RE: A really hard question on Satan and deception.
November 8, 2011 at 1:32 pm
(This post was last modified: November 8, 2011 at 3:17 pm by Mister Agenda.)
1. By 'it' I will deduce you mean immortality and not the tree itself, in which case a verse stating something along the lines of 'Adam and Eve would have lived forever had they not eaten from the tree of knowledge' would suffice to indicate that immortality was an option. If by 'it' you mean the tree itself, I remain speechless.
2. Something created by a maker who knows exactly what it will do in any circumstance cannot have free will. It can only do what its maker designed it to do. You can't have it both ways: either God did not know in advance what Adam and Eve would do before creating them, which would afford them free will; or he did and they did not have free will.
3. At least this makes more sense than it existed so the Hebrews would know it existed. And props to you for conceding that it would have made a difference if they had eaten from the tree of life.
4. That's an example of what I was saying about ad hoc explanations to explain away contradictions. Even if you are correct about the 'true meaning', it doesn't say 'spiritual death', that is something you added to explain why the verse doesn't really mean what it literally says. You're free to believe yours is the correct interpretation, but it doesn't change what the verse actually says.
5. Choice necessarily requires that you would have been able to make a different choice. Absolute foreknowledge necessarily implies that the future is fixed and no one can do other than what they have been foreseen to do. Absolute foreknowledge is not compatible with a world in which people's choices are free. Asserting that this is not a logical way of looking at things is an extremely weak objection compared to reasoning showing why it would not be the case.
6. So what is the doctor's justification for requiring you to jump through hoops to get him to cure your addiction? What's wrong with smoking is that it causes addiction and cancer, which exist only because the doctor allows them to. Note that at this point I'm not even tightening the analogy to 'someone tells you there's a doctor that can cure your addiction but you don't get to meet the doctor until after you die, and it's that person telling you that you have to do what they say for the doctor to help you, and there's a bunch of other people telling you that guy's doctor isn't real and you should listen to them about what the doctor wants.'
2. Something created by a maker who knows exactly what it will do in any circumstance cannot have free will. It can only do what its maker designed it to do. You can't have it both ways: either God did not know in advance what Adam and Eve would do before creating them, which would afford them free will; or he did and they did not have free will.
3. At least this makes more sense than it existed so the Hebrews would know it existed. And props to you for conceding that it would have made a difference if they had eaten from the tree of life.
4. That's an example of what I was saying about ad hoc explanations to explain away contradictions. Even if you are correct about the 'true meaning', it doesn't say 'spiritual death', that is something you added to explain why the verse doesn't really mean what it literally says. You're free to believe yours is the correct interpretation, but it doesn't change what the verse actually says.
5. Choice necessarily requires that you would have been able to make a different choice. Absolute foreknowledge necessarily implies that the future is fixed and no one can do other than what they have been foreseen to do. Absolute foreknowledge is not compatible with a world in which people's choices are free. Asserting that this is not a logical way of looking at things is an extremely weak objection compared to reasoning showing why it would not be the case.
6. So what is the doctor's justification for requiring you to jump through hoops to get him to cure your addiction? What's wrong with smoking is that it causes addiction and cancer, which exist only because the doctor allows them to. Note that at this point I'm not even tightening the analogy to 'someone tells you there's a doctor that can cure your addiction but you don't get to meet the doctor until after you die, and it's that person telling you that you have to do what they say for the doctor to help you, and there's a bunch of other people telling you that guy's doctor isn't real and you should listen to them about what the doctor wants.'
