A question for open-minded Christians

Great Debates
21

All right, let me lay out my argument in some more detail. (unfortunately, I don’t understand modal logic well enough to put it into that form, so I’m keeping it informal). If you disagree with it, tell me which specific step you disagree with, and we can work from there.

  1. Omnipotence: the state of being in which anything that is wanted can be accomplished.
  2. Wanting: the state of being in which that which is wanted will be accomplished, if possible.
  3. If an omnipotent being wants something, the “if possible” clause of 2 is fulfilled and therefore what is wanted will be accomplished.
  4. According to the Bible, God is omnipotent
  5. According to the Bible, God wants everybody to be Christian
  6. Combining 3, 4, and 5, everybody is Christian (according to the Bible).
  7. According to the Bible’s standards of Christianity (in other parts of the Bible), not everybody is Christian.
  8. Since trusting the Bible for factual information leads us to contradictory statements 6 and 7, the Bible is not a valid source for factual information.

Numbers 4, 5, and 7 (corresponding to numbers 1, 2, and 3 in the OP) are based on Biblical readings and are subject to interpretation. If you choose to disagree with them, they are far enough from the conventional interpretation (or any interpretation I’ve ever heard before) that the burden of proof is on those making the assertion.

I realize this free will question is basic theology, but I’m questioning the accepted explanation. Can God or can God not make everybody Christian without free will? If you’re going to say that he could, but then it wouldn’t count, or some condition like that, the question becomes “Can God or can God not make everybody Christian without free will in a way that counts?” or whatever your condition was. If the answer is yes and presumably God hasn’t, then I’m waiting for any evidence (not even proof) that God indeed didn’t want everyone to be Christian. If the answer is no, I’m waiting for any evidence that there are things God can’t do. Contrary to what seems to be the popular veiw (specifically Jodi, Liberatarian and Polycarp), I’m not holding God to my own standards, saying that I think he should have made everyone Christian. I’m saying that these are his own standards, and it seems strange that an omnipotent being doesn’t hold himself to his own standards.

As to the faith question, I’m wondering where Christianity would be without the Bible. Maybe you could infer that there is a God who had a son who came down to Earth to save it, it certainly wouldn’t seem like the most likely conclusion to me, but each to his own, I guess. Without the Bible though, you wouldn’t even know his name. You wouldn’t have any idea what to do to become a Christian. And then why was the Bible written if not to give a clearer picture of Christianity? It is a pretty slippery question though, very hard to prove either way and not something I choose to thrust myself too deeply into.

MrO: I agree with you, that theological ontological arguments don’t really lead anywhere. Two arguments can be equally valid and sound and lead to opposite conclusions. This doesn’t, however, preclude the possibilty of invalid arguments, and what I am attempting to prove is that one specific argument is invalid.

Jodi: I think maybe I misunderstood you on the OT issue. Are you saying that, according to the Old Testament, God wanted everyone to be Jewish, not Christian? Maybe this is another objection to the Christian faith, but do we have any reason for not sticking to the conventional interpretation that Jesus’s crucifixion nullified a good number of OT commands, including that one?

22

DAVID –

“Can be,” not “has to be.”

No. If I want a Snickers but don’t eat one because I’m watching my weight, does that mean I didn’t want the Snickers? If I want to call a coworker a total idiot but don’t because it wil make it harder to work with her, does that mean I didn’t want to call him an idiot?

There are a myriad of reasons why a being who can do something nevertheless decides not to do it. That doesn’t have anything to do with the issue of whether something is “wanted” or not.

[quote]
3. If an omnipotent being wants something, the “if possible” clause of 2 is fulfilled and therefore what is wanted will be accomplished.[/qote]

This does not follow. If what God wants is to be loved freely, then compelling people to love Him obviously does not further His goal of being loved freely.

This does not follow, for reasons already set forth. God desiring everyone to be Christian (even if true) does not equal God making everyone Christian.

Except No. 6 is logically incorrect and therefore any assumption built upon it is in turn logically incorrect, so your conclusion (No. 8) does not follow.

