(December 16, 2016 at 11:35 am)Tonus Wrote:(December 16, 2016 at 9:49 am)SteveII Wrote: Regarding the idea that God uses people who are 'screwed anyway' to accomplish his will, yes, I believe that is the case.
My concern with this is that using Judas in this manner was only for the purposes of convenience. There was no need to prophesize that someone would betray Jesus, and there certainly was no need to have someone lead his enemies to him. That seems capricious.
I don't think we have the information to say that it could have been accomplished some other way--for the same reason you articulate below...
Quote:Quote:I believe that God's goal is the redemption of people and a desire for a personal relationship, and we have free will to choose such. While God does want the best possible life for you (given your free will and the free will of others), this might be supervened by the one objective that could override it--namely the accomplishing the greater purpose of the maximum number of people having a personal relationship with him. So, it could be that some event in my life would be terrible for me, but has a purpose I cannot see--or it might just be a terrible event that is the result of nothing more than natural causes, my free will and that of others.
I am thinking that if God can pluck a person out of one possible fate and into another --as with Judas-- then this also has a ripple effect. Judas life unfolds differently-- he goes to different places and meets different people and takes different actions, which have effects that change the lives of other people, whose actions then affect others, and so on. Let's assume that God is able to do this-- to change the future by affecting individual people, and that he is able to see how this changes the future for everyone. So God can arrange a future that accomplishes the goal of having the maximum number of people achieve a personal relationship with him. If that God is the God of the Bible, we see that his plans have only resulted in, at best, about a 30% success rate. Meaning that billions of people --possibly tens of billions if we take those who are no longer alive into account-- may be going to hell.
If having free will meant that more than two-thirds of humanity was going to suffer for eternity, wouldn't it have been better not to have free will?
I think you characterized everything correctly and your conclusion, unfortunately, is accurate. However, I think we do not have standing to say that billions of people who freely chose God was not worth the billions more that freely did not. It is obvious that God places an extremely high value on people freely choosing him.
