RE: The Problem of Evil, Christians, and Inconsistency
August 28, 2014 at 11:06 am
(This post was last modified: August 28, 2014 at 11:06 am by Tonus.)
Yeah, I think the math for "free will" doesn't work with the idea of a future world with no wickedness. As I understand it, free will means that we will always have the option to do what is wrong in the eyes of god. So far in human history, not a single human being has avoided using his/her free will to do what is wrong in the eyes of god. God once put on a human costume and managed to go ~33 years without offending himself, before arranging to be murdered by ...wait for it... free-willed humans who did what was wrong in his eyes in order to further his plans for humanity.
Since humanity is, so far, batting 1.000 when it comes to using free will to do what is wrong, I don't think it will go very well in a future paradise or heaven unless we have our free will removed. You can't say that "we'll be perfected" because Adam and Eve were perfect and they're batting... 1.000. You can't say that witnessing the glory of god would have any effect, since the humans who have seen the glory of god are batting... 1.000. Even the angels in heaven appear to be batting around .333 when it comes to pissing off god!
So after the end of the world (or whatever it is that is supposed to follow once god fixes everything) the best we can hope for is that over time, every single human will find a way to anger god and wind up in hell, along with about a third of the angels. Or all of them, if god doesn't have a program for replenishing them when they screw up. Alternatively, god realizes that we're a pretty bad design and removes the "free will" module from everyone's programming and we get to spend eternity trying to put a little ball in a cup while drooling all over ourselves. Or something like that.
Since humanity is, so far, batting 1.000 when it comes to using free will to do what is wrong, I don't think it will go very well in a future paradise or heaven unless we have our free will removed. You can't say that "we'll be perfected" because Adam and Eve were perfect and they're batting... 1.000. You can't say that witnessing the glory of god would have any effect, since the humans who have seen the glory of god are batting... 1.000. Even the angels in heaven appear to be batting around .333 when it comes to pissing off god!
So after the end of the world (or whatever it is that is supposed to follow once god fixes everything) the best we can hope for is that over time, every single human will find a way to anger god and wind up in hell, along with about a third of the angels. Or all of them, if god doesn't have a program for replenishing them when they screw up. Alternatively, god realizes that we're a pretty bad design and removes the "free will" module from everyone's programming and we get to spend eternity trying to put a little ball in a cup while drooling all over ourselves. Or something like that.
"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
