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One Love
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   Posted 10/29/2009 11:29 AM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
"To take the stand that God is at fault for the presence of evil is implicitly to lose one's relation to God since one now becomes God's judge, which is the very position of evil.  Thus, to lose one's relationship to God is to lose one's self to evil; to remain agnostic where God and evil are concerned is to lose one's own soul by refusing to choose and implicitly to admit to having a love of God that can be qualified or negated by that which is not God--and thus to confess one neither loves or even knows God."
 
James Loder on Kierkegaard's "On the Edification Implied in the Fact that Before God We Are Always in the Wrong."
 
 


Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Post Edited (One Love) : 1/27/2012 11:10:31 AM (GMT-6)

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Tom
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   Posted 10/29/2009 12:26 PM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Sizzling hot coals of burning truth.

T


"Man is a person not by nature but by spirit. By nature he is only an individual." Nicolas Berdyaev

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Similitude
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   Posted 10/29/2009 6:48 PM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Yep. God and His benevolence GROUND the rationality and intelligibility of all non-relativistic, normative thought. He can't, therefore, be on trial, logically speaking. That's putting the cart before the horse. Ain't doable.

Even the atheists argue as if their view is "right" for me. But such non-relativistic normative judgment is irrational from atheistic starting points. All attempts to define what "ought" to be, whether relativistic or not, will, to be intelligible and rational, involve the relation of teleology because it will involve beliefs about the "world" GOING "somewhere" PARTICULAR in the future, as well as the belief in human freedom. IOW, the future is not UTTERLY open. Events aren't just caused, they are DIRECTED to certain SOFA's. Without that assumption, even relativistic normativity is irrational.

Even atheists can't get around the uniformity of nature. But even the uniformity of nature is not necessary if there is no teleology. If, as many atheists are now arguing, our universe only seems improbable because it's one of an infinite set of different "kinds" of universes, then if follows that we can't know that nature is uniform even in this one. Atheism proves too much. It proves, as Plantinga etal have argued, that even the belief in apprehension is just blind, groundless faith.


 

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One Love
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   Posted 1/27/2012 12:10 PM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Good to remember...


Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

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Similitude
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   Posted 1/28/2012 6:24 PM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Indeed. What I find liberating is the fact that benevolent theism is the only rational way to go. That means Christianity is just a species of benevolent theism in terms of dialogue with others. But if our opponents have already rejected benevolent theism, it is unlikely that they, on their own intellectual steam, will find Christianity plausible. But even then, with God all things are possible.
 
I think the following indicate that Christianity is plausible on its own terms:
 
1) It is exceedingly difficult to show it plausible that the NT is a product of intentional deceit on the part of its authors,
 
2) It is exceedingly difficult to show it plausible that the authors of the NT were mentally incompetent enough to write fiction, unbeknownst to themselves,
 
3) It is virtually impossibe to demonstrate that the OT is contradicted by highly plausible historical inferences,
 
4) There are very good historical reasons to believe that Gerald Aardsma has "located" the Exodous etc as occurring at the fall of the Old Egyptian Kingdom,
 
5) Pre-Abrahamic human history is so difficult for all views (either in terms of scientific evidence, theodicy explanations, or both) that even historical views of Genesis are no more implausible or a-plausible than their competitors, so long as it is recognized that the earth is significantly old and that the age of the earth and humanity is indeterminable by the bible because of the way genealogies were used by Hebrews alone,
 
6) The biblical view that the godhead is a plurality allows for an explanation of creation that involves divine libertarian freedom analogous to our own in the sense that it involves sentient motivation that is also SOCIAL/SYMPATHETIC motivation (thereby cohering with our natural belief that our designer is benevolent, socially),
 
7) Parsimony warrants ruling out a necessary god-world relationship, given a loving sociality within the godhead that renders a necessary god-world relationship unnecessary,
 
8) 6) & 7) further mean that Christian divine teleology is more parsimonious than some theistic views since it can be explained in terms of creatio ex theo rather than mere teleological tinkering with pre-existing, non-divine entities in the fashion of the necessary god-world relationship--i.e., even the very existence of non-divine entities is explained teleologically, not merely event sequences of non-divine entities.



