(December 2, 2014 at 8:23 am)alpha male Wrote: By your reasoning, god could not have made such predictions, as he didn't know that people, being free moral agents, would kill Jesus.The JWs used to teach (may be different now) that god would intervene in human affairs to make sure his predictions came to pass. Which is to say, if things weren't working out as predicted, he would simply influence people into action. It was to show that if god said something would happen, we could be assured that it would happen because he could arrange for it. It made god's predictions a certainty.
Aside from the quibble of god meddling in the free will of at least a few individuals (Judas was the example that troubled me the most) it's not a bad way to have a world where the future is not set in stone, yet a deity can make predictions that we are certain will come to pass.
"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
