I have been engaged in an ongoing discussion with several friends about the concept of human Free Will, a cornerstone of all Abrahamic religions. If humans do not have Free Will, the whole scheme of sin and salvation collapses.
Tag God’s characteristics
This is a little argument from a friend of mine, Julian. Let me know what you think:
Those who adhere to divine foreknowledge adhere to the notion that God has complete knowledge. He is omniscient. Thomas Nagel…
John Grove, a commenter here on occasion at ATP, and a great supporter of my work, has really kindly placed the first review of my new ebook on classical theism: God’s omni characteristics. It is an amalgam (the book) of my posts, with some original extras, which I think is a super one-stop shop for all things counter-apologetic and arguing against that nonsensical God/god.
It comes with great sadness to announce that my favourite podcast of all time, Reasonable Doubts, will no longer continue to be. This upsets me because there is no greater podcast on the internet than this one. RD has been with me for a good number of years and has provided ample stimuli for me to pass on in my own way.
If you were God. A friend recently emailed this: The South Carolina Shooter’s Free Will or the Will of God?…
There is this prevailing ide that God has personhood and that humanity is somehow styled on his image. Atheists believes that the causality here works the other way such that humanity existed and styled God on the image of humanity. But who would want to let minor quibbles like that get in the way of a good god-design? These anthropogenic properties of God manifest themselves in different ways: looks, emotions, rationality and sentience.
The classical theistic components of God, his characteristics of being all-loving, all-powerful and all-knowing don’t work very well together. This has been something which I have sought to elucidate over the years, so I thought I would compile a synopsis of where we are at with the idea of OmniGod, and what he has created. These are good arguments, I believe, and I would love to see my readers interact with them, and I would love to see theists of all natures take them to task to see if they stand up. Bookmark this page and return to it, if you will – there’s quite a lot here! I would like to see this as a growing compendium.
My friend Julian Haydon questions this: ANSWERS BY AN HONEST CHRISTIAN Did anything exist before the Creation? …Only God,…
My last post in this series looked at the idea that Yahweh, as the parochial Jewish God of a particular section of the Middle East in time, bears no resemblance to the God that Christians believe in, and is supposedly that exact same God. The Janus-styled god who appears to flip personality, characteristics and general existence at the turn of the New Testament, is fundamentally different from the present-day Christian God. We are all atheists on this god, except Christians don’t seem to realise it.
This has come up recently in conversation so I thought I would post this video I did some time back.
Many people believe ridiculous things. Most of the time, we eventually shuffle off such beliefs. But some remain. In the case of Christianity, this is the belief in Yahweh. I don’t mean to be overly rhetorical, but the belief in Yahweh is patently ridiculous, much more so than the belief in God.
Some time back I posted an argument on mentalizing deficits with regard to God being unfair. This broadly stated that certain autistic type people who have an inability to empathise are less likely to believe in God, presumably because the intersubjectivity of empathy allows an agent to see the,selves from somebody else’s point of view. This means that they are less able to suppose what God would think about them whilst doing any given moral action, and such like. The abstract, to the paper looked at in the post, reads:
OK, so it’s not here on my site, but on James A. Lindsay’s (whose book Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly I have just edited) site, God Doesn’t; We Do, in a debate with apologist Tom Gilson.
Here is a video that I did with James A. Lindsay. He has put together some footage to go with…
Theists, the world over, claim that God is omniscient. However, this is not an easy claim to make for a whole host of reasons, one of which is worth looking into here. I want to look at the idea that in many instances, you cannot know that you don’t know something. If there is a situation where you cannot know something, then if it is claimed that you are omniscient, this would invalidate that claim.