 

Post Edited (Similitude) : 1/29/2012 7:06:58 AM (GMT-6)

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Similitude
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   Posted 1/29/2012 8:28 AM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
The thing about benevolent theism being the ground for warranted belief is this: There IS a theodicy that makes sense. That doesn't mean humans can prove the details of that theodicy. But to the extent that a theodicy is clearly speculative, it is less plausible than one that isn't. That's what Greg is saying when he argues that the degree and distribution of natural evil can not be explained in terms of soul-building. He's saying even if it is about soul-building, no human can possibly understand HOW that can be, given the degree and distribution of it. This is why posited cosmic histories have to be judged IN PART in terms of the plausibility of their respective theodicies. Plausibility in explanation has to include theodicy evaluation SINCE benevolent theism is THE ground for warranted belief. A cosmic history that implies there is no plausible theodicy is implausible on that ground alone.

And that's why ALL existing cosmic histories are implausible. They either require too much pure speculation or they are void of a doable theodicy or both. The NT approach has this in its favor: If the NT is true historically, it's theological claims are confirmed by signs and wonders. That alone gives it evidential support for its entailed theodicy. What other theodicy has evidence like that?


 

Post Edited (Similitude) : 1/29/2012 7:50:28 AM (GMT-6)

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One Love
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   Posted 1/29/2012 9:02 AM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
What I wonder is this: Is the whole thought process of theodicy compossible with an idea of UNconditional love for God? In other words, unconditional love to God means loving God with all of oneself independent of any "evil" factors that may or may not be attributable to God, right? What I hear Loder saying is that taking a stance of adjudication to God is saying that some piece of evidence or some event can somehow make God UNworthy of our unconditional love and service in our own minds...thus saying that something OTHER THAN God can conditional one's love for God.

This is the essence of what Satan was doing in Job.

I think about Richard Wumbrand.  You know, the "Tortured for Christ" guy  who (with others) experienced transcendent experiences of the Lord while suffering horrible torture.  When SPECIFICALLY asked about theodicy, he SPECIFICALLY said that his method was not to even think on such things, but simply ponder Christ himself.  I can't say that's bad advice.

Personal and communal knowledge of God leads to unconditional love of God, self, and others.  We love because He first loved us, right?


Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Post Edited (One Love) : 1/29/2012 8:09:00 AM (GMT-6)

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One Love
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   Posted 1/29/2012 9:12 AM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Let's look at it like this. The First Great Commandment is loving God with all of oneself. If a person doesn't look at evil FROM THAT STANCE, then they will inevitably and effectively deify creaturely suffering/pain...until God fades in the distance before it.  Sometimes even to "non-existence." 

If there is ANYTHING I appreciate about my more Calvinistic "Theistic Bootlicker" days, it was that, as much as I struggled with the problem of evil and human pain, in the end, I always tried to place the Uncreated above the Created in priority through obedience as much as my sin would let me.  I learned from Job.  If not for that, I may have become an atheist or agnostic WAY sooner...ESPECIALLY with all the theodicy discussions and rampant evil/suffering in the world.  In the end, my (personally) undeniable experience with Jesus saved me from theodicy's possible impacts.  Heh. 


Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Post Edited (One Love) : 1/29/2012 8:32:40 AM (GMT-6)

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One Love
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   Posted 1/29/2012 9:40 AM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Greg and I have always differed when it came to theodicy on a basic level. I remember way back in the Coolboard days whenever Greg said that if Calvinism was true...and he met Jesus in heaven, he then would feel "moral compunction" to reject Him because he couldn't truly love a God would would do any kind of predestination of any person into hell. I remembered thinking THEN: How is this stance unconditional allegiance to God? How is this not outright insurrection of the Creator and his right to his own Creation? That never sat well with me. Even when I didn't really understand God as LOVE truly, I understood that. Even after all my changes of thought about God, I STILL feel that way.

My own struggle with conditionality of love for/obedience to God got brought out, not main by theodicy, but by interactions with Aki, my wife. Long story short, I effectively made her (and my relationship with her) a condition upon which I would relate lovingly/obediently to God. I made things idolatrous. It's taken almost the total dissolution of the marriage...but I have been broken from that conditionality. And it was worth it. ;-)


Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Post Edited (One Love) : 1/29/2012 9:18:45 AM (GMT-6)

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One Love
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   Posted 1/29/2012 9:42 AM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Hmmm, thought.

Perhaps, theodicy is primarly a TWO-STOREY phenomenon.

I've got the sneaking suspicion that it is...


Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

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Similitude
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   Posted 1/29/2012 11:19 AM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
THAT benevolent theism is the ground for warranted belief means THAT there IS a theodicy, whether or not we understand it. Otherwise, we couldn't even truthfully say we love God BECAUSE He first loved us. To even say God loves us is to SAY there is a theodicy. It means that the sufferings of this present age are WORTH it ULTIMATELY. If that were not the case, it couldn't be truthfully said that God loves us in a competent way. And therefore, we could not know we owed Him love. It is a mere logical possibility, after all, that God has no capacity for sympathy and only enjoys novelty. But that is not a warranted belief. It is just one of a set of an infinite number of similar arbitrary beliefs that are ungrounded (i.e., disregards any inductive criteria for normative evaluation).

And that helps me clarify my language from the discussion about Hartshorne. I should say that it is a WARRANTED and COMPELLED belief that there is a necessary being. There is a sense in which there are all kinds of merely logical possibilities that we can't prove are unthinkable (even if they are), but which, on the other hand, can not be warranted beliefs regardless. The ontological argument is, IMO, a confused way of trying to say just that. To say a belief is warranted is to say we CAN evaluate it normatively. But such normativity is UNintelligible apart from benevolent, competent teleology.


 

Post Edited (Similitude) : 1/29/2012 10:38:23 AM (GMT-6)

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Similitude
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   Posted 1/29/2012 11:44 AM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
But given that there IS a theodicy (if there is warranted belief), it follows that an explanation can only be deemed plausible if at least the following conditions are satisfied:

1) The explanation has to be coherent (i.e., it has to deduce/imply the data it's posited to account for),

2) It has to be consistent with a plausible theodicy,
 
3)  It has to be intelligible (i.e., it can't pretend that mere words are a legitimate substitute for intelligible concepts--lots of physical verbage fails this criteria),

4) It has to be "better" than its competitors (if it has any) per some inductive criteria (like parsimony/analogy/breadth of explanation).

It's the stringency of these conditions that compels honest men to have epistemological humility. Most mega-explanations don't even satisfy 1). They're literally just works in progress which, as Kuhn pointed out, tend to be proven hopelessly problematic eventually.


 

Post Edited (Similitude) : 1/29/2012 11:11:57 AM (GMT-6)

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One Love
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   Posted 1/29/2012 1:26 PM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Similtude:
But given that there IS a theodicy (if there is warranted belief), it follows that an explanation can only be deemed plausible if at least the following conditions are satisfied:

1) The explanation has to be coherent (i.e., it has to deduce/imply the data it's posited to account for),

2) It has to be consistent with a plausible theodicy,

3) It has to be intelligible (i.e., it can't pretend that mere words are a legitimate substitute for intelligible concepts--lots of physical verbage fails this criteria),

4) It has to be "better" than its competitors (if it has any) per some inductive criteria (like parsimony/analogy/breadth of explanation).

I would argue that...at least for the Christian...IF RIGHTLY UNDERSTOOD, the Incarnation, Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ-the-Logos, EUR, and the Vision of God (Theosis, Theoria) would seem to be all the "theodicy" one would need in a truly ONE-STORY Creation. Seriously. If someone were to truly be open-minded and really LOOK at it, it really IS intelligible...which is why WE are all here talking about it. I have very little doubt that many of us long-time boardmembers here could express our ideas to OPEN-MINDED people quite easily and clearly.  It's just that the full implications of the belief are so staggering to regular egoic life that on some level, NONE OF US really wanted it to be true, at least at one time in our lives. Just my thought.

icon_bandit 


Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Post Edited (One Love) : 1/29/2012 12:38:35 PM (GMT-6)

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One Love
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   Posted 1/29/2012 1:32 PM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
But...on another level...

Saying it bluntly, theodicizing (if I may use that term) takes place in the "dianoia" and not primarily in the "nous". The DIRECT, IMMEDIATE apprehesion of God is not a matter of discursive reasoning, though it can be expressed approximately in such terms. That's why the Prayer of the Heart (ANCIENT Christianity, now!) is a PREMIER WAY to get around the professor in our heads...as we are lead into SILENCE into that direct apprehension.

If I spend my time thinking about theodicy (how God can be justified/existent in the face of evil), how do I directly, immediately experience God's "gift" of my existence at the same time, when I can only do the latter by Grace-appropriating faith?   How can I "judge" God according to my mental categories (which IS what's happening) and perichoretically indwell God in love at the same time?


Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Post Edited (One Love) : 1/29/2012 12:35:11 PM (GMT-6)

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Similitude
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   Posted 1/29/2012 6:05 PM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
D: I would argue that...at least for the Christian...IF RIGHTLY UNDERSTOOD, the Incarnation, Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ-the-Logos, EUR, and the Vision of God (Theosis, Theoria) would seem to be all the "theodicy" one would need in a truly ONE-STORY Creation.

