or emotion will lead to the same conclusion. For example someone could say that the idea of an all powerful lazy god does not seem quite right from an emotional standpoint without getting why. While if they knew the logical argument too they would say that the reason is because it’s a double standard between what people should do and what a god should do if God is not allowed to do anything. Atheists are often only capable of making a logical and not an emotional argument though in some cases. They will be able to understand what a double standard is and say ‘Here is the logical fallacy’ in 5 seconds, but their belief system tells them that nothing is really right or wrong so technically it’s ‘not wrong’ if God were to just use a double standard like this. Even though internally they recognize to some degree something isn’t right with that they simply ignore that emotion as ‘illogical’ since what their intuition is telling them is that there must be some form of objective morality and their belief system does not agree with that.

                    “At the end of the day the only logical conclusion you can possibly make is that there HAS to be an uncaused cause. But they’re always angry and they don’t want to accept that so [while I am trying to have a logical discussion] they always change the subject and go on yet another rant about the old testament or a tsunami or whatever.”
                    I didn’t change the subject and you didn’t answer what i said about this exact topic, you are still assuming there HAS to be a God behind the initial event of history, it may be true that some form of consciousness had to be around if consciousness cannot be explained as coming from matter, but that doesn’t mean it had to be an all knowing all powerful God. As I said earlier, it’s a lot less logically explainable to start with huge complexity instead of starting with a simpler form of life.

                    I read the article you linked and it seems like the church caused a lot of problems with all the people there. Yes they are attached to it since it’s their only source of any belief in meaning in life but that doesn’t mean that Christianity is actually true.

                    “I do not believe that erasing God from the picture would have helped my anger. I think there are other ways.”
                    Just keep in mind that for me it is not about erasing God from the picture since he isn’t even in the picture, I don’t have a reason to believe, the idea isn’t natural to me. Christians sometimes make the argument that other people secretly believe in God and this is just a totally wrong statement.

                    If you want to really make an ultimate argument for God, the best way would be if you could just derive everything logically and show that it’s unavoidable that an omnipotent God is required. But i’m not seeing that, i’m just seeing this uncaused cause argument a lot of times which is just saying ‘something’ caused the initiation of the universe, it isn’t saying God did it. For example, if early in human history we saw no stars but the sun, and 1000 years later on suddenly 1 billion stars appeared in the sky at once(due to the light from them all having traveled the distance to earth in the same timeframe) that would be pretty good evidence of an intentional Design act. But that hasn’t happened. And it wouldn’t be proof of an Omnipotent God, just one powerful enough to perform the act it displayed. It may actually be logically impossible to prove Omnipotence even if we lived in a vastly different universe where there was some obviously existing Omnipotent God since no matter what feats occur to demonstrate omnipotence , omnipotence necessarily means that God could do something 10x more grandiose. The same goes with Omniscience.

                    But the history of the universe is not like that to the chagrin of Young Earth Creationists, it’s a lot more coherent to assume there was not a massively powerful God creating the universe. Although even in such an odd universe like the idea i mentioned, it would still be needed to explain why the God is the uncaused cause and the uncaused cause is not instead the basic nature of life and consciousness in general, which would include the nature of God.

                    • “If you want to really make an ultimate argument for God, the best way would be if you could just derive everything logically and show that it’s unavoidable that an omnipotent God is required.”

                      The following is as close to that as you can get, as far as I’m aware:

                      http://www.perrymarshall.com/godel

                      It’s not proof that God has to be infinite and boundless and all powerful; but it’s proof that such an entity necessarily has to exist IF the universe is rational.

    • Stephen Watt says:

      Since science has not even started to give treasonable reason for creation and certainly not for human life Whereas scripture does tell of Someone outside of matter, space & time The stupidity of some who say How could there be a God who is overall, not setting to rights the horrors of life. They seem to forget God was in this world as a man healed the sick fed the hungry, blind to see lame to walk even raised the dead,what did mankind do and still do ?rejected Him and crucified Him chose rather a murderer than Him
      History geography prove this is true As being slaves think those who reject God and His word are those who are slaves to sin as is seen in the awful world we see today Yes you can keep your believe and atheistic religion I Know whom I believe

    • Brian Guichet says:

      Your entire reply is put to moot with one word EXPERIENCE. If an omnipotent God fixed every little thing all the time murder rape sickness then there would be life,not free will life. There is no pleasure without pain, no joy with out sadness. If there was never the bad you can not appreciate the good. If there was always perfection in circumstances there would be no maricles to exsplain. No question if there was a God because why give credit to for something that just is when it’s ever something that is not.

    • Zaki Islam says:

      The day you understand God in all It’s possibilities, it’s the End. Period. A limited intelligence cannot define a limitless entity. Period.

    • brooks marsh says:

      Hi Michael, Your depth of thought came from the gift or grace of a
      loving God that I pray will touch you this moment. Below is my Easter morning personal reflection for you. Remember we all have feet of clay and many doubts yet God gave us a “yoth”, (the smallest letter of the Semitic alphabet), of faith so that we could accept Him in Faith and put the weight of clay behind us. Love and Blessing to you brother.
      Easter morning I sit in the warm Georgia sun reflecting on this day. As my thoughts wander in and about: gratefulness, family, prayer and daily activities; I can’t help but notice the wood decking. Years of sun, sand, humidity, wind, imminence heat and rainy cold have marked their time on it. Countless deep grooves, and cracks and broken edges are first visible. A closer look shows dark spots of wear and wood breaking down. Looks like a major spring project. As I step through the process; it is a project of sanding, filling, sanding again, removing and replacing boards: sealing, and finally staining….

      As thoughts go, my deck project sends me to looking at myself and how the same sun, wind and daily life process has marked me. We are all cracked and broken people and cannot be fixed as simply as the spring project I rest on. In our frailty, we at best are good people with “feet of clay” that drag us down at times. We certainly cannot fix ourselves, but can have contentment and peace as we do have a hope.

      You see this simple but broken deck brings me the clear the significance of this day. The Christ that was broken for us and the healing for all mankind given to us today by His love and grace.
      Yes, He was sent for this sole purpose. Fulfilling hundreds of prophecies, after a short life of preaching, fearful and jealous religious leaders arrested Jesus. It was not enough to jail Him. This servant to the lowest of society was too dangerous. He was mocked beaten and scourged publicly. “It was executed with thin elm rods or straps having leaden balls or sharply pointed bones attached, and was delivered on the bent, bare, and tense back.” The victim was fastened to a pillar for the-purpose. His skin was torn from his back and a crown of thorns was pressed onto His head.” He carried the cross He was to die on up the mountain, and his hands and feet nailed to it. He died with two thieves crucified with Him, forgiving one of them as he hung from the cross. As He died light was taken from the sky and He called out. His was then speared in His side. No greater love.

      While this is the most read historical death of all time, this miracle of all time is what we today call Easter. Jesus, broken by man arises from death, appears to many and tells us to make “Go and make disciples, (teachers), of all nations”. He then was taken to heaven.

      So we do not choose what happens in the soil when the seed breaks and grows. We cannot choose the direction of the strong cold winds, relentless ocean storms, or the brightness of the sun that warms us and the moon that reflects softly on us. Our days our filled with joy and challenge, much of which we can not control. Yet we can choose contentment in all that we face whether it be joyous or overpowering by accepting the love in our hearts from the great God that is the maker of your precious heart and soul. The one that was broken to save us. We are able to accept this healing as we have in us the gift of grace that allows it. There is a letter/symbol from my reading: “Yodh”. It is the smallest symbol in the ancient Semitic alphabet. Jesus tells us that with the smallest bit of faith we can move mountains. Like this small symbol, God puts in us the tiniest bit of faith so that we by this bit of faith, can accept His healing and new direction of life not separated from Him. Accepting Him makes us spiritually new. Sitting back in my chair I am warmed; and smile as I am touched with the healing realization of this gift of love that is greater than “all” else around us in this unusual year and time… or really and other time in our lives.

      Ah… My broken deck project is not so big after all….

      Share the love He made in you with those you touch today and each day, leaving an indelible mark of love and light from the maker of this love in you. In fact, my prayer today is that you do not meet a person with out sharing a mere “Yohd” of His light and love that was a gift to you paid by His death and resurrection. Find today, yourself enveloped in the prayer and love of me and those that share your heart in His love.
      You are a precious part of who I am today and I am so thankful for that.

      Blessings and love,

  3. Michael Champion says:

    @PerryMarshall:
    It seems like one of the comment chains we were talking in has run out of posts. I have heard about this issue before, WordPress supposedly doesn’t work at allowing comment chains to go beyond a certain length so there is no Reply button on your post. I’ll reply to it over here.

    “The rationale you would invoke to reason through what kind of force is reasonable for anybody to use would be “just war theory” which is a very well developed body of work. Many scholars have written about this.

    So you could try to apply just war theory to what God could or should do.

    But it is painfully obvious that God, if God exists, doesn’t work that way. We obviously do not live in a world where God blocks bullets and stops rapists.”

    I will add in that this just war idea when fully applied to society generally results in the idea of one or another kind of Anarchism,although the main ones who heavily misuse the concept are Anarcho Capitalists. Since capitalism is generally focused on differential advantage and tends towards aggressive wars in the first place. If there were no more wars, what would the construction companies, weapon companies, and oil companies profit from as they destroy and rebuild country after country? War is basically intrinsic to capitalism and capitalism requires it to maintain cyclical profits and avoid economic collapse. I will start this response off by saying the most important point i want you to understand is the anti capitalist argument i am making about an open source society. It honestly doesn’t matter that much if you still retain your Christian beliefs for whatever reason, even though i still heavily disagree with them and especially a lot of their big implications like the Christian idea of Hell justifying oppression, I’m hoping i can convince you on the capitalism argument as that to me is a huge deal. So if you have the time please do watch those two Zeitgeist documentaries I linked here as they are absolutely key to understanding what’s going on in the world and how it could be 100x better in pretty much all areas. Each are about 2 hours long but even individual parts of them are very informative and I guarantee you’ll learn a lot from them, assuming you haven’t already seen them of course.

    As for your argument that seemingly supernatural events occur, i don’t dispute that some might happen, but i don’t think religion needs to be invoked here. For example if Christians experience ‘miracles’ related to their religion more often when doing what they think their religion tells them to do, that doesn’t necessarily mean the religion is true, it could just be an effect of their mass belief. You could easily see the same thing happen with people of non-Christian belief systems. It’s good evidence that the so called miraculous effect doesn’t come from an omnipotent god but the people themselves. And these kinds of effects would be limited, it is not like everyone with cancer in the world could suddenly all be cured at once.

    I think this is a lot more reasonable than saying that some people do not get healed from a disease just because God said he didn’t feel like it on a whim. It is also consistent with people of whatever belief system sometimes getting more miraculous results when they conform to the belief system more, they fit what they’re supposed to be according to the mass belief more, so they generally get more ‘energy’ from it than someone else would who is less associated with the beliefs, giving a higher chance of a ‘supernatural’ event. But that doesn’t mean they’re suddenly guaranteed to be healed from any illness just because they conform to their religion. At the end of the day, nobody would be totally invincible regardless of belief system, George Washington may have resisted a few bullets but that doesn’t mean his beliefs made him completely impervious to harm, a cannon ball explosion would definitely be fatal. Since there’s evidence for these ‘miraculous’ events happening to people of multiple belief systems not just Christianity, there’s no way your theory holds up, it is not just some Christian God dispersing miracles when he sees fit. You even argued this yourself to some extent i believe by saying you know that some people have the power to heal and saw people get cured of deafness in the same room as you. So in other words it is those people who have that ability, not God doing everything. The airquotes I use are because I don’t believe things called supernatural should not be explainable with science, if they do really exist, then it is unavoidable that they would have to be explainable by science in some way, just like everything else. For example if supernatural healings occur then scientists could figure out the mechanism for this healing and possibly learn to use technology to replicate the effect, or at least figure out how people with an ability to heal do this so they can make others able to do so. If they don’t occur at all then it’s easy to explain but one way or another there is always going to be an explanation. Even if the mind is not created by matter, it still operates through it in a specific way, so there should be a discoverable mechanism.

  4. Michael Champion says:

    @PerryMarshall:
    Seems like the same thing happened with the other thread too. I read through the article on Godel’s incompleteness theorem but the thing is, God would fit inside a circle too. If God is a conscious being then I can draw a circle around “All matter, all energy, all conscious beings” and God won’t be on the outside.

    Something I am noticing about this theorem is that the only thing i cannot delete from the equation are laws of nature. If I draw a circle saying “All laws of physics, all energy, all matter, all conscious beings” what is still left outside? It has to be explanations for how the laws of physics and everything else work, justifications for them. So your argument seems great if you apply it to the idea that there must be more fundamental laws of nature behind all of them, or laws of how consciousness would work at its most basic level, but not for inserting God since God can be put in a circle. Explanations of how nature and consciousness work are the most ‘gaseous’ and simply cannot all be stuffed in a circle with everything else no matter how hard you try.

    • If God is infinite then God cannot fit inside the circle.

      • Michael Champion says:

        Sure he can. No matter how smart or powerful someone is they still count as a conscious being. I see no reason God would get out of that category, you put him in it in the first place.

        • Please explain how infinite space can fit inside a finite circle.

          • Michael Champion says:

            You’re taking it too literally. I’m not talking about a physical circle but a conceptual one. AKA, God is a conscious being->God fits in the category of conscious beings. There’s no way around it. That’s how i described it last time.

            • Michael, you cannot draw a physical or conceptual circle [outer boundary] around something that is boundless. That is the definition of boundless.

              • Michael Champion says:

                “Michael, you cannot draw a physical or conceptual circle [outer boundary] around something that is boundless. That is the definition of boundless.”
                Boundless in which ways? No matter how omnipresent/omniscient/omnipotent of a person, they’re still 1 individual. Does God not have individuality? If he does then he is just one conscious individual no matter how omnipresent he is throughout spacetime.

