Which religion is best?

[Moniker]

It doesn't work like that if there is free will (which seems to be an alternate way of saying "God isn't omniscient after all," but few people want to admit this).

Then it must be established that the Judeo-Christian God is not all-knowing: God doesn't know the future, God doesn't know how his creations were intended to work, etc. Is this an idea widely accepted by all Judeo-Christian sects

Certainly came across that way in Catholic school. There's some prayer or such that goes something like "You know what I'll do before I do it, what I'll pray before I pray it" ... something like that. Anywho, I think it's pretty common view at least in American Christianity that God is infinite in all directions he possesses. All the prophecies, and the very existence of the book of Revelations would seem to indicate this as well. I'd say it's a safe assumption. Can't speak for Judaism.

Omniscience being incompatible with free will always gave me pause too (chief intellectual reason I'm an atheist). Milton makes a valiant attempt at reconciling them with the lines:

...So will fall
He and his faithless progeny: whose fault?
Whose but his own? ingrate, he had of me
All he could have; I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.

The "strength to stand but freedom to fall" idea may not get rid of the problem, but it's good food for thought. I think the idea is something like God knowing what choices you will make when you are created, but they are still your choices, made by you in an abstract sense, perhaps, before, or during, your creation.

Milton was a monist, meaning that he believed everything that has or will ever exist (Chaos, Heaven, Hell, Middle Earth) exist inside God. This is another angle for tackling the paradox, since Creation is a facet of the Creator. I'm not doing Milton real justice here, but if you're interested in sincere, intelligent (genius?), and thorough attempts at attacking Christianity's biggest problems, he's the best I've read. Paradise Lost is a good place to start and his De Doctrina Christiana is good for follow-up.



tl;dr - It isn't really fair to consider Omniscience+Free Will as a form of Christian doublethink. It's a rich area of theological debate and study; in vain, maybe, but highly interesting.

[Ed Oscuro]

It doesn't work like that if there is free will (which seems to be an alternate way of saying "God isn't omniscient after all," but few people want to admit this).

Then it must be established that the Judeo-Christian God is not all-knowing: God doesn't know the future, God doesn't know how his creations were intended to work, etc. Is this an idea widely accepted by all Judeo-Christian sects

Something like that is accepted by the majority of Christian philosophers who follow Alvin Plantinga and, long before him, Thomas Aquinas, who states that God must respect laws of logic. For Plantinga (and his camp), God is in time (as opposed to being timeless), as a result of having chosen to create time. So God definitely, in their view, has been presented with alternatives; God's choices reflect the considered (a funny word to use about an omniscient being) judgment of what would be best (or approximately best). This isn't a discussion of cosmology and religion, but I suppose an example from that debate might shed some light: The popular "fine-tuning" argument of God's having created the universe, but then tweaking it on various occasions to better reflect God's properties (omnibenevolence, etc.) is used to give God some leeway to be relevant in the current, obviously imperfect universe (and I think it is an appropriate endeavor that far) without compromising those divine properties. Of course, Quentin Smith and others have pointed out that this makes God look incompetent.

(So far there hasn't been any slam-dunk analytic argument against God's existence or God's having created the universe, but a lot of what the Christian philosophers would like to carry over doesn't seem likely to work, usually with some obvious failing or other - this can be said of most arguments though. Of course, they're all supposing the Big Bang, which may be problematic.)

One of the biggest sticking points is that when I hear that "God is in time" and that there are what amounts to constraints on God (beyond choice, i.e. choosing to be a good god instead of a bad god, like in Oz), it doesn't sound like my idea of what a God should be like. All the alternatives are pretty bad in various ways too.

In some sense the most likeable religions might be something like Zen, or Native American religions where there is just an eternal battle. The idea of Ragnarok (Vikings, right?) seems to parallel what's actually going to happen, except in reverse for energy intensity I suppose.

tl;dr - It isn't really fair to consider Omniscience+Free Will as a form of Christian doublethink. It's a rich area of theological debate and study; in vain, maybe, but highly interesting.

Agreed. It's probably in vain. Honestly, I think the world's just as likely to be actually deterministic as for there to be free will, but I don't fret over it.

[xbl0x180]

I would be more willing to accept the concept of a God who is not perfect, not all-powerful, and not all-knowing. God is still pretty good at doing stuff, very powerful, and really intelligent, so one would still have to respect, fear, and maybe grow to love him


Related sausage links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDHJ4ztnldQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzzORZhnCao

[Ed Oscuro]

Or her...one of the pro-Christian arguments goes something like "one of God's attributes is whimsicality, so occasionally she accidentally half-makes a good universe" or something. The concept of a god who is not all-powerful and not all-knowing would be more in line with the evidence, at least. It seems silly to say that God, not having to worry about something like an attention span, would not care enough to make a universe that was perfect in every way, if that were possible. It's rather interesting that rank and file Christians don't always get that there not only are widely accepted limits on God's capabilities, but that they need to be there to protect God's rep - at the same time the high-level analytic philosophers take it for granted.

[BulletMagnet]