Why would a perfect being make an imperfect world?

[Godscreated]

Yeah, the newer translations have changed the word of god to suit their desires.  What's wrong with the KJV anyway, lol?

You're just not very intelligent are you. The newer translations we use come with more understanding of the ancient Hebrew and Greek giving us greater clarity of some words and phrases. Nothing is wrong with the KJV except it's written in an older language that is no longer spoken and makes it tougher to understand for people of today. I enjoy hearing it read by someone who can read it like poetry.

GC

[The Grand Nudger]

I think the word you're looking for is credulous, I'm not very credulous.  The answer is no, ofc.  

So, to recap, there's nothing wrong with the KJV, except that it's hard for people to understand (I'm guessing "people" doesn't include you, miraculously)...and except for that one part where it totally miffed a translation and got a whole bunch of people thinking that god created evil..when, really, he didn't do anything quite so bad, he just created disaster, is all.



I'd rather be credited with evil, personally, especially in light of what christer-god considers evil. Back-talking the menfolk and suchlike. I mean...I think we can both agree...that that's no earthquake, eh?

[Godscreated]

Jesus has always existed, the Hebrew's have been expecting Him when the exile began. God has always existed and the acceptance of Him is through free will. Free will was so important to God from the beginning that He allowed Adam and Eve to choose to disobey Him. He wasn't going to interfere with perfect love. Adam and Eve chose to destroy that relationship.

Now you're just fucking with me. Jesus has always existed because people were "expecting him" AFTER some point in time? Oh, I get it. This is a sly shift away from "Free will is your ability to accept or reject Christ" to "Free will is your ability to accept or reject God". This is what you people do instead of saying, "You're right. I misspoke. I meant God." You dig yourself a big fucking hole, fill it to the top with hot steaming bullshit and dive right in head first. So Adam and Eve had the choice to follow or reject "Christ" because he always existed, even before he was prophesied? I can smell that from here.

Listen please, God is and always will be God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, they are one God in three persons, they are like minded and like matured. They have always existed and were for time unknown existing fine without this universe or humanity. Yes they had the choice to accept or reject Christ even though at that time He wasn't referred to as the Messiah. Some believe it was Christ who walked in the Garden with them and I tend to believe this, too.
So the only thing you smell is your inability to understand the scriptures.

I think you are a bit confused as to the nature of free will.  Free will is the ability to act freely according to my own will.  What you're talking about is the ability to make one single, extremely specific choice.

I know what free will means and I know God can act upon it because of His providence over His creation. Like I said before the only choice that God will not interfere with is our choice to accept Him (Jesus). Jesus said that He and the Father are one and that no one comes to the Son without an invitation from the Father.
God may or may not interfere in some decisions you make or have made but, you will never know if He has unless you are serving Him. God allows you many choices in your life without interference but sinful choices come with a price, non-sinful choices have no price against them by God or man.

GC



Well thank you. So it wasn't my memory which failed me at all (this time). I don't read every post in a thread. Even if I did, I wouldn't remember anything but vague ideas. I have a terrible memory.

Okay, I read it. Choose Christ or reject him. I'm sorry, but I don't see how that applies to Adam and Eve. I don't see how that applies to the twelve tribes of Israel. At no point were they told to "accept" Christ. To accept Christ is to be Christian. You can't be Christian before the Christ exists. I'm sorry, but you're just making up bullshit here. That would be a HUGE loophole for anyone before Jesus to get into Heaven. You can't go to Hell unless you've heard the word, after all, and Jews hardly went around preaching about the Christ a thousand years before his appearance. That makes Oprah God. You're going to Heaven, you're going to Heaven, you're going to Heaven, EVERYBODY is going to Heaven!
[/quote]

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I think the word you're looking for is credulous, I'm not very credulous.  The answer is no, ofc.  