                Other examples of boundless that still fit within a conceptual circle:
                An infinite universe would still fit in a circle, since it can be categorized as the universe, or all of space, or whatever it is. Or an infinite multiverse. I gave you an example of boundlessness that is difficult to fit in a circle, but that is only with a group that has a naturally infinite number of members making it impossible to count them all. It doesn’t work that way with an individual or they wouldn’t be individual at all.

                • Tim Payne says:

                  God’s infinity goes beyond the laws of physics, incomprehensible,into the nothing. The laws of physics your meat is bound by does not apply to God’s everything. That law was created just for us. I can’t prove that to you, but I know it is true, and if you ask you maybe you can see it also. It does take faith at least as much as the size of a mustard seed.

              • Michael Champion says:

                You didn’t respond to what I said about how laws of physics and possibly of the mechanics of consciousness could be ‘gaseous’ in the way i described, requiring an endless series of justifications. I guess your way of responding was to say you think you can apply that to God too but that is just not true. You should realize that God can be categorized because you do categorize this idea you have just like I told you. It’s right in your use of pronouns and adjective describing God as an individual. Let me phrase it another way. What makes it different when individual humans can be categorized, but God can’t? What is the deciding factor here that allows God to escape the individuality category and be boundless? I’m not seeing any and i can’t imagine what it could be, even when i imagine all the Omnipotent/Omniscient/Omnipresent/etc traits God is supposed to have. And if you can’t illustrate it it makes me unable to believe you are right. So it would help if you could show me what that deciding factor is that makes him boundless and able to escape categorization, omnipresence and all the others i mentioned don’t work for the reasons i explained, he is still categorized. I want to be able to see your whole line of reasoning here and all the foundations of what you’re saying is your logical deduction of God.I do think you are ultimately biased, although to a smaller extent than most Christians, and down there in the chain of reasoning somewhere near the beginning you have a ‘God MUST be boundless’ thought that is corrupting the rest of your reasoning process.

              • Michael Champion says:

                Just in case you’ve forgotten about this thread, I’ll post again. To summarize, you are not explaining the origin of your idea that God must be boundless, or how that can possibly be the case when I’ve shown you how one individual by definition has to fit in the category of ‘all individuals’. There’s no other way to explain it. No matter what you say is true, you cannot change how categories work, and an individual, God or not, fits in the category of ‘all sentient beings’. Which is really important as it will show you that the christian God idea just cannot be fully boundless in all ways.

                Again, it is not as if i am simply making this idea up. I see zero ways around this inescapable logical conclusion. If you have any other ideas it would help for you to say them as otherwise I am going to assume you just do not have a logical explanation for how God can be boundless.

              • Michael Champion says:

                It isn’t really relevant to me whether you post this particular comment or not, but what is relevant is the picture you’re creating for everyone else viewing the thread. You might not have realized but you’re making it seem like there is no counterargument to what you said about the idea of boundlessness by not posting my response and leaving yours as the last one. It’s been several weeks at this point, you have had plenty of time.

  5. Michael Champion says:

    If you want to talk more about the issue of the ‘just war’ idea you brought up then i think you should answer honestly this question. What would you do if you were omnipotent? Remember true omnipotence means there is absolutely nothing stopping you from doing what you want so you could easily fix any of these issues with no negative side effects on the universe. There’s no reason not to.

    If it’s painfully obvious to you that there is no omnipotent God that stops bullets and rapists, then why do you still believe in an all powerful God? This is where Christians usually make the “Argument of Ignorance” and say that because God is supposed to be mysterious that his actions are for mysterious unjustifiable reasons that stupid ignorant humans like them could never understand, which makes no sense at all. People are either right or wrong when they believe in the ‘just war’ principle. If they’re objectively right, it wouldn’t matter how much smarter God was, he would come to the same conclusion. More intelligence only lets someone analyze issues in more detail, it isn’t going to change the truth of any hypothetical objective morality, not even infinite intelligence would. No matter how much you zoom in on the details of an object with a microscope it’s still going to be the same object, you’ll just understand more of it. The same goes with morality if morality is objective. If humans come to an intellectually honest and logically valid conclusion about what is right and wrong, it’s not going to suddenly change just because someone smarter looks at the same question.

    Also this argument of ignorance is exactly like the atheist argument that intelligence serves no purpose whatsoever and is not oriented around discovering truth at all, since that means the same brain making that argument is an invalid source of analysis. If the Argument of Stupidity Christians make is true, and God could figure out a moral conclusion completely the opposite of humans based on the same facts with both sides being intellectually honest and logical, because he’s much more intelligent, then for all these Christians know, anyone who disagrees with their argument is simply more intelligent than them and coming to a completely opposite conclusion in a valid and correct way while they’re the wrong ones. Christians don’t realize this at a fully conscious level but they’re introducing Moral Relativism whenever they make this argument and undermining their own claims.

    Fortunately, philosophers have addressed the issue of objective morality for ages before Christianity even existed. I’m sure you have heard of Euthyphro’s Dilemma which fully answers this question. To summarize it, If something is objectively right/wrong then it’s also so for God, otherwise morality is arbitrary if it is just based on what God decides others should do. At best any religious creator god figure can only be a messenger for what is right and wrong based on objective truth, or else it’s all just arbitrary anyways and they have no reason to listen.

  6. Tom Godfrey says:

    Michael Champion,

    May I join your conversation with Perry? You have covered several issues, but if I may, I would like to focus on what appears to me to be a logical problem with claims in the first paragraph of your first comment for this thread. If you disabuse yourself of one key logical fallacy, other issues might soon vanish.

    Let’s start with this claim: “You cannot have an omnipotent and omnibenevolent god at the same time while also having this world we live in exist in its current state.” You should understand that universal negatives like this are notoriously hard to prove. You can make the claim with ease, of course, but can you prove that it is true? I doubt that you can, but you can certainly believe that the claim is true by faith, right?

    You may protest that you can turn it into a logical problem for people like me who believe in God. I give credit to Greg Bahnsen for helping me understand the problem of evil. To save you the trouble of reading his long article about it, I will explain it briefly right here. Just in case you are want to read his article anyway, here is a link to it.
    http://www.cmfnow.com/articles/pa105.htm

    Let’s turn your claim into a syllogism that begins with two premises or presuppositions.

    1. God is omnibenevolent (completely good).
    2. God is omnipotent (completely powerful).

    What we have so far is not a problem for believers, but we still have another premise to add.

    3. Evil exists or happens.

    As Bahnsen points out, no evil, no problem. We evidently agree on the need to accept this third premise, but does this lead to a logical problem for believers? Does the third premise require rejection of one or both of the first two, or, in other words, does it force us to conclude logically that the kind of God in which we have put our faith cannot exist? This may surprise you, but the answer is no, because of our option to add a fourth premise or presupposition.

    4. God has a morally sufficient reason for the evil which exists.

    I think you must have realized that the syllogism was not quite complete after you added the third premise, because you went on to say this at the end of your first paragraph: “Please note that just because the God character has perfect knowledge does not mean that human intuition is incorrect about what would be a better world, it just doesn’t know all the full details beyond what it has already figured out to be true.” Please correct me if I misunderstood, but I think this means that you prefer a different fourth presupposition.

    4 (MC). God does not have a morally sufficient reason for the evil which exists.

    So which fourth presupposition is true? You have racked your brain to think of a morally sufficient reason that God might have for the evil that exists, and yet you cannot think of even one, right? You might challenge me to think of one. If I can’t think of one either, can we therefore logically conclude that no such reason can possibly exist? Your fourth presupposition is another one of those universal negatives. Can you prove that it is true? It could be hard to do, especially if we agree that argumentum ad ignorantiam is a logical fallacy. Given your statement of confidence in human intuition, quoted above, I suppose I should not jump to any conclusions about what you recognize as a fallacy, so if anything I have said here should be considered controversial, please explain why.

    This coin has another side. I cannot prove that my own version of the fourth presupposition is correct either, but we are each free to prefer our own version of it by faith. I think the upshot of this is that your syllogism is not really a logical problem for believers after all, regardless of how obvious this may be. We certainly do not know the full details beyond what we have already believed to be true. God is believed to be eternal, omniscient, and omnipresent too. What about us? What business do we have pretending to be like God in these respects?

    Bahnsen went on to explain that unbelievers still have a problem asserting the third premise while also believing that there is no God. I think you recognized this in your August 18, 2018, 8:01 pm, comment, where you wrote, “Atheists [… believe] that nothing is really right or wrong so technically it’s ‘not wrong’ if God were to just use a double standard like this. Even though internally they recognize to some degree something isn’t right with that they simply ignore that emotion as ‘illogical’ since what their intuition is telling them is that there must be some form of objective morality and their belief system does not agree with that.” To keep our focus sharp, let’s set this issue aside and settle the fallacy issue I described above first, before moving on.

    You challenged Perry to explain what he would do if he had the power of God. I suppose I should not ignore this challenge, because you may well present it to me too. Well, I think this hypothetical is actually irrelevant to a proper analysis of the syllogism of interest. If I had the power of God without knowing what God knows, I admit that my actions and judgments could be very different but not necessarily better. If I were in God’s “shoes” with all of the standard divine attributes, I guess that my actions and judgments would be exactly the same as his. Why not? One could speculate, of course, but how would this subjective exercise be relevant to the logical issue before us?

    If you have spotted a problem in my own logic here, please explain.

    • Michael, I just want to mention that Tom Godfrey does not believe that science can tell us anything about history, and since our philosophies are completely incompatible and mutual agreement is inherently impossible, I no longer engage with him.

      • Michael Champion says:

        Well that is really a shame. I guess Christianity has too much of a hold on him so he decides to be anti science. When that fundamentally makes no sense. If any metaphysical things you postulate are true then they would unavoidably have to scientifically true too, science is just the discovery of consistency and truth in the world.

        • Brian Thomson says:

          Wow… where to begin…
          Science as we know it is limited in ways we cannot even comprehend. It is only our own arrogance that allows us to believe otherwise.

          I was once asked by a philosophy student, “If your God is all powerful can He create a rock so big he can’t move it?” and he said it with a smug smile. He thought he had backed me into an impossible philosophical corner. I replied, “The very fact that you can ask that question means that you do not comprehend God. If God wanted to He could create a rock bigger than the known universe. If He then wanted it to move, it would move on it’s own”.

          I am a big fan of our efforts in science as I see them as our way to try to comprehend what God has created. If we were, somehow, able to learn everything that mankind is able to learn in the next 10,000 years we would look back and clearly see how vast our own arrogance is today. As an example if we were so arrogant as to make the claim that we now know 10% of all knowable knowlegde, and that is beyond credible, that would mean that there is still 90% we have no idea of. I firmly believe, for instance, that all of what we consider physics is based on the relative density of the space we are in. If we were to travel towards the core of our galaxy the “laws of physics” would change. The very prinicples that keep our bodies working would… change. The very principles that would make our ship work would… change. To what I do not pretend to know! Imagine… every atom in us and the ship becoming the next heavier element once a threshhold in spacial density was crossed. Or perhaps the laws governing how electrical signals are transmitted changed. My point is not that any of these conjectures is a fact. My point is, rather, the vastness of what we do not know. In all of that immeasurably vast ocean of facts that we do not know… is there room for God? Perhaps there is also room for an understanding that we are not capable of yet?

          I am a Christian. I have seen God be so real in my life that most Christians would not believe me if I told them. When I was a child a doctor told me that I had a rip in my heart so big that it could be clearly seen on an X-Ray. He said that he didn’t know how I was alive and that he did not expect me to live through the next two months. My mother took me to a Christian faith healer by the name of Hunter. The following day she took me back to the doctor. After arguing with my mother for almost an hour, explaining that there was no possible way there was any change this soon, that the tests were expensive, that her coverage would not pay for the tests, my mom did her best “mom voice” and told him, “DO IT!”. The doctor drew blood, took X-Rays, then waited with us while the tests were run. When the results came back He looked confused, then infuriated. He said, “They ran the wrong person’s tests!” He yelled at his people to get it right and we waited. The second set matched the first. He yelled at them to do it again, and we waited. When the third set matched the first he was livid. He drew more blood, took another X-Ray, and put all of the tests in himself… and we waited. When those results came back… and matched the previous results… he began talking to himself, “I’ve heard of this before… never actually seen it myself… it’s like Brian’s had some form of… spontaneous regeneration… It’s like he has a brand new heart!” It is now 40 years later and I have never had another issue.

          I have had several dozen experiences of similar impact and some much more so… like having Jesus appear next to me, take my hand, walk with me, sit down with me, and explain things to me plainly. With experiences like that, there is no scientific basis for anyone ever getting me to believe that He is not real, or that He is not the God of the Bible. Say we met in person, shook hands, had a conversation… and someone tried to argue that I did not exist… you would argue that you met me, shook my hand, and had a conversation with me. That is the exact response I am giving you here. God is real, and He wants a personal relationship with us!

          To put it simply the laws of science are only so valid as God wanting them to be valid. He is the author of the laws of physics and He can change them any time He chooses to.

          As to the question of “how can God be all powerful and all loving and allow sin to exist”. It is an incredibly basic question, and easily answered, if put into the proper perspective.

          I once had a pastor ask me, “Why?” I was puzzled and said, “Why what?” He said, “Why did God do… all of this? Creation… allowing everything that has happened that led up to his need to be crucified… and going through with the crucifiction… all of it?” I thought about it and shrugged. He said, “The Bible says ‘In the beginning was to Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’. So we see a picture here of the godhead alone in nothing. Now God couldn’t even have a good conversation with Himself because each part of the godhead is all knowing. There would be nothing to discuss. He wanted a bride. He wanted His bride to be flawless but He also wanted her to have free will so that she could love Him of her own free will. He could have made a robot, but that would not be a bride. This is why free will is so important that He allows us to do horrible things during this lifetime, our time of testing, so that through this testing we can come to love Him in spite of the testing… so that the love is tested and true. We as the church are the body of the Bride of Christ… We are the end goal that God has had in mind since before time began.”

