Comments on: Mormon Free Will Redux

By: Clark

Clark — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:25:22 +0000

Geoff, as I said I think ex nihilo explains how that is possible. Once you make God into a being then everything changes.

Blake you can’t simultaneously appeal to tradition which presupposes foreknowledge to justify omniscience entailing all present entities and any predicable property.

For the rest I’ll leave for a separate post.

By: CEF

CEF — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:18:05 +0000

Clark – I think you misunderstood me. I did not mean to say that *you* are trying to cut off inquiry, but only that by allowing that statement to stand without challenge, would/could be used as a trump card thereby cutting off inquiry. And it is the cutting off inquiry that you most object to. But again, I may totally misunderstand this statement. “That is revisionist accounts of free will or responsibility are false and our language is an ontological guide for the meaning of scriptural terms.” What is it that you mean by this?

By: Geoff J

Geoff J — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:34:55 +0000

Blake is right Clark. As a theist and a Christian it is not a stretch to assert that God knows all that is presently exists. As Blake mentioned, there are plenty of scriptures to back this assertion. Blake’s argument that the future cannot exist if there is LFW is logically very sound. And you have yet to make a dent in the argument that moral responsibility can exist in the absence of LFW. All you have is the assertion that God doesn’t or can’t know something that presently exists (LFW or not).

I think your only defense on such a position is to fall back into some variation on solipsism as I mentioned in #61.

By: Blake

Blake — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:09:08 +0000

Clark: “Blake merely saying God knows all that is logically on par with my saying God knows everything past, present and future. ”

Uhh? No it isn’t. You have no argument why God cannot know all that presently exists (and any being who was aware of all that exists would hardly be God). I have an argument that God cannot know the future if LFW exists because they are mutually exclusive. Further, I don’t reject scriptures or radically re-interpret them. I give them a reasonable and plausible reading. I readily admit that some scriptures seem to imply that God has foreknowledge. The scriptures are not univocal on the issue. Further, if you believe that Geoff and I base our views merely on western linguistic usage, then I suggest you look again.

Finally, I am not just making up this stuff about God knowing all that exists. The scriptures and Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions affirm it. Are you suggesting that God doesn’t know all that exists presently?

By: Clark

Clark — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:32:56 +0000

CEF, I’m not cutting off inquiry. I’m earnestly seeking to understand. I’m more than willing to put forth arguments and see them falsified. Merely saying God is such and such independent of any argument tends to be what I see as the problem. If the argument is from the scriptures then of course I can just turn to passages where God knows the future and say that’s my basis. Blake and Geoff reject such scriptures or radically reinterpret them, which is fine. But they do so on the basis of their western linguistic use of ‘free will’ being privileged.

Recognize I’m far too skeptical about the strength of most philosophical argument to establish much. So I really don’t have much of a horse in this race beyond thinking that more possibilities are acceptable than Blake.

By: Clark

Clark — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:30:50 +0000

Blake merely saying God knows all that is logically on par with my saying God knows everything past, present and future. Unless we can make an argument from some fixed properties of his being anything we say is completely ad hoc. Sure you can say that’s what God knows. The question is why you say it.

By: CEF

CEF — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:29:58 +0000

Clark – I should just say “yea, what Geoff said”, and turn loose of this, but I tend to look for agreement too much for that.

I freely admit that I am *way* over my head in this conversation, so if I say/claim something that is just not true, it is only done out of ignorance, not malice. So with that in mind – When you said, “That is revisionist accounts of free will or responsibility are false and our language is an ontological guide for the meaning of scriptural terms.” Is this the sticking point for you? Thinking back to the conversation about “trump cards,” would this “ontological guide for the meaning of scriptural terms” be a trump card that you think could/would be used to put an end to inquiry that you reject/think would be wrong?

Just because God may not know how to get lost, does not, to me, entail that He does not understand how the mechanics of the universe works. Again, given how much we have learned in the past 100 years, and how much more we are sure to learn in the next 50-100 years, why would we not think, that if we are given enough time, we will not eventually progress to a point of being gods ourselves.

I think the hardest part is not learning how to harness the elements, I think that is a given. But learning how to love one another instead of trying to wipe the “other” of the face of the earth, is what makes one a god, worthy of worship.

I think I understand the argument you are making with the above, how do we know God/we did it and not something else? I think if we take out the part of the brain in the vat thing, which has already been said that no one really believes, then where am I going wrong?

By: Blake

Blake — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:22:18 +0000

Now Clark, you’re going to have to explain to me how God’s knowing our present mental states, basic powers and the unorganized data prior to an act of free will and the ordered data resulting from the act of free even remotely approach just saying that God can do anything we can imagine. What I have proposed entails that God has present knowledge of all states of the world. I’d like to see your argument that it entails anything more than that.