(February 5, 2016 at 7:02 pm)Pandæmonium Wrote:(February 5, 2016 at 5:00 pm)athrock Wrote: How would God be able to reveal His existence without impacting your free will to accept or not accept Him as your Lord?
For example, if He is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent, then many (like Hitchens and many member of the forum) would resent Him as the ultimate Big Brother.
Others would choose to worship Him out of fear (the very thing that forum members SCREAM about every time the existence of hell is mentioned).
So, how does God strike a balance between giving you (a mere speck of material in a purely natural world) the ability to perceive the existence of the supernatural Creator of that world without so overwhelming you with His glory that you are coerced into worshiping Him?
(Oh, and the "different gods" bit? Theologians accept that Christians, Muslims and others do worship the same God - but they have different impressions of him based upon the paths they have followed to find him.)
Ok, none of that particularly addresses my points in the cited post.
So I ask again, how do you resolve the inherent and self evident contradiction of, on the one hand, assuming this as of yet undefined and un-evidenced being has ordaining free will to chose, with the idea that in fact we are also pre-wired/predisposed to believe in 'its' existence (also unsupported and demonstrably false in my case)? You may as well just force belief if you're going to do that.
Why is it a contradiction? Giving us a pre-disposition to believe in Him is pretty subtle, IMO.
Quote:And how does this even compute in a scenario where this celestial being has created an entire universe, including the life forms that reside within it and, importantly, every facet of their existence from behavioral to emotional, only to then stumble at the hurdling block (even taking into account Muslims and Christians and the relatively small number of Jews into account) of having a very large proportion of the planet both today and throughout history never worshipping it, or even knowing of its existence? I ask you how a rational mind can even consider that to be feasible let alone plausible.
How? Relatively simply, I think. More people believe in some sort of a supreme being than you apparently realize. If you add up the number of Christians, Muslims and Hindus alone, you're at about 5 out of 7 million people who are theists (monotheists or polytheists). So, God understands what the life experience of each person has been, and I personally believe He grades on a curve. And, FWIW, the Church teaches that all those who lived and died as "good" people before Christ were waiting for His day in a relatively pleasant place known as "Abraham's bosom" and had an opportunity to meet him during the three days his body was in the tomb. This is known as the harrowing of hell.
Quote:I am ignoring all these deflections of materiality, 'what other forum members think' (I don't particularly care) and further assertions until you can provide a satisfactory answer to that.
Done.
