"Free will was given to man by god."

[jayjacobus]

Jay jacobus wrote:

why would you gain knowledge by reading about Adam and ignore your own experiences?

The Bible is part of the culture that I and a lot of others are embedded in. Every person's experiences are shaped by the culture in which they live. There never has been nor ever will be a person who lives outside of a culture. All propositional knowledge is got through cultural channels.

Religion is a very weak channel if it prevents people from an effective relation with God.

I am an abnormality that relates to both culture and God.

[Belinda]

Jay jacobus wrote:

why would you gain knowledge by reading about Adam and ignore your own experiences?

The Bible is part of the culture that I and a lot of others are embedded in. Every person's experiences are shaped by the culture in which they live. There never has been nor ever will be a person who lives outside of a culture. All propositional knowledge is got through cultural channels.

Religion is a very weak channel if it prevents people from an effective relation with God.

I am an abnormality that relates to both culture and God.

This is a very deeply divided world that we live in today. If your God is special to you and you feel that you know your God then you have at least made an effort to live a good life. Maybe some day you will find a fellowship of people who think as you do. Good luck anyway.

[jayjacobus]

Jay jacobus wrote:



The Bible is part of the culture that I and a lot of others are embedded in. Every person's experiences are shaped by the culture in which they live. There never has been nor ever will be a person who lives outside of a culture. All propositional knowledge is got through cultural channels.

Religion is a very weak channel if it prevents people from an effective relation with God.

I am an abnormality that relates to both culture and God.

This is a very deeply divided world that we live in today. If your God is special to you and you feel that you know your God then you have at least made an effort to live a good life. Maybe some day you will find a fellowship of people who think as you do. Good luck anyway.

Do you understand what I intend?

No, I know what I intend but I can only hope.

[Immanuel Can]

Theists believes God created and maintains everything ; i.e. determinism.

This doesn't follow. Most Theists do not believe God micromanages the universe. He is the Creator, but is capable of creating free will possessing creatures. That's how most see it.

Atheists are generally Materialists, and Materialism, if true, does entail determinism.

[Immanuel Can]

Why IYO is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil always considered superficially from a moralistic perspective?

Because "knowledge of good and evil" implicates ethics/morality. It's what the text says.

There was no society at that time so obviously knowledge of good and evil refers to something other than societal morality.

Biblically speaking, morality is not a product of society, but rather an objective property to which different societies respond differently -- some by obeying the moral law, and others by breaking it. But its origin point and rational grounding is in God, not man.

That's why the Bible uses the phrase, "The Law of God."

[jayjacobus]

Why IYO is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil always considered superficially from a moralistic perspective?

Because "knowledge of good and evil" implicates ethics/morality. It's what the text says.

There was no society at that time so obviously knowledge of good and evil refers to something other than societal morality.

Biblically speaking, morality is not a product of society, but rather an objective property to which different societies respond differently -- some by obeying the moral law, and others by breaking it. But its origin point and rational grounding is in God, not man.

That's why the Bible uses the phrase, "The Law of God."

"the law of God" has no meaning if only God. Biblically speaking speaks to man not to God.

You cannot speak to me through God. You can only speak to me through man.

Unless I hear God but that is not you speaking.

Wake up your understanding.

[Immanuel Can]

"the law of God" has no meaning if only God.

Are you familiar with the grammatical term, "genitive case"?

"Of" doesn't mean "to." In this case, it means "by authority of."

[henry quirk]

[uwot]

Determinism implies that everything that happens happens of necessity. But it does not imply that what will happen can be predicted.

Depends on the type of determinism. If it's yer god type determinism then us mortals have no chance of prediction, because of the inscrutable ways of god, and god doesn't need to predict, because it already knows. That's omniscience for you. On the other hand, if it's materialist determinism, ya shouldn't let that incorrigible rogue Mr Can dictate the terms and conditions. He wants to portray materialists as the sort of knuckle draggers that Henry Quirk pretends to be; that we think that the universe is made of lots of little billiard balls which are all bouncing off each other according to Newtonian mechanics. He likes that sort of materialist, because it is as easy to show they are wrong as it is to show that god doesn't have a white beard nor lives on a cloud.
Whatever stuff the universe is made of is 'material'. We don't know what it is, but one property we know it to have is that it gives rise to consciousness. We don't know whether there is any feedback in the system, as we intuitively feel, or consciousness is just farted out and blown around in the breeze. I gave up on philosophy of mind years ago and concentrated on the relatively simple philosophy of physics, with relativity and quantum mechanics and whatnot. Lots of cracking neuroscience since then, most of which implies that we are not as free as we like to believe. The problem there is that repeatable phenomena are the sort of things that science can process, it can't really account for people doing what they want.

