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)
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.
Still avoiding the hypotheticals, going to the extreme (that we can only have exactly what we have or a tyrant God who stamps out all traces of free will), and backtracking on the purported scientific evidence that animals were created for a world without death.
What I'm getting out of this is you have less interest in debating than asserting your worldview, which is fine when it comes to religion. Basically the answers to all questions that were not collapsed into easily dispatched charicatures of themselves is: "there is no way to actually understand this, but we know it's true because we've been told it's true". That doesn't fly for me, so I feel any chance of this conversation being productive has ended. I appreciate the respectful engagement, and while I don't appreciate my points becoming repeatedly simplified, I understand that happens in discussion
Wait, I'm pretty sure I answered here:
Here's a real life example: Who do you think is more virtuous: a chad who has easy access to many attractive women and still doesn't give in to lust but marries and remains faithful to his wife or an incel who never had any options and does the same things without getting tempted?
I mean, I'm pretty sure you know the answer and you're just being stubborn. The answer to your hypothetical is easy - God wants to test us and see if we're worthy. This is why life is hard, why we have moral culpability (what kind of a God would judge a man who has been determined to sin and not repent?) and why we're not on autopilot mode (determinism).
So, why does Chad deal with much more temptation in his life than the incel? Certainly there are many who've fallen into temptation who wouldn't have had they simply not been in a given situation. Should we not be made to face the totality of all situations if reaching virtuosity is the true goal of this system? Why does this system of virtue and sin exist in the first place? That can't be put onto man's actions because it was God who put the prohibition on the fruit, thereby making it a forbidden action. It simply could have never been created. Was that system all put into place so God can test beings despite already knowing what each is going to do?
You did not answer any of my hypotheticals, you again simplified it to "why is life hard? God wants to test us". But my hypotheticals were nuanced and in multiple directions. If what you posit is correct, why aren't things harder? Why can't we insist upon our will and break the laws of physics, surely that would be a better way to test a person's virtue or lack thereof, to go back to your own example, make everyone a universal gigachad and see what they do.
You CONTINUE to simplify and avoid the difficult questions, as well as avoiding providing proof of previous claims such as science showing us animals were originally designed to function better without death. I tried to give a peaceful offramp to this conversation but then you pulled out the typical holier-than-thou "you know I'm right but you're too stubborn to admit it" schtick that people who are stuck up regarding their religion always pull out. So please, either provide evidence for claims you yourself made earlier and actually try to answer the nuanced, multi-faceted questions that have been asked of you WITHOUT reducing them to the strawman you are accustomed to knocking down, or just let this go. You're not doing either of us any favors in your purposeful obtusiveness