Which is distinguished from a deterministic universe…how, exactly?
(Other than the lack of a scapegoat.)
You might think you got a good deal. The car salesman KNOWS if you got a good deal.
No, the point is we KNOW we got a bad deal, and that the salesman is lying. Because, in this case, it’s a salesman who brags about his ability to give us any car we want for free, but makes us jump through hoops to get it, and “randomly” tortures some of us for fun. So we can get a fucking car.
I would, to torture this metaphor even more, rather walk to hell.
I’ve never had a problem with evil, so this may not even be relevant, but both my own childhood conclusion and the RCC teaching are that, on one hand, evil is necessary for free will to exist and on the other, often what we perceive as “bad” isn’t.
Is death bad? Gee, depends - is a world so full with people that there isn’t room for two people to lie down and make more good? I miss Abuelita and Dad and my cousin Iñaki could have used a few more decades and his parents wouldn’t have spend the last ten years being depressed but… death is a part of life; it’s as good or as bad as gravity. A lot of other things, we have the power to stop or diminish them - it’s our individual and collective choice to spend ourselves, individually and collectively, in some directions or in others.
I perceive infants getting untreatable illnesses and suffering horribly before dying, or people being trapped by an earthquake and slowly dying of thirst all the while being able to hear their rescuers but not be found by them, to be unequivocally bad, and the idea that an all-powerful god would countenance those things is unequivocally evil. There is not - could not - be a situation where that is better than the alternative, which would be a world identical to this, but without those things occurring. And it’s clearly possible, as God is omnipotent, remember?
I’ll be sure to remember that the next time I hear about someone suffering horribly, that it’s either their free will or it’s only “bad” not actually, you know, bad.
But I do know if I got a good deal - because the plan is the good deal, and the plan is what happens.
We already know that the car salesman wants, with certainty, the best possible overall deal. We know that he has the power to get that deal. So I do in fact know that it is the best possible deal - the only space for there to be uncertainty as to whether my deal was a good one or not is if the car salesman actually doesn’t want that best overall deal.
Issues with this have already been pointed out, but this is something we’d also have to take in the other direction. What we perceive as “good” isn’t, necessarily. Love and charity and faith might well just be there in order to teach us a lesson, and not virtues at all. Me donating a kidney to a complete stranger could have much worse results.
Also, we can’t go to “death is part of life”, that it’s natural, that it’s just as much a part of things as gravity, because those things are all in the purview of God. To us, they may be how things are - but God could have created a world where those things were not. We can’t use “well, that’s just how things are” as an escape clause, because uniquely in this case the being we’re looking at has power over “how things are”. And as you say - it’s our individual and collective choice to spend ourselves, individually and collectively, in some directions or others. That also goes for God.
That’s not exactly what omnipotent means. God cannot create a burrito so heavy that it can’t be lifted, because if He could, then He couldn’t lift it, destroying His omnipotence.
The world you describe is not possible, given other, more important design constraints.
Why doesn’t every car have front, side, top, and bottom airbags, tank armor, and a fully qualified trauma surgeon on standby helicopter duty overhead? Clearly we can make these things: we have tanks, air bags, doctors, and helicopters.
Where, in the picture you just described, does your free will come into play?
Bricker – do you believe the faith/belief/certainty you describe in post #157 is entirely granted by God, or was there some element of free will in your achievement/grant of that faith/belief/certainty that God is good?
I think there was an element of free will involved, but I don’t believe it was sufficient on its own: that is, i don’t think you can simply WANT to believe and then start believing. (Although what is rationalization in daily life if not that very process? 
)
And when will this happen?
And, in fact, in Christian theology he has. It’s called Heaven.
There’s an author named Ashleigh Brilliant that has made a career out of constructing “Pot Shots,” little illustrated epigrams, not to exceed seventeen words, that he’s sold on postcards and other merchandise. Some of his work has gotten temporary fame; he’s the originator of “I May Not Be Totally Perfect, But Parts of Me Are Excellent,” which was a popular T-shirt for a while.
One of his cards always struck me as tremendously insightful: “When I Reach True Enlightenment, I’ll Let You Know (If Letting You Know Still Seems Important).”
It nicely illustrates the problem of question like the one implied by jsgoddess’ last post: why aren’t we simply in Heaven now, if Heaven is so great and doesn’t have the flaws of our mortal existence?
When we reach Heaven, we will understand – because we’ll finally have the capacity to understand, something we lack being limited to thinking with meat brains – why we couldn’t be in Heaven before.
And here you are, giving God human limits, despite claiming he doesn’t have them. Of course he could do that, he could create it and lift it,
Then you have a God who isn’t omnipotent, not even close.
Because we, unlike the Infinite, have limited resources, and don’t get to decide the laws of physics.
I’m sure you recognize how useless this sort of statement is to non-believers…
It’s not just useless, it actually completely contradicts the “God works in mysterious ways” argument.
Because it’s saying that God does not have to move in mysterious ways, but chooses to. Because we can understand. The previous argument was that we just can’t understand because it’s too far beyond us.
In what sense? It would be me selecting what to do, so I suppose it would come into play starting from an evaluation of the options, through when the choice is made, and up until the action is completed (since I could change my mind).
In that picture I would say it would be the part where the car salesman presents his suggested deal, and I then think “Alright, what are my desired end goals from this, in what order are they prioritised, and how do I best match those up to the actual options that I have?” Having weighed up those possibilities, I would freely choose the option that made the most sense to me in terms of those factors. So, for example, if what I wanted was a large family car, and the deal I was being offered was for a sporty two-seater, even if it was a cheap deal I might well turn it down - unless it was ridiculously cheap. In this particular hypothetical situation we also have the factor that whatever deal the car salesman offers would be the best possible overall deal, so if that’s what I value then I could freely select that option - or reject it, or have it outweighed by some other factor.
Whoa, hold on a moment. I am the product of my understanding of the world, the product of my thinking. If you’re saying that at some point I will be given the capacity to understand, that I will have my mind opened up to possibilities that I am incapable of even comprehending on any level beyond the most basic, then the end product there might very well be a person who understands why people can’t go to Heaven right away - but it won’t be me. Such a fundamental change to not just my being but my *self *would be, effectively, the death of me and the birth of something with the memories of some human that existed until just recently.
I’m guessing that the simplest response to this would be to go back to a child-parent analogy (they do seem to crop up every now and then!). A child’s understanding of the world is fundamentally different from what it will be when it grows up, or at least that’s very likely. Yet, we wouldn’t say that child-Bricker and adult-Bricker are two separate people. Except… I kind of would, in all honesty. The problem is a matter of spread and smudging - we can’t pick out a place where suddenly there’s a new person there. But if we took a child and suddenly filled its head with adult knowledge and personality, I would argue that even if those things are based on the life they would have led what we’ve done there is create a new person, a new self.
Beyond that, though, the kind of fundamental understanding changes you’re talking about seem very much like they would be deep and powerful enough that they would result in the transformation of one person into another, rather than growth. On those grounds I can’t see why I am necessary to the process of the creation of this other person.