On Fri, Nov 29, 2002 at 02:04:05AM -0600, Gametech <voltronalpha at hotmail.com> wrote: > Matthew Hunter wrote: > > On Fri, Nov 29, 2002 at 01:29:50AM -0600, Gametech > > <voltronalpha at hotmail.com> wrote: > >> Matthew Hunter wrote: > >>> Creating a universe is one hell of a lot more like having kids > >>> than hiring a hit man. > >> Okay go create something like a robot, if it kills someone see who > >> shows up at your door. > > Robots don't have free will. > > You're being deliberately obtuse. > Heh... No. I said it just so you'd make that reply that way if you didn't > see my underlying point. Clever, no? No. > To compare us to an omnipotent god is the same as comparing a robot to us, > our freedom of our will isn't comparable to the freedom of an omnipotent > gods as the same is true from a robot to ours, it does what it was designed > to do, just like we would in the case of being a creation of gods. OK, here we have to fork the argument. Either 1) you actually mean omnipotent, or 2) you mean omniscient. Now, an omnipotent God could conceivably design a world that included free will and so on, but didn't allow anyone to commit evil acts. An omniscient God would presumably know the consequences of all his acts, and thus would responsible for later actions exactly as if setting up a stack of dominoes to topple. The counterargument to both forks remains the same: free will. If omniscient, then God may know the results of his actions, but he is not making our choices for us. We choose to do good or evil, and foreknowledge of that choice does not equate to a lack of choice. If omnipotent, then by removing the consequences of evil choices from the world, God would be negating the significance of free will. If there are no consequences to evil acts, than why does it matter whether you choose good or evil? Thus, an omnipotent God cannot logically protect us from evil acts, freely chosen, without removing our free will in practical, if not theoretical, terms. -- Matthew Hunter (matthew at infodancer.org) Public Key: http://matthew.infodancer.org/public_key.txt Homepage: http://matthew.infodancer.org/index.jsp Politics: http://www.triggerfinger.org/index.jsp