Question about antitheists and salvation

Faith & Science Conversation
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That is correct. God does know in advance what we will do, just as we do not know for sure what we will do. We live with uncertainty. Certainly, God can too.

I absolutely agree with you. God gives us the ability to choose in small things and large. Sadly, we often do not use that ability when we could make a positive difference. @GJDS is right that God knows us, even better than we know ourselves, but we can change and often God wants us to do better.

The question of freedom and morality, not works, are much more important than evolution. YEC have committed a serious sin by making their Christianity to be based on science.

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@T_aquaticus @DGX37
This is a difficult notion for both theists and atheists – if God is all powerful and all knowing, why doesn’t He prevent such awful events? In fact, He failed to prevent people from torturing and brutally killing His own Son! It is difficult for us to accept this, as we would go to any lengths that we can to prevent such things happening to our children, and indeed to anyone.

Yet when the disciples got ready to put up a fight, Christ said to them don’t – if that is the way God can send an army of angels to prevent this from happening. We can see this mentioned in Psalms and the Gospel.

Psalm 22:1-3 (KJV)

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?
2 O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.
3 But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.

Mark 15:34 (KJV)
And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which is, being interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

I cannot pretend to understand this fully. My own view is that we want to be free from any external power preventing us from doing things, and we have told this to God in many ways. I suppose the easy response is to tell God when and how He should do things for us, and when He should butt out, and this would not work out too well for anyone. In such a scenario, we would be gods, and God our servant, and when we want Him to kill and destroy those we do not like, He should obey us. But who would God choose to destroy and who to serve?

A dilemma by any measure. A lengthy discussion would be needed to explore freedom for us and freedom for God, but perhaps at another time. I think for-knowledge would work into this within the modern scientific context (perhaps more science fiction), where a transcendent being would operate outside time and space, but than more contradictions and dilemma.

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Yes. “Mercy trumps law” is another way of saying that. Jesus never disobeyed the law, even though some think he did. He rightfully got upset with the Pharisees when they said his merciful healing was work on the Sabbath.

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That makes a lot of sense if you consider all time whether it’s past or present to be real, so called eternalism, I on the other hand, believe in presentism, that only things happening right now exists, past and future is only a concept that is very useful to us to describe changing present. I will not act like I can prove it because I can’t. But because of this difference of views I don’t think we can reach common ground.
But that raises a lot of problems, like being frustrated from humans choices in that particular situation if he knew how everything would end and why it happened.

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I don’t understand it at all. It’s like a movie to him, he knows exactly what we will do, and it is correct, 1:1 every small thing, every atom, every quantum fluctuation, not only that, but he made it so. He created us so the universe do exactly what he wanted it to do. In your view, all reality is between his palms, and your and mine actions and beliefs are there too.

It only seems so, but because all laws or reality, all actions that happened were pre-planned by God, Judas only acts on cause and effect that was already set up long ago, he is then no different than a robot that claims that he made a choice but his creator decided his every decision along with his claim that he has free will long time ago.

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It’s the same as: God decided in advance what we will do
He made us for heaven’s sake, how could he not? It seems there comes to this thing, there is some idea that God knows what we will do but didn’t make us do it, but it’s obviously untrue. He made the whole universe, he made us, and he made all present and future happen how he wants it to happen, so it will happen, exactly as he wants it to happen, there’s no free will there.

And if that’s true, how this can be true? how can he give us a ability to choose if he already decided for us? To me it’s clear contradiction, I have genuinely no idea how those two things can be true. In your view, everything came from God, how can then his creation decide for itself? How can program decide for itself if programmer said that it would do this calculation and does exactly that? Then it’s only question of semantics, not if we have free will or not.

228

I’m not so sure about that. Luke 6:1-5 makes an interesting commentary in that regard. After the Pharisees accuse Jesus of breaking the law, his response isn’t “No I’m not …” but instead a short commentary on how David broke the law, and Jesus seems to allow that mitigating circumstances should be allowed for. Not exactly a ringing endorsement for hard-nosed legalism.

[Not to mention that it’s the law that adulterers be stoned. Jesus doesn’t seem to have been much bothered by that one either. He seems to pretty consistently put people ahead of the law. Almost as if he’s more concerned about the spirit behind the law (the actual pursuit of justice, mercy, and walking with God) one might be tempted to think.]