No. 5 and No. 6 are incorrect, not as a matter of theology but as a matter of logic. The Bible does not state that God wants everyone to be Christian in the absence of free will. If you assert that it does, then it is your interpretation that is “far enough from the conventional” that you will have to explain how you are arriving at that assertion. The same with your statement that the Bible says everyone is Christian – something it simply does not say, period. So if you assert that it does, you must prove it.

I’m going to parse this out sentence by sentence, because I’m not sure I follow you.

Sure. He could make everyone Christian; He could even make everyone want to be Christian. But in neither case would the choice to be Christian have been made freely by the individual – i.e., by the exercise of free will.

The “way that counts” is “with free will” – i.e., love freely given by choice. Substituting that phrase, your question becomes “Can God or can God not make everyone Christian without free will but simultaneously with free will?” The question is a tautology, and in fact is merely another way of phrasing the old question “Can God create a rock so heavy He cannot lift it?”

The problem (well, one of them) with your assertion regarding 4, 5, and 6 – i.e., that because God desires people to be Christian, all people are therefore Christian. Frankly, it’s now been explained several times why this does not follow – free will.

No one has said that Christianity is not a Bible-based religion. It is. That is a far different matter than asserting that the Bible is a factually accurate text, or an infallible text, or a divinely inspired text, or whatever. This is another example of the leaps in logic you seem inclined to make – if the Bible is not the unerring word of God and factually accurate, then it is irrelevant. That doesn’t follow.

No. Another illogical assumption on your part. The opposite of “God wants everyone to be Christian” is not “God wants everyone to be Jewish.” I never said that was what the OT says; it does not.

“That one”? There is no “that one.” You now appear to be saying “If God doesn’t want everyone to be Christian, He must want everyone to be Jewish.” Again, as a matter of simple logic (not theology), that does not follow. The opposite of [A] is not **; the opposite of [A] is [not A]. In other words, the opposite of “God wants everyone to be Christian” is “God does not want everyone to be Christian,” not “God wants everyone to be Jewish.”

To Jews, the idea that Jesus’s crucifixion “nullified a good number of OT commands” is absolutely rejected. It therefore is hardly a “conventional interpretation” to everyone – it sure isn’t to them. My point is that you cannot say the Bible (entirely) says that God wants everyone to be Christian, because the first half of the Bible does not say that.

23

Hi, David, God of Frogs

Your step number two is a little awkward, because you define “wanting” by using the word “wanted”. But, if I understand it correctly, you are effectively saying that the statement “I want X to happen” is the same as the statement “I would cause X to happen if I could”.

Several other posters have quarreled with this understanding of the word “want”. I agree with what they say, but I won’t repeat the arguments. Suppose for a moment we accept your understanding of “want”.

Given that understanding of the word “want”, no Christian – in fact, I think, nobody – would accept your step number 4, that the Bible states that God “wants” everybody to be Christian, i.e. that the Bible says that God would make everybody Christian, if he could.

If the Bible doesn’t say this, your entire argument falls. I don’t think the Bible does say this. Why do you think it does?

There is also a basic confusion in the question you pose in your most recent post, “Can God or can God not make everybody Christian without free will?” It depends on what you mean by “Christian” – a term which you do not define in any of your steps. If you mean somebody who accepts Christ as his personal saviour, yes, an omnipotent God can do this. Whether this “counts” or not is irrelevant – he can do it. Bit if you mean somebody who freely chooses to accept Christ as his personal saviour, no, even an omnipotent God cannot do this, because it is a contradiction in terms, and a logical impossibility.

Or you can come at the same problem another way. What is meant by “omnipotent”? In the Christian understanding of the word, to say that God is omnipotent does not mean that he can do the logically impossible. Hence to show that God has not done the logically impossible does not disprove his omnipotence.

24

This is the “can he create a rock he can’t lift?” argument I was referencing in my post.

