There have been many comments about free will. I think that free will matters also in our attitude towards the creation, how we treat what God has created, different species and the people who suffer because of environmental changes and other adversities. The basic principle is relevant also from the point of evolution because it is a difference between determinism vs. no determinism.
How deterministic or teleological is evolution?
If we think purely from the point of science, natural selection favors individuals that produce more grandchildren. To have much grandchildren, the individuals need to be well adapted to their environment. This gives the expectation that evolution drives populations towards a particular goal. It happens in a ‘blind’ way in the sense that there are no teleological tendencies. Despite the blind approach, in practise the endpoints converge, at least to some level, if there are no big external changes in the environment. If we would start from scratch, the new creatures would evolve towards a likeness of the previous ones. Vertebrates in the sea would develop towards being better swimmers etc.
If God intended to have something like humans, it did not necessarily demand special creation, Adam made of dirt within a day. It could have happened through evolution. If God used evolution when He created, then evolution would be teleological, development towards a wanted endpoint. There are several potential ways how God could guide evolution and most of these ways would be such that we would not see the handwork of God without faith. God does not usually sign His works in a manner that would be obvious to humans.
The rules, the insistance, are all part of the church or the people bit.
God says all are forgiven The Chruch says only if you are a Christian
God says all are forgiven The Chruch says Only if you believe
God says all are forgiven The church says Only if you repent
God says all are forgiven The church says all need to be forgiven
God says all are forgiven The church says “NO”
IOW the church adds to the basic notion that Jesus died for our sins
The church removes our freedom not God
I am a Christian because I want to be. it is my choice.
The church says Become a Christian or else!
That is your choice and prerogative. But why must everyone else ?
Fine if that is what you want.
Some people, even many prefer to leave the nest and go it alone. Something about independence. Are you claiming that is wrong? if so why?
why should you or anyone else dictate the way to live (even God?)
I think someone said that we need to be childlike. And I would rather be on a hike in the mountains with my older Brother holding my hand than being all about myself and my free will and my opinion.
“Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” Mark 10:14-15
God wants that all would be saved, has prepared a way to salvation and has called people to this road through the body of Christ (universal church) but that is not the same as ‘all are forgiven’.
The followers of Jesus should proclaim what Jesus and His apostles told, not what is just our opinions.
I agree that many churches have added new rules and doctrines to what was the original teaching. What we think about that is up to us.
Thanks. I like your analogy of walking up a mountain.
Yes, I recall reading the Stanford entry on this about 5 years ago when I was investigating free will. As you say, it seemed to be a good neutral source for someone like me to start off with, who has formal training in philosophy.
And there was i expecting the Prodigal Son. Oh well.
Sure, if that’s what you want. But why impose it? Why must everyone see it that way, or even want it that way? That is dictation not providence.
Um, err. What did Jesus die for?
Are your sins forgiven? Why are you so special? Do you think anyone can be forgiven?
Who is doing the forgiving? Can you claim that God refuses to forgive anyone? (other than someone who blasphemes the spirit)
What is the criteria for God’s forgiveness? It is by Grace. Grace does not require anything.
But Paul must be right, right? (Paul didn’t believe his own people were forgiven let alone anyone else)
The church has made its doctrines from day 1.There are dynamics involved. But therre is a difference between being a memeber of the church and God’
Jesus died for all sins. There is nothing in that act that said it was for a particular group, or had to be clarified, or verified. God does not need verification. He did it.
I guess it is just a matter of perspective. (OOh can I claim VFA? @Dale ?)
There is something in his words however. You are so badly mistaken (but not as badly as the Sadducees thankfully, for your sake). It wouldn’t take a lot to convince me that you have never read a Bible.
You cannot claim that. You can believe it but you cannot claim it.
So is the 7-day creation
So is Jacob making speckeld sheep by getting them to drink speckled water
So is the belief that mental illness is from demon possession
So is the belief that ecstatic speaking is prophecy
So is Jonah getting swallowed by a whale and not getting digested
And this passage from Proverbs 6
I know you aren’t getting as much honor here as you might, from me or anyone else, because of your badly flawed thinking and selectively ignored scripture, not to mention your being very opinionated. And I could be wrong (I don’t think so), but you won’t be in the future either.
The reward for humility and fear of the LORD is… honor… Proverbs 22:4
But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” James 4:6
I tried to defer to someone more giftedly kind and gracious than myself, but you were not having anything from him either. Not being alone in this I’m sure, but we beg you to read and heed.
A bit from the Wikipedia article on open theism is, I think, helpful here:
“Nothing that exists or occurs falls outside God’s ordaining will. Nothing, including no evil person or thing or event or deed.”
This fits with how Richard the word “control”, which he has called “heavy handed”. But that is not what I mean by the word; to rephrase the above:
“Nothing that exists or occurs fall outside God’s maintaining will…”
I don’t see any way that the scriptures support the quoted view – which is to say that Calvin was plain wrong. But I also don’t see any way from the scriptures to escape the modified quote, which asserts only that God controls Creation according to the rules He selected, rules that we generally refer to as “natural law”. That is the opposite of “heavy-handed” because it rests on the principle that God is faithful, in this case meaning that He will not (lightly) depart from controlling things according to the rules He chose.
