Armand Jacks Destroys ID in One Sentence

_{Barry Arrington
April 16, 2017

Intelligent Design

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Intelligent Design}

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Armand Jacks says he has a knock down show stopping argument to rebut ID’s claim that intelligent agency is the only known cause of specified complexity.

Get ready.

Hold on to your hat.

Here it is:

Using the same argument, the only known causes of everything we have ever seen in the entire universe are material causes.

Are blind unguided material forces capable of typing the post you just posted AJ? If you say “no” your argument is refuted. If you say “yes” you look like a fool or a liar or both. Talk about the Scylla and Charybdis.

AJ, you really should stop and think for 10 seconds before you write something like that down. I know, I know. Thinking is hard, and 10 seconds is a long time. But still.

As for the title of this post, on reflection maybe I overstated AJ’s accomplishment a little.

Comments

F/N: it seems that somewone above refuses to recognise that, first, we must be significantly and responsibly free to be rational and morally governed. Then, he repeatedly fails to attend to a simple technological fact that has been discussed in this and other threads but consistently ducked: no computational substrate is a rational entity in itself. it is merely a glorified, GIGO-limited calculator or estimator using analogue and/or digital signal processing to generate outputs on inputs plus noise and stochastic behaviour. As a reminder, I again call attention to Reppert, which is being consistently adroitly side-stepped:
. . . let us suppose that brain state A, which is token identical to the thought that all men are mortal, and brain state B, which is token identical to the thought that Socrates is a man, together cause the belief that Socrates is mortal. It isn’t enough for rational inference that these events be those beliefs, it is also necessary that the causal transaction be in virtue of the content of those thoughts . . . [[But] if naturalism is true, then the propositional content is irrelevant to the causal transaction that produces the conclusion, and [[so] we do not have a case of rational inference. In rational inference, as Lewis puts it, one thought causes another thought not by being, but by being seen to be, the ground for it. But causal transactions in the brain occur in virtue of the brain’s being in a particular type of state that is relevant to physical causal transactions.
So, first, any such objector advocating evolutionary materialistic scientism and fellow travellers needs to explain and justify how he can appeal to logic on his worldview foundations: ____________ The persistent side-stepping of this crucial issue shows beyond doubt that they have no cogent answer, they just want to ride piggyback on our recognition that we are in fact responsibly and rationally free. Even, as they try to manipulate that recognition to undermine our understanding of what sort of world we must inhabit for that to be so. The incoherence and in the end utterly amoral or even nihilistic manipulativeness are patent. The only answer to such is to consistently call their attention and that of onlookers tot his fallacious tactic, and to insist that the issue be frankly faced, on pain of drawing very stringent conclusions about those who indulge such cynical rhetoric. Remember, such play by the reprobate's rule, if I can get away with it, it is "good" enough and "true" enough. Meanwhile, they will try to project irrationality and worse to those who challenge them. As we have repeatedly seen. Game over. KFkairosfocus_{April 18, 2017
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AD, our freedom is substantial but limited. We need to be very clear that without substantial responsible rational freedom, we can neither be rational nor morally governed. A key test is, can we love? __________ . If one says, not, then I think our mothers have somewhat to say to us. If so, love requires freedom. From that we can then ponder the various worldview challenges with a more balanced stance. KFkairosfocus_{April 18, 2017
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People are getting their agents and their observers confused. If the agent is the observer, then knowing what you're necessarily going to do before you to decide to do it....well, actually, that is pretty weird, but maybe it's weird in an infinite causal chain/first cause sort of way rather than a necessary contradiction? In any case, it's unnecessary to consider in this case, as our omniscient observer and our free will endowed observed agent are separate.LocalMinimum_{April 18, 2017
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AnimatedDust,
GUN @111: I just don’t have a problem with seeing omniscience as limiting free choice. What am I missing? Can’t you know the future without causing it, thereby limiting free will?
I'm not sure if you're missing anything. I have stated several times, though, that foreknowledge doesn't mean causation. OTOH a consequence of foreknowledge is determinism. There are many that would argue that determinism is compatible with free will for the reason you just gave - i.e. compatibilism - but that seems to be dirty word for many at UD, which I find a bit odd since, IMO, the worldview of most here pretty much demands it. I'm not sure that compatibilism is necessarily wrong, but it does lead to some strange consequences - such as your free choices being determined before you were even born.goodusername_{April 18, 2017
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AD:
You’ve been really honest and forthright a few times in this thread.