          All of creation… all of what mankind has gone through… the fact that Jesus died to pay for our sins… all of it… was to make it possible for Him to be with His bride. To make a point of that, God patterned our marriages as a foreshadowing of the marriage that He is aiming for. That is what the Bible says, “Husbands love your wives as Christ loves the church, and He died for her”. This is so that we can get a glimpse through our limited human minds of what God has in mind.

          This is the “greater moral reason”. Each of us is free to choose to follow Him, or not to, and the choice is up to us. The only way that God could create a perfect world would be to remove free will… and that would be the undoing of His entire reason for our existing.

      • Michael Champion says:

        So are you going to respond to what I said to you about your argument that God must be boundless? I realize you are busy but over a week passed including a weekend where there would normally have been an opening. I have made many of the main points necessary here but I want to know your reaction and see if you’re understanding my point of view here.

        Also, if you do not have much time to respond to anything, for me the priority list for things I want you to respond to is something along these lines:
        1:The two documentaries i linked on capitalism as this is a more important subject than religion
        2:The post I made in your thread, “Cells Make Decisions as members of a Superbly Organized Army”, since I think i have found a good idea online of what mechanism cells use to communicate quickly with each other as they are shown to do in many cases, and also how they get the appropriate proteins in place for intra-cellular operations with the DNA and other things, rather than relying on them somehow randomly floating into place in time just because they are the right shape to fit, which is not realistic. There needs to be an active force pulling them into place for it to logically compute.
        The normal hypothesis is that proteins have a chemical ‘address’ attached to them which directs them to the right place, but this only explains confirming the destination not the actual mechanism of active movement to the destination. Which i think this source that i linked in the other thread explains well.
        http://viewzone.com/dnax.html

  7. Michael Champion says:

    Sure you can join the conversation. Although after reading your long post it seems like you didn’t do much trying to actually disprove what I said, you just said that I can’t prove a double negative. I don’t need to prove it. You’re the one presupposing this idea of God and setting it as default. The way you phrased my rejection of the christian God idea makes it sound like I want it to be true but i don’t. To me the default view is that God doesn’t exist because i don’t have a reason to believe he does. Not that this matters, since at the end of the day you don’t have an actual explanation of how all the evil in the world is actually justified here.

    ” I think the upshot of this is that your syllogism is not really a logical problem for believers after all, regardless of how obvious this may be. We certainly do not know the full details beyond what we have already believed to be true. God is believed to be eternal, omniscient, and omnipresent too. What about us? What business do we have pretending to be like God in these respects?”
    Here is the problem. By rejecting that even with the limits of our intelligence, normal people are capable of discovering truth including that of any hypothetically objective morality, you’re introducing an infinite regress of how much intelligence is needed to understand anything. No matter how much someone knows they have to be Omniscient according to Christians to truly understand how things work and have a true opinion. In other words, there is never a point where you can prove you have a good idea, even God couldn’t since it’s impossible to prove you know everything, this fits well with Godel’s Incompleteness theorem. Moreover this opinion is self-destroying because the moment you say you are not qualified to make judgements, and only God is, that means that you aren’t qualified to make the judgement that only God can make judgements. See the problem?

    Which of these ways of looking at the situation is more productive for the conversation? Which one makes it possible for either of us to actually conclude anything that matters about what’s right and wrong? You are saying only God knows and that means that you are basically unable to comprehend truth according to your worldview. I’m saying that if something is true, and there is any objective truth to morality, then it’s just a matter of whether you know the facts or not, and intelligence is only relevant to the extent which it allows humans to learn the facts about what’s right or wrong.

    @Perry:
    OK then. Also if it seems like i spammed you by posting in a lot of threads in this site recently, sorry, but if you want to know which comment i made seems the most valuable i’d recommend my comment in the ‘Cells are Members of a Superbly Organized Army’ thread.

  8. Tom Godfrey says:

    Perry Marshall,

    I posted my comment twice yesterday, because the first time I tried, my comment failed to appear with a message saying that it was awaiting moderation. Please feel free to remove the duplicate and try to see what might have gone wrong, so that this won’t keep happening. It would also be nice to get rid of the extra fields at the bottom of our comments that repeat our first and last name.

    Your explanation for not engaging with me reflects a basic misunderstanding that ought to be clarified. I am not anti-science at all. We evidently just disagree about what science is. For me, it is all about studying and observing nature and understanding the laws of nature through hypotheses and repeatable experiments that can be used to verify or falsify them. I have no problem with this at all. In this context, methodological materialism makes sense.

    What I reject is calling it science when modern experts speculate about origins and the history of life on earth based on their interpretation of currently available, necessarily incomplete physical evidence, especially if this is done under the same no-miracle presupposition. I doubt that this kind of speculation can be falsified. To me, it looks like educated guesswork, not the ordinary kind of science that supports technological progress.

    You are under no obligation to engage with me, of course. As far as this discussion with Michael Champion is concerned, I believe we may actually be on the same page. Maybe we can set aside our differences regarding science and focus on helping him think about the problem of evil and related ideological issues.

  9. Tom Godfrey says:

    Michael Champion,

    Thanks for accepting my participation here.

    I started my “long post” by quoting one of your claims and challenging you to prove that it is true. I gather that your response is basically to challenge me to prove that it is false. Well, you are right about my not trying to disprove it, but this was not my goal. I was not going to accept an argumentum ad ignorantiam from you, and I do not want to fall for this fallacy myself either. Where did I set up a default presupposition? You can take whatever presuppositions you please. So can I. Can we agree then that your claim was actually just a belief or opinion, not part of a logical syllogism that you can rationally defend? If so, I think we can move on.

    You went on to say, “There is no reason to assume an Omnipotent being exists. It is not just because of the problem of evil but because it doesn’t even make any logical sense, any conscious being has a limit to how much energy and matter they control, ‘Omnipotence’ is an idea that only exists as something people make up.” Now that the problem of evil is behind us, let’s think about your claims in this quote from farther down in your opening comment.

    How do you know that “any conscious being has a limit to how much energy and matter they control”? We can quickly agree that plenty of conscious beings have such a limit, but I think you intended to claim that no conscious being, not even God, has unlimited control. If so, I think you are facing another one of those universal negatives that is notoriously hard to prove. Can we agree that this also is merely an opinion that you hold by faith without proof?

    You may be thinking that God can control only the energy and matter in the universe, and since the universe itself is finite, then even God must respect this limit. If so, I see two problems with this idea. First, correct me if I am wrong about this, but I don’t think we have found any outer boundary of the universe. For all we know, it could be boundless, right? Second, if God created all of the universe that we can see, do we really have any reason to conclude that he could not create even more energy and matter at will and without limit?

    Before we leave this, we should realize that an omnipotent being could have “a limit to how much energy and matter” is under his control as long as this limited amount is all-inclusive. The prefix omni- means all-, not unlimited-. If we agree on this point too, we may be ready to conclude that neither one of the reasons you gave for the leading claim about assuming existence withstands scrutiny, leaving you with yet another universal negative to defend (“There is no reason to assume an Omnipotent being exists”).

    It is one thing to claim that there is no reason, another thing to claim that there is no sound reason. If you are honestly searching for a reason, I can give you one. Just ask. By now, you should give up on the idea and retreat to a statement that you can rationally defend, such as a bare or groundless statement of faith that no omnipotent being exists.

    I reject the way you frame the problem before us. Our goal should not be to prove that we have a good idea. We ought to recognize that our knowledge and intelligence are limited, so no matter what we may believe and judge to be good or morally justified, God could actually know better. I think this is consistent with the teaching in Is. 64:6. God gets to be the final Judge in the end. It does not follow that we should refrain from even trying to make judgments about what is good or morally justified. We just do the best we can. Fortunately, God knows our limitations (Ps. 103:13-14, Is. 64:4-5).

    • Michael Champion says:

      “Can we agree then that your claim was actually just a belief or opinion, not part of a logical syllogism that you can rationally defend? If so, I think we can move on.”
      The point is your reason for presupposing God has a good reason is your Christian beliefs. You’re not logically deducing those beliefs you’re just using what you were told is true by authority figures. So i have no reason to agree with you when that is your reason for making this logical stretch. You don’t have a reason why God should act in this way so i conclude your thought here isn’t based on your actual reasoning process. “God MUST have a reason because my religion says so” is what it seems like you are saying. You should try to be an independent critical thinker here and examine whether the religion makes sense. My syllogism is completely logical here, you’re the one who refuses to make an argument instead reverting to an argument that it is impossible for anyone to know anything true about what’s right and wrong.

      “How do you know that “any conscious being has a limit to how much energy and matter they control”? We can quickly agree that plenty of conscious beings have such a limit, but I think you intended to claim that no conscious being, not even God, has unlimited control. If so, I think you are facing another one of those universal negatives that is notoriously hard to prove. Can we agree that this also is merely an opinion that you hold by faith without proof?”
      I can’t give some perfect proof here as it is a problem to prove double negatives. But do you have a reason to believe this is the case?

      ” If you are honestly searching for a reason, I can give you one. Just ask. ”
      It looks like you really missed the point. I don’t just believe the idea of God is unreasonable, but I don’t think it is a good idea at all. It’s an idea emerging from an authoritarian worldview, designed to induce obedience into the public. Why should one person get to have all the power compared to everyone else? That’s a dictatorial mindset.

      “I reject the way you frame the problem before us. Our goal should not be to prove that we have a good idea. We ought to recognize that our knowledge and intelligence are limited, so no matter what we may believe and judge to be good or morally justified, God could actually know better. I think this is consistent with the teaching in Is. 64:6. God gets to be the final Judge in the end. It does not follow that we should refrain from even trying to make judgments about what is good or morally justified. We just do the best we can. Fortunately, God knows our limitations (Ps. 103:13-14, Is. 64:4-5).”
      You’re stuck in a limited religious mindset. Why do you not want to know anything about what is morally right? That’s the only way you can act effectively after all, if you try to learn what’s the right course of action. You think it’s all based on what God tells you but how do you know that if you can’t evaluate for yourself whether what your religion says makes sense and should be done? You’re not thinking independently. Please do. Although since you are religious it is basically your job to deny anything against your faith as otherwise you will be socially ostracized by whatever religious community you’re in. Meaning you’re inherently biased right from the get go as you don’t value reason and truth as a higher priority than what religion tells you. I’m not saying you couldn’t overcome your indoctrination anyways, but there are many social pressures that are going to be pushing you against following the evidence where it leads.

  10. Tom Godfrey says:

    Michael Champion,

    When I invited Perry to delete my duplicate comment, it did not occur to me that my original comment might be deleted instead, so that the timestamp of the remaining duplicate makes it look as though I posted once long after you replied. I was really disappointed to discover this morning that your reply was deleted along with my original. In hindsight, I should have left well enough alone. Sorry about that.

    Let’s not hold this against Perry. I was assuming that he does his own work on maintaining his blog, but for all I know, he has delegated this work to a new guy who needs more experience. I would be surprised if your deleted comment can be recovered at this point, but hopefully, we can carry on anyway. At least my reply to you has direct quotations that may be good enough to allow our discussion to continue.

    By the way, I do not distinguish between things that are “scientifically true” and things that are true only in some other sense. As I see it, a claim is either true or false or mysterious without any adverb needed. As you probably know, what some scientists believe is true may or may not be believed by others, and even a consensus may have to be adjusted as more is learned. This is a problem that people face if they prefer the physical clues approach to learning about origins and the history of life on earth. What they may think they know about this topic is merely tentative speculation. That’s the nature of science. Think of phlogiston, for example.

    • Michael Champion says:

      Yeah, i noticed the original got deleted but only noticed now.

      I don’t get your point. Of course scientific truth is different than others. Anyways, you didn’t really respond to anything i posted in my most recent comment that i can still see. Religious brainwashing, the basis for your beliefs, your Authoritarian mindset, and so on.

  11. Tom Godfrey says:

    Michael Champion,

    When I first checked this morning, your reply late yesterday had not yet passed moderation, so I could not see it. After I posted my comment this morning, it did not appear right away, so I could only guess whether it got through successfully. No feedback. At least I didn’t try again and post a duplicate. It is inevitable that moderation requires delays, but the current arrangement is not user-friendly. I think website code-behind changed recently, probably when the two superfluous name fields started showing up under each comment. I assume you see the same issues. Anyway, I guess we can live with these defects for now and hope that they will be fixed before long. We can complain, but otherwise, it is out of our hands.

    You told me that your syllogism is completely logical, and I suppose it is, but the conclusion depends crucially on the choice of the fourth presupposition. If 4 (MC) is included, you may conclude that no God having the attributes claimed in 1 and 2 exists. If believers’ 4 alternative is included instead, such a God can exist, and the “problem of evil” is not really an unsolved problem for us. You may protest that I did not logically deduce my belief in the truth of my 4 alternative, but I think you need to admit that you did not logically deduce yours either. How could you? It is another one of those universal negatives that may not even be possible to prove without having a divine attribute yourself, like omniscience. I think the upshot of my analysis is that we both walk by faith. Neither one of us has proved anything with this syllogism. Logically, a wrong presupposition can lead to a wrong conclusion. Are you ready to admit this? If not, please explain where you think I went wrong.

    You advised me to “try to be an independent critical thinker,” but I believe I have been one for practically all of my life. Let’s think about this. Are you thinking that my belief in God merely reflects my Christian upbringing and required no independent critical thinking on my part? If so, why? You are only guessing, right? I actually remember a time when I rejected my upbringing and the unseen prompting of the Holy Spirit, but then, while continuing to exercise my independent critical judgment, I decided to put my faith in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. The fact that I ended up deciding to agree with other parties does not negate the fact that I am “an independent critical thinker.” You agree with other parties too, right? Would it make sense for you to change your mind just so you can try to be “an independent critical thinker”? Think logically. I am no more “stuck in a limited religious mindset” than you are stuck in a limited atheistic mindset. We are both free to change our mind. I have already done this several times in my lifetime. It could happen again.

