Time Immortal

1. I like voliscience as outlined.

But, even if one works with omniscience, one must remember that God (”the Judeo-Christian one”) is eternal, not everlasting. God is outside of our time standards. It is not that God knows what we do ‘before’ we do it. He knows it ‘as’ we do it, since all moments in time are present to Him in one mental act. To claim that He knows ‘before’ we do something is to extract His knowledge of all time to an arbitrary point in time.

Furthermore, one is confusing an epistemological necessity with a causal antecedent. God, or Ken, may know that I will be washing dishes for some time between 11 and 7 on Sundays. This may be from witnessing many repeated events, knowing my duties at my job, or apprehending the fact that I am dishwashing at such times in the one apprehension of God. Now, it may be, especially with God, that, since such knowledge is true, I can not have done anything else (and thus, potentially, not an act of free will). But, God is presumably not interefering with the requisite mental properties in my head, and for sure Ken is not forcing me to wash dishes even though he KNOWS that I will be doing so. Another agent’s knowledge does not have causal significance. I may be doing it because I am forced to by another entity (say: my boss), or because I want to do my job for internal reasons, but neither God nor Ken are forcing me because they know, beforehand, what I will be doing. Moreover, even if I have no other choice, and God or Ken will force me to wash dishes if I do not wash them myself (thus I can not do anything other than wash dishes) — one can not conclude that my washing dishes is not done freely because I Still Can Choose To Wash Dishes - ie: God’s or Ken’s compulsion need not be applied for me to wash dishes.

Thus even if an agent has but one option due to the true knowledge God has, one is not immediately absolved of responsibility or lacks free will because it is still possible that the agent chose the action.

2. To the first part, about universal truths and Socrates predating Christ with a particular moral norm, I have this quote from Chesterton:

“The story of Christ is very common in legend and literature [incarnations and crucifixions occur in cultures other than Judeo-Christianity]. So is the story of two lovers parted by Fate. So is the story of two friends killing each other over a woman. But will it seriously be maintained that, because these two stories are common as legends, therefore no two friends were ever separated by love or no two lovers by circumstances? It is tolerably plain, surely, that these two stories are common because the situation is an intensely probable and human one, because our nature is so built as to make them almost inevitable.

Why should it not be that our nature is so built as to make certain spiritual events inevitable? In any case, it is clearly ridiculous to attempt to disprove Christianity by the number and variety of pagan Christs. You might as well take the number and variety of ideal schemes of society, from Plato’s Republic…to Blatchford’s Merrie England, and then try and prove from them that mankind cannot ever reach a better social condition. If anything, of course, they prove the opposite; they suggest a human tendency towards better condition.”

G. K. Chesterton, “Christianity and Rationalism” in The Blatchford Controversies

3. On evil:

a) What do you say, O Reader, about the possibility of “unredeemed suffering”, that is, suffering which does not fit into any plan of God (say, Bambi painfully dying after a forest fire with no moral growth for moral agents like humans (a quick death would not change the moral growth for the arsonist, say) and no possibility for the local bacteria etc. to flourish more because of the suffering)? I would say that, to the extent that Bambi could mentalize it, God’s love would be present, and to the extent that Bambi does not have a mental life where pain and death become occasions for suffering (pain is not the same as suffering), the suffering half of unredeemed suffering collapses. Pain is good — it tells you something is wrong and needs to be fixed — and without a sufficiently complex mental life it can not know suffering or something that even endures through time.

[Note: I observe that many atheists, Nicholas included (and perhaps especially) have real issues with the idea that pain is an integral part of human life, as is (at times) suffering. Humanity is gifted with a full range of emotions, and to suggest that we avoid all situations in which certain emotions might find expression is, I think, an abrogation of the very human nature that atheistic/humanistic reasoning claims to uphold. And yet, there it is: many atheists seem to labour under the delusion that suffering and pain are, necessarily, things to be avoided. -- Ken]

b) Why do atheists seem to demand a God who is extemely cosmologically and personally interventionist? If all pain and all suffering are to be eliminated, first, our free will is to be eliminated (free will is where moral evil comes from) and to constantly add energy into the universe so as to ensure the growth and propagation of every species without the death of a single microbe. Life could not be planet-bound for the simple reason that it would eventually devour all the inanmate matter in its everlasting existence and then have to ‘vacuum’ in other planets and stars to continue without death.

How can we be agents in this? If we are immortal, what impetus do we have to love one another or produce offspring? What would be our telos? We would be impotent, ignorant, amoral and more negative predicates without will or change. In a sense, we would be ‘antigods’ — having the negation of every property of God. In another sense, we could not exist if all our properties would be negated in the eliminative sense (”a rock is not alive” means that the rock lacks the property ‘living’), not as an indication of lack of precision of meaning (”God is not all powerful” means that our concepts of ‘all’ and ‘power’ are insufficient to describe God, but God’s power is not thereby non-existent). What’s the point?