Thank you for the good words. Actually, I have always been honest. Not always convincing, but honest.
IOW, does the playbook you adhere to possibly proscribe the conclusions KF reaches?
No. KF's lack of logical consistency proscribes his conclusions. I only pointed it out. Using the same rules and logic as he does.Armand Jacks_{April 18, 2017
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GUN @111: I just don't have a problem with seeing omniscience as limiting free choice. What am I missing? Can't you know the future without causing it, thereby limiting free will?AnimatedDust_{April 18, 2017
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Phinehas,
If you are defining “determined” in a way in which whatever is known is determined, then you’ve merely defined your way to winning the argument.
Close - I would say that, in principle, if the future is “knowable”, than it is determined. That’s an important distinction, because I’ve seen many people (some here at UD) who recognize the problem I’m describing and try to work around it by saying that God grants us free will by purposely limiting his own foreknowledge of what we will choose. Putting aside the issue of whether an omniscient Being can choose to not have certain knowledge, that doesn’t address the issue, IMO, because that wouldn’t mean that the future isn’t determined, it would merely mean that God has chosen not to know what it is that has already been determined. On a side note, I think from a logical standpoint, it may not be contradictory to say that God doesn’t know the future, and yet is still omniscient, since omniscience means “knowing all there is know” - and if the future hasn’t yet been determined yet, then there is nothing to actually know.
The future is known, therefore the future is determined. But what does this mean? It means the future cannot be altered at this point, but that’s not particularly surprising since choice and free will only happen in the present. When the future is present, it could be altered via free will, in which case our knowledge about the future would be different than what it is. Until the above can be shown to not be the case, it cannot be claimed that free will is necessarily incompatible with foreknowledge.
I think it's trivially simple to show that the above is not the case. It's a self-contradictory statement to say that God knows that "X" will occur tomorrow, and thus it's determined that X will occur tomorrow, but that that doesn't mean that X will occur tomorrow.goodusername_{April 18, 2017
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AJ at 103: Is it possible that the rules you depend on to reach your conclusion in this post are purposely constructed so as to allow any theory, even untestable, to be fair game, but not "God" (as you understand the term and apply it to your worldview) so as not to "allow a divine foot in the door?" You've been really honest and forthright a few times in this thread. But are you Lewontin honest? IOW, does the playbook you adhere to possibly proscribe the conclusions KF reaches? If you declare his conclusions outside the realm of acceptable thought, i.e. outside of science, you are relieved from any substantive retort, no? Is that the slightest bit possible?AnimatedDust_{April 18, 2017
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Harry @ 88, I agree with you. Joseph's brothers tried to murder him and then sold him into slavery where he ended up in prison for years before being named Pharaoh's second in command where he was able to save fledgling Israel from starving to death. When he saw his brothers again for the first since they betrayed him, he said, "you meant it for evil but God meant it for good." (Gen 50:20). Their actions were still evil and they were still accountable for their evil at the same time God was sovereignly using the situation for His own purposes. This is beyond human understanding.Florabama_{April 18, 2017
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KF:
Of course, the above saying a dismissive but fallacious assertion over and over does not lend it the truth it never had to begin with. Blah, blah, blah.
BS. An inference is either logically sound or it is not. Putting a bunch of words around it does not change this. Since my inference is identical to yours, just seen from the opposite side, either they are both logically sound or they are not. It has already been pointed out by UB that mine assumes it's own conclusion. Which it does. As does yours. Now, I expect a response with a bunch of accusations, followed by a cut and pasta fest that would put Bornagain77 to shame. But none of that changes the fact that the inference you have been using for years is fatally flawed.Armand Jacks_{April 18, 2017
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Phinehas, I am afraid that your argument is more about dancing around the logic than it is about presenting a logically consistent arguement. We might as well be talking about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. You can't treat the future in the same way we do the past. With respect to the past we know what happened and (potentially) all of the decisions made by individuals that led up to the past event. Even though the past is known, we can't infer from this that the people involved did not have free will. However, if the future is known, with the same accuracy that we know the past, we can't infer that the people involved, will have free will. Every human made event is dependent on the decisions of the people linked and leading up to that event. Let's keep this as simple as possible. Let's assume that it is known that you will kill KF on Friday in a homosexual lovers dispute. If you kill him, what free will did you have? If you dont kill him, then the knowledge of the future is flawed.Armand Jacks_{April 18, 2017