    You said I missed your point, but I think you missed mine as well. You made a universal negative statement, gave two reasons to believe it, neither one of which you defended, and now instead of admitting that you cannot defend the main statement either, you want to talk about how good or reasonable the idea of God is, right? Well, okay, you can dodge my point, but let’s think about your new reason for believing that the idea of God is neither good nor reasonable: “It’s an idea emerging from an authoritarian worldview, designed to induce obedience into the public. Why should one person get to have all the power compared to everyone else? That’s a dictatorial mindset.”

    I don’t see the connection between belief in God and an authoritarian worldview. I think there are lots of worldviews, many of which embrace the idea of an omnipotent God. I suspect that most, if not all, of them call for respect for some authority who can demand obedience. Does this make them authoritarian? Even if a worldview is authoritarian, by what logical principle does it follow that any belief that emerges from it is necessarily bad or unreasonable? Your question about one person having “all the power compared to everyone else” puzzles me. Who do you suppose that one person is? Maybe you just did not explain your reason well enough, so feel free to reword it in a form that you can defend with confidence.

    You asked why I don’t “want to know anything about what is morally right.” How do you know what I want? I do the best I can to know. I evaluate for myself what makes sense and what should be done while realizing that my knowledge and conclusions may well be imperfect. What is the problem here? Is it any different for you? If so, how? Do you claim to lack bias?

    • Michael Champion says:

      You said earlier that you thought people shouldn’t try to figure out what’s right and wrong and instead figure out what the Bible tells them to do due to their imperfections. That’s basically saying you don’t want to figure anything out.

      ” but I think you need to admit that you did not logically deduce yours either. ”
      It’s not like I can know as an absolute truth that no omnipotent God could possibly exist. But it just seems more reasonable than the other option. If all normal standards of morality would mean God would change the world, then most likely God doesn’t exist. You can’t explain why God wouldn’t do anything other than appeal to your own ignorance. If you can actually explain why an Omnipotent person shouldn’t do anything to improve the world you can try that but you haven’t done that yet. You’re still appealing to your own ignorance and the argument that since God’s omniscient he could know way better what’s right and wrong. But at that rate, why trust yourself that God would know better if you can’t trust yourself to decide what’s right or wrong for anything else?

      I get it that I cannot just prove beyond all doubt any of my conclusions. But that is not even the point here. As for what you did talk about with what’s right and wrong, you said that many worldviews appeal to some kind of authority. But what I am saying is that religion simply tells people to believe or go to hell, this is an authoritarian system of beliefs where nonbelievers are essentially executed for not obeying. How is that not wrong? It obviously is. Unless you don’t believe in hell?

  12. Tom Godfrey says:

    Michael Champion,

    Now I can see your 12:05 pm and 1:40 pm comments. If you posted another one after those, it must be in moderation still. I hope Perry fixes this blog so that we get some immediate feedback after we post a comment.

    You may either have me mixed up with someone else on another thread or have trouble quoting me exactly. You can use Ctrl-F to search for “Bible” and quickly verify that I haven’t even mentioned the word before this comment, and I didn’t say I “thought people shouldn’t try to figure out what’s right and wrong.” Near the end of my most recent comment, I said, “I do the best I can to know [what is morally right]. I evaluate for myself what makes sense and what should be done while realizing that my knowledge and conclusions may well be imperfect.” Why would you assume that I think others should not do this too? Of course, our evaluation or figuring stuff out can take into consideration guidance found in the Bible, but so what? It certainly does not follow from this that I “don’t want to figure anything out.” Maybe you only exaggerated for dramatic effect and did not really mean what you said. If so, please clarify.

    We may be making progress. Thanks for admitting, perhaps in a roundabout way, that you have no absolute proof to support your belief that no omnipotent, omnibenevolent God could possibly exist in view of the problem of evil. I have already admitted that my own version of the syllogism (with presupposition 4) does not absolutely prove that such a God exists. We both walk by faith in this regard. I think this means that we can move on and consider the “problem of evil” solved for anyone willing to accept presupposition 4.

    I understand that you do not accept it, evidently because you still believe that 4 (MC) is more reasonable than 4 and more likely to be true, even though you now admit that you cannot prove that it is. If this really does come down to a difference in probability, I think you would have to admit that you lack knowledge of the parameters needed to calculate an actual probability. You are really only estimating, right?

    Can you even defend you claim that 4 (MC) is more reasonable? As far as I know, “all normal standards of morality” take into account the knowledge of the moral agent, not the knowledge of a victim or some third party. Think of a case of negligent homicide, for instance. I am reminded of the scenario where a man wearing a mask cuts the heart out of an unconscious man while several witnesses see this happen and do absolutely nothing to stop him. Let’s suppose that each one of those witnesses is a moral agent familiar with normal standards of morality. Was it right for them to do nothing or not? Does it matter what they knew? I think we can agree that it does. While at first blush you might think you should scream at them to stop the man before it was too late, you might not, if only you knew what they know. They are all medical students observing a heart transplant in a hospital operating room.

    So what does this have to do with the issue at hand? If God is the moral agent, then he needs to be judged based on the complete knowledge that he has, not on the incomplete knowledge that you or any other fallible human has whenever a moral judgment is made here on earth. It is irrelevant that God has not disclosed his morally sufficient reason for the evil which exists. It is irrelevant that I cannot guess what it might be with confidence. So what if we can’t explain what his reason is? It would be a fallacy to conclude from this that no such reason can possibly exist.

    Given my belief in the nature of God, it seems practically certain to me that such a reason does indeed exist. If you believe that God does not exist, then for you the “problem of evil” converts into a challenge to explain the existence of “normal standards of morality.” How did they originate without God? Why shouldn’t we simply do what is right in our own eyes?

    You asked, “… why trust yourself that God would know better if you can’t trust yourself to decide what’s right or wrong for anything else?” The stated if-condition is not true. I can and do trust myself to decide what’s right or wrong, but my decision will necessarily be based on consideration of guidance and information from sources outside of myself. My decision could be wrong. I dare say it works the same way for you too. My belief that almighty God knows all and loves the world has nothing to do with foolish attempts to judge his moral decisions based on one’s own limited knowledge. If I am ever hauled into court, I might choose to judge the judge, but his judgment would certainly be weightier than mine. It’s the same with God. He rules. I don’t. It’s actually a good thing. May his will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

    Thanks for honestly admitting that you “cannot just prove beyond all doubt any of [your] conclusions.” You went on to say, “But that is not even the point here.” Okay then. What is the point?

    When you say, “… religion simply tells people to believe or go to hell,” you are using figurative language. Religion is not an animate agent, so it does, says, or tells people absolutely nothing. Unfortunately, the word is also very vague. As far as I am concerned, even atheism is a religion. Let’s be more specific and consider the teaching in John 3:16-18. This is actually the message you had in mind, right? If not, please be specific.

    Otherwise, let’s consider your summary statement that “nonbelievers are essentially executed for not obeying.” This looks like a gross distortion to me. Where did you get this idea? It has been known for centuries that people are free to disobey God without necessarily being immediately executed (Psalm 73), and we are all destined to die eventually, regardless of how well we obey (Heb. 9:27). It is not up to me to judge God because of consequences suffered or to be suffered eternally by people who make bad choices of their own free will. How can I even be sure I know exactly what those consequences will be in any specific case? I do feel obligated to encourage people, you included, to make wise choices.

    • Michael Champion says:

      Sorry for the late response. Other issues came up and I forgot to check this thread.

      You concluded you cannot make a judgement on God with incomplete information but this is not quite right. Consider this analogy for objective morality:If an omniscient God would have an infinitely accurate microscope to see all details, that does not mean normal people can conclude nothing as they still see. If people can observe objective morality and truly determine some things are right and wrong they can make judgements on what would be right and wrong for this christian God idea, too. Their judgements don’t have to be entirely perfect to still be a good approximation of the truth.

      So this argument:
      ” It is not up to me to judge God because of consequences suffered or to be suffered eternally by people who make bad choices of their own free will. ”
      is wrong. Also the terms are wrong, too. “To be suffered of their own free will”? Imagine someone diving headfirst into a flaming lake of fire. Obviously it is not like that, nobody would want eternal torture. The word choice you are looking for is “punishments inflicted on” not “consequences suffered by”. Which shows you’re using a euphemism. You should also realize this biblical punishment system is rejected in the real world, that’ why nobody gets burned at the stake or tortured by the church for being a heretic anymore. If you accept the real world treating religion this way as morally right because religious freedom should be respected you must see the contradiction with calling it morally right for the Christian God character to torture people for eternity.

  13. Tom Godfrey says:

    Michael Champion,

    No need to apologize. Life goes on. We both need to be patient if we use this blog for our discussion. My comment dated August 31 had to wait in moderation over the Labor Day weekend, so you would not have seen it until it finally passed only two or three days ago. Thanks for not giving up.

    I agree that I can “make a judgement on God with incomplete information.” You and anybody else can do this too, of course. By the same token, I also agree that “… normal people … can make judgements on what would be right and wrong for this christian God idea, too.” This much is not in dispute.

    You may have read my statement too quickly and inadvertently set up a straw man here. We probably agree that it would be unreasonable to expect any fallible human to have the complete knowledge of any omniscient being, but in the scenario under consideration, I think we ought to agree as well that there is simply too much relevant information beyond our grasp for us to pretend that our hypothetical judgment in a case against God ought to be taken seriously, let alone have consequences that God ought to fear.

    Our judgments in cases involving human agents are not like this, because the defendant can actually be put on trial and have a fair opportunity to make a case for acquittal. Someone on trial for murder could reasonably argue that he did not realize his reckless behavior would cause a fatal accident, so the charge might be reduced to negligent homicide. Who could serve a subpoena on God, let alone properly judge whether his defense case is true, even if he did appear in our kangaroo court?

    Of course no one dives headfirst into hell of his own free will. Let’s not make another straw man of this either. The suffering I had in mind was “because of consequences suffered or to be suffered eternally by people who make bad choices of their own free will.” It is eternally irrelevant whether a “punishment system is rejected in the real world.” God is holy and not bound by our modern preferences. Nevertheless, I know of no society where bad choices necessarily go unpunished or without undesirable consequences.

    Sometimes, the guilty party may feel that the punishment received is too great for the crime committed (Gen. 4:13). In any specific case involving eternal punishment, we are in no position to tell the full extent of either the crime or the punishment to be received. God rules. We do not. Life can be tough. If God choses to torture people for eternity, it is not up to you or me to judge whether this is morally right or wrong. It would not matter if we did this anyway. Maybe, to quote Robert Burns, the big idea is that we should either “guess and fear” or else be saved from the “wrath to come” (1Thes. 1:10).

    Maybe we have beaten this horse enough. Unless we still have a realistic hope of substantial forward progress, let’s move on next to consider something else you told Perry in your opening comment: “I hope from this you understand how your reasoning process is being twisted by Christianity and logical reasoning concludes christianity is false. Or at least give some clear answers on what your fundamental attachment to Christianity is and why you are persisting in the non logical reasoning … “ Maybe by now you see that the “problem of evil” is not such a good example of the allegedly twisted reasoning of believers, let alone a good reason to conclude that Christianity is false, so let’s focus next on another logical issue you covered in the same comment. The next two paragraphs here are direct quotes from it.

    “How did [consciousness] originate?->From less complex consciousness as it has throughout all of history, possibly some fundamentally least complex version of consciousness that is the basic nature of intelligence and caused the first DNA ancestor to originate through an as of yet unknown trait of natural law

    “I know you mentioned natural law possibly creating consciousness in your book but you still are fixated on God as shown in your writing, where you use God as your Primary Assumption, not some natural emergence of consciousness which is more coherent and logical. You’re still stuck in the God of the Gaps mentality and your version of God of the Gaps is that God created the universe and planned everything so DNA would arise and create intelligent beings. You’re still trying to jam God into your thought process in an unnatural way IMO.”

    One point you may notice right off the bat is that “From less complex consciousness” or even “some fundamentally least complex version of consciousness” is no good answer to the question you posed. Even if consciousness actually did evolve from simpler to more complex forms, this would not explain how the earliest form of it originated in a primitive universe without any consciousness at all. Neither would it explain how it eventually developed sufficient skill or means to supply the information found in DNA. I suspect that any materialistic theory advanced to explain either one of these two origins is going to be unscientific, unfalsifiable, data poor, and imagination rich, but maybe you know of one that deserves respect. If so, please enlighten me. Otherwise, ask yourself whether such a theory should be considered reasonable.

    As you probably know, even a nonsensical idea can be believed if only the problems with it are ignored, dismissed, or overlooked. One value of a discussion like the one we are having is that we expose our own ideas to critical scrutiny, and in the process, problems may come to light that had been left in the dark or swept under the rug, so to speak. Please explain why you believe that “some natural emergence of consciousness … is more coherent and logical” than a supernatural, eternal consciousness as a reasonable source of the information in DNA. Maybe before you do, it would be helpful to watch this video clip where Stephen Meyer talks about “the God of the Gaps mentality” that you evidently consider problematic. It takes only about two and half minutes to watch it.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGqzCA1mnyM

    • Michael Champion says:

      “You may have read my statement too quickly and inadvertently set up a straw man here. We probably agree that it would be unreasonable to expect any fallible human to have the complete knowledge of any omniscient being, but in the scenario under consideration, I think we ought to agree as well that there is simply too much relevant information beyond our grasp for us to pretend that our hypothetical judgment in a case against God ought to be taken seriously, let alone have consequences that God ought to fear.

      Our judgments in cases involving human agents are not like this, because the defendant can actually be put on trial and have a fair opportunity to make a case for acquittal. Someone on trial for murder could reasonably argue that he did not realize his reckless behavior would cause a fatal accident, so the charge might be reduced to negligent homicide. Who could serve a subpoena on God, let alone properly judge whether his defense case is true, even if he did appear in our kangaroo court?”
      This is just an argument that God doesn’t exist, not that it’s impossible to make judgements. Since God doesn’t exist, it’s all just hypothetical but talking about the idea is still possible. You can look at the ideas proposed in the bible and judge those.