J: I assume that when a person on Mars Hill believed with the very little info presented by Paul, they knew nothing of the passion or even the incarnation. Those are beliefs that come with further historical informing as far as I can tell. The reason why the passion and incarnation are important to believe is because scripture isn't that hard to understand and it IS history with real factual implications. Where that much is given, that much is required--for works accountability, not salvation, I would argue.

D: That's why the Prayer of the Heart (ANCIENT Christianity, now!) is a PREMIER WAY to get around the professor in our heads...as we are lead into SILENCE into that direct apprehension.

J: I don't want to get around the professor in my head. I just want to use it where it's appropriate and not as a substitute for other experiences that have their own role in the totality of Christian experience. There is a time to be still and know that He's God. But there's a time to move and converse with others as well.

D: theodicy (how God can be justified/existent in the face of evil),

J: It's just academic, though. If you believe you have a warranted belief, it follows there IS a theodicy whether you understand it or not. The purpose of conceiving of theodicies is apologetic only. We don't need one to believe some of our beliefs are warranted. But if we're intellectually honest in our analysis, we know there has to BE one if we also believe some of our beliefs are warranted.

The point is, explanations, to be plausible, have to be consistent with conceivable theodicies. Otherwise, they're just implausible on that ground alone. That doesn't mean they're false. They just can't be known to be true or plausible in terms of HUMAN normative criteria. An explanation that seemingly implies there is no benevolent/competent teleology is seemingly false for that very reason.

Private revelation can trump all this. But it has no implications for the obligation of other humans. I'm talking about HUMAN (i.e., SPECIES) criteria for plausibility evaluation--not individual criteria.


 

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Similitude
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   Posted 1/29/2012 6:18 PM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Another way of saying it is like this. Lewis said we can't prove there are proofs, and we can't prove there are no proofs. Similarly, we can't prove there is a theodicy, and we can't prove there is not a theodicy. But we (humans, i.e.) DO try to prove things. And if, indeed, anything can be known (which implies belief can be warranted), there simply IS a theodicy.

This is because no knowledge is knowably and absolutely immediate. There are always elements of synthesis and analysis in every act of cognition as far as we can tell. This is because some relationships are correlative ones even when no deductive or inductive discursion is involved. E.g., substance and attribute are either correlative, or some grounding principle has to be used to adjudicate when a quale is an attribute OF a substance as opposed to a substance-less "property." There is no other way we can make sense of it even IF absolutely immediate apprehension occurs. In short, categories work in concert, not in isolation.
 
Thus, to say apprehension can be ABSOLUTELY immediate has to be a claim of private revelation itself. And that's why no one need concern themselves with it unless they have the same private revelation. Communal activity can only reasonably concern itself with HUMAN modes of knowing. That's what makes it communal.


 

Post Edited (Similitude) : 1/29/2012 5:29:38 PM (GMT-6)

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One Love
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   Posted 2/2/2012 1:00 PM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Similtude:
Thus, to say apprehension can be ABSOLUTELY immediate has to be a claim of private revelation itself. And that's why no one need concern themselves with it unless they have the same private revelation. Communal activity can only reasonably concern itself with HUMAN modes of knowing. That's what makes it communal."

So, if you have a community of people who each experience the immediate, direct Presence of God...and share about their experiences in the community, what is that? That is what I think we have with the Saints.


Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

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Similitude
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   Posted 2/4/2012 4:26 PM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Right. We can share experiences, just like we can share experiences with non-Christians. So long as what's being shared is just an experience, the source of it need not even be an issue. But soon as an 'ought' is entailed in an experience that is not entailed in another's, there is no recognizable communal obligation. That's all I'm saying. IOW, Kenneth Copeland, etc can tell me all day about what he or others ought to do based on his/their putative private revelation. But until it's confirmed with something like the kinds of signs and wonders that prophets to the PEOPLE are supposed to have, it has no status as public revelation that needs to be acted upon by the people.


 

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Tom
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   Posted 2/4/2012 6:00 PM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.

D: Greg and I have always differed when it came to theodicy on a basic level. I remember way back in the Coolboard days whenever Greg said that if Calvinism was true...and he met Jesus in heaven, he then would feel “moral compunction” to reject Him because he couldn’t truly love a God would do any kind of predestination of any person into hell. I remembered thinking THEN: How is this stance unconditional allegiance to God? How is this not outright insurrection of the Creator and his right to his own Creation?