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F/N: Of course, the above saying a dismissive but fallacious assertion over and over does not lend it the truth it never had to begin with. Instead, there is need to address the comparative difficulties challenge that is being ducked. And we need to ask: is it credible that the objecting comments were produced by blind chance and/or mechanical necessity? Patently, not. And that carries us to the heart of the design inference on tested, reliable sign. Show us a reliable case of blind forces doing what intelligently directed configuration routinely does: ___ The objector cannot properly fill that in, and he knows it, he is forced to show yet again how FSCO/I arises by design simply to try to object to it. The rhetorical resorts to dismiss actually imply the strength of the claim by revealing the weakness of the attempts to oppose it. KFkairosfocus_{April 18, 2017
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AJ:
I’m still confused. Let’s use my Maple Leafs example again. Let’s assume that it is known that they will win Lord Stanley’s cup in 2017. If all of the players decided to exert their free will to go out for a drink rather than play the last game in the playoffs, then the future was not known. If they can’t choose to skip the game, then they have no free will.
Imagine being able to see the future in exactly the same way you see the past. Now take a look at your question above, but apply it to 2016.
It is known that the Penguins won Lord Stanley's cup in 2016. If all the players decided to exert their free will to go out for a drink rather than play the last game in the playoffs, then the past is not known. If they couldn't skip the game, they had no free will.
Does this make sense? Not really. Of course the players don't have free will about the past now. But that doesn't preclude them having free will when the past was present. If they had done something different, then we would know something different. Only the present is contingent, because choice only happens in the present. We only know what did happen, but that doesn't mean there was no free will at the time. In a similar way, of course if the future is known in the same way we know the past then we don't have free will concerning it now. But that doesn't preclude us having free will when the future is present. If at that point we do something different, then that something different is what we would have pre-known. Only the present is contingent, because choice only happens in the present. We only knew what would happen, but that doesn't mean there would be no free will at the time. Think of it as a bit like Heisenberg's Uncertainty. At time t we can have choice about what happens at t but no knowledge (it's contingent). At t+n we can have knowledge about what happened at t, but no choice about what happened at t. Why is it not possible that at t-n one could also have knowledge about what will happen at t, but no choice about what will happen at t?Phinehas_{April 18, 2017
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Armand, Life requires the ability to specify something among alternatives and instantiate that specification in a transcribable memory. The very first things that must be specified at the origin of life are the set of non-integrable constraints that are required to interpret the description. Without this, there is no life. There is no cell. There is no cell cycle. And for those married to evolution, there is no informational medium of heritable variation, and nothing to be selected. Open-ended evolutionary potential does not exist until the system can describe itself in a spatially-oriented memory (i.e. a code) and successfully interpret the description. We look at this and say that it seems that intelligent action is somehow necessary for life, because it is the only thing we know of that is rich enough to specify the system in this manner. But then we actually study the system from a physicalist perspective, and we find that (among all other material systems in the cosmos) the only other place we can identify such a physical system as genetic translation is in the use of language and mathematics -- two unambiguous correlates of intelligence. I would appreciate it if you'd stop using me to attack Kairos. This is the point he is making to you. EDIT: By the way, the core claim of biological ID is that a universal correlate of intelligence can be detected in the origin of life on earth, That claim has been validated by physics. The empirical observations that validate the claim are not even controversial. It is hardly a case of assuming a conclusion.Upright BiPed_{April 18, 2017
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UB, an inference that assumes its own conclusion, as mine did, is not scientific. I admit it. But you are suggesting that an inference such as that repeatedly presented by KF, which also assumes its own conclusion, is scientific? I honestly don't see how you can defend that logic.Armand Jacks_{April 18, 2017
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How so?
Because:
The last science-based inference before events disappear into the forever unknown is an inference to design – an impenetrable and unambiguous inference to design.
Upright BiPed_{April 18, 2017
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UB:
Armand, there is a vast difference when it comes to the origin of life on earth.