[Of course that leads directly to the old distinction between God’s prescriptive will and His permissive will, i.e. what He mandates and what He allows.]
I had a mathematician brother who could expound on this, though it’s one of those things that I understand while listening carefully but fades away afterwards. Yet he postulated not just “two dimensions of time” but two dimensions each of height, width, and length, and those weren’t absolute but were minimums.
He wouldn’t have to know “the precise trajectory of evolution”, only its constraints (of course this is really VFB). If my university biology-major friend was right that only seven interventions were needed in the course of evolution to guarantee humans then the constraints model is sufficient.
I would characterize this as similar to having a stream flow across a near-level plain consisting all of silt and sand, which results in what’s called a braided stream; a big aspect of a braided stream is that the only thing predictable about its course is that it will be tangled.
Another option is, as above, constraints: Take that near-level plain and add an additional 1° tilt, and then some hills protruding into the plain such that they leave gaps that the river has to flow through, and the result is that while the course of the river in the spaces between those gaps is still chaotic, it can be firmly predicted that the river will flow through the gaps – and if a gap is narrow enough, the prediction can be made that the river will flow through that very specific spot.
To illustrate, we have the Incarnation occurring at what is referred to as “the fullness of time”. In this model, “the fullness of time” would be a narrow gap that the river of events has to flow through – or at least the “river” that is God’s chosen people, since what was happening in China or Australia or the Americas would presumably not be relevant (of course the “fullness of time” concept goes farther than just the Incarnation; it includes the Incarnation occurring in a situation where communication/travel across large distances is reasonably easy along with a scattering of God’s people across those large distances).
Given that “the image of God” is relational, i.e. it designates being the representative(s) of God among Creation, I suspect that any such lifeform would have qualified.
Hi. Yes, I agree (I think) with what you are explaining here. I think God, by his will, desired a universe in which other agents could act in free will but this necessitated God allowing (via his permissive will) those agents to potentially act in ways that go against God, i.e., God willingly gives up his complete control over certain events. God’s will is to limit his (deterministic) control. In other words, God willingly created a universe with the potential for evil, but it was the choices of other free will agents (angels, humans) that actualized that evil.
Something that the ‘fanatics’ seem to have thrown out is the ancient principle that scripture is, as the written word, like the living Word: both human and divine. It is human in its literature, its worldviews, its ‘cosmology’, and it is those things in every part, but it is also divine in every part, being sufficient to convey the lessons God intended. So it can’t be divided into human bits and divine bits, it is both all the time.
The error of the ‘fanatics’, then, is regarding it as all divine and only very grudgingly admitting that any of it is at all human.
All of it, just as all of it is divine. As one of my professors reminded us regularly, it is more than human literature but it is never less than that.
In my view I don’t see that there can be that much debate: the ‘fanatics’ want the scriptures to be holier than Jesus, excluding the human factor. To use a rather earthy analogy, even Jesus got pimples and flatulence, and we should thus expect the scriptures also to have very human aspects. Though the flip side of that is that even Jesus’ pimples were not apart from His divine nature, so it isn’t legitimate to dismiss parts of the scriptures as not divine. As another of my grad school professors noted, inspiration is incarnational.
“You are a God Who hides Himself”, it says somewhere.
And that is probably the level on which interventions would be made – not so much the decay aspect as vector quantities.
Given the origin of living things in Genesis 1, from God’s command to “Bring forth!”, I would consider the evolutionary process to be mostly undirected. If my university friend’s figure of only seven interventions between the first cell and homo sapiens is right, needing just seven interventions, then it wouldn’t take many interventions at all to guide the entire “family tree” of life.
Though that’s a point at which the OTV strikes me as fitting, that God commanded, “Bring forth!” but what was brought forth was not determined other than by the rules of chemistry.
The development of brain capacity seems to overshoot the bare essentials for survival, not just in humans but in dogs, crows, elephants, dolphins, and a lot more. It may just be that what really marks humans apart from those other species that appear to be self-aware is having opposable thumbs and then having had to make a shift from original environment to a new, more demanding one – or to put it another way, the need for problem-solving and the ability to manipulate tools for solving those problems. Given that, I would think that “complex, intelligent, social, self-conscious” life forms should be expected.
I always think of my friend’s claim that only seven interventions would have been necessary to achieve humans.
And meanwhile the rest of the living world could develop naturally.
So there would be just one teleological strand and the rest would be ‘free’.
Yes. And that fits with God controlling everything according to the rules He selected, not arbitrarily, not whimsically, in other words not like"the gods of the nations" who can be bought off by the right ceremonies or rituals. I think it was Gerhard Forde who emphasized that God cannot be bought, which is a way of saying that following the Law or other rules cannot earn His favor – a point set against the natural human impulse to want to trade promises for favors.
…is a very good thing if you’re hospitalized with an SBO.
I like this on that:
Ah, yes – motivated reasoning:
…the smarter we are, the better we are at motivated reasoning, because we’re better at finding and marshaling and presenting the arguments that show that we’re right.
You weren’t watching? I just did. 