      “Of course no one dives headfirst into hell of his own free will. Let’s not make another straw man of this either. The suffering I had in mind was “because of consequences suffered or to be suffered eternally by people who make bad choices of their own free will.” It is eternally irrelevant whether a “punishment system is rejected in the real world.” God is holy and not bound by our modern preferences. Nevertheless, I know of no society where bad choices necessarily go unpunished or without undesirable consequences.”

      The intent behind jail and etc in the modern world is to isolate dangerous people from society where they can commit further crimes. I would 100% agree with the argument against the death penalty, if things were actually implemented the right way and people who can realistically be expected to just go kill more people are not let off early to go do it again. So in some cases maybe a death penalty can be justified, but that’s only in the context of a criminal justice system that doesn’t work and lets people go who will go cause a lot of harm to others once again. A more ideal one wouldn’t.

      You’re just making a double standard where God gets to be special and ignore all the rules of morality. This is an authoritarian mindset which seems like it’s just fear based.

      “Sometimes, the guilty party may feel that the punishment received is too great for the crime committed (Gen. 4:13). In any specific case involving eternal punishment, we are in no position to tell the full extent of either the crime or the punishment to be received. God rules. We do not. Life can be tough. If God choses to torture people for eternity, it is not up to you or me to judge whether this is morally right or wrong. It would not matter if we did this anyway. Maybe, to quote Robert Burns, the big idea is that we should either “guess and fear” or else be saved from the “wrath to come” (1Thes. 1:10).”
      This is exactly what i’m talking about, you are in a fear based mentality where saying you believe in God in hopes of not getting tortured for eternity is what you do because you are afraid of getting punished. It’s going to make you biased. Again you’re using the argument of Might=Right because you say since God rules nobody else has room to object. But Might=Right means that anyone in power in the real world must then be ‘right’ even if it’s some genocidal maniac. So I doubt you really believe that, you probably believe right and wrong are separate from who is powerful and can control others.

      “One point you may notice right off the bat is that “From less complex consciousness” or even “some fundamentally least complex version of consciousness” is no good answer to the question you posed. Even if consciousness actually did evolve from simpler to more complex forms, this would not explain how the earliest form of it originated in a primitive universe without any consciousness at all. Neither would it explain how it eventually developed sufficient skill or means to supply the information found in DNA. I suspect that any materialistic theory advanced to explain either one of these two origins is going to be unscientific, unfalsifiable, data poor, and imagination rich, but maybe you know of one that deserves respect. If so, please enlighten me. Otherwise, ask yourself whether such a theory should be considered reasonable.”
      The problem with the origination of the least complex version of consciousness isn’t something I’ve figured out the answer for, but this idea solves a lot of other issues. Maybe the least complex version of consciousness is somehow natural to the universe, not an emergent process. Why that would be the case, I don’t know. Christianity and religion haven’t solved the issues of their origins, and have a lot more inconsistencies than many other systems of belief.

      I watched the video. He says that because we know information and codes can emerge from minds that the code of DNA must have come from a mind, rather than natural processes which we can’t explain as making codes. The problem is this, he jumps to the conclusion that God did it when all he can think of right now is that some mind may be responsible for codes. Even if consciousness in some form caused DNA to emerge that does not mean it was an omnipotent omniscient god like Christians say.

      Your idea right now is that there is no explanation on how an earlier form of consciousness, or a least complex form of it, could have originated itself. But why is God special in comparison? If the explanation for why God is eternal is that he just is eternal, why couldn’t some form of consciousness also be eternal? It would remove the issue of origination. All we know is that at least some kind of consciousness is probably responsible for the origin of codes if we assume that only minds can generate codes, but that does not mean God did it. You haven’t derived the existence of an Omnipotent Omniscient God here. Perry made an attempt to prove that, but it still wasn’t fully logical as i showed in the other comment thread with him.

    • Alex MacEachern says:

      Let me first quote your exact words in your post of Sept. 7 2018;

      “How did [consciousness] originate? – from less complex consciousness as it has throughout all of history possibly some fundamentally least complex version of consciousness that is the basic nature of intelligent and caused the first DNA ancestor to originate through as an of yet unknown trait of natural law”.

      That statement is nothing more than a hypothesis with NO scientific verification. You use the word “possibly” which confirms my statement. Also an unknown trait or natural law is just that. Unknown. When you lack evidence you should not propose unproven phenomena as being truthful.

  14. Tom Godfrey says:

    Michael Champion,

    I’m not sure when your comment passed moderation, but once again, it did not happen promptly.

    I understood from the start that you were not arguing “that it’s impossible to make judgements.” Of course judgment is possible—for any being with a mind. You said, “Since God does not exist, …” as though this has already been established in your own mind, but if you actually have a valid argument to support this belief, I don’t see where you have shown it here. If you really are so sure about this, can you explain why you go to so much trouble to discuss it with believers? Would you do this sort of thing with people who believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy?

    You explained your ideas about the purpose of jails and capital punishment in human societies with criminals who will eventually die one way or another anyway. I don’t understand why you think any of this is relevant in a scenario where the Judge is Almighty God and the defendants to be rewarded or punished are all immortal souls.

    You accused me of “making a double standard,” but in reality, I don’t make either standard, let alone both of them. God makes his own standard, and human societies make theirs. Of course “God gets to be special,” but it certainly does not follow that he “ignore[s] all the rules of morality.” He created the rules that really count in the end, so I have no reason to suppose that he ignores them. Even in human societies, certain authorities have special privileges without necessarily entailing some form of immorality. For example, a policeman might legally exceed a speed limit, especially in an emergency situation. We should not assume that God can morally do only what we can morally do. He rules. We don’t. This may seem to you to reflect too much of “an authoritarian mindset,” but what you think about it does not change the setup. It isn’t really “just fear based” either. God loves you—and the whole world (John 3:16). Rewards are offered too.

    I am not making a “Might=Right” argument. That’s just a straw man. My argument would be more like “God=Right” instead. You may suppose that “God=Might,” so that we can derive the same equation, but your logic breaks down when you realize that “Might=Right” could justify what Hitler did. His might was certainly far below the might that God Almighty commands, so we are talking about entirely different levels of might. With apologies to Euthyphro and Socrates, God is not right because he is mighty. Neither is he mighty because he is right. He is both right and mighty because these are both intrinsic attributes of his divine nature. We agree that for mortal humans, “right and wrong are separate from who is powerful and can control others.”

    Thanks for admitting that you haven’t solved the “problem with the origination of the least complex version of consciousness.” Maybe if you could solve it, you could also “solve a lot of other issues,” but I recommend not counting your chickens before they hatch. At this point, if you remain an atheist, I think you are still stuck without an answer to your own question: How did consciousness originate? You are no closer to solving any other related issues.

    Could “the least complex version of consciousness [be] somehow natural to the universe, not an emergent process”? If it is, then it originated when the universe originated. Without God in the picture, I don’t think you can explain the origin of either the observable universe or this hypothetical, unobservable “least complex version of consciousness.”

    You said, “Christianity and religion haven’t solved the issues of their origins, and have a lot more inconsistencies than many other systems of belief.” This claim is too vague for us to discuss. If you have a point relevant to the origin of consciousness, please clarify it.

    On the video, you complained that “[Meyer] jumps to the conclusion that God did it,” but you are only imagining that the “intelligent agent” that he actually specified must be God. Well, God makes a lot of sense in this case, all right, but I think his argument, as stated, stands. I think you were much closer to the truth when you thought about “consciousness in some form [causing] DNA to emerge.” You need to complete this thought and try to imagine a form of consciousness that would be capable of both designing and physically implementing live creatures with DNA in their body, not to mention possibly even a consciousness of their own. I doubt that you will entertain the notion that this might be a “least complex version of consciousness … somehow natural to the universe.” God is a lot more sensible candidate.

    You went on to ask, “But why is God special in comparison [to an earlier form of consciousness or at least a complex form of it]? If the explanation for why God is eternal is that he just is eternal, why couldn’t some form of consciousness also be eternal?” First, saying, “God just is eternal” is no explanation for why he is eternal. Second, some form of consciousness is eternal. That’s God. Bingo. The problem of origination is solved. You said that I “haven’t derived the existence of an Omnipotent Omniscient God here,” but so what? It may be true that all this line of argument establishes is the existence of “an intelligent agent” capable of creating all life on earth, but we can learn more about God in other ways. What’s the problem?

    You claimed, “Perry made an attempt to prove [the existence of an Omnipotent Omniscient God], but it still wasn’t fully logical as i showed in the other comment thread with him.” I don’t really know what you are talking about here, but really, Perry ought to speak for himself, unless you think I made his argument in my own words. If so, please quote Perry and repeat your refutation for me.

    • Michael,

      Tom is an adherent to Answers in Genesis. Their statement of faith includes this:

      “By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record. Of primary importance is the fact that evidence is always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information.”

      My experience is that Tom more or less adheres to this, with the additional factor that AIG only allows the Bible to be interpreted their particular way. The fallibility part of their statement doesn’t seem to apply to their own interpretation of Genesis – only everyone else with regard to interpreting science. It’s exhibit “A” of unyielding fundamentalism.

      My conversations with Tom have thus been unproductive and I no longer engage with him.

      • Michael Champion says:

        @Perry:Well that’s too bad. I guess that means he is going to be stuck within certain thought lines to avoid breaking with religious beliefs. I’ll just ignore him if it really seems to be going nowhere.

        Tom, you are repeating the same things you said earlier and don’t seem to really be understanding. It doesn’t matter if God’s nature makes him intrinsically good and powerful, that still means good is something separate from and higher than God. God is an individual that can be good, and then may be good all the time, but God can’t be the concept of good itself. Even attempting to form a sentence to say that fails, should you say ‘God is the logical concept of good/the concept of good comes from God’s nature’ you have already declared good as a concept separate from god in the very wording of that sentence. If i asked you if God is an individual that fits in the category Good, you would definitely say yes, it’s unavoidably so according to your beliefs, but then you’d have to admit the category is containing him and not the other way around, he cannot originate the concept of goodness. Some christians have tried to use this incoherent idea to explain Euthyphro’s Dilemma away but it just is not logical, even in syntax if you try to explain it without a contradiction.

        From all this, flows the rest of the issues like that god would have to obey objective moral laws like humans if there really are any such laws.

        “You explained your ideas about the purpose of jails and capital punishment in human societies with criminals who will eventually die one way or another anyway. I don’t understand why you think any of this is relevant in a scenario where the Judge is Almighty God and the defendants to be rewarded or punished are all immortal souls.”
        It’s the same concept. If God is omnipotent nobody can get past him and cause more problems and harm others, so creating ‘Hell’ for them doesn’t actually do anything productive. You pretty much have to agree that in Christianity, even if there was no Hell, anyone whom god deems evil isn’t going to have a chance of harming anyone since he’s Omnipotent and could easily stop any and all acts he sees as evil without having to imprison and torture people eternally in hell. So a utilitarian argument cannot exist for hell, only one that somehow no matter how much they change their minds compared to how they were earlier, people whom God deems bad must burn and get tortured for all eternity.

        Technically, since none of this current discussion i just brought up is based on evidence, just ideas about right and wrong, it should bypass your answers in genesis rule on not accepting any evidence, but i’m not so sure that will be enough. Although it’d be great if you did think about it a little.

        • God IS the concept of good itself. Everything God IS is boundless, like good.

          God is not in the category of good. Good is in the category of God.

          Everything God ISN’T is finite – like evil.

          Everything that is good, is good because it harmonizes with the character of God.

          It’s good that you called out these distinctions. Props to you for that.

          BTW I used to believe in an eternal hell, it’s what I grew up being taught. I realized that makes no sense. If it’s true it means the gospel is BAD news, not good news. I haven’t written about this, much too busy, others have done a decent job of addressing this. I believe hell is fair and just. Which is very, very bad news for some very evil people.

          A few years ago I said this in an email to a friend:

          ~

          There’s a set of books called “Faith of the Early Fathers” by Jurgens and I recommend you buy Volume 1 because it has writings of the church fathers starting at 80AD with Polycarp who was a disciple of John. Catholic tradition says that he was the kid that Jesus held on his lap when he said “Let the children come to me”. You can read letters written by the early church fathers during the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd century and you can watch the development of Christian ideas. You can see how similar it all is to the New Testament. It completely overturns the idea that Christianity was invented in 300AD by Constantine. If you just skim this book it becomes instantly obvious that it’s just not true.

          If you buy Volumes 2 & 3 there’s something else that you can see. It’s what I call hell inflation. You can look it up by topic and start to see, as hundreds of years go by, the descriptions of hell get more lurid and frightening and how they start elaborating on it. I think the New Testament depiction of judgment has been significantly distorted. For example, in Acts 17 and then in John 15 Paul and Jesus talk about people who are ignorant not being guilty for their ignorance. In 200AD, a guy named Origen espoused an idea called “apokatostasis” which was the idea that God’s judgment is not retribution but correction. Augustine came along 200 years later and he articulated a very strong doctrine of original sin and a view of humans as being unable to free themselves from sin and addiction. Augustine’s views were embraced and have been ever since. Origen was declared a heretic but I think Origen is right. I believe it’s actually difficult to make a good case for eternal suffering in hell if you read all of the verses in context. Most verses that talk about judgment describe it as a second death. There’s only a couple that lend the distinct impression that it lasts forever. The biggest one is Revelation 14:11 but that verse is actually quoting Isaiah 34:10 which refers to a city that is permanently destroyed. It’s not describing a city that burns forever.

          • Michael Champion says:

            @Perry:
            “God IS the concept of good itself. Everything God IS is boundless, like good.”Your idea that god is good, translated into a format, that looks like this.

            Category Good:{God, Some other good individual, some event or object or etc that is good somehow, etc}
            It’s in the terminology you’re using when you’re saying God is X, that automatically says God is a part of the category X and not the other way around. Even if you refused to say it in that way, and just said Good=God, you wouldn’t be able to honestly deny that in your worldview, the statement “God is in category Good” is true. To deny that would be to say “God isn’t in the category of Good” which makes no sense in your world view, since then he’d necessarily be in the category of something lesser than good.