How so? kF's inference is still one that assumes its own conclusion. Just as mine was. Thank you for pointing it out. If I had have brought it out I would have been accused of projecting, or distracting, or strawmanning, or raising a red herring, whatever. UB, I would like to apologize to you personally for the sarcasm above. You do not deserve it. It is aimed at one or two there. You have always debated honestly.Armand Jacks_{April 18, 2017
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Armand, there is a vast difference when it comes to the origin of life on earth. The last science-based inference before events disappear into the forever unknown is an inference to design - an impenetrable and unambiguous inference to design. If materialist wish to acknowledge that inference, yet maintain their belief in materialism, that is perfectly okay -- BUT -- they cannot legitimately ignore the evidence, then claim science to themselves, and denigrate all those who disagree with them -- as they do now. It is suicide for science.Upright BiPed_{April 18, 2017
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Interesting take on the atheist's perverse kind of blindness by the great preacher, Bossuet, at the link below: http://aleteia.org/2017/04/17/light-from-light-why-do-we-give-christ-this-title/?utm_campaign=NL_en&utm_source=daily_newsletter&utm_medium=mail&utm_content=NL_en The constantly recurring theme of our praise, glorification, etc, of God, is not a mark of narcissism on God's part - infinitely far from it, of course - but are means whereby we can express our love for Him. It's taken me most of my life to understand such a simple ploy made a available to us, but which evidently has been at least unconsciously understood for millennia. In heaven, it will also be a love of our brothers and sisters in Christ, and theirs for us ! Quite self-serving in the long run, as is our adherence to our faith, anyway. But not pusillanimously inspired by ourselves !Axel_{April 18, 2017
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KF:
F/N: While, occasionally issues of theology, exegesis or Bible text etc come up at UD, let us remember the actual focus of this thread. Namely, a claimed knock-down answer to the design inference:
Still building that strawman up higher I see. Please go to my original comment and point out where I made any such claim. You can access it from the link Barry put in the OP. Well, you could if Barry actually put a link rather than just quote mine. But, being the honest man that you claim to be, I'm sure that an apology, or a retraction, will follow shortly now that I have applied this corrective.Armand Jacks_{April 18, 2017
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PS: At 22, I posed a response:
we have seen a tangent, but one that has in it A worldview level misconception that needs some response so that we can refocus the issue. Here, an objector has asserted that the only acting causes are material ones. That is, he sees the cosmos in physicalist terms as blind forces of chance and mechanical necessity acting on matter and energy in space-time, such that temporality and change emerge from chance and necessity, with agency squeezed out. (We can take it that he is not implying that only the materials that things are made of act, he is implying that agency and purpose are delusional; so that directly acting actuating causes trigger change by acting on the only components of reality he will accept in chains that must in the end come out of nothing or else must span the infinite traverse of time past in steps, as already described. [Both those options imply absurdities.] He does not see the grand delusion involved in implying that his fact no 1, self-conscious, reflexive, enconscienced awareness is an illusion.) We are back to the problem of computational substrates and how they act. If mind be reduced to such one way or another, whether an analogue or digital or neural network wetware machine, the inherent problem is that such are simply not rational, responsible entities. They are blind, cause-effect machines driven by GIGO-limited hard and soft ware. Which itself raises the further question as to how the required FSCO/I to effect such a machine comes from. In the case of he human brain and CNS as computing substrate, there is a serious issue of the sheer lack of materials to store the info content to account for hard and soft ware in the zygote. And, we need to understand that patching up an analogue computer or loading coded algorithms and data structure into a digital one, or wiring up a neural network are all forms of programming that express an inescapably information-rich, GIGO-limited content unto the hardware substrate. if your ball and disk naval gunlaying analogue computer is not set up to solve the right differential equations in the right way, it will fail; something that took decades to get right. If your Pentium has some flawed instructions, it will blindly execute its microcode without caring one way or another, it is a rock that has no dreams it is just executing organised cause-effect chains, hence the famous recall. And, a neural network, too is no magic, you do not get to a functioning computational substrate for free out of lucky noise filtered by incremental differential success. That should have been quite evident by the times of the kelvin tide prediction tables, not too many years after Darwin’s two books came out. And as I pointed out in my remarks in the other thread, Darwin himself ran straight into the problems as can be seen from his letter to Graham:
. . . you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance. But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind? . . . . Lastly I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilisation than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risks the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is. The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.