So, to recap, there's nothing wrong with the KJV, except that it's hard for people to understand (I'm guessing "people" doesn't include you, miraculously)...and except for that one part where it totally miffed a translation and got a whole bunch of people thinking that god created evil..when, really, he didn't do anything quite so bad, he just created disaster, is all.

It especially includes me, it's why I do not use it. I have 6 different translations and use 4 of them often. None of them differ from each other, some are easier to read and others are more of a literal translation, combined they help me to find answers to questions and find the truth to those questions. Of course all my study is God guided, something I'm sure you find funny but, I find it enlightening and in that the answers I seek.

I'd rather be credited with evil, personally, especially in light of what christer-god considers evil. Back-talking the menfolk and suchlike. I mean...I think we can both agree...that that's no earthquake, eh?

Any sin will find it's judgment whether now or in the next life. In that society and that time it was a big deal, respect means little today unfortunately.

GC

[Drich]

If I were looking for complete perfection, absolutely!

Which is what you seem to think God was looking for, so again why didn't he throw the whole thing out and start again?

Well, he wasnt happy when adam ruined the garden of eden, a supposed perfect place. Obv he wanted perfection according to the bible.

BCV?
quotation please

[The Grand Nudger]

It especially includes me, it's why I do not use it. I have 6 different translations and use 4 of them often. None of them differ from each other, some are easier to read and others are more of a literal translation, combined they help me to find answers to questions and find the truth to those questions. Of course all my study is God guided, something I'm sure you find funny but, I find it enlightening and in that the answers I seek.

Human beings have a habit of finding whatever they're looking for, even if it isn't there.  Enlightening isn't the word -I- would use to describe that little gem, but I think we've already established you have trouble with words.  Especially the King Jamesey ones.  Bet you missed all the good dirty jokes in shakespeare too, damned elizabethan english!

Any sin will find it's judgment whether now or in the next life. In that society and that time it was a big deal, respect means little today unfortunately.

GC

I'm sure that the people of the world breathed a collective sigh of relief when the ground began to shake beneath them and their city fell into the earth...after all, at least Iscah wasn't sassing Barak again.  What a bitch, amiright?

[Edwardo Piet]

So then...

Why WOULD a perfect being make an imperfect world?

The answer? It's a loaded question. It wouldn't.

---

A perfect being wouldn't make a world at all. They'd be so perfect they would be all that would be required to exist. In fact they wouldn't do anything, they'd be changeless. Nothing would need to happen. Everything would be perfect.

It is an interesting paradox. I think the answer is that He creates out of love. He needs nothing from us but gave us life from His abundance and opportunities to enjoy it.

It's not a paradox. It's a contradiction.

A being wouldn't need to create anyone for any reason or do anything for any reason if it was already perfect.

If he was truly perfect he wouldn't need to create imperfect beings to love. You say he needs nothing from us... his creating us contradicts that.

He can't be doing it for us because we don't exist yet.

[SteveII]

1. I think if your worldview was Naturalism it would. For there to be real free will, the mind, something immaterial, would have causal effect on the world and the notion of determinism undermined. I have not heard of an argument that preserves both Free Will and Naturalism. Feel free...
2. My third reason addresses the brain damage objection: Lastly, while there is a causal dependency of the mind events on the brain events, you cannot confuse correlation with identity. It does not follow that if two events are correlated, that they are identical.
3. I presented 3 reason that you have not addressed specifically. Why is this not evidence that for mind/body duality? 
4. A worldview is measured on how well it assimilates reality into a coherent framework. I think mine does that better than yours for a lot of reasons. This one happens to be the topic of this thread. If you are okay with a worldview that fails to address everything, that is your business.

1. You make a lot of presupposed assumptions about me.  I fought very hard against the idea of determinism, for years.  I hated the idea, and had many debates about it.  I do not have a world view based around it, I just accepted it.  I already accept there are immaterial concepts and ideas.  I do think naturalism is correct, however, if it were proven incorrect, I would accept it and move on, just as I have done before.  I have no deep beliefs or philosophies based on it that would unravel.  I have no God or Soul or Afterlife to lose. 


