Actually neither one of us knows how close the analogy is, because everything we know about this god was written by Man.
There’s nothing magical about what you feel as you. It’s all generated by a meat machine in your skull that gets input from the senses. All that preventing humans from complete understanding of how that meat machine works is lack of information and technology. I see no reason to believe that could not be accomplished by future humans or advanced extraterrestrials, let alone a hypothetical supernatural omnimax god.
Your wording is confusing me. Either:
- God makes it so that people can freely choose to do evil, and that simultaneoulsy they do no evil. In this case, the disjoint is in the effect of their actions; it’s a heisenburg uncertainty world where evil is happening and not happening simultaneously all the time. Causation is obviously shot to hell and evil certainly is being done, even while it isn’t. This appears to be what you’re talking about, right?
To do this without causing the world to implode in a puff of logic, God could achieve the same effect by declaring all actions to be good, by fiat. It then logically becomes possible to freely choose any acts, incuding ones traditionally considered evil, and not be doing evil. The only problem with this is that atheists will point out that no omnibenevolent entity would do this (or allow the evil half of the heisenburg universe to be carried out) and chuck your argument out.
- However, at the end of your post you were saying that all God needs to do is actualize that possibility–the possibility that everyone freely refrains from ever doing any evil. Depending on how you read this, it’s an entirely different scenario; what’s being altered here isn’t what’s good, it’s the properties of free will. The kind of free will used by theists in anti-POE arguments typically assumes that it’s impossible to have free will and not have people choosing to do evil things lots of the time. The thing is, though, that an omnibenevolent God can’t choose to do evil - so does he have free will? If so, then we could be similarly endowed with anti-evil free will and the POE promptly asserts that an omnibenevolent god must imbue its creations with that kind of free will rather than the evil-allowing kind, since obviously making evil creations when you have an alternative is evil. Or alternatively if anti-evil free will isn’t allowed, then god has no free will, which plays hell with his omnipotence.
Poor theists - problems every which way they turn.
We know enough to see that your analogy does not hold water.
Remember, I don’t have to PROVE that God can understand what it’s like to be Czarcasm. Rather, for your argument to hold true, it’s up to you to demonstrate that ant:Czarcasm::Czarcasm:God. We have no reason to believe that you’re analogous to some all-powerful Creator and we have every reason to reject that premise.
Lemme rephrase.
A lot of people think that for someone to be free concerning action X requires that it be genuinely possible for them to do X, and also genuinely possible for them to refrain from doing X. (Note that I’m not saying the idea is that it’s possible for them to both do and not do X. That would be contradictory. Rather, the idea is that it’s both possible for them to do X, and to refrain from doing it.)
So: If someone is free concerning morality, then it is genuinely possible for them to act freely morally, and it is genuinely possible for them to act freely immorally.
From this it follows (skipping a few steps here, but hopefully the idea is clear) that: If someone is free concerning morality, it is genuinely possible for them to always freely act morally.
From this in turn, it follows (again, skipping a few steps it is hopefully not necessary to go through explicitly) that if everyone is free concerning morality, it is genuinely possible for everyone always to act freely morally.
Presumably, God can create any reality that is genuinely possible.
And from all of that, then, it follows that God could have created a world in which everyone always acted freely morally.
Many of them seem to assume this. I’m offering an argument that involves a claim that this assumption is false. There’s nothing logically contradictory, anyway, in the idea of a world in which everyone is free and everyone freely chooses the good. (Presumably Heaven is supposed to be a place like this after all!)
It might be possible for him to have free will if that “can’t” is the same “can’t” in “God can’t create a square circle.” God can’t create a square circle, not because there’s something God can’t do, but because there simply is no such thing, even conceptually, as a square circle. Similarly, it may be that God “can’t” choose evil just because it would be logically contradictory were he to do so–and as I argued in a previous post, saying God can’t perform logical contradictions puts no limits on God, and rather just expresses features of our language.
Similar to what I was getting at. It’s not that there’s a special kind of free will that’s anti-evil, it’s just that it’s possible for a creature with free will to never do evil. So why didn’t God create the world with those kinds of creatures, instead of the one he actually created?
Yes, it is easy to say. Yes, it is impossible to justify. I know this. That’s what “faith” is about.
I can’t imagine why you’d think I was doing such a thing.
We cannot explain what it’s like to be God; sorry. I’d love to. But I can’t.
But God can create a square circle. Even though it doesn’t exist.
Agreed on the language features aspect; but, that aside, he can still perform logical contradictions.
Ah, well that’s a question we’ll probably never know the answer to. Maybe we’ll know when we get to heaven (if it exists). But we ain’t gonna theologically reason out the mind of God on the SDMB!
It is a feature of the English language that any sentence of the form “X can create a square circle” is false. This is a consequence of the meanings of the term “square” and “circle”.
