Thanks u/Plemethrock
We can have a discussion on whether or not free will exists. Discuss if every action we do is already predetermined by how our brain is wired, with the environment around us being the inputs.
We can also have a discussion on whether or not humans have souls and analyze the evidence for and against us just being our bodies
(I made an error and had to repost, apologies)
That's the world as we know it after the fall which is cosmic in scope. Before that there was no death or evil. The Earth was paradise, Eden.
Exactly. I'm not the one equivocating though - I specifically said God's uncreated will is the primary cause and our created wills are secondary causes. There's a very clear distinction between God's nature and our human nature.
You are equivocating them by using your hypothetical question of "if your son becomes a murderer are you responsible?" in response to the argument you're responding to. The person having a son did not create the world where murder is possible, where the son will have instincts that drive him to want to commit murder, the human father does not know his son WILL commit murder and let it happen anyway, etc etc. it's a false equivalence whether you want it to be or not
Sure, in another comment I said the analogy is not 1 to 1 because we're secondary agents.
God didn't create that world either. There was no death before the fall. As I said, you're describing the world after the fall. Your contention ultimately boils down to this: "Why did God made us in His image having free will and being capable of not loving Him and disobeying His command? Why didn't He create us as automatons so that no ill could come out of the creation?"
The answer as I already said is because there's no love without freedom of choice. Maybe people who think marrying their AI gf (golems) is an option may disagree, but frankly they are degenerates and they're too far gone in their metaverse minds. God allowed evil to enter the world via our own choices because He ultimately knows He can make a greater good this way. This is why I made the analogy with the child - you know the child will suffer and die eventually, but you still have the child because life is a greater good even considering all that.
You are again being extremely limiting on the ways the world could be created. You're changing my contention to fit your framework. What is death? Did God create death? If not, where did it come from? Why did it exist after the fall? Did God change creation after the fall? If not, by what mechanism was it changed? Did God create that mechanism, or...? But even arguing in this framework is presupposing your beliefs, to which I'd still ask for an actual breakdown of how animal physiology supports a world without death (and how that effects plant death, why animals have to experience death if humans were the ones who made the mistake, etc). Still I'm interested in your answers to these questions.
So, let's talk a different way. I have free will but that doesn't mean I can do anything I want. I cannot fly. No matter how much I will it, I am limited by physical reality, a set of systems God put in place. So, how is it not possible to still have free will and have constraints on evil? Perhaps a man could only become physically aroused in the presence of a woman he made a sacred marriage pact with, surely God could make that happen. If free will itself were so important, we should all be living in our own simulations and be able to impose our wills however we want, to truly see what we would do. Otherwise our free will is held in check by the limitations of our physical reality which certainly could have been made more restrictive to remove or reduce evil, OR less restrictive so there is even greater capacity for evil. Free will is already not unlimited, so why would further limits contradict the importance of free will? Why wouldn't fewer limits highlight it?
Do not boil my argument down to automatons and AI girlfriends, you are trying to make a dumbed down argument to respond to so you can impose your already existing belief frameworks onto this debate
I'm telling you what the Orthodox Christian teaching is on all this. This is my worldview. According to the Christian faith (which is based on divine revelation and not empirical observation or purely rational reasoning which are secondary to it), death is unnatural and is not part of the creation which is perfect. Death is the privation of life, just like evil is the privation of the good, chaos is the privation of order, darkness is the privation of light, etc. God didn't change the creation after the fall - the fall of man caused the fall of the whole creation (hence cosmic in scope). The closest I can explain it is shifting of one realm to another which was a supernatural event beyond our understanding (like creation and miracles are).
We're not told that. Some Church fathers meditated on the way Eden was before the fall, but the affirm patristic teaching is that we can't have positive knowledge of what things were like there, just like we can't know how the afterlife functions (beside what we've been told about it). The approach is apophatic, meaning negative - "the human body and nature was unlike what we know today". Basically it's not possible to give a naturalistic rational breakdown of how nature operated because of our limitations. Obviously the Bible doesn't get into detail about many natural phenomena and the explanation for that is that such knowledge is not profitable/benefitial to us and that's why it wasn't revealed. Everything we need for our salvation and virtuous life has been revealed by God. It's much like how a father wouldn't get into details about how the engine works when asked by his 7 year old about cars. The obsession people have to know everything and peer through all mysteries is very much childlike and we're as impotent as children in this endeavor even though we believe we know so much.
The irony is we concentrate on minute details and phenomena millions of miles away from us, or invest great effort in looking at how microscopic things work, or how the Earth supposedly was millions of years ago and take great pride in this knowledge. But disregard the most important aspects of our life - the spiritual realm, the fate of our soul and that of our neighbour. But that's man's nature - we miss the foret for the trees just like Adam and Eve missed the Garden for that one tree that was forbidden. We're always searching and never content.
This was the natural state of being in Eden as Adam and Eve didn't have sex as we know it. They fell because they were deceived and they disobeyed and that's when all sin, evil and death entered the creation. But even after the fall, and especially after Christ, there are constraints on evil - we are given explicit moral laws and conscience and most importantly the Church which is guided by the Holy Spirit. A person who lives a Christian life participating in the divine grace through the sacraments has nothing to fear. If he makes his soul a house for the Spirit, if he becomes sanctified, no evil has power over him.
If God were to intervene and modify man to not be capable of sinning, that would not only make him a tyrant, but would negate the possibility of man to reach true virtue which is only achieved through struggle with the passions and transcending the worldly. For Christians, this life is a preparation for the eternal life - it's not self-sufficient and self-contained. We have to make ourselves worthy of God and restore our likeness which was lost due to the effects of the fall and sin.
God eventually healed our nature by assuming it in the person of Jesus Christ. Thus the fall was reversed and our path to salvation and eternal life in God was cleared. The purpose of man is to become one with God, to become like-god (theosis). What good is for God a being that can't freely choose to love Him and be with Him? Such a being is no better than a dumb beast that's only loyal because of instinct or a machine that's been programmed to emulate love. No, that's how Satan operates - he's the one who enslaves people and tries to subvert their free will through deception.
There's much more to be said on that and the Church fathers have written tons on those problems. I can assure you every aspect of the Christian faith has been addressed in detail and put to scrutiny in the past 2000 years.