(p.s. I've studied this in multiple college courses.  I know the arguments for and against.  I personally find the arguments for duality, free will, and a personal God all to be weak, and based on emotional attachment to the ideas, and little else).

How do you think you would react if it were proven that free-will did not exist?  Would it negatively impact your belief in God, or how you view yourself as a self made person, and how you view others as choosing to be sinful or good? [1A]

2. No, it doesn't.  It also doesn't follow that they are not identical. There is no actual evidence that mind is not just an emergent property of the brain.  Illogical arguments are not evidence.
3. Fine, I'll address your 3 points.
 a Not everything that goes on in our mind is causally determined by our bodies. Sometime what goes on in our bodies is a result of what goes on in our mind. I am choosing to reply to you and do the necessary chores of getting sentences down on the screen. We have mental-to-physical causation. The explanation of both the choice I made and the physical events going on in my body is for the purpose of defending my position. A purposeful explanation is a teleological explanation and a teleological explanation is not a deterministic one. 

I already addressed this one.  I never said everything that goes on in the mind is determined by our bodies. But it is determined by something.  Just because you do not know the causation does not mean you get to insert magic. This IS essentially God of the Gaps. [2A] Also, if you are going to define free-will to mean purpose or desire, then just admit that and we can discuss compatibilism.  [b][3A][/b]

 b. Secondly, electrodes can be used to stimulate the brain to do different things (make a noise, raise a hand, etc.). However the patient always says something like "I didn't do that, you did that". There is no place that can be stimulated to cause a patient to decide to do something. 

Exactly!  Because there is no decision making, so there is nothing there to stimulate.  The feeling that you "chose" something is illusory, this example exposes that illusion.  This is actually evidence of the illusion, not something magically exists outside the brain in some "real" way.  [4A]
At any rate, your final sentence isn't true.  The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) appears to profoundly affect cognitive control, and feelings of "choice".  Damage to this region of the brain can make people feel as if they are not making choices, but simply responding to impulses. They describe themselves as feeling "robotic" or as if they are simply a passenger in a vehicle, watching it all happen. People can actually lose the feeling of free will, because it is caused by the brain! [b][5A] [/b]

In any case, you are still inserting magic where there is a gap in knowledge.  Back to God of the Gaps, but with free will. 

c Lastly, while there is a causal dependency of the mind events on the brain events, you cannot confuse correlation with identity. It does not follow that if two events are correlated, that they are identical.

Right, but that also does not mean you get to entirely dismiss that they might be.  Correlation does not imply causation, true, but it in no way dismisses causation entirely. [6A] 

If the mind existed outside the brain, then we would have the ability for the mind to exist when the brain is fully asleep (not REM), or dead.  But that isn't the case. When the brain sleeps, so does the mind. When the brain is dead, so is the mind.  (waits to hear about NDE's next) [7A] 

(p.s. In case I was unclear, I am not attached to the idea of determinism.  I actually still find it difficult to accept, and rather detestable to think we are either basically robots or perhaps slightly random robots.  I struggle quite a lot with the notion, and it causes me more than a little anxiety. I would probably feel relief, if anything, to find evidence that it is not correct. That being said, I don't deny things simply because they make me uncomfortable.  I face what seems to me to be truths, even hard or difficult truths.  So please stop asserting I only believe this thing because I want to, that's so patently absurd in my case, it's not even worth a laugh.) [8A] 

1A. If Free Will was proved false, it would be catastrophic to my worldview. While you seem to be agnostic about the body/mind duality issue, you have made statements that say my belief is false, un-reasoned, and inserting God-of-the-gaps/magic. The fact that my worldview depends on Free Will being true says absolutely nothing about whether it is true or not--and therefore carries zero weight. 