 

T: I always agreed with Greg on this, so I don’t think it amounts to insurrection to say there are no conceivable worlds in which I can imagine myself finding Calvin's God beautiful. God wants us to reject false versions of him, no? I think so. So tell me, D, are there ANY versions of God you presently reject as false? Sure there are. That’s WHY you reject them. And what you feel just is that moral dimension of God’s image in you; that's part of WHY you reject what you view as the false versions of him. So far you and Greg agree.

 

Where you disagree is that you find profit (and even seem obliged) in contemplating the possibility of the truth about God turning out to be what you NOW in fact reject as false about him (I suppose for the sake of recognizing God as absolutely supreme, which is an admirable motivation though I don’t think it’s warranted in the sense you mean it). Greg rejects this step because it's inherently self-contradictory. It doens't make sense to say that part of any worthwhile belief in the absolute worth and authority of God ought to include the willingness to believe ANYTHING about God, and that essentially denies his (and your) present reasons for believing God to be this way and NOT that way.

 

In other words, to believe “God is this way and not that way” with conviction and not indifference and then to add “God is also such that if he’s not in fact this way but is in fact that way it won't matter to me; I’ll still feel the same way about him" is inherently self-contradictory (well, a kind of existential self-contradiction). If I may feel equal admiration for either case, then it seems irrational to hold to either position with conviction. But you DO hold your present views with very great conviction. That’s Greg’s point.

 

I remember his qualification went something like, “Look, if God really does unconditionally determine the vast majority to hell, then God will have to equally determine my response to his being this kind of God when he reveals the truth to me, in which case I’ll bow and worship, yeah, but it will be a worship he determines and not the KIND of worship I presently have REASONS for offering him.” Greg’s point is that God can’t be the Calvinistic version and expect Greg to freely (undetermined by God) feel and think that God is worthy of worship. FEELING admiration and PERCEIVING beauty in the Calvinistic version of God (in a way undetermined by the Calvinistic God) is inconceivable to Greg. It is to me too. And I can’t believe it’s conceivably beautiful to you. The fact that you have decided presently NOT to worship Calvin’s version of God (on philosophical, biblical, and especially aesthetic and moral grounds) tells me you agree.

 

Will God in the end get what he wants? Sure. But there are some things the Calvinistic God can’t want and so cannot have. You want to fault Greg for admitting this. But it’s entailed in your own rejection of Calvin’s version too. So I'm not sure in the end what benefit there is in saying you can imagine a world in which you'd find Calvin's God to be beautiful and worthy of admiration simply because that being is God even though conceiving of God in such terms at present is so revulting. It seems less than honest...know what I mean? Maybe that's not the word.

 

Tom


"The aesthetic value the world has for God is in expressing, not constituting, the aesthetic value God eternally finds within Godself." Greg Boyd

Post Edited (Tom) : 2/4/2012 5:42:07 PM (GMT-6)

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Similitude
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   Posted 2/4/2012 7:06 PM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.

 

Right. It's perfectly fine to say personal, subjective experiences of joy seem to just mean to that person that however much suffering said person will ultimately experience will be ultimately rendered worth it. But can one truly tell another, "hey, I have had profoundly joyful, blissful, immediate experiences with a being I believe to by my creator, and those past experiences are sufficient for me to love that creator even if He doesn nothing but torment me eternally starting tomorrow" and still expect the hearer to take it seriously? I don't see how.

Seems to me that what an outsider will infer is really going on is that the experiencer is saying, "given my intuitive belief in benevolent/competent teleology, past joyful experiences that seem to have a powerful being as their source are such that it seems obvious that said powerful being actually IS my benevolent/competent designer." Then, the fact THAT there is a theodicy (per the intuition of benevolent/competent teleology) is correlated to the powerful being as its ground.

But outsider has no reason, communally, to give a whit about this unless they have analogously correlated similar experiences with the rest of their epistemological approach. A person without those experiences could just as easily wonder if the experience might be one of Satan's angels appearing as an angel of light. The point is, there are many logical possibilities. Only analogy gets us to community and consensus. Indeed, only analogy gets us to the belief that the origin of words, not our own, is ANOTHER conscious, thinking self.


 

Post Edited (Similitude) : 2/4/2012 6:31:35 PM (GMT-6)

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One Love
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   Posted 2/5/2012 9:23 AM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Hmmm...

Let's start here.

Tom:
Greg’s point is that God can’t be the Calvinistic version and expect Greg to freely (undetermined by God) feel and think that God is worthy of worship. FEELING admiration and PERCEIVING beauty in the Calvinistic version of God (in a way undetermined by the Calvinistic God) is inconceivable to Greg. It is to me too.

