Oh, I don’t know. I can make a case for destroying Sodom OR Gomorrah. Just not both. Whichever town remained would have been incredibly anxious to reconcile with the Deity, but the lot of them got less consideration than the least of the Ninevites.
Um, huh? Of course there’s a choice to accept the existence of gravity. You can choose to believe the evidence right in front of you, or close your eyes and put your hands over your ears and go ‘LALALALALA I dont believe in gravity!’ and then step off a cliff.
If 1+1=2, why would you need freedom to believe that 1+1 might equal 3? Have you had your freedom to think this taken away? Or are you simply using evidence given to you to make a decision about reality?
The idea that evidence takes away your freedom to choose doesn’t make any sense to me. Why would you not want all the information you can get before you make a decision that’s going to affect you, as believed, for eternity? Why would making this decision in total ignorance be preferable to making it in full confidence with all relevant info?
You can choose to ignore evidence, but do you really believe that evidence does not affect your decision? Evidence inclines people to believe what it supports. Stronger evidence makes certain choices more difficult.
And here you say you want more evidence. Why, if it does not affect the choices you make?
Which makes it more virtuous how? I never understood this. Why is it supposed to be wonderful to believe something without evidence?
Your free will defense to the POE doesn’t work, by the way. Leaving aside the per se logical problems of libertarian free will as a concept, God can still decide to only create people who he knows will freely choose good.
Beside, that defense doesn’t work for humans, does it? If you see somebody about to throw a baby off a cliff, and you have the power to stop them, do you just decide, “well, that’s his free will, I can’t intervene,” or do you stop him? If you would stop him, then isn’t God at least as good as you are? If it’s evil for humans to allow evil, then it’s evil for God.
What is God’s end goal with this “free will” experiment anyway? what is he trying to accomplish?
Of course it does, that’s part of the definition of evidence. You haven’t shown why this is bad. You originally made it sound like evidence was taking your freedom of choice away, rather than providing the necessary information to make a choice. It sounds like you’re arguing that making decisions in complete ignorance is preferable to making well informed decisions because you’re more free that way.
No, stronger evidence makes certain choices easier because the evidence shows you the correct choice.
Of course evidence affects the choices you make, by giving you a reason to make one choice over another. With no evidence one way or another, what do you use to make a choice? If you have no evidence that god exists, why would you choose to believe that god exists?
Skald, if this is going off-topic, say so and I’ll not continue the hijacks.
Me neither, which is why I don’t believe that.
“decide to only create people who he knows will freely choose good” seems to have logical problems.
Why is that true? Why should there be any equivalency between humans and God?
Good questions. I don’t know the answers.
So you accept that evidence affects choices. I’m not claiming that making a choice with or without evidence is either good or bad. Please read what I write more carefully.
You’re agreeing with me. Some choices being more difficult makes other choices easier.
That’s exactly what makes it a free choice.
It’s all right by me. Y’all are pretty much arguing about theodicy and faith at this point, and my original quesiton is merely a special example of the problem of evil. It’s not like you’re arguing about transubstantiation.
Well, one could argue that having humans without free will makes the Earth nothing more than God’s giant doll house, with Him positioning us like a never ending stop motion movie. Sure, there would be no evil, but there would be no good, no neutral, and nothing about the entire situation that is worthwhile.
If we knew that God was there to prevent evil from happening, we wouldn’t bother stopping the guy with the baby. We might not even consider our own morality, knowing that God would force us to do the right thing. Or, we would be so frightened of angering God as to strip ourselves of anything that amounts to free will, going right back to God’s doll house.
I have pet cats (way too many pet cats, but that’s another thread) and they do things that annoy me at times. I’m not interested in lobotomizing them, or replacing them with poseable stuffed cats, because their individual personalities, flaws and all, are what make them worthwhile pets.
Why not just skip right to what comes after?
Not at all, if God is omniscient.
No, that’s what makes it an ignorant choice. A free choice is when you’re allowed to choose without constraint. Evidence is not a constraint, you’re free to ignore it, interpret it, etc. Evidence does not remove freedom of choice, it merely gives you a reason to choose one over another. It influences a choice, it most certainly does not force one.
According to Preacher, God was feeling unbearably lonely in the empty void, and had a desperate need to fill his loneliness/emptiness with the love of others. A cosmic attention whore, if you will. But the angels fawning over him didn’t do the trick, because like any dependant person will tell you, being loved isn’t enough : you have to be preferred. Over and over and over*. Hence, the endless testing.
Of course, it’s just a comic book. But I like this image of God nonetheless.
*Can you tell I’m speaking from experience ? 
Do you feel free to ignore evidence?
Can you explain further?
Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t I?
Well, you’re welcome to…
Not you personally. I mean, you ARE, but I’m not suggesting anything.
The One True Faith was discovered by a small village on the Nile around 4500 BC. Unfortunately they were wiped out by a disgruntled Pharaoh, and everyone since then has believed in falsehoods. You wouldn’t expect God to save a teacher of falsehoods, would you?
Actually, I usually don’t comment in threads that ask questions of believers, because I’m not one.
I know. I phraed the thread title so as to avoid a believer-unbeliever war. And I’ll be tesseracting you a cream-cheese bagel to make up for using your name in vain.
No no no, this is the special definition of “free”. You know, the same one that’s used in “free will”. It means “entirely unconstrained, undirected, uncompelled, and unfounded in any prior knowledge or fact. Kind of like complete randomity, but subtly different on the issue of spelling.”
Don’t debate whether it’s a free choice. Ask instead, why in the seventeen hells and four hecks would anybody want to make a free choice?
And how can you listen to church people and make a free choice? They’re arguing (well, asserting) their position at you. To really make a free choice, you need to be completely free of all information whatsoever - probably to the extent of being unable to articulate the question due to a lack of knowledge about the words and concepts involved.
No, the Lot of them got plenty of consideration. It was just everyone else that got the shaft (or the pillar, as the case may be).
Bad jokes aside, and back to the OP: God does save martyrs from torture and death. Ste. Joan isn’t being tortured right now, is she? In fact, she’s doing just fine right now in Heaven. God not only saved her, He brought her to the best place possible. Compared to the eternal joys of Heaven, even the worst of Earthly tortures are irrelevant.
Which is not, of course, to say that it’s OK for us to torture, since unlike God, all we have to compare to is Earthly things. So we should still strive to make Earth as good as possible, by Earthly standards.