2A. No no no. If one comes to the conclusion (as I do) that there is an immaterial mind that can think/reason/decide and then have causal effect on the brain, then that is all we can conclude from that evidence. I never said, "therefore God." That is poor argumentation and would be God-of-the-Gaps.  If I were to move on to a Natural Theology argument that God is the best explanation for an immaterial mind, then that would have it's own arguments and conclusions--but that is a separate issue than what we have been discussing. But, back to the points I made in A. You didn't undermine them with some other explanation--so I am going with the conclusion--the mind is immaterial.  

3A. Compatiblism is just redefining Free Will until it fits with determinism. 

4A. You have simply described compatiblism--which seems to be the result of Naturalism running smack into what all of our reason and senses tell us is genuine Free Will. The resulting conflict must be reconciled--so we will redefine our way out of it!

5A. Just because neuroscientisthave identified the area of the brain that processes a decision does not make a point against an immaterial mind. No one disagrees that the immaterial mind must act on the physical brain.  Since the brain both feeds the mind all physical stimuli and is the recipient of direction from the mind, it only makes sense that damage to the brain will produce psychological effects. 

6A. I was not making a point about causation. I was making a point about identity. 

7A. Again, the immaterial mind is 100% dependent on the physical brain. 

8A. I only meant to point out usually that atheism results in naturalism which entails determinism. If there is anything the proves any of these steps wrong, it will cast doubt on the others.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Well, he wasnt happy when adam ruined the garden of eden, a supposed perfect place. Obv he wanted perfection according to the bible.

BCV?
quotation please

"Be perfect as I AM perfect."?

A being wouldn't need to create anyone for any reason or do anything for any reason if it was already perfect. If he was truly perfect he wouldn't need to create imperfect beings to love. You say he needs nothing from us... his creating us contradicts that.

It's not like there was this super powerful guy who got lonely and made toys to play with. You only see a contradiction because you have an impoverished concept of God. God is completely in act across all eternity. He has no remaining potential needing to be actualized. He is unchanging, thus the act of Creation produces no change in Him. It merely manifests and attests to His perfection.

[Asmodee]

At what point does an apple exist? When it appears on a tree, or did it always potentially exist even when it's tree was still in seed form?

The apple doesn't just magically appear, it came from somewhere.

Therefore inside the apple seed exits all the apples it will produce it just requires certain conditions for the apples to be made manifest.

The spoken word of God is the original seed, he spoke and his thoughts materialized.

That is a very simplistic way to look at it, and not very accurate.  An apple "exists" when it exists and not before.  I can't take an apple out of a seed and eat it because the apple doesn't exist yet.  A potential apple is also referred to as "not an apple".

Listen please, God is and always will be God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, they are one God in three persons, they are like minded and like matured. They have always existed and were for time unknown existing fine without this universe or humanity. Yes they had the choice to accept or reject Christ even though at that time He wasn't referred to as the Messiah. Some believe it was Christ who walked in the Garden with them and I tend to believe this, too.
So the only thing you smell is your inability to understand the scriptures.

No, I'm thinking it's your inability to understand the difference between Jesus the god and Jesus the man.  It is a difficult concept.  I'll give you that.  I'm not sure if you believe in the trinity, three distinct parts of a single being (it sounds as if you do) or no trinity, they are all just manifestations of the same single being.  Regardless, you have Jesus the god and Jesus the man.  I can't believe I'm about to give you a Sunday School lesson, but here goes.

God is perfect.  God it not subject to weaknesses of the flesh such as temptation.  Yet Jesus was tempted for 40 days.  Why would the devil bother to tempt a God he knew full well was beyond temptation?  Because Jesus was more than simply a piece of God, Jesus was also a man and it was Jesus, specifically, NOT just "God the son", who was the Christ.  Only as a man was he subject to tribulation, temptation and pain.  God is beyond all these things.  So while the argument can be made, and rightly so, that the three bits have always existed, the one bit WAS NOT "the Christ" until AFTER being born in flesh.