I would disagree with you point, UDS, in that IMO an omnipotent God can do the logically impossible – just not in a way we can understand it. In other words, the limitation is not upon the power of God to do, but the power of humans to understand. The framework of logic is ours, not His, and I don’t think “we can’t see how He could do it” equals “He can’t do it.”

I am no longer surprised by – though still struck by – the human tendency, when applying a paradox to God, to assume that the limitation is upon God’s power to do and not upon our power to grasp.

25

Hi Jodi

I don’t think it’s a question of understanding. Sure, there are lots of things that we can’t understand, or even conceive of, that an omnipotent God can do. Nevertheless, MrO posted earlier that an omnipotent God could not make a square circle, and I agree. He cannot make something that is both a circle, as we understand “circle”, and square, as we understand “square”. Sure, he can make something that we don’t understand and can’t conceive of, but then, by definition, it will not be a circle as we understand it or a square as we understand it, and certainly not both.

Although the adjective “square” and the noun “circle” both have meaning in the English language, the phrase “square circle” has no meaning. Hence the construction of a square circle is a logical impossibility, even for an omnipotent God. By the same reasoning God cannot compel me to choose freely to accept Christ as saviour.

26

Jodi: you’re introducing the concept of priorities into the definition of “wanting”. While it is a relevent concept, we should be able to define the word and then step back and consider how it ties in. In both of your examples, you want two things - to eat a snickers bar and be skinny, or to express your feelings about a coworker and still be on friendly terms with him/her. As non-omnipotent beings, we often have to prioritize. To choose an example of my own, I have a dollar, but I want a pack of gum and a sticker, which brings me over a dollar. I have to prioritize, because I can’t have both. (Notice that this doesn’t negate the fact that I still want both.) If, on the other hand, I find a dollar on the street, I can have both. The need for prioritzation comes from restriction - in this case the finite amount of money I have. But for an omnipotent being, there is no possible restriction. He has an infinite amount of money, or, to go back to your example, can repeal whatever rule says that if you eat candy you get fat. Every item on his priority list is number 1 - there’s no possible reason he can’t acheive everything. To put this back in the context of the debate, the only reason (you say) that God can’t make everybody Christian is because according to the rules of logic, that would nullify free will. But for an omnipotent being, these rules of logic can be thrown out at will, therefore getting rid of the need to prioritize.

(emphasis mine)
I’m still waiting for an answer to the question that doesn’t involve the word “but”. Whatever you put after that word, I can just put that into the question, assuming it’s relevent in the first place.

The “can God create a rock” question never really struck me as a reason to reject God - yes is a perfectly good answer. (Follow up question: can God lift it - also yes). With an omnipotent God, any sentence beginning with “Can God” can be answered with a yes.

The Bible makes it clear that there is a difference between Christians and non-Christians. I’m not exactly sure what that difference is, but for the purposes of this thread, if the Bible would consider someone Christian, they are Christian. This relates to point number 7.

well, that would be point number 1 in my argument above. Can you come up with another definition of omnipotence? Also, if God can do everything except the logically impossible, why not say God can do everything except eat veggie burgers? What is so special about “logically impossible”?

I’ve also explained this point several times (I think we have some miscommunication going on here): I wasn’t the one who was claiming that there were things God can’t do. You were, with your discussion of priorities. I’m trying to argue the opposite of what you think I’m arguing: that God, can, in fact, do more than you give him credit for.

As to the question of whether he would, that is a yes or no question. If you think no is the answer, really I wouldn’t be able to prove you wrong. Maybe a follow-up question or two, and then we can all go home and return to our everyday lives. But right now you seem to be staking out a middle position that is untenable (see above discussion on priorities). If your position is really that God doesn’t want some people to be Christian, give me a shout.

I’m going to drop this discussion on faith, because my objection to Christianity is only to the extent that it is influenced by the Bible.

and JodiI think the point about the OT is answered by the discussion on priorities, unless I’m still not understanding what your’e saying.