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Perhaps we need to distinguish between the letter of the law and the spirit (Or intent)… The whole point is that the Pharisees looked at the letter of the Law. For instance.
Sabbath law restricts the distance you can walk from your home. So the Pharisees bypassed this by inventing what they called a Sabbath Home. Allowing them to travel further.
Whenever Jesus challenges the Law He was trying to show that it is not the letter that counts but the reason for it. You can obey the letter of the law and still do what the law is trying to prevent…
The more the Pharisees clarified the Law the more distant they went from understanding what the Law was for.

Richard

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Look, I never said God knows what we are going to do. The is the position of others.

God did not predetermine us to be good. We have the capability to be good or evil. If God did predetermine us to be good, there would be no need for Jesus the Savior.

God did not plan the world so WW2 would happen or WW3 would begin in Ukraine. Those are our choices. If we continue to mess up. the end will truly be a disaster of our own making that we cannot blame on God no matter how hard we try.

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That much is clear.

Try and separate knowledge from action.
You seem to think that if I know something is going to happen I will change what I do? If I change my actions then it will change what happens, and there is no certainty that the new result will be any better of worse than the predicted one.
And this applies to God?
If God does something it will change not only that thing but many consequences down the line (Butterfly effect). As far as God was concerned Jesus was going to be betrayed. It did not matter in the least whether it was Judas or someone else. Judas chose for himself.

Richard

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He was defending the principle that mercy trumps justice, and that the priests and David did indeed violate the letter of the law, but Jesus himself did not.

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I’ll just leave that, since I realize it’s important to a lot of people to maintain that conviction.
But …

That’s an interesting (and common) assertion right there worthy of a lot of attention just on its own. Up till a few years ago, I probably would have agreed with you in stating it that way. But now I’m increasingly convinced that there is no conflict between justice and mercy. God is both, perfectly, and all the time. I.e. - if God is merciful (and He always is) - then it must always be just for him to be merciful. And if God is Just (and He always is) - then it must be merciful for him to be just.* I.e. - many of us have long been under a (I would now say mistaken) conviction that God overlooks offenses (i.e. - ‘sets aside justice’) so that he can be merciful to us. But actually - to leave our sin unaddressed (i.e. - to not cleanse us, even as painful as that always is) ends up not being the merciful thing to do. God does make us face the consequences for our sin, and separates our sin from us (even using punishment and suffering as is often necessary - and much more importantly: restitution and reconciliation when possible), not only because that is perfect justice for God to do so, but also is the only merciful thing God could do for us too. To leave our sin unaddressed (while we might prefer that in the moment) turns out to not be merciful, since it leaves us in our sinful state.

The only scriptural push-back I see to this view, is that there actually is a verse that flat out declares that mercy triumphs over justice. But I now choose to see this not as one triumphing at the expense of the other, but more as one being the higher attribute in view that should motivate the other attribute, or even necessarily contain the other within itself. For example, perhaps we could observe that the whole point of justice is because we love, and want mercy all around, for all parties if and when we are thinking as we ought - that is - as God thinks.

*[thoughts I gleaned from George Macdonald’s sermon: “Justice”]

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You certainly may. :slightly_smiling_face: Not, again, that we can get our heads around God’s relationship to time and the wonderful mystery of how he orchestrates his providential interventions into the lives of his children, but he indeed does. His sovereignty over time and place and timing and placing of discrete and otherwise disjunct events cannot be causally connected by natural means.

If you can project and imagine the myriad of all the precursor events required to have the sequences fall out precisely the way the did, you might have to conclude that each was meticulously planned ‘ahead of time’ and that all concerned were merely automatons, eliminating personhood and choice. All it would take to completely upset the arrangement would be something as seemingly insignificant as someone delaying slightly to have another piece of toast before leaving for work, akin to the butterfly in Beijing effect.

Since God has a dynamic relationship with each one of us and our individual circumstances, the mystery of his omnitemporality allows it where presentism does not. It also fits well with his immutability and divine simplicity.

(You might correctly suspect that I am not a fan of Molinism, either.)

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Somehow you seem to have concluded that I think otherwise? If so, could you elaborate? I don’t think I have any problem with the rest of what you said, either.

Rules, ‘laws of love’, are required for good interpersonal, family and societal function. I have a good case in point that demonstrates that there is no conflict. Decades ago my younger son had an accident where he had a fairly long gash (ca. 3 cm) in his forehead and it was bleeding profusely, as head wounds do. Not even being able to assess the wound, since he was applying pressure to it, I called 911 immediately. While I was on the phone, though, I quickly realized that we could get him medical attention sooner by driving to the ER, five miles away, told the operator so and thanked her. So we were on our way seconds later, headlights and emergency flashers on and doing 75 or maybe north of 80 mph, first in a 55 zone and then a 40. There was a county patrol car going the other direction, maybe on its way to our home, but in any case, I was unconcerned with the letter of the law.