That should give us serious pause. Instead of going to grand delusion, we should be willing to acknowledge the force of empirical fact no 1, we are self-aware, reflexive, self-moved agents with causal capability in the mechanical, embodied world, such as we express when we type and post a comment in this thread. Then, we need to ask, what sort of world must we be living in, to make such possible. And I assure you, it will not be a world of blind chance and necessity only acting on matter and energy in spacetime. Agency with responsible, rational freedom must be recognised for itself, as step no 1. And, our understanding of empirical observation must be broad enough to recognise WHO is observing, observations do not make themselves happen out of nothing and illusions. Where, again, the denial of self-moved, responsibly and rationally free agency instantly leads to grand delusion and collapses into absurdity. The ideologically rooted, institutionalised, entrenched denial of agency is at the heart of the problems we see. And Darwin himself should have seen that long since. Unfortunately, he resorted to logic with a swivel, selectively hyperskeptical rhetoric, which failed to ask, but what does the jumped up monkey mind picture I just painted mean for my own system of thought? We need to ask that question, and we need to note the implications that worked out across C20, as Darwin here foresaw, even a full decade after he published Descent of Man, with the remarks in Chs 5 – 7 esp at the beginning of Ch 6. No wonder H G Wells (a student of Huxley, Darwin’s Bulldog as he was called) warned us in no uncertain terms in several novels, especially the very opening words of War of the Worlds:
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water . . . No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us . . . . looking across space with instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas. And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation, creeps upon them. And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?
The horrors of the past 100 years did not come out of nothing, for no reason.
Notice, how studiously this is avoided.kairosfocus_{April 18, 2017
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UB:
It assumes its conclusion (against evidence to the contrary). It’s as simple as that.
Finally, someone got it. Of course it assumes its own conclusion. It only took two days and ~90 comments. Yet, it is the same argument used by KF and others as a so called irrefutable argument for ID.Armand Jacks_{April 18, 2017
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F/N: While, occasionally issues of theology, exegesis or Bible text etc come up at UD, let us remember the actual focus of this thread. Namely, a claimed knock-down answer to the design inference:
Using the same argument, the only known causes of everything we have ever seen in the entire universe are material causes.
Notice, BA's response in the OP: Are blind unguided material forces capable of typing the post you just posted AJ? If you say “no” your argument is refuted. If you say “yes” you look like a fool or a liar or both. This is absolutely pivotal, and it seems the issue has in the main been slid away from rather than squarely faced. KFkairosfocus_{April 18, 2017
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Interesting take on the atheist's perverse kind of blindness by the great preacher, Bossuet, at the link below: http://aleteia.org/2017/04/17/light-from-light-why-do-we-give-christ-this-title/?utm_campaign=NL_en&utm_source=daily_newsletter&utm_medium=mail&utm_content=NL_enAxel_{April 18, 2017
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Phinehas:
Until the above can be shown to not be the case, it cannot be claimed that free will is necessarily incompatible with foreknowledge.
I'm still confused. Let's use my Maple Leafs example again. Let's assume that it is known that they will win Lord Stanley's cup in 2017. If all of the players decided to exert their free will to go out for a drink rather than play the last game in the playoffs, then the future was not known. If they can't choose to skip the game, then they have no free will. On a related subject, if they win the cup, I might start believing in miracles.Armand Jacks_{April 18, 2017
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'It assumes its conclusion. It’s as simple as that.' Another hilariously pithy 'home run', Upright BiPed. A bit like Dirac's reply to a journalist's request, could he explain it (what Dirac had just stated) in layman's terms. Simply :'No'.Axel_{April 18, 2017
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GUN:
I’m not saying that foreknowledge is causation – we agree that it isn’t. What I’ve been saying is: If – in principle – there’s a future to know – then the future is already determined.
If you are defining "determined" in a way in which whatever is known is determined, then you've merely defined your way to winning the argument. But let's run with it anyway. The past is known, therefore the past is determined. But what does this mean? It means the past cannot be altered at this point, but that's not particularly surprising since choice and free will only happen in the present. When the past was present, it could have been altered via free will, in which case our knowledge about the past would be different than what it is. I do not see an reason why knowledge about the future must necessarily be different. The future is known, therefore the future is determined. But what does this mean? It means the future cannot be altered at this point, but that's not particularly surprising since choice and free will only happen in the present. When the future is present, it could be altered via free will, in which case our knowledge about the future would be different than what it is. Until the above can be shown to not be the case, it cannot be claimed that free will is necessarily incompatible with foreknowledge.Phinehas_{April 18, 2017