Your claim was that free will consisted solely of your ability to choose to accept or deny, specifically, Christ.  NOBODY in the twelve tribes of Israel accepted Christ because God the Christ had not yet been born.  While "God the son" may have existed, "God the Christ" did not.  As I said, I know it's a difficult concept.  But "the Christ" is also known as JESUS Christ because he's not "the Christ" until you add the fleshy bits.  So yes, before the birth of Jesus people worshiped the same God, but they did not "accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior".  Jesus was "the Christ".  PART of him was God the son.  The other part was man.  Until you put the two together you don't have a Christ.  People don't seem to understand that Christ is a title, not a name, and I think that might be where you are getting confused.

I think you are a bit confused as to the nature of free will.  Free will is the ability to act freely according to my own will.  What you're talking about is the ability to make one single, extremely specific choice.

I know what free will means and I know God can act upon it because of His providence over His creation. Like I said before the only choice that God will not interfere with is our choice to accept Him (Jesus). Jesus said that He and the Father are one and that no one comes to the Son without an invitation from the Father.
God may or may not interfere in some decisions you make or have made but, you will never know if He has unless you are serving Him. God allows you many choices in your life without interference but sinful choices come with a price, non-sinful choices have no price against them by God or man.

GC

I think you do know what free will is.  And I think you know very well you're not using it correctly.  If you didn't know what free will was and you did think you were using it correctly then you would say simply, "God gives us free will."  That's the entirety of what you have to say when you know what it is and believe that you are using it correctly.  But that's not what you say.  You add a definition afterward.  You say, "God gives us free will and that means, specifically, the ability to freely choose to accept or reject Christ."  When you add a definition after a common word or phrase it tells me that you do know what it means and you do know that you're not using it correctly, which is why you feel the need to add the definition you are using, one which you know that no reasonable person would infer on his or her own.

So perhaps you could save some confusion in the future and just stop using the term "free will", using just your definition for it instead.  Because you are not saying we have free will, you are saying we are free to make a single, binary choice.  I know you would really like to shoehorn the concept of free will into what you're saying, but you and I both know very well that it doesn't fit.  So stop lying to yourself and stop lying to me.  Either we have "free will PERIOD" or we have "SOME DEFINITION OF WHAT WE HAVE".  We cannot have both "free will", a term which stands on its own and means the ability to act without interference according to our own will, AND "some restrictive subset of true free will".  It's one or the other AT BEST, and the Bible says it's not "free will", by it's real definition.

An interesting note here, I'm sure you didn't realize you were doing this, but you're confusing the argument as a means of increasing your authority in the discussion.  You start out saying, essentially, that God has a right to fuck with creation however she likes.  I never said she didn't.  If she wants to change what she made that is her right.  I concur with that one hundred percent.  I never even suggested that wasn't true.  But that's not the issue here, is it?  The issue is "DO WE HAVE free will?", not "IS IT GOD'S RIGHT TO INTERFERE WITH free will?"  You've added the issue of God's rights as a way of imparting authority into your position, even though I've never called those rights into question.  And this is why, a few months ago, I stated that, by instinct, I don't trust what Christians are telling me.  You don't even realize when you're slyly changing the conversation to artificially bolster your position, allowing you to argue from a position of more authority.  Rather than make a compelling argument, and let's be honest for a change, it's because you don't have one, you've chosen to assert authority.

[Drich]

"Be perfect as I AM perfect."?

So who was Jesus talking to? Better yet how was 'perfection obtained' in the sermon he just laid out in chapter 5. What principle or fundamental challenged encompasses perfection as He and God are "perfect?"

This lends to the question is perfection a state of being without flaw or is perfection something else? Asking, Does (At least in chapter 5)Perfection describe a state of love we are to strive to obtain? Rather than being with out error?

Everything leading up to your quote (verse 38 to 47) would seem to suggest that Jesus find or rather defines our perfection through the practice of loving one another. So then in your specific instance of 'quoted perfection' or being perfect as God is perfect, Jesus is not describing a state without error but a state where one's love is "complete" as Jesus' love was complete, and as the Father's love is complete.