So no matter that the subject of the sentence you just typed is “God,” the sentence is false. Again, this isn’t because of any fact about God in particular. It’s a fact about the language you’re using. Because the language you’re using is the way it is, the sentence “God can create a square circle” is false.
But the words you use don’t make sense when applying to God. “Subject” and “false” are both logical constructions. “Because… then”, as you phrased it. (or IF/THEN as a computer would) are logical trains of thought, by which God is not bound. You simply can’t use an IF/THEN (or a because… therefore, or any other permutation of it) when referring to God’s abilities.
God can make a square circle. Even though it doesn’t mean anything. Even though it’s merely a linguistic construction. He can still do it, because he is omnipotent.
You or them? 
Personally, I reject the idea that God is describable by philosophical absolutes of the form omni-___-ent, because all it does is lead to paradoxical statements. Instead, I describe God as self-limiting – that is, there is nothing outside Himself which sets limits on what He can do, know, feel, etc. He Himself sets those limits – best example of what I mean might be the rainbow at the end of the Flood myth. He is still capable of destroying the world by water… but He has committed himself that He won’t do it. (And please, no hijacks into the non-historicity of the Flood; I know it’s a myth; I’m making a point within the story as story, okay?)
If it doesn’t mean anything, then you haven’t succeeded in saying anything. We’re left with nothing to discuss!
It’s as though I came to you and said “Fjhshjsjhs! I insist that fjhshjshjs!”
In such a case, I haven’t said anything.
If “God can make a square circle” is meaningless as you claim (that wasn’t my claim–my claim is that it is false, not that it’s meaningless) then saying “God can make a square circle” is as pointless as saying “Fizzywizzle.”
IMO – and all it is is MO – even other human beings are capable of conceptualizing the emotional state of another and vicariously ‘experiencing’ it, without themselves being subject to its effects. One of the best ways of ministering to someone in the throes of a negative emotion is to understand how they feel, and then see how to bring them through it to renewed emotional stsbility. It doesn’t mean you have to be consumed by despair or grief yourself; you merely need to grasp what it is that the person who is, is feeling. A good author is quite capable of not only empathizing with his characters, but of making his readers do so as well. And this without himself or themselves necessarily experiencing the emotions themselves. Take Nabokov’s Lolita as an excellent example – AFAIK Nabokov had no pedophilic tendencies, and excluding Cesario there are few if any Dopers who do. Yet anyone can read that book and experience the perverted desire and self-delusion of Humbert Humbert through Nabokov’s gift for putting us inside his head.
Likewise, God is well aware of a bigot’s hatred and scorn for his targets, without Himself feeling bigotry. Whatever it is in huamn experience, God has been there, done that, and has an infinite collection of T-shirts. 
Sure. I agree with you. There is nothing really to discuss, other than “I believe” or “I do not believe”. When talking about an entity not bound by logic or human perception, we have no rational way of discussing him beyond the level of faith.
Sure, we can try to construct logical arguments and reason about the ineffable and the infinite, but we’re just passing time; we aren’t going to reach any conclusion, any more than the millions of people in the centuries before us did. You can’t prove or disprove the unprovable.
Doesn’t stop us trying though, and it’s certainly fun. But we’re talking about an omnipotent, omniscient magical being not bound by logic, reason, or any of the laws of the universe.
His nature is a matter of faith, not reason. It can’t be anything else. One believes or one does not. Or one believes something else, or something in between. But one cannot reason about the unreasonable, and any attempt can do so can be met with the response “but it’s magic” (trite phrasing, I know, but the easiest way I can think of to say it). So he can make a square circle, lift a rock he cannot lift, etc. Even if these things mean nothing. Because to say that he can’t do it because it doesn’t mean anything is to apply a logical argument to the ineffable; which you can’t do. So - it means nothing, and yet still he can do it.
And no, I cannot explain that. If I could I’d be God!
Actually, the theory is still on the table until you come up with a god we can question.
Nonsense. You are the one who insisted that the relationship between you and an ant is analogous to the relationship between God and you. I don’t have to produce any God to point out that your premise is questionable at best (and that’s putting it mildly).
You made the claim, based on your understanding of what God would be like. You don’t get to dodge this by saying, “But we don’treally know what God would be like!”
Sure it could. The Bible is full of examples of God giving concrete evidence of his existence and his agenda. The fact that some modern theists believe in a deity that is completely resistant to both observation and reason is an aberration. For most of history believers have believed what they have believed because it was the best explanation they could come up with for the evidence at hand.
You disagree that belief in an ominpotent God is a question of faith?
I read THK’s remark as that characters in the Bible (who were not, for the most part, historical personages) did not have to rely on faith alone to believe in God. The Lord of Hosts demonstrated his reality to Moses, to Abraham, and Gideon and Samson and so forth, quite concretely.
I wonder if God has ever had a crisis of faith.