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JAD,
With that in mind how do we now evaluate Armand Jack’s knock down single proposition “argument?” “the only known causes of everything we have ever seen in the entire universe are material causes.” A home run? Or a swing and a miss?
It assumes its conclusion (against evidence to the contrary). It's as simple as that.Upright BiPed_{April 18, 2017
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In the same way that WJM argues that there is no way that materialism can logically ground human freewill, there is also no way for atheistic materialism to provide an ultimate explanation for the universes’ existence or for our existence. Some atheists will try to argue that the universe could be the ultimate explanation for its own existence (it has always existed) therefore we don’t need to appeal any kind of eternally-existing transcendent intelligent creator (God.) However, even setting aside the glaring problems caused by big-bang cosmology, there are intrinsic logical problems with the idea that the universe could be the ultimate explanation for everything that exists. The giveaway is the word could. If it is possible that it could be the ultimate explanation, it is also possible that it could not. Putting the problem in more technical terms, everything we know about the universe is contingent-- stars, planets, rocks, trees, petunias and people etc. are all contingent (their existence was caused by something else.) Can a finite collection of contingent things be non-contingent or necessary? That leaves us with a logical dilemma: as long as it is possible for the universe to be contingent it is not logically necessary for it to be ontologically necessary. However, there is nothing logically impossible that a necessary (or self-existing) being actually exists, nor that it is logically necessary for it to be ontologically necessary. Clearly there would be no question such a being would be the ultimate explanation for the existence of everything else. (I am not arguing that this proves that such a being exists.) However, it should be obvious that there is nothing that we know about the universe that requires us to think that it is logically necessary to conceive of it as the ultimate explanation for the existence of everything including itself. With that in mind how do we now evaluate Armand Jack’s knock down single proposition "argument?" “the only known causes of everything we have ever seen in the entire universe are material causes.” A home run? Or a swing and a miss?john_a_designer_{April 18, 2017
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Florabama @ 85
How people understand it, is different across denominations with Roman Catholics rejecting it for the reasons you describe, and various other denominations accepting or rejecting it to one degree or another, so one can still be “Christian,” and reject the idea that predestination overrides man’s free will, but the fact remains that people who claim a felicity to the Bible, must do something with the verses that touch on it. Explanations range from, “those verses are just talking about God making the Hebrews His ‘chosen’ people,” to a fully fatalistic belief that, as you put it, raises the question, “where is the free will?”
Those who are guided by the Bible regarding predestination need to take into consideration the following regarding our free will:
The man who has sinned is the one who must die; a son is not to suffer for the sins of his father, nor a father for the sins of his son. To the upright man his integrity will be credited, to the wicked his wickedness. But if the wicked man renounces all the sins he has committed, respects my laws and is law-abiding and honest, he will certainly live; he will not die. All the sins he committed will be forgotten from then on; he shall live because of the integrity he has practised. What! Am I likely to take pleasure in the death of a wicked man - it is the Lord Yahweh who speaks - and not prefer to see him renounce his wickedness and live? But if the upright man renounces his integrity, commits sin, copies the wicked man and practises every kind of filth, is he to live? All the integrity he has practised shall be forgotten from then on; but this is because he himself has broken faith and committed sin, and for this he shall die. But you object, "What the Lord does is unjust". Listen, you House of Israel: is what I do unjust? Is it not what you do that is unjust? When the upright man renounces his integrity to commit sin and dies because of this, he dies because of the evil that he himself has committed. When the sinner renounces sin to become law-abiding and honest, he deserves to live. He has chosen to renounce all his previous sins; he shall certainly live; he shall not die. -- Ezekiel 18:21-28 The Lord is not slow about his promise as some count slowness, but is forbearing toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. -- 2 Peter 3:9 This is good, and it is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. -- 1 Timothy 2:3-4
However one understands predestination, one should assume that it is one's own choices that will determine how one spends eternity. One should never assume that it was the will of God that they be lost.harry_{April 18, 2017
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