Cites? For witnessing? 
Tell you what, if you want “reasoning, explanations, all that”, I’ll meet you half-way, but you’ll have to do your part. I’ll post, and you read. M’kay? 
Um, most of the “axioms” in that post seemed to be conclusions instead of fundamental elements of reasoning.
The following quote…
…is a particular good (bad?) example of this. It can easily be broken down into more basic statements, which leads me to suspect that it’s not an axiom.
God has a will. His will is boundless. Things that are boundless are free.
(See? All definitions, of a sort.)
Therefore, God’s will is free.
(A conclusion, of a sort.)
I don’t see the justifications for any of those three statements. I see no particular reason to assume that “having a will” is a property that God possesses, that this hypothetical will is without bounds, and that things without bounds are free.
That was just one claim; there were ten? fifteen? of them within the post, and I can break them all down into more basic statements.
Aren’t you worried that you’re using an awful lot of axioms here?
To answer the thread title: It wouldn’t. If free will has any meaning at all, it can’t be destroyed simply by God showing his face.
It is conceivable that God making an appearance would cause everyone to believe in him. This is not inconsistent with free will. Everyone could weigh the evidence, and come to the same conclusion. So I don’t think it is a reasonable argument to say that God refrains from obvious displays of power because he values free will.
I also do not agree with Lib that people would rationalize away the obvious displays of power (the implicit conclusion being that God does not do obvious displays like raising the dead because it wouldn’t convince people anyway). Actually, I think people would very quickly believe in God if he did something obvious. Just think about how many people have been tricked over the years by magicians and people who claim to talk to the dead. God would blow the pretenders out of the water.
The only problems regarding people remaining unconvinced despite obvious evidence, are: 1. People might believe that it is a dream, or they are in some altered state. 2. People might still not believe that they could know anything personal about God, despite his powers. After all, the only thing proven by amazing displays of power is that there is an amazingly powerful being. It doesn’t prove anything about how he feels about us.
I think we can rule out both free will and stubborn disbelief as reasons why God does not show us more obvious displays of his powers.
So why doesn’t God convince us all that he exists? Why would he? To answer this you have to know what God’s goals are. Is his goal for everyone to believe in him by any means necessary without taking away their free will? Apparently not.
Maybe believing in God is really irrelevant. The mistake is in assuming that it is one of God’s goals at all for everyone to believe in him now. Maybe what he really wants is love and faith. Maybe after you die you are taken before God, and it is your love and faith that are tested, not your belief. After all, still existing after your own death would certainly qualify as a display of power even greater than any proposed so far in this thread. It makes moving stars seem like nothing.
That seems to be the best answer I can think of. Why should God convince us that he exists now, when his goal has never been simple belief? God will convince us that he exists. He will perform the greatest feat you can imagine. And it is only then that we will be judged on whether or not we accept him into our hearts.
quote:
What’s more ironic is all the christians want to maintain that this god of theirs is perfectly moral. Cause if you ask me, forcing someone to a bad thing and then killing not only them but also killing their families and then torturing them forever isn’t moral but rather pretty fucked up.
Libertarian:
Whoever said that God did or said those things is ignorant or lying.
It’s right out of the bible, which I cited. I will agree that there are a lot of lies and ignorace in there.
cr
Vorlon wrote:
No.
Badchad wrote:
Good! Then we share some common ground. 
No one answered my question.
Tris
If God is completely all-knowing, then he knows what “free will” choices we are going to make before we do. He knew right from the start what choices each and every one of us will make. According to those who take Revelations as prophecy, He already knows the outcome of the battle between heaven and hell.
Therefore there cannot be free will if he already knows the outcome, and he is a sadist for creating humans while knowing that a very, very large percentage of them will end up in eternal torment, or whatever hell is supposed to be.
So either god doesn’t know the outcome, we have free will and his advertised attribute of omniscience is false, or he is omniscient and is a cruel bastard akin to a child pulling the wings of flies.