1) If the Calvinistic version of God is true, then there is NO liberatarianly free feeling and thought ANYWAY. So the "revulsion" itself would be predestined eternally by God...not unlike Satan's form of "revulsion". So the whole idea of "freely" rejecting God as morally repugnant is a non-starter in the first place.

2) What the thought process above DOES bring forth is the sensibility of rejection of God's authority and reality AS CREATOR and OWNER of all Creation on behalf of some sense of moral repugnance is the main issue that I disagreed with (and still do). Functionally speaking, how was Greg's rejection of God ANY DIFFERENT then Satan's, with respect to coming from a CREATURE(self?)-CENTERED rather than UNCREATED(God)-CENTERED in it's view of God? Real talk.

3) I put Abraham in Greg's place. I think that Abe would be SILENT before God before offering any statements of moral repugnance. But that's just me. Actually that ain't just me.  Kierkegaard would say the same thing, I think. :-)

"To take the stand that God is at fault for the presence of evil is implicitly to lose one's relation to God since one now becomes God's judge, which is the very position of evil.  Thus, to lose one's relationship to God is to lose one's self to evil; to remain agnostic where God and evil are concerned is to lose one's own soul by refusing to choose and implicitly to admit to having a love of God that can be qualified or negated by that which is not God--and thus to confess one neither loves or even knows God."


Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Post Edited (One Love) : 2/5/2012 8:27:00 AM (GMT-6)

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One Love
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   Posted 2/5/2012 9:33 AM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Tom:
Where you disagree is that you find profit (and even seem obliged) in contemplating the possibility of the truth about God turning out to be what you NOW in fact reject as false about him (I suppose for the sake of recognizing God as absolutely supreme, which is an admirable motivation though I don’t think it’s warranted in the sense you mean it). Greg rejects this step because it's inherently self-contradictory.

The recognition of God as absolutely supreme is more than an "admirable motivation". According to SK (and Loder following him), it is the mode by which one moves through Religiousness A to Religiousness B. Moving through being a "Knight of Infinite Resignation" to a "Knight of Faith".

Right, Corey?


Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

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Similitude
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   Posted 2/5/2012 11:11 AM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
According to Hebrews, Abe inferred that Isaac would be resurrected to fulfil what he understood the promise to mean. In that sense, he did just what Greg and other theodicists are doing. They're recognizing that given that there is a theodicy, it is more rational to formulate one that is coherent and unfalsified (and, in some cases, more plausible) than to have none at all. That doesn't make it true. But it does mean that such cosmologies are more plausible AS cosmologies than those which have no conceivable theodicy.


 

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One Love
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   Posted 2/5/2012 12:18 PM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Similtude:
According to Hebrews, Abe inferred that Isaac would be resurrected to fulfil what he understood the promise to mean. In that sense, he did just what Greg and other theodicists are doing. They're recognizing that given that there is a theodicy, it is more rational to formulate one that is coherent and unfalsified (and, in some cases, more plausible) than to have none at all. That doesn't make it true. But it does mean that such cosmologies are more plausible AS cosmologies than those which have no conceivable theodicy.

At the time of God requesting Abraham to sacrifice his son...as he was leading his son up to his own death in his mind...I doubt that Abraham was debating any moral repugnance of what God was asking him to do. He wasn't said to express some sentiment like "What kind of moral God would do this to me?" or anything like that. He was being obedient, pure and simple. "Teleological suspension of the ethical", right, Corey? He was placing priority on the Creator rather than the created...which is a primary aspect of the "faith" described in Hebrews 11, yes?

I'm just saying. I cannot see Abraham as biblically described doing the face-to-face rejection via moral repugnance of God like Greg would. 

Can YOU see that, Jeff?


Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Post Edited (One Love) : 2/5/2012 11:21:42 AM (GMT-6)

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Similitude
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   Posted 2/5/2012 3:58 PM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
I don't think any rational person rejects God because of moral repugnance. Because that's irrational. But I have no problem believing Abraham deduced the fact that Isaac would be ressurected on the grounds that the promise of God (who he believed was truthful) required it.

And in that sense, the discursive reconciliation done is similar to theodicy formulation. The intellectual exercise of theodicy formulation need not imply that a failure thereto proves there is no theodicy. A theodicy is just a condition of a plausible causal/historical account, true or not.


 

Post Edited (Similitude) : 2/5/2012 3:20:20 PM (GMT-6)

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