[Belinda]

I wrote:

Determinism implies that everything that happens happens of necessity. But it does not imply that what will happen can be predicted.

Uwot, physics has a high rate of predictability because the variables of the very small and the very huge are so few as compared with events at our level?

[uwot]

Uwot, physics has a high rate of predictability because the variables of the very small and the very huge are so few as compared with events at our level?

Well again, it depends. At the quantum level, individual events have little more than zero predictability. At the very large scale, no one predicted that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. We simply don't know what the variables are. Things are complicated on our scale, but they are at least familiar, so we can cook up mathematical formulæ that fit the data and give us a pretty good level of prediction.

[henry quirk]

Two things...

1 Just call me Henry...ain't no need to call me Henry Quirk.

2 "knuckle draggers that Henry Quirk pretends to be": I don't 'pretend': I 'tailor'.

[RCSaunders]

"Free will was given to man by god."

LOL!??!?! ..god didn't want us to have free will, so he forbade us to eat the fruit of wisdom!

In the mythical Garden of Eden there would be no discussion about clinical abortion as God's necessity would prevail as in everything.There would be no sin as nothing could happen there that was not ordained by God.

Odd, your Bible must read differently from mine. In mine, sin originated in Eden, first by Satan, in the form of the serpent lying to Eve, then by Eve in direct disobedience of God, and then by Adam in the same defiant disobedience. If nothing could happen in Eden not ordained by God, God would have been the author of sin, as the extreme Calvinists believe.

If the Garden of Eden story is nothing but, "myth," conjecture about its interpretation is simply conjecture. Interpretations by New Testament writers are as good as anyone else's, and they do not agree with you.

Have you ever read Mark Twain's "Adam's Diary?"

[RCSaunders]

God determines everything that has happened or will ever happen. So that men could choose to obey God, or not as the case may be, ...

If God truly determines everything it would include every supposed choice every human being made. That is the view of the extreme Calvinist called predestintion. The Calvinists, at least are consistent in their view and deny limitless free will. Their inconsistency is in holding individuals responsible for their behavior and beliefs in spite of the fact they have no choice in the matter.

If human beings truly have free will their own behavior is self-determined and cannot also be determined by God. In the past, theologians have performed some amazing mental gymnastics attempting to eliminate this obvious contradiction.

Modern philosophers do much the same thing while teaching that human behavior is determine by evolution, genetics, brain behavior or brain chemicals, culture, or other influences they work very hard to convince people to choose to believe them and hold people responsible for their beliefs and acts as if they actually had a choice in the matter.

The point is that human behavior, including thinking, is either consciously chosen or determined by something else.

[Nick_A]

Why IYO is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil always considered superficially from a moralistic perspective?

Because "knowledge of good and evil" implicates ethics/morality. It's what the text says.

There was no society at that time so obviously knowledge of good and evil refers to something other than societal morality.

Biblically speaking, morality is not a product of society, but rather an objective property to which different societies respond differently -- some by obeying the moral law, and others by breaking it. But its origin point and rational grounding is in God, not man.

That's why the Bible uses the phrase, "The Law of God."

Nick_A wrote: ↑Thu Jun 13, 2019 8:19 pm
Why IYO is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil always considered superficially from a moralistic perspective?

Because "knowledge of good and evil" implicates ethics/morality. It's what the text says.

It is resistance to questions like this which made me leave Sunday school at an early age.

Genesis 2

8 Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. 9 The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

There seems to be an objective relationship between these two trees suggesting that the universal concept of good and evil transcends social morality.

Genesis 3:

22 And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” 23 So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side[e] of the Garden of Eden cherubim

Jesus arrival on earth seems to contradict God's will here. He wants us to become aware of objective good and evil and begin the transformation made possible by the tree of life. Was Jesus in error?

The two trees are connected and it is clear that objective good and evil for Man refers to more than social morality. However the atheists consider all this a basic contradiction natural for primitive people and believers say one must have faith. So the seeker of truth annoys everyone during their efforts to experience the depth of an extraordinarily profound meaningful teaching. Well, as long as we avoid the hemlock we'll be OK.