27

As and out this gets an 11, on a scale of 1 to 10 . It is frequently used in the form that says that your limited mind can’t possibly understand the infinite God - so shut up and row.

28

DAVID –

No, I’m not. I define “want” as in “the desire that something come to pass.” I reject your definition of “want” as " the state of being in which that which is wanted will be accomplished, if possible." I reject it because it does not reflect the reality that it is perfectly possible (and even common) to want something but nevertheless not accomplish it, whether because one cannot or because one chooses not to. This is not the same as prioritizing between multiple wants. Your definition of “to want” is IMO simply incorrect. This has nothing to do with priorities, which is a concept I did not introduce.

Your point boils down to an assertion that God could compel us to do something, while simultaneously refraining from compelling us to do the exact same thing. I submit that in the rational framework within in which we function, and within which we attempt to understand Him (must attempt to understand Him), that is a nonsensical position. For the same reason to answer the question “Could God create a rock so heavy he could not lift it?” with “yes” is also a nonsensical position. The statement is a paradox, and as such does not admit of a yes or no answer. For the same reason, the question “Could God compel us to act, without compelling us to act?” similarly does not admit of a yes or no answer, because it is a paradox. (These are both versions of the same paradox, by the way, viz. “Can God do the impossible?” If it is truly impossible, then He cannot do it. If He cannot do it, then He is not God (i.e., is not omnipotent).)

Sure. But that leaves us with a state of affairs that we are utterly unable to grasp – a God that can simultaneously create a rock He cannot lift, and yet lift the rock. We have no frame of reference by which we could possibly comprehend such a state of affairs, and so it is irrelevant to us. It is the same for an assertion that God could compel us to love Him, and simultaneously not compel us to love Him. Since that state of affairs is an impossibility within the framework we by necessity must function in, we reject it. As we must. Because as a concept, it is meaningless. The compulsion negates the lack of compulsion (or vice versa), and so the concept is literally nonsensical – it makes no sense. By necessity, I must attempt to understand God in ways that make sense to me with the tools I have – and that leaves out answering “yes” or “no” to paradoxes that definitionally do not admit of such answers.

I don’t understand this, so cannot respond to it.

The paradox listed was never intended as a reason to reject God, but rather as an illustration of the limits of humanity’s ability to understand God, as all such paradoxes are. “Yes” is demonstrably not a “perfectly good answer;” if He can lift it, then He didn’t make it too heavy for Himself to lift. If He made it too heavy for Himself to lift, then He can’t lift it.

Point Number 7 is not the problem. Points 2, 3, 5, 6 and 8 are.

We are certainly miscommunicating, because you are absolutely misinterpreting my points. I never said “there were things God can’t do,” and to say I said this must certainly be a willful misreading of my posts. I have said there are things God would choose not to do, one of which is to impose His will on people that He desires will come to Him through their own free will. To that point, your only answer is to posit some universe in which God would somehow compel us while simultaneously refraining from compelling us. As I have already said, such a universe can have no relevance to any discussion of God in this universe, since it encompasses something which is an impossibility – i.e., that the states of being compelled and being free from compulsion can simultaneously exist. This has nothing to do with “priorities,” which is not a concept I have introduced and in fact is not what I am talking about at all. Perhaps you find people reluctant to debate you on this issue because of your tendency to both misread and misstate what they have said?

On the contrary, it is your position that is wholly untenable, devolving as it does to an assertion that God would compel us while simultaneously refraining from compelling us. This in turn devolves to an assertion that free will may somehow exist in the presence of compulsion – ignoring, of course, that in any rational universe the presence of compulsion definitionally nullifies free will, and both cannot exist simultaneously. This in turn renders the entire concept of free will (the absence of compulsion) and compulsion (the absence of free will) entirely meaningless. This is what UDS is (correctly) saying in his last post: Something cannot be both square and round. Which takes us directly back, of course, to the idea of paradoxes applied to God: If God is omnipotent, why can’t He both compel us and refrain from compelling us at the same time? Because the human definitions of those terms do not admit of both existing simultaneously. If you assert that both can exist simultaneousy, then you have obviated their definitions.