            Concepts are higher and more fundamental than individual people or objects that fill as examples of them. You are saying that these things must be part of God and emanate from him but not why that would be the case, Omnipotent or not. You don’t have any other examples of a concept originating from an individual. In all other scenarios, individuals, or unconscious objects, just fill in categories and act as individual examples of ideas. You would never accept this kind of reasoning anywhere else. But somehow your God idea is an exception for you.

            “God is not in the category of good. Good is in the category of God.

            Everything God ISN’T is finite – like evil.

            Everything that is good, is good because it harmonizes with the character of God.”
            But how do you know that? It makes more sense to me to just say God has to inevitably be in the category Good. Remember Euthyphro’s Dilemma, if Good is actually objective then it is just a logical truth in some way, independent of God. While if God arbitrarily decides it, it’s not objective at all, since he isn’t basing his evaluation on something objective and therefore necessarily independent of him. Even this third option that God’s innate nature is goodness, isn’t consistent. The innate good nature would just be one of many that are good. Even in your specific scenario, where for whatever reason, God’s good nature is necessary for other people to do anything good, that would just be a situation where one good thing is required for other ones. It doesn’t remove the conceptual impossibility of an example of a concept somehow being its origin.
            If you do not agree with this idea:
            “God’s nature would be a perfect example of a good nature”
            Then that means you don’t have to agree the Christian God in your belief system is just one example of a good nature. Even if his nature is a 100% Perfect one.

            Let me try another example here. Let’s say somebody acts in a good way, you then say that person is acting like God since doing the right thing is god’s nature, but what do you say if God does something good? “Then God’s acting good aka the way he objectively should act”. But wait just a moment. Once you’ve placed it as an objective truth, which it has to be for it to be just as true with God’s actions as anyone else’s, then it’s necessarily beyond God’s nature. Describing it as God’s nature is essentially a passive description. If God is omnipotent, he should be able to change his nature. So why doesn’t he? “Because that would be wrong” ? But that means either the wrong-ness of the action would be independent of him, or God is entirely controlled by what his nature dictates and does not have free control over it. I’m sure you’d disagree with that last version which practically makes God unconscious, so you seem to be only left with God choosing to do objectively right things that are so for reasons independent of himself.

            “It’s good that you called out these distinctions. Props to you for that.”
            It’s nice that you understand there is an argument here but I am still not seeing the full origin of your conclusion, it seems like you are basing it on religion, not on some unavoidable conclusion you arrive at.

            “BTW I used to believe in an eternal hell, it’s what I grew up being taught. I realized that makes no sense. If it’s true it means the gospel is BAD news, not good news. I haven’t written about this, much too busy, others have done a decent job of addressing this. I believe hell is fair and just. Which is very, very bad news for some very evil people.”
            Well I agree this would make the bible quite bad news if anyone who is deemed bad is tortured for eternity. Initially my thought was you would then say that there is no such thing as eternal hell and therefore regardless of you believing in it, you couldn’t believe anyone could keep getting punished regardless of changing to be better in some way. But what you do seem to believe based on your quoted email, is basically just as bad.

            ” In 200AD, a guy named Origen espoused an idea called “apokatostasis” which was the idea that God’s judgment is not retribution but correction. ”
            Sure but correction only makes sense if there is someone left alive/ in existence to fix. Can’t help someone self correct if you kill them.

            “I believe it’s actually difficult to make a good case for eternal suffering in hell if you read all of the verses in context. Most verses that talk about judgment describe it as a second death. There’s only a couple that lend the distinct impression that it lasts forever. The biggest one is Revelation 14:11 but that verse is actually quoting Isaiah 34:10 which refers to a city that is permanently destroyed. It’s not describing a city that burns forever.”
            So….You believe hell is just permanent killing/wiping out of existence then? For at least some people you believe that based on your quote. And that’s just a pretty horrible thing, there’s nothing you can do to change if you don’t exist anymore. This is the kind of thing that has many people think Christianity is a violent belief system. How can it not be when plenty of Christians think exactly that kind of treatment is just great? If God is omnipotent, there is no case where that can ever make sense and be justified as necessary. This is a problem with the belief in omnipotence in general, it doesn’t fit reality and what happens in the world. Anyways, what you’re basically telling everyone is that if they go too far against what your beliefs say then you’re 100% happy with them being wiped from existence when they die, maybe imagine yourself saying that in person to someone, then you might start to reconsider that thought.

          • Michael Champion says:

            Can’t find where my reply to this went. I thought I was the one waiting on a response here. Seems like I must have missed something.

            I’ll just repeat the response to this i thought i had successfully posted earlier.

            “God IS the concept of good itself. Everything God IS is boundless, like good.

            God is not in the category of good. Good is in the category of God.

            Everything God ISN’T is finite – like evil.

            Everything that is good, is good because it harmonizes with the character of God.”
            But why do you think that? I see this is the idea you’re going with but i can’t see why you think so. The Venn Diagram i showed you earlier shows how your God idea necessarily is an individual that fits inside of categories-not the other way around. You surely wouldn’t say it is false to put God in the categories, which is what linguistically happens when you say “God is a good person”. It looks like this:
            God is Good therefore this is true:
            Good People{Individual 1, 2, …., God}
            Even the phrase ‘harmonizes with the good character of God’ defines God’s character as good, something else, something higher in importance. An adjective which can be applied to God or anyone else. “Harmonizes with the mediocre character of God” or “Harmonizes with the bad character of God” wouldn’t fit here for certain. So you are left with using “good” because you have to define God’s goodness in some objective way. At least that is what it seems like is going on here with the very language itself.
            “It’s good that you called out these distinctions. Props to you for that.

            BTW I used to believe in an eternal hell, it’s what I grew up being taught. I realized that makes no sense. If it’s true it means the gospel is BAD news, not good news. I haven’t written about this, much too busy, others have done a decent job of addressing this. I believe hell is fair and just. Which is very, very bad news for some very evil people.”

            This is the part where i initially thought you were not so hardcore of a Christian until I read the next part which made me change my mind.

            “A few years ago I said this in an email to a friend:

            ~

            There’s a set of books called “Faith of the Early Fathers” by Jurgens and I recommend you buy Volume 1 because it has writings of the church fathers starting at 80AD with Polycarp who was a disciple of John. Catholic tradition says that he was the kid that Jesus held on his lap when he said “Let the children come to me”. You can read letters written by the early church fathers during the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd century and you can watch the development of Christian ideas. You can see how similar it all is to the New Testament. It completely overturns the idea that Christianity was invented in 300AD by Constantine. If you just skim this book it becomes instantly obvious that it’s just not true.

            If you buy Volumes 2 & 3 there’s something else that you can see. It’s what I call hell inflation. You can look it up by topic and start to see, as hundreds of years go by, the descriptions of hell get more lurid and frightening and how they start elaborating on it. I think the New Testament depiction of judgment has been significantly distorted. For example, in Acts 17 and then in John 15 Paul and Jesus talk about people who are ignorant not being guilty for their ignorance. In 200AD, a guy named Origen espoused an idea called “apokatostasis” which was the idea that God’s judgment is not retribution but correction. Augustine came along 200 years later and he articulated a very strong doctrine of original sin and a view of humans as being unable to free themselves from sin and addiction. Augustine’s views were embraced and have been ever since. Origen was declared a heretic but I think Origen is right. I believe it’s actually difficult to make a good case for eternal suffering in hell if you read all of the verses in context. Most verses that talk about judgment describe it as a second death. There’s only a couple that lend the distinct impression that it lasts forever. The biggest one is Revelation 14:11 but that verse is actually quoting Isaiah 34:10 which refers to a city that is permanently destroyed. It’s not describing a city that burns forever.”

            Key word in all this, “permanently destroyed”, therefore you think hell instead is the 2nd death described in the bible, apparently non-existence. How is this better than eternal torture? In some ways, it’s almost worse, as it would seem to be a far more impossible to repair scenario than even torture. It certainly doesn’t prove to me that the Bible is Good News all of a sudden. It changes the celestial dictator figure from one who throws unbelievers into eternal torture chambers to one that wipes them from existence. It’s still quite bad. Worse when you consider the Christian God is supposed to be Omnipotent, and therefore is never at any risk of having any plan thwarted, and could easily do things in other ways with no risk whatsoever. The worst I’d do if i were suddenly in possession of omnipotent power, is eternal restrainment/imprisonment without torture for as long as is necessary to stop the individual from posing a threat to others. Wiping people from existence does not make sense in the same way as eternal hell does not make sense. I cannot understand why you would think it’s better.

            • Before my dad died of cancer, he was in severe pain. When he passed everyone was relieved.

              I’m not sure why you feel that prolonging suffering eternally would be beneficial to anyone.

              Ultimately I believe that God deals with all people fairly and justly. There is no other way that virtue can be served.

              • Michael Champion says:

                If I had omnipotent power like God is supposed to in Christianity, i would have cured your dad’s cancer. And that’s a bad analogy. You can’t compare the non-preventable death of someone involuntarily suffering some disease which nobody had control over happening, with actively and intentionally wiping someone from existence for going against whatever God’s standards are. Your whole argument’s based on a false dichotomy where you either kill the person off or send them to eternal torture in hell. I don’t agree with either option. If God is omnipotent there is no justifiable motive for erasing someone from existence, it would be easy to just make them not a threat and unable to inflict harm on others.So what’s the justification? It’s not a protective one, as i just showed you. It could have been if you argued God to not be omnipotent and erase people out of necessity/have no other option for some reason or another, but that’s not what you are going with. It’s not to prevent suffering for the person in particular like you seemed to argue, since they’re certainly not going to agree with getting erased, and would find that to be a lot worse than staying alive. As far as I can tell, it is some kind of argument that it’s somehow making the world better to erase someone seen as evil, even if their actions could easily be nullified from having a negative effect on others without doing this. But why do you think that? Why couldn’t said ‘evil’ people just be prevented from harming others until they realize they are objectively wrong in some way? In the real world, some of the main justifications for the death penalty are due to some form of danger posed by the person to be put to death. Or their draining on resources needed to keep them alive combined with threat to others. But those arguments fall flat and cannot be applied if God is omnipotent and has infinite resources and infinite power to prevent danger.

                As for the argument that after doing X number of actions seen as evil someone is irredeemably evil, why isn’t it true the other way around? Nobody is seen as unchangably perfect and virtuous if they are a good person for a long time. And the same can be said of people doing something wrong. So the argument that erasing someone who’s done many evil things is mercy/preventing suffering is wrong, since committing evil acts doesn’t suddenly make someone irredeemably evil the same way as being good doesn’t do the same the other way around. People are able to change in both ways. So why do you think an inevitably finite amount of evil can justify an everlasting and infinite punishment of erasure, if God is supposed to be all powerful and never has a direct need to erase anyone?

                • Michael,

                  You have defined God in such a way that he could not possibly exist. So I don’t see a way forward here.

                  Question:

                  Suppose that, hypothetically, by whatever means, I could somehow prove to you that the God of Jesus is the real God.

                  Would you follow him?

                  • Michael Champion says:

                    I don’t think i saw this comment, it seems i forgot to turn on the email notifications after posting a new chain and after Tom moved to a new page of comments i didn’t see it.

                    I never said God couldn’t possibly exist, although at least the christian all powerful God seems impossible to exist, and lacks evidence for existing. If an omnipotent God existed there could be evidence for that, i just think omnipotence itself is a contradiction, and the mechanisms for this omnipotence don’t seem to make sense.

                    Let’s say that the Christian God was real, then. Omnipotent or not, or all powerful to whatever limited extent some variant of Christianity dictates, either way, if i followed him or not would depend on the situation. I wouldn’t believe God to be a good person by any stretch of the imagination, but if I had some undeniable proof that I would be wiped from existence or tortured for eternity if i disobeyed, and had no effective means of resistance, I’d certainly hate God, but might obey some set of rules in order to not get utterly destroyed. For example if someone held a gun to your head and threatened you and/or people you cared about, and told you to say you worship some religion, I wouldn’t hold it against you or call you a bad person if you temporarily listened while waiting for a way to remove or evade the threat or for someone to help out. And that’s basically what Christianity says to non believers, it just does so in a way that tries to make up for lacking proof of the threat. Now I know you probably wouldn’t phrase it that way when talking to some random Joe, and might be offended that someone says Christianity’s like that, but it’s how many people do see Christianity and how many Christians treat it based on textual evidence from the Bible which indeed does treat it in that way in many cases. As you seem to have already somewhat agreed that the bible threatens people with non-existence if they disobey God and don’t meet his standards you should probably agree that it’s similar morality to trying to hold someone at gunpoint. It’s just not based in anything provable or in the physical world, but if it was provably true, it’d be exactly the same. While if God theoretically undeniably exists and for whatever reason, obeying God is not some threat based system, I would just choose to not obey, as I wouldn’t agree with God’s moral standards set in the Bible. Of course, unless the scenario is such that whether God will threaten to force non believers to obey or not, believers will do this to non believers, in which case depending on the situation I may or may not be incentivized to pretend to be Christian if the only other option would be to end up like those people who got burned at the stake for heresy. Fortunately, this is mostly not the case in the real world.

                    Depending on what version of Christianity you’re going with, some of which ignore the problems in Christianity and interpret it in a more universalist or positive way, I could be more inclined to agree with some theoretically existing Christian God, but the problems i pointed out earlier are still there. Even if God was hypothetically having entirely good intentions and you removed many of the problems Christianity has, there’s still the problem of lack of results in the real world and the whole problem of evil and omnipotence debate. But to give you a better idea I will go with my standard for what God should do, which is that God’s actions would be more understandable the more God is actually limited and not omnipotently able to fix all problems. With full omnipotence making the character pretty much impossible to understand or sympathize with. Something that would also help out is if you explained what you would do if you were God, and did not just defer to some explanation that you must be too ignorant to understand that and that God works in mysterious ways, which is basically a zero-answers thinking style that doesn’t attempt to solve problems or come up with a solution. If I was God, I would immediately try to use omnipotence to figure out the optimal solution, and enact as best as possible, although with omnipotence, it’d be hard to imagine how there could be any limits in immediately achieving a very ideal result that’s win-win for everyone.