Either way, I don’t like the sound of him.
Nightime:
Not destroyed, but severely curtailed. It would remove one very powerful factor in the moral choices people make. Perhaps he values maximum free will (although there may indeed have been times in the past where he has felt other factors are more valuable than those considerations).
particlewill:
Sorry, that does not follow. Knowing beforehand does not mean causing.
Chaim Mattis Keller
Particlewill wrote:
Morality is not epistemic; it is ethicistic.
—I know that God did not say or do those things because I know two pertinent things: 1) Who God is, and 2) contradictions do not exist.—
If God is superior to you in every way, then couldn’t he very easily be one thing and then easily convince you to think something else about him? How can that possibility ever be overcome, or even held to be less likely than it’s opposite, without simply assuming that one or the other is true?
No, a perfectly moral God does not have to be consistent, since that imposes a constraint on him, and makes your case 2 become your case 1. A perfectly moral god can be arbitrary or even evil from our point of view. The Biblical God certainly is, since he changes his mind (see Jonah) and kills billions (the Flood).
So, the only possibility that works is that God is good by definition.
Your dichotomy, by the way, was also described by Russell in Why I am not a Christian.
If that were the case, then God wouldn’t want us to have any knowledge about the possible consequences of our actions or preferences for some outcomes over other. If we have knowledge, or preferences, then our will isn’t as “free” as it could be.
Why would God want us to make decisions randomly?
But there can be no foreknowledge is there is no causation. If our actions are the result of initial conditions, then regardless of whether or not we can understand how we think, from God’s perspective, we don’t have “free” will.
Besides, if God is responsible for the initial conditions, and is the ultimate source of all things, then God caused/causes/will cause everything that occurs.
If God wanted us to have utterly unconstrained will, He should never have created us: existence requires constraints.
Apos wrote:
It can’t. I simply made the moral decision to trust Him. It isn’t just that He loves me. I love Him, too!
Vorlon Ambassador’s Aide:
That’s not true, as long as there is an appearance of equality on both sides of the dilemma. Knowledge lends a certain weight - experience and feeling lends far more weight. Our will is most free when both temptation (in the general sense - not all people are tempted to the same thing, obviously) and obedience to abstract principle have roughly equal mental weight.
How is it random?
Your statement presupposes lack of free will. It assumes that our actions are all chemically-conditioned responses to external stimuli. You cannot begin with such a postulate if free will is the subject of the debate at hand.
Chaim Mattis Keller
I must admit that I don’t quite see your point. After all, feeling is always involved in decision making: if there were no preferences or desires, no one would ever do anything. There’d be no reason to do anything.
I don’t understand why you seem to value implicit and unconscious principles more than explicit and conscious ones…
What distinguishes temptation from desire in general?
You suggest that the fewer restrictions are placed on will, the more free it becomes, as well as that God values the maximization of free will. If there are any underlying principles behind our will, it would necessarily have to be restricted (it would be one thing and not another, etc.). The logical conclusion is that God would value a will that has no underlying order or principle (i.e. random) over one that is so ordered, because it wouldn’t be as restricted.
Most certainly not. While I’ve disagreed with much of what you’ve said in this thread, I see no grounds for judging it incorrect, but this is simply wrong.
My statement presumes that will is the result of something. It could be anything: chemical patterns, electron wavefunctions, spiritual energies, ANYTHING. If we have souls, how do those souls function? What rules do they obey? In what manner do they work?
We might not understand how our minds/souls work, but wouldn’t God necessarily understand, both because He is omniscient and because He created everything, including us?
If God understands the rules by which we function, then He understands how and why we come to decisions. In this sense, will can never be “free”, as it’s the result of restrictions (ultimate guiding principles).
If you’d prefer to claim instead that our souls/minds/whatever aren’t based on laws, rules, or principles… well, that opens a can of infinitely long worms.