Apparently you’re not, since one has nothing to do with the other.

29

Can I have that “Shut up and row” line? It sure is easier than trying to explain all of this to David, God of Frogs.

30

You can’t have it both ways: does your inability to comprehend a situation mean God can’t create it or doesn’t it?

31

I’m not sure it belongs to me since I’m a little weak on SDMB rules as to intellectual (ahem!) property rights, but if it does I’ll just put it into the public domain and anyone can use it. I probably heard it somewhere anyway since I’m not all that original.

32

What did I say that indicated a desire to “have it both ways”? Do you run my posts through some translator, by which they the come out meaning something other than what they say?

Obviously God can create situations I (we) cannot comprehend. I’m confident He does it all the time. But when you choose to theorize a situation so far beyond our power to comprehend that it defies even being discussed, where does that leave us? This is not Schroedinger’s Cat. The cat is not simultaneously alive and dead in any world except one of pure theory. When we talk about something being alive or dead; compelled or not; either too heavy to be lifted or not; then “both” is not an admissable answer.

God may be able to fold time like a taco; compress time and space into one eternal instance in which everything happens at once and in one spot, both the possible and the impossible, because everything is possible, even the paradoxical, and so no such thing as “impossible” exists. But what does it avail us to discuss Him then? That is not our frame of reference. It is so far beyond our frame of reference that we can’t conceive of it from here. So that brings us no closer to any understanding of Him, either as an actual entity or as a mythical construct (take your pick). So you theorize that God can simultaneously compel us and refrain from compelling us. How has that advanced the discussion one iota?

In the framework of logic, where the compelled and the freely offered do not coexist, we must ask why God would refrain from compelling everyone to follow Christ, if He really wants everyone to follow Christ. The obvious answer is that He wants people to come to Him willingly and by free choice. As a response to this, I think “but He could compel them and simultaneously not compel them!” is a singularly bad one, because you have removed the discussion so entirely from the rational that the conversation simply halts.

33

Well, that sounded a tad cranky. Apologies for the tone. Bad date.

34

I choose to take what I want from the Bible. Not without reason, of course. Gotta have reason. I take anything that supports love and kindness towards other people (and towards one’s self) as gospel. Personally, I think that God is good. I don’t think he’s going to condemn people for not believing in him. If he did, that wouldn’t be a God I would want to worship, because some part of me would be worshipping and believing out of fear, not love.

I think God just wants us to be good. I’d say that, then, I don’t believe 2 is right, either. There are people I know who, to be quite honest, would abuse Christianity to make everyone miserable around them. They might be better off as something that has a less of a history of aggressive recruitment.

I believe that Christ can help those who want to be helped and healed. I know it did that for me. I don’t think that the same person who has taken away my fear of death, who has helped me to love myself and others in a way that I couldn’t learn from Wicca (and my failure to do this is not a fault in Wicca, but rather a result of my own incompatibility with the religion) or agnosticism or atheism could condemn someone over something that really, in the long run, doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. I needed Christ, though. I think anyone and everyone could benefit from a relationship with him. But whether they and the world could benefit more from some other philosophy is independent of this fact.

I think he knows this. I think he knows that the Bible isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be and that Christianity can be used as a dangerous weapon. So he doesn’t mind what other people do, as long as they’re not creating suffering, either for themselves or for others. And I think he can forgive them even that.

Sorry for babbling. I’m new at this. I don’t know if that means my opinion means nothing. I mean, I’ve been a Christian for about two weeks now (two whole weeks). I don’t know everything, or maybe I don’t know anything. But I had to share my point of view here. Sorry.

35

I do not think the original argument is valid, because I do not believe god wants everyone to be christian (using the frog god definition of want), but why are you so convinced that god could not find a way to have us all be christians without taking away our free will?