                  • Michael Champion says:

                    Seems like i missed this somehow, might’ve not seen it while looking at the other comment thread.

                    If God existed and could be proven to be real I would probably not follow him. If I was being actively threatened with eternal torture, or as you argue, non-existence, if I don’t meet God’s standards in some way, clearly, I would be incentivized heavily to do so if I knew it was true, but that wouldn’t exactly stop me from heavily disagreeing with Christianity. If you find that there is someone threatening you and people you know, or vast portions of humanity, at gunpoint(this would be the same if not worse, if somehow true), I would not call you a bad guy if you pretend to agree with whatever the gunman tells you to say or to do until you can evade or nullify the threat. To a limited extent, if Yahweh tells you to sacrifice your kids to him or die(as happens in the old testament), there’s surely a certain point where most people would refuse to be manipulated and deal with the resulting attack. But the basic idea psychologically is the same.

                    So whether God exists or not, although i think God definitely does not exist, that doesn’t really matter in my personal evaluation of what is correct and what is moral. If God existed and was doing something actually helpful, that might be useful to know. For example let us say your whole thought that God heals people is true, that might be nice to know and all, but doesn’t exactly mean what’s right or wrong is now different. If it was certain fact that people who tried to pray for God to heal them or someone they care about got results reliably, and this was due to God, then maybe that would become useful, but it wouldn’t exactly be adding anything to people individually, other than telling them there is someone to ask for help from. For example it is not as if that makes them able to heal people on their own. Even if God healing people was somehow true. And if it did then God would become obsolete if people were able to do so without God’s help and figured out the specific mechanisms and etc.

                    Anyways, long story short, no, I would not want to follow God if he somehow existed, I’d only do so under threat of some kind since I don’t agree with the Bible and find the morality in the Old and New Testament mostly pretty bad and in some places essentially abhorrent. Even the New Testament says Jesus will bring a sword and slay countless people with the second coming and send them to hell or wipe them from existence, I do not get at all why people say the New Testament is non violent, this is just incorrect. I have no reason to think God is a good character worthy of being followed and respected and you don’t really seem to be giving me any. In Evolution 2.0 and here the only attempts at that I have seen is you saying that God heals people when you cannot prove that is the case and do that while ignoring everything else in Christianity showing the violent intent of its God. Although you don’t exactly ignore it, you agree that it’s there when questioned about it, but just somehow think this is fine if everyone who disobeys God or is sufficiently far from whatever your Christian moral standards are deserves to be deleted from existence. Needless to say, I do not agree.

                    • Michael,

                      Obviously you’re not here to talk about chromosomes. You want to discuss theology and morality.

                      There is no question whatsoever that Christian belief has a LOT of baggage. I’ll be the first to admit it. But I just don’t see any way to step away from the huge amount of baggage you bring into this conversation.

                      I can only report to you that my personal spiritual experiences (yes, which include people being healed and the like) are quite far from your characterizations.

                      I wish you all the best in your journey.

  15. Tom Godfrey says:

    Michael Champion,

    Perry has indeed decided not to engage with me, but he obviously still feels free to tell others what I believe. I like to think of myself as the expert on this, and whenever he guesses wrong, I always want to try to set the record straight. Maybe I slipped up in the past and told others what he believes, so he might just be getting back at me.

    Anyway, I have no affiliation with Answers in Genesis (AiG) but admit that I like a lot of the AiG articles. However, neither AiG nor anyone else really has the power to allow the Bible to be interpreted in only one particular way. People are always free to twist it at will, no matter what, and I dare say this is often done whether AiG staff members like it or not. In fact, I myself have exercised my freedom to disagree with the preferred AiG interpretation of some parts of the Flood narrative in Genesis, for instance. Please do not jump to the conclusion, perhaps encouraged by Perry’s comment, that I think in lock step with Ken Ham or anyone else in the AiG organization, even though I probably do often agree with them. I like most of the ideas proposed by Gerald E. Aardsma too, but I do not agree with everything he says either.

    I accept the doctrine that the original manuscripts of the Bible were inerrant. This may seem to be a terribly weak statement, since we do not have any of those manuscripts available for study, but I also believe that the extant texts or witnesses allow the original text to be recovered so well that we should consider our Bible to be trustworthy, with no cloud of serious doubt over any key doctrine, including the first verse in the Bible. There is still room for honest differences of opinion about the proper interpretation of some passages. I think these can be discussed rationally without destroying faith in God.

    • Michael Champion says:

      ” accept the doctrine that the original manuscripts of the Bible were inerrant. This may seem to be a terribly weak statement, since we do not have any of those manuscripts available for study, but I also believe that the extant texts or witnesses allow the original text to be recovered so well that we should consider our Bible to be trustworthy, with no cloud of serious doubt over any key doctrine, including the first verse in the Bible. There is still room for honest differences of opinion about the proper interpretation of some passages. I think these can be discussed rationally without destroying faith in God.

      That means you’re still unwilling to change your beliefs if the evidence tells you something else. You are not making a logical derivation but going through a mental filtering process. It seems to look something like this:
      Receives information->Does that info fit the Biblical narrative?->Reject if it doesn’t, find some way to incorporate if it seems iffy, accept otherwise
      Instead of this:
      Receive information->If that information would logically mean a change in beliefs then they change
      The second one is what scientists use to discover meaningful info about the world. The first one is based on dogma.

      You may not be 100% agreeing with those AIG people, but the end result is you’re still always trying to fit any evidence to a biblical narrative. You’re not willing to think critically about that, it’s limiting your mind.

  16. Tom Godfrey says:

    Michael Champion,

    Your October 10 reply to Perry was mostly addressed to me, but I suspect you had not yet seen my reply to you dated October 9, which had probably not yet passed moderation. You started off by telling me, “…you are repeating the same things you said earlier and don’t seem to really be understanding.” I do not know what I repeated, but it does seem clear that you are still intent on talking about good, evil, and punishment. From my point of view, this part of our discussion is “going nowhere.” I prefer to drop this part and move on, even if you and Perry continue discussing it.

    Recall that you argued on August 11 at 12:24 am , “Christianity is far worse morally speaking in explaining the problem of evil. You cannot have an omnipotent and omnibenevolent god at the same time while also having this world we live in exist in its current state.” I think I explained this problem to your satisfaction, and I am satisfied with your admission on August 31, at 1:40 pm, “I get it that I cannot just prove beyond all doubt any of my conclusions.”

    If you look back at my September 7 comment (search for “horse” without quotes), you can see my suggestion for a new topic that I would be interested in discussing with you. It’s about the origin of consciousness. You already picked this topic up once, in your September 16 reply, but it has been ignored ever since my September 21 comment. Can we pick this up where we left off?

    • Michael Champion says:

      “Your October 10 reply to Perry was mostly addressed to me, but I suspect you had not yet seen my reply to you dated October 9, which had probably not yet passed moderation. You started off by telling me, “…you are repeating the same things you said earlier and don’t seem to really be understanding.” I do not know what I repeated, but it does seem clear that you are still intent on talking about good, evil, and punishment. From my point of view, this part of our discussion is “going nowhere.” I prefer to drop this part and move on, even if you and Perry continue discussing it.”
      Basically, since you don’t really have any objective standard of good/evil, yes, it is going nowhere.

      The origin of consciousness, I do not see how relevant that really is. I can’t claim to know how consciousness began. I can talk about how if you believe God is eternal you could make the same argument for consciousness in general. But I don’t see what all this goes towards, definitely not some proven fact of how consciousness began. It seems like you want to argue that logic dictates God must have existed at the beginning like Perry was doing earlier, is that it? Or what exactly do you want to do?

  17. Tom Godfrey says:

    Michael Champion,

    We both submitted a comment to the moderator on October 14. Your went in first, but of course I had not seen it when I submitted mine. I suppose I should respond to your newest comment that I can see now, even while I am still waiting to see a response to my last one.

    Your analysis of “a mental filtering process” is missing an important element. You wrote, “That means you’re still unwilling to change your beliefs if the evidence tells you something else.” We need to be more precise with the wording here, or else we risk confusion. Neither evidence nor information is an animate agent, so neither one can actually tell you or me anything. Evidence means nothing until it has been interpreted by someone with a mind, and the interpretation will involve facts considered true and relevant as well as assumptions that may or may not be valid.

    You should disabuse yourself of the notion that evidence amounts to an infallible authority. It is nothing more than fuel for interpretation. We should never be fooled into thinking that we must believe an interpretation, because it cannot possibly be wrong. In other words, evidence will not necessarily fuel an interpretation that “would logically mean a change in beliefs.” An interpretation is not necessarily even logical, though it may well persuade some people to change their beliefs, regardless of whether it is right or wrong.

    You believe that scientists “Receive information->If that information would logically mean a change in beliefs then they change [their mind].” I think you have the first step right, though it may be more commonly known as observation, but you skipped over important steps on the way to a change of mind.

    If we are talking about a process of learning about nature and the laws of nature as they are currently observed, the scientist may form a hypothesis and test it with a repeatable experiment. This may lead not only to a personal change of mind but also to information that can be shared and possibly used to make predictions or to support technological advances.

    If we are talking about a process of learning about origins and undocumented events in ancient history that cannot be observed, the researcher may still form a hypothesis, but any experiment designed to test it will be of doubtful relevance, especially if questionable assumptions have to be made about primitive environmental conditions. In general, whenever a hypothesis involves an assumption that may or may not be correct, and there is no way to verify it or falsify it scientifically, the conclusion will necessarily be tentative and subject to honest doubt.

    I know you also included a guess about my own “filtering process,” but let’s not try to analyze it yet. I hope you are “willing to think critically about” the one you covered without “limiting your mind” to old dogma. Focus is good. Let’s either agree that my analysis here is correct, discuss some problem with it that you found, or move on to the origin of consciousness issue.

  18. Tom Godfrey says:

    Michael Champion,

    I am responding now to your October 27 comment where you said, “Basically, since you don’t really have any objective standard of good/evil, yes, [our discussion of good, evil, and punishment] is going nowhere.” Did you say “you” because you believe that I have no such objective standard but you do? If so, what is it, and how was it established? Otherwise, if no one else has it either, in your opinion, I think we come back to what Bahnsen claimed in his article:

    “Thus the problem of evil is precisely a philosophical problem for unbelief. Unbelievers would be required to appeal to the very thing against which they argue (a divine, transcendent sense of ethics) in order for their argument to be warranted.”

    On the origin of consciousness, let me take you back to these paragraphs from your first comment on this thread:

    “I hope from this you understand how your reasoning process is being twisted by Christianity and logical reasoning concludes christianity is false. Or at least give some clear answers on what your fundamental attachment to Christianity is and why you are persisting in the non logical reasoning where your thought process looks like this:

    “Christianity must be true->Try to find proof of God->Find something that proves consciousness drove evolution->OK God Must Have been responsible, no more thinking needed

    “Instead of this:
    “Find proof of consciousness driving evolution and being more primary than matter->Conclude consciousness must have originated at some point or another->How did it originate?->From less complex consciousness as it has throughout all of history, possibly some fundamentally least complex version of consciousness that is the basic nature of intelligence and caused the first DNA ancestor to originate through an as of yet unknown trait of natural law”

    It seems to me that you are now walking this back. Instead of showcasing your thoughts on the origin of consciousness as an excellent example of your own “logical reasoning” behind a conclusion that Christianity is false, now you question its relevance and no longer claim to know how consciousness began. I certainly do believe that God is eternal and has always had consciousness as well as the power and intellect necessary to endow his creatures with it as he pleases.

    You might consider this a working hypothesis rather than a proven claim and wonder whether you have any better alternative to recommend. I certainly do not argue that “logic dictates” anything. Logic is not an animate agent. Only a being with a mind can dictate something, right? I think you used figurative language to refer to the ordinary process of reasoning as practiced by fallible humans.

    Maybe my work here is done.

    • Michael Champion says:

      “I am responding now to your October 27 comment where you said, ‘Basically, since you don’t really have any objective standard of good/evil, yes, [our discussion of good, evil, and punishment] is going nowhere.’ Did you say “you” because you believe that I have no such objective standard but you do? If so, what is it, and how was it established? Otherwise, if no one else has it either, in your opinion, I think we come back to what Bahnsen claimed in his article:

      ‘Thus the problem of evil is precisely a philosophical problem for unbelief. Unbelievers would be required to appeal to the very thing against which they argue (a divine, transcendent sense of ethics) in order for their argument to be warranted.’

      It seems like you are assuming I must fully prove every facet of what is objectively wrong/right in order to disprove divine command theory. That is not really needed. Yes i don’t think you have an objective standard, the key here is you seem to believe something is right/wrong just because God says it is. But that’s a contradiction, as it means he’s either arbitrarily making it good, or he’s using an objective basis, to determine that it is, which means it’s outside of his control. Can’t have objective right and wrong and still use divine command theory.

      As for how exactly we define objective right and wrong, while it would be too difficult to try to define every exact instance of what is objectively good or bad, it’s easy to tell that people do make this attempt all the time. If mass genocide is objectively wrong you wouldn’t need to be omniscient to know that. And knowing all the details of every single possible thing that could be right or wrong and to what degree is unnecessary to know at least some.

      That guy’s comment is contradictory. They are not using a divine sense of justice in their argument, they are using an objective one. A theoretical divine justice would either be objective or subjective, you have to pick one, if it is up to God’s arbitrary choice then it’s subjective and this is not what those arguing for objective morality attempt to use.

      “It seems to me that you are now walking this back. Instead of showcasing your thoughts on the origin of consciousness as an excellent example of your own “logical reasoning” behind a conclusion that Christianity is false, now you question its relevance and no longer claim to know how consciousness began. I certainly do believe that God is eternal and has always had consciousness as well as the power and intellect necessary to endow his creatures with it as he pleases.”