We are not going to argue about the value and validity of speed limits, laws of love for our neighbor and public health and welfare, nor will we argue about the justice of penalties for wanton disobedience of said laws. But you get my point – there is no conflict between justice and mercy. All the time. (It may not always be as easy to decide as in my illustration, however. :slightly_smiling_face:)

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Yeah - I was more using your phrase “mercy trumps justice” as a springboard for reaction rather than trying to presume I know everything you think about this. I’m glad you have much the same conclusions. I think it is fairly common in Christian circles to think of “mercy trumping justice” in those sorts of ways - and understandably so since you can certainly find that sort of language in the Bible too.

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A fun providential footnote to the emergency room story is the date. My employer (which was the hospital involved) had at the time three levels of health insurance for us to choose from – the ostensibly best level had the highest premiums but lowest copays. I plotted out the actual out-of-pocket costs for each plan versus the medical bills incurred over time, where the percentage slope changes were before and after the individual and family deductibles were met, and the out-of-pocket. The lowest plan was always the least expensive, except for one thing – the higher two plans had an emergency room copay waiver, but the lowest did not.

After a couple of years, they decided to include the emergency room copay waiver in the lowest plan as well. The day it went into effect? Yes, the day of my son’s accident. (The amount was not peanuts, either – it was $1000, and in 1990 dollars, worth way more than today!)

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The accusation was against His disciples, not Him.

“He who is without sin cast the first stone.” Jesus put the onus on the accusers to let her go…

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And even the disciples had not violated the law. Picking a snack while walking through someone else’s field was allowed, just not carrying a bushel. The Pharisees in their self-righteous false nobility and pretentious zeal had extrapolated from legitimacy and were accusing them of harvesting, something which was indeed against the law.

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I obviously agree, some ancient guy could do one thing instead of another and boom, a lot would be a lot different. And that’s ignoring that there are billions of humans. There’s no way to exactly plan what will happen. But you are also underestimating God’s knowledge, to make substantial difference in the world, it takes more effort than that. Especially because our free will is not without restraints and also because many just let the life take care of them.
But then I disagree that this is a bad thing. This is the exact thing that makes it more than some little theatre that God created to relieve boredom. It makes God’s endeavour and sacrifice worth anything, and not just playing around.
I also don’t see any problem with presentism, God is present everywhere so he shares with us our every moment, I am living right now, he doesn’t need to take me back to how things were 10 years ago to have a relationship with me.
I think that to God, not perfect relationship is better than no relationship, and obviously us being obedient robots that he interacts with is no relationship.

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Okay let’s take it slowly, because I see that we both jump to conclusions without really trying to understand another’s position.

This is tough, I mean… you can’t change what you do… When it’s time to do something, you will do something based on many factors and one of them is free will, but free will is not something easy like a machine that just throws out ideas that your body follows. There’s no second chance, there’s no changing, what you will do next time is different choice even if the subject seems identical, you can’t return and you will never return to the choice that you made.
What does “changing actions” mean to you, action in something that happened, you can’t change them, if your future actions will be different, you are just acting differently that you did before, there’s no “changing”.

Well, I guess it does, at least if we are trying to discuss him logically. He made a decision, and there it is, decision was made, he can’t take it back, I guess he could bring the past state of things once more and make a decision, but that’s different decision. But I say we are no different, his actions bring unforeseen consequences, our also bring unforeseen consequences. If God can do it, why can’t we?

Yes, Judas choose for himself, and also yes, Jesus already knew that Judas would betray him, if God knew it from beginning of universe, Judas didn’t make the choice, because God created him to do it. But free choice is not free will, Judas clearly was heading in this direction when Jesus accused him of betrayal, he made many choices to push him there, and another few wouldn’t be enough to stop things from happening.
But no matter what, it doesn’t matter if it could be someone different, God knew it would be Judas, If you claim that God had enough wisdom to know that someone will betray Jesus when he got born, I can agree with that, it doesn’t go against free will, the situation nation of Israel was heading, was quite clear to God, but if you say that he knew exactly that Judas would be the one to do it, from the moment of his birth, then he didn’t have free will.