RE: The free will argument demonstrates that christians don't understand free will.
April 29, 2014 at 9:22 am
"Free will" is one of those terms that you can get a lot of different definitions and interpretations for. It seems to me that the concept was developed specifically to deal with the problem of god creating evil. If we can blame the existence of evil on something/someone else, then god remains perfect and good. Thus, those who misuse free will are responsible for evil. Then there had to be an explanation for why, if free will brought so much suffering into the world (including that of god himself), did god provide angels and humans with it? That explanation seems to have created some complications down the line regarding the future in either heaven or paradise, but it's not as if Christians aren't used to complicated and wild explanations and rationalizations for the stuff they believe.
"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