      I still believe Christianity doesn’t answer any of those questions well, and cannot perfectly know everything about how consciousness would have started, but I at least know enough to say that Christianity is wrong in quite a lot of areas.

      The ‘logic dictates’ bit is just saying that sometimes people find no other coherent conclusion than one they find with a reasoning process. I don’t really see any way how Christian Young earth creationists can be right given what science has shown for example. And no i do not think my idea of how consciousness may have begun is some proven fact, but I do know at the least that the Christian God hypothesis falls through in quite a few ways.

  19. Tom Godfrey says:

    Michael Champion,

    I am interested in discussing your issues, but this will be difficult if you dodge my questions or make claims that are too vague to discuss.

    You correctly quoted my previous opening paragraph with questions for you about what you had said earlier (“Basically, since you don’t really have any objective standard of good/evil, …”). But then, instead of answering my questions, you only rephrased your earlier statement (“Yes i don’t think you have an objective standard, …”). This took us back to square one and left me wondering what your answers to my questions are, so we made absolutely no progress here.

    You made a guess about what I am assuming, but it is entirely wrong and irrelevant. You seem to want to digress by heading into a new discussion of divine command theory instead of finishing our discussion of the problem of evil. I have not asked you “to disprove divine command theory,” you evidently see it as a contradiction, and I don’t know how it could be reconciled with the teaching in Rom. 2:12-16, so why go there? How is it relevant?

    To make some progress here, I think it would help if you either admit that “the problem of evil is precisely a philosophical problem for unbelief,” as Bahnsen claimed and for the reason he gave, or else explain clearly why you believe he is wrong about this. You may have already tried to go the latter route, but your case is still too vague. You started talking about “That guy’s comment,” for example. I have to assume you are talking about what Bahnsen said and I quoted, but why should I have to guess? The man has a name. To whom does “they” refer in the next sentence? I think you must mean the same man, but the puzzling switch to a plural pronoun tends to obfuscate your message.

    You went on to try to explain why you concluded that Bahnsen’s comment is contradictory, but your explanation made no sense to me. He was talking about “a divine, transcendent sense of ethics,” while you digressed to talk about whether morality is objective or subjective, missing the point that he wanted to make. If unbelievers present the problem of evil as a good reason for a believer to convert to atheism, don’t they need to appeal to “a divine, transcendent sense of ethics” in the process? If so, this undermines their objective.

    In other words, if evil does not actually exist, any argument featuring a problem of evil has to be rather silly. Atheists struggle to establish the reality and relevance of evil—which they need to do to make their case—without invoking “a divine, transcendent sense of ethics.” Aren’t good and evil imaginary, unscientific, or essentially meaningless concepts in their own materialistic worldview? It might help to reread the last six paragraphs of Part 1 of the Bahnsen article, the last one of which has been quoted above. Here’s the link again.
    http://www.cmfnow.com/articles/pa105.htm

    I don’t understand how atheists might avoid their dilemma, regardless of whether morality is considered to be objective or subjective, but if you think you know a way for them to do this, please explain it as clearly as you can. One way to avoid it is to agree with Bahnsen on this issue and move on to something else that might be more persuasive.

    You said, “I still believe Christianity doesn’t answer any of those questions well, and cannot perfectly know everything about how consciousness would have started, but I at least know enough to say that Christianity is wrong in quite a lot of areas.” This is far too vague. What questions are you talking about? Christians believe that God is eternal and has always had consciousness, so why are you wondering “how consciousness would have started”? What else is there to know about this? How do you suppose “the Christian God hypothesis [regarding consciousness] falls through in quite a few ways”?

    We cannot have an intelligent discussion about wrong ideas “in quite a lot of areas” at the same time, so please pick out just one of them, mention how you came to know enough about it, show how well you understand it by clearly explaining the problem, and see whether your case against Christianity can withstand critical scrutiny. You may have already tried to do this in your opening comment for Perry, but maybe you want to see which argument, if any, still ought to be considered persuasive at this point.

    You also said, “I don’t really see any way how Christian Young earth creationists can be right given what science has shown for example.” Here you are speaking figuratively again. Science is not an animate agent capable of showing anything. But that’s okay. You should understand, however, that I am not fooled by this subtle suggestion that “science” is an infallible authority that one dare not question.

    If you meant to refer to facts about nature and the laws of nature as currently observed and revealed by scientists using the familiar scientific method, creationists do not find any of them any more controversial than they are within the general community of secular scientists. These facts can have technological applications and are more practical than problematic.

    If you meant to refer to tentative speculation about origins and the unobserved past, it’s another story entirely, but as far as I am concerned, this takes us outside the realm of ordinary science. If you disagree, please explain. In any case, it would be a logical fallacy to conclude that creationists cannot be right just because you do not know of any way to reconcile what we believe with actual facts. Let’s be reasonable.

    • Michael Champion says:

      I didn’t get the notification for this until yesterday, although I probably should’ve responded then to make it a bit faster.

      I’ll start earlier on where you said I didn’t respond to some of your questions, it seems like they were these ones:
      “Did you say “you” because you believe that I have no such objective standard but you do? If so, what is it, and how was it established? Otherwise, if no one else has it either, in your opinion, I think we come back to what Bahnsen claimed in his article:”
      It seemed to you like i was evading the question when i said i don’t need to know every detail of objective right and wrong in response to this. As for what objective morality is in general, I can guess what some components of it might be, without having to know an exact answer for everything about it. Usually, people will answer that quite a few types of crimes are wrong without question, while others become a grey area since they’re done out of necessity. But in those grey areas, like someone stealing food to survive, the preferred option is to not steal and still survive. In other words, I can say that it’s preferable if people have symbiotic relationships rather than parasitic ones. So ideally, no parasitic relationships would need to exist and people wouldn’t harm each other at all. I can’t exactly know the entirety of how objective morality would work, but I can say many people would agree with that sentence and believe the world would be more ideal if aggression was not needed and cooperation was the norm. However, many Christians would say Christianity disagrees with this, and dictates that everyone must accept God or else burn in hell. This is something i think is pretty problematic about Christianity.

      “You went on to try to explain why you concluded that Bahnsen’s comment is contradictory, but your explanation made no sense to me. He was talking about “a divine, transcendent sense of ethics,” while you digressed to talk about whether morality is objective or subjective, missing the point that he wanted to make. If unbelievers present the problem of evil as a good reason for a believer to convert to atheism, don’t they need to appeal to “a divine, transcendent sense of ethics” in the process? If so, this undermines their objective.”
      I’m not sure what your personal definition of a divine transcendent sense of ethics is. But in some sense, I agree that atheists are caught in a paradox, but not because of needing to believe in religion or God. This also covers your other issue where you said you want an admission that this is a philosophical problem for unbelief. Mainly, they say that ‘Christian morality is wrong’ but shoot themselves in the foot when they say it cannot be objectively wrong, which removes the whole point of saying it is wrong if their own statement can’t be trusted as objective and impartial.

      “In other words, if evil does not actually exist, any argument featuring a problem of evil has to be rather silly. Atheists struggle to establish the reality and relevance of evil—which they need to do to make their case—without invoking “a divine, transcendent sense of ethics.” Aren’t good and evil imaginary, unscientific, or essentially meaningless concepts in their own materialistic worldview?”
      Yes, this part I agree with, most atheists think good or evil do not exist in any objective way, but this is not just because they don’t believe God exists. They don’t believe there is such a thing as good or evil. As far as I can tell, that would mean any objectively existing definition of good or evil. Not a personal, subjective one, which presumably has no objective basis. That seems like it’s the idea you’re getting at when you say Atheists don’t believe in good and evil. That they do not believe in anything being good or bad beyond the extent to which people declare(arbitrarily, as far as Atheists can tell) that it is. So what I don’t understand is why your idea of good and evil depends on God.

      ” It might help to reread the last six paragraphs of Part 1 of the Bahnsen article, the last one of which has been quoted above. Here’s the link again.
      http://www.cmfnow.com/articles/pa105.htm

      I don’t understand how atheists might avoid their dilemma, regardless of whether morality is considered to be objective or subjective, but if you think you know a way for them to do this, please explain it as clearly as you can. One way to avoid it is to agree with Bahnsen on this issue and move on to something else that might be more persuasive.”

      I looked at the Bahnsen argument and it makes some points which are right with atheists in general. Subjective arguments for what is good are arbitrary if they do not have any objective basis. Utilitarian versions of goodness where you promote happiness for the greatest number requires an objective judgement that this in itself is a good thing that has value. Utilitarians would normally say that it isn’t, and just argue that people in general should be utilitarian since it’s likely to benefit them, but at that point it’s no longer an argument about objective good or bad. The problem here is that Brahnsen conflates God with objective good. Here’s a section of Part 2 of his argument where he seems to do that:
      “Such indignation requires recourse to the absolute, unchanging, and good character of God in order to make philosophical sense. The expression of moral indignation is but personal evidence that unbelievers know this God in their heart of hearts. They refuse to let judgments about evil be reduced to subjectivism.”
      Key line is his idea that God must have an unchanging perfectly good character according to Brahnsen for objective good to exist. But how is God’s perfectly good character defined as perfectly good?Presumably, an objective standard of good. If not, I don’t see another option, unless you have thought of one. Even his line here in mentioning subjectivism in atheist morality seems to call to mind the idea that if God’s goodness is not subjective, inevitably, it must be Objective, therefore based on some objective standard of good.

      “You said, “I still believe Christianity doesn’t answer any of those questions well, and cannot perfectly know everything about how consciousness would have started, but I at least know enough to say that Christianity is wrong in quite a lot of areas.” This is far too vague. What questions are you talking about? Christians believe that God is eternal and has always had consciousness, so why are you wondering “how consciousness would have started”? What else is there to know about this? How do you suppose “the Christian God hypothesis [regarding consciousness] falls through in quite a few ways”?”
      It’s what i’ve pointed out earlier. Young Earth Creationism can’t be true, the earth is not 5000 years old. There’s no evidence of a divine creator god actively intervening in the events of the world, like causing a worldwide flood, or conveniently making it seem like the earth is billions of years old based on the half-lives of many radioactive materials. Or conveniently making it seem like the universe is billions of years old due to the speed of light. So your particular Christianity variant is definitely wrong. As for the Christian God idea in general, it doesn’t answer the origin of God, or why God is Omnipotent, or why there is no evidence for God existing.

  20. Tom Godfrey says:

    Michael Champion,

    Thanks for answering with more clarity my old question about the reality and relevance of evil. Your new answer seems to be from the point of view of atheists, which I assume you share, because you said, “Yes, this part I agree with, most atheists think good or evil do not exist in any objective way, …” I think we agree now that the famous “problem of evil” cannot be presented from this point of view as a legitimate challenge to faith in God. This leaves the other side of the coin in the Bahnsen analysis.

    What about “a divine, transcendent sense of ethics” that at first blush might make a “problem of evil” argument appear to be cogent? What does this sense have to do with God? Let me see if I understand your line of reasoning. You suppose that this sense of ethics must not be a problem for atheists, if in fact it has nothing to do with God, right? Does this issue really require a solution to the Euthyphro dilemma, as your comment seems to suggest? That dilemma may only confuse or complicate the issue. Christians believe that transcendent sense of ethics exists because God endowed mankind with a conscience at creation, and I think this is consistent with the teaching in Rom. 2:14-15. This seems both simple and satisfactory to me. Atheists would have to reject this belief, of course, but then they still need some way to account for at least a “transcendent sense of ethics.” Never mind how others do this. You have obviously thought about this deeply. If God is ruled out, what alternative makes sense to you?

    Moving on to questions you believe Christians do not answer well, let’s start with the age of the earth. Have you heard any Christian claim that the right answer is “5000 years old”? Okay, I should not quibble about the exact number, but really, how does anyone know the correct answer to this question? Never mind Perry’s argument about the speed of light and the various radiometric dating methods. I think every answer falls into one of at least three categories depending on its basis.

    One basis is study and interpretation of currently available physical evidence under assumptions that may or may not be correct and cannot be scientifically verified, so conclusions actually amount to speculation or educated guesses that are always subject to rejection or adjustment as more is learned. Answers to the question of interest made on this basis have already changed multiple times in fairly recent history.

    A second basis is biblical chronology that stretches back to creation of the heavens and the earth. The Bible offers no specific, one-verse answer to the age question, but even if it did, it would be useless without also knowing the exact date when the answer was given, so that time elapsed since the given date could be added.

    A third basis is information in other holy books or folk traditions. I think some of these might indicate that the earth is eternal, without any specific age at all. The credibility of these sources may depend on a wider study of all chronological information included and the amount of verification that has been possible.

    Without a time machine in good working order, I think it follows that a statement like, “… the earth is not 5000 years old,” is really just a statement of faith. People may be convinced that they know the age of the earth as a fact of science, but underneath the covers, this knowledge proves to be a mere illusion. But so what? Why has the question of the age of the earth even been raised? Does it matter? If so, why? Would knowing this piece of information with absolute certainty have any impact at all on an invention, modern technology, living standards, or exploration of the Solar System? I say the answer is no, because this has nothing to do with ordinary science. It is purely a question in the realm of history, not science. It is essentially the same story with regard to the age of the universe.

    What other questions did you find problematic for Christians? I saw only one. Did God actively intervene in events on earth, such as the Flood of Noah, for instance? You claimed that there is no evidence of this, and this is certainly an easy claim to make, but you should know that universal negatives are notoriously hard to prove. I am convinced that your claim is wrong, and it should be easy to understand why we disagree. I accept evidence (as opposed to absolute proof) that you have either ignored or dismissed.

    The Flood of Noah is a case in point. This comment is no place to delve into much detail, but at least I am impressed with the evidence that Gerald E. Aardsma has uncovered related to the Flood and the Exodus. There is also the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, which involves a body of evidence that has led atheists in the past to belief in God. I think if you look for evidence and honestly evaluate what you find, you might agree with me on the correct answer to this other question after all.

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