Vorlon Ambassador’s Aide:
By “feeling” I meant “sensation.” As in, it’s one thing to “know” that you shouldn’t touch a hot potato, and it’s quite another to have actually felt the potato.
Where did I say or imply that?
I use “temptation” to refer specifically to a desire that tempts one to act opposite a stated belief or principal he/she holds. Granted, any desire can be tempting, but this is a religious discussion, and in a religious context, the word “temptation” generally connotes “temptation to sin.”
Why would it “necessarily” have to be so? This is something you’ve been saying that I don’t quite understand.
Not true. Just because G-d doesn’t impose a certain decision doesn’t mean that he prefers people to make choices randomly. He prefers that they act according to orderly principles, but that they arrive at said principles of their own free will rather than his imposition.
OK, I stand corrected.
However, to say “how do souls work?” is to imply that souls do not have the freedom to choose…that certain stimuli, applied to souls, must produce certain outcomes. According to the Bible (and we are discussing Biblical religion, right?), (BTW, I refer to the Orthodox Jewish understanding of said Biblical verses) the soul of man is in G-d’s image…capable of freely choosing between different courses of action. The soul is the will. So to answer the next question…
Yes…he understands that he created our souls with the same capacity he himself has: the ability to make decisions influenced but not forced by external input.
Chaim Mattis Keller
Ahhh. Point taken.
You certainly didn’t say it, although I think I can make a good case that you’ve implied it.
To be honest, I still don’t see why adherence to a principle necessarily requires “free will”. That’s a side issue, however: I’m focusing on the “simple animal instinct” bit, here. Presumably animal instinct can be thought of as a system of rules, but why can’t complex behaviors arise from rule systems that are much more complicated?
In some trivial sense, our emotions, sensations, and thoughts always cause us to pick that which is in our best interest in the literal sense (it’s our interest at the time). Whether we later think those actions were in our interests is more-or-less irrelevent: they were in our interests at the time.
Isn’t morality itself in our best interests? 
Definition of Temptation: noted.
If you assign any properties at all to something, this is equivalent to placing a restriction on it, and placing a restriction is equivalent to assigning a property (“okay, humanity is given property A, and is denied Not A…”). A will is a thing that makes a selection, has a preference, generates a choice, etc., and as such, it must have an underlying set of principles (it must possess properties) that cause it to function, which means that its nature is defined as something. Definition is necessarily “restriction”: the undefined state has no restrictions and no properties (or all properties).
I’m not doing a very good job of explaining the point, but it is correct nonetheless.
But by giving them a nature of a certain kind, by defining what they are, God determines how they will act. Even if we assume that human behavior is somehow acausal (which results in some massive logical problems), God defined them as being that way… and thus set the kind of choices they were capable of making.
The act of creation was God imposing His will on the void, in a sense. Could God have created light without defining darkness? (rhetorical question only)
I strongly suspect that the nature of a soul must be defined if it is to be created… and the nature of the soul determines what it has done/is doing/will do.
If there are no restrictions of any kind on the soul, then it can’t have any properties. Arguably even God is restricted (if God has a property, He cannot have its opposite). God can’t change or overcome His own nature any more than you or I can transcend ourselves.
Things aren’t forced to act in a certain way by their inherent nature, they are their nature. That nature nevertheless determines what decisions will be made.
To put the issue another way: What does Orthodox Judaism think about AI? I’m guessing it’s considered to be fundamentally impossible.
If we do someday manage to create AI, how will that be interpreted religiously? Will even the possibility that a machine can be intelligent be denied?
if we all did not believe in God would He cease to ‘exist’ in our terms and conditions and ‘exist’ outside our perceptions of things that truly exist for us…or non-exist
Maybe He hasn’t kept Himself hidden. Maybe it is just that some don’t want to see. Maybe some are so blinded by all of the supposed knowledge and wisdom being put forth today that they can’t see the very simple evidience.
Joe Elliott
http://members.aol.com/joe4jesus/index.htm
Feel free to present it. In fact, I would appreciate it.