Zhukov said:
First you said he created evil, now you are arguing he allowed the potential for evil, with which I entirely agree.
Creating the potential for evil and knowing for sure that evil will be born as a result through omnipotence is the same thing as creating evil.
He gave us the ability to go through a door, then he created a door to see what we would do. Creating the door is not the same as making someone walk through it, nor does it have any bearing on what's on the other side of the door.
God created the potential for evil knowing full-well what humans would do with it. God is omnipotent, there are no surprises with God.
How would his knowledge alter free will?
If someone already knows how your life will turn out, what you will do with your life, the exact moment of your birth and death, no decision or action you take during your life is free because the result is already pre-determined. We only have the illusion of freewill because unlike God, we cannot see our own fates.
Your thinking god is a three-dimensional being like you or I. He's not. He exists outside time. Relative to god your actions aren't pre-determined, it's just that they already happened. God isn't watching as time unfolds, god can stand back and see 'all time' in one glance.
No, you're wrong. You don't know what I'm thinking. I'm taking into account the fact that God created time. God created every aspect of reality including abstract ideas, time, the physical laws of nature, gravity, everything. In the line of argument that I'm making in this thread, nothing is possible in reality unless God makes it possible. God can see all time in one glance, so obviously he knows what your past, present and future decisions and actions will be simultaneously all the time. So, keeping that in mind, you contradicted yourself here by saying "God isn't watching as time unfolds" and then saying "god can stand back and see 'all time' in one glance." God is omnipotent, which means he knows all that there is to know. You said it yourself, God is timeless and he can stand back and see your life, its beginning, middle and end in a glance. So if God can do that and know how your life will turn out, you would logically be unable to make any decisions freely that God doesn't already know you will make, which would make your fate pre-determined. It only seems that we have free-will because we cannot see our own futures. The fact that God has already pre-determined our destinies negates the notion of the free choice to honor or rebuke God because God already knows before we are born, who will and will not recieve salvation.
No, I don't see the connection that creating the potential of something is the same as creating that something. Neither have you demonstrated how that is. You just state it as fact. Creating the potential for evil is the same as creating evil? No, I don't accept that argument at all. McDonalds created the potential for you to get fat, but did they create 'fat'?
But the difference between McDonalds and God is that God is omnipotent. He created time so he knew what would happen before it happened if he created a means for man to fall from grace. If we logically analyze the Genesis story and take into account all the facts listed in the Bible, the only conclusion is that God, being omnipotent, would have known that by creating the serpent and the tree and designing man the way he did, that man would disobey him. And McDonalds didn't create fat, but God sure as hell did when he included it in his creation. Nothing that is in creation would exist if God had not included it or a variant of it in his original grand design.
No, god is technically capable of evil, but he's prefectly good. 'Us in his image' means we are intelligent and have free will, just like him, nothing more.
I know what "in his image" means. Many people misinterpret it to mean in his "physical" image. But if that were true, chimps, gorillas and other simians would be lumped into that category as well and I doubt very many "devout Christians" would agree with doing that. "In his image" obviously refers to our sentient condition. But we are both good
AND evil. Wouldn't it stand to reason that God is as well? I mean he did kill millions of people in the great flood and when he destroyed cities and killed first-borns and drowned the Egyptian armies and tortured Jonah, etc. Plus something that came from God led to the emergence of Satan and sin in the creation. If God's being did not include evil, it would not exist in reality.
They are free to us. Just because you can't see the decisions you will make in the future now, it doesn't follow that there is some constraint on your will. Viewed outside time you've already freely made every decision you ever will. The fact that you are only aware of the decisions you've made in your past does not change that fact.
Well that's just what I've been saying. We live under the veil of free-will because of the constraints of time we live under in our reality. God doesn't live under those constraints, so he knows all past, present and future decisions you will make and what the outcomes of those decisions will be. Because he knows this, your life is pre-determined. You can't surprise God by making a random decision because he already knows what you will do.
Sure, what's your point? Is it that if God created Lucifer and knew Lucifer would turn to evil then God created evil? Well that would be the same argument you tried with humans and sin. Creating the potential for something is not the same are creating that something.
It isn't when you apply it to beings like us who cannot see the future. But imagine a being, not God, say an alien. The alien is a psychic with the ability to see through time effortlessly in the past, present or future. The alien sees the future and sees himself building a weapon that will be stolen by his enemy and used to destroy his planet. Knowing this and how it will turn out, the alien decides to build the weapon anyway. That's the same as God creating the tree of knowledge, knowing all the time that the serpent would tempt man and man would disobey.
