RE: The Problem of Imperfect Revelation: Your Thoughts?
July 11, 2013 at 2:28 pm
(This post was last modified: July 11, 2013 at 2:47 pm by MindForgedManacle.)
(July 11, 2013 at 2:12 am)Godschild Wrote: God is not omnibenevolent, where did you get that idea from, I know it wasn't from scriptures.
Aside from the Bible's abundant references to God's supreme goodness (far moreso in the New Testament than in the Hebrew Bible), I'm using omnibenevolence not because it's necessary for the argument, but because it is a VERY common claim by Christian apologist. Even one of the more prominent of them, Alvin Plantinga, uses the concept in his Modal Ontological Argument for God's existence under the term "all-loving". Hence, I use it. For my argument, I only need it to be the case that God wants for the people he creates to go to heaven and that his actions must be consistent with his nature.
Quote:God will not violate the free will He's given us, your problem is you believe god gave free will in the whole of our lives, this is no scriptural. God gave us free will to chose Him or to reject Him, outside of that the amount of free will God allows you to have depends on His will.
It isn't really "free will" if it's 'given' to you, and can be reneged by God. That's "will-insofar-as-I-allow-it", i.e NOT free.
Quote:With these two points wrong all of it fails.
Considering the poorly thought out nature of your objections, I disagree.
Quote:God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent, the scriptures never hint at God being omnibenevolent. Omnibenevolent is not part of Christianity, you will not find it in any Christian doctrine, it is a word made up by nonbelievers to try and gain an edge in an argument. The use of omnibenevolent is a dishonest way to support a dead argument.
Omnibenevolent merely means the same thing as "all-loving". The Bible never actually uses the word "omnipotent" or "omniscient", but are you really stupidly going to claim that the Bible does NOT refer to God's unparalleled power, knowledge and goodness?
Also, unbelievers didn't make the word up, believers did (e.g. Plantinga and the like).
(July 11, 2013 at 12:26 am)apophenia Wrote:
You appear to have two implicit premises, both of which are debatable:
a) a specific interpretation of a holy text according to a specific standard of interpretation delineates all and only that which is necessary for salvation,
Hm, I don't think you quite got what I was getting at. My point was that assume Premises 1) & 2) are a correct picture of the god Yahweh (and they're used by major apologists). If premise 3) is true - that God wants for his human creations to go to heaven, and God is capable of revealing himself to people without eliminating there free will - then there is no impediment to God revealing himself to people as he did with, say, his prophets, and clearly their free will couldn't have been broken.
More to the point, assuming God instead chose scriptures as his means of disseminating information on how to achieve premise 3), given premise 1), God should have the ability to make revelation not truly possible to having interpretations, at the very least, of the means of salvation being wrong.
Am I wrong in this?
Quote:b) differing interpretations of what is required for salvation and differing actions in accordance with those interpretations results in differing levels of success wrt salvation.
Ah, I guess you did get what I was getting at, but is it reallt debateable? I mean, if He's supposed to be able to reveal himself to people sans-eliminating free will, and he can do anything that is consistent with his nature, an imperfect revelation that can be wildly interpreted seems rather... inconsistent, if what truly matters to Him is getting people to Heaven.
Anyhow, I hope I didn't misunderstand your objections, and thanks for the critique.
