(October 21, 2013 at 1:29 am)Beta Ray Bill Wrote: If we're to live trillions of years in heaven or hell, what is the point of 70 years of life on Earth? It seems kind of pointless, doesn't it? Shouldn't we be judged over how we act over the next 1,000,000,000,000 years than the next 10?
Indeed. This brings up the question of free will. Those who "pass the test" now and are ushered into a new world would still be capable of sin, unless they had that capability removed. To remove it limits our options and thus is a form of behavioral control, which means that humanity would no longer have free will. Which means that god could have taken a shortcut by programming humanity this way in the first place and skipped the part where billions of people suffered either temporarily or eternally.
Or he doesn't make any changes to humanity at all, knowing that each person is a ticking time bomb, ready to start the whole mess over again. Neither option seems logical to me.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