As I have already said, God could simply predict which free willed people would eventually convert to christianity and create only those people. But there are other ways. If you saw a dollar lying on the ground and picked it up, did that dollar take away your free will? Or did you choose to pick it up? What if someone put the dollar there, and predicted that you would pick it up? Did they take your free will away? God can predict all possible results of all possible events, so do you really doubt that god could find a combination of events that would cause people to choose christianity on their own? Or is the fact that god knew it would happen enough to take away all our responsibility for our own actions? This is not quite the paradox you think it is, certainly not on the level of making a square circle.

What if I predict that you will disagree with my argument? Am I taking away your free will and forcing you to disagree? Or are you simply choosing to do so?

36

David

If I understand your position correctly, the statement “God is omnipetent” means “God can do anything, even the logically nonsensical”. And the statement “God wants everybody to be a Christian” means “God would make everybody a Christian, if he could”.

Given those meanings, your entirel argument rests on the premise that those two statements are found in the Bible, doesn’t it?

But where are they found in the Bible?

37

It might be a corrupt interpretation of John 6:40:

38

What is the difference between “a situation we cannot comprehend” and “a situation so far beyond our power to comprehend that it defies even being discussed”? Either way we can’t comprehend it, to different degrees of non-comprehension. Either way, since our comprehension abilities are finite, it has no bearing on whether or not an infinite being would be able to comprehend it. While I can see a difference between the situations that you were referring to as being comprehesible only by God (i.e. Shrodinger’s cat) and the ones under discussion, the difference is only a matter of degree. There is no fine line or such.

Angel: Congrads on your new religion. I can agree with all of your sentiments, and my opinion that Christianity doesn’t intellectually hold up doesn’t change my observation that it has changed many people’s lives for the better.

UDS and Libertarian: As I was saying before, if we can establish that God could have made everyone Christian and have free will, and you still think that God didn’t want everyone to be Christian, well, I don’t really have too much of an argument there. So far though, we seem to be stuck up on the question of whether or not God making everybody Christian would take away their free will. If you do think that God in fact wanted some people not to be Christian, and could control their religion without infringing on their free will, then I may as well ask my follow up questions now:

  1. why are people Christian, if not to serve God? Christians seem to shun the idea that they are Christian just to get into heaven, and the only other reason I can think of is to serve God.
  2. How do I know if I’m one of the people God wants to be Christian?
39

I don’t recall saying anything at all about free will. I’m not going to allow you to state some argument that I haven’t made and then ask me to defend it. What I said is that you equivocated, and that is the point that I will defend.

And now I will address your two new questions, disregarding your qualifier about what belief might entitle one to answer them.

There are many answers to the question of why I’m a man of faith, but the most important to me personally is that I know Him, and, as they say, to know Him is to love Him. What’s not to love? He is boundlessly good, unconditionally forgiving, and mercifully just.

Determine for yourself whether these words have meaning that is significant to you:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

40

I don’t think we can establish that. But let it pass for a moment

If “want” means “will compel” then, no, I don’t think God “wants” everybody to be Christian.

David, stop a minute. If, as you suggest, “want” means “will compel”, accepting the statement “God does not want [will not compel] everybody to be Christian” does not allow us to conclude that God “wants [will compel] some people not to be Christian”. You are overlooking the alternative possibility, which is that God is not going to compel anyone.

You’ve chosen a highly artificial meaning of the word “want” for the purposes of your argument. Having done that, if you want your argument to be taken seriously you’ve got to respect the meaning which you yourself have chosen. The inverse of “God would compel me to be a Christian” is not "God would compel me not to be a Christian "; it is "God would not compel me to be a Christian ".

Your basic position is that an omnipotent God must cause to happen everything that he would like to happen; otherwise he would not be omnipotent. I think you misunderstand omnipotence. To say that God is ominpotent is to say that he can do anything. If you say that God must do X, the corrollary is that he cannot do not-X; hence you cannot say that an omnipotent God must do X. It follows that it cannot be true to say than an omnipotent God must cause to happen that which he would like to happen, because that would deny him the potential not to cause it - which, as an omnipotent God, he must have.