No true Free Will exists if Ex Nihilo creation is true

[Bill the Cat]

"Proscribe" means "forbid." I would be delighted to hear that you do not proscribe Calvinism, but I suspect you meant that you do not subscribe to it.

See what I get for posting while I am eating...

Back to the original idea of this thread: If God is omnipotent, then he is still "on the hook" in some sense for the way the universe is, ex nihilo creation or not.

That's what I tried to get him to see before the crash when I explained that God allows the natural disasters to occur, and all of the carnage that follows, despite having the power to stop them, so He is just as responsible for death and misery from a Mormon framework as He is from an ex nihilo, Arminian, or Calvinist one.

[seven7up]

You are still making the assumption that God could not create our spirits with free will and end up with the exact same spirit as if it existed forever as in the LDS scenario. He could. That is what omnipotence is.

As if God can create a being purely from God's own mind and imagination Ex Nihilo (knowing everything that the creature would do before hand) and then "wash his hands" of what the creature does afterwards?

The kind of creation and omnipotence you speak of implies complete unilateral power. God has TOTAL control and therefore is responsible for every "choice" that the creature makes.

-7up

[Sparko]

As if God can create a being purely from God's own mind and imagination Ex Nihilo (knowing everything that the creature would do before hand) and then "wash his hands" of what the creature does afterwards?

duh. It's called free will.

The kind of creation and omnipotence you speak of implies complete unilateral power. God has TOTAL control and therefore is responsible for every "choice" that the creature makes.

-7up

Not if he gives them free will. Apparently your idea of an omnipotent God isn't really omnipotent if he can't create free will.

[seven7up]

BILL: So, God places the mouse in the maze, despite not wanting it to go to point B, and you think that is Calvinism?

No. In Calvinism (or Ex Nihilo), God WILLS people to go to hell, and therefore they do. If God did not want them to go to hell 1) He could have created those particular individuals differently OR 2) He could have refrained from creating those individuals to begin with.



7UP: God creates people to go to hell. In fact, in that theology, God created all of us from God's own mind in such a way that the grand majority of us would end up in misery and damnation forever. ... and puts the blame squarely on the creations which God conjured up purely from His own imagination.

BILL: That's Calvinism for you.

Calvinism is the logical conclusion that is drawn from Ex Nihilo creation theology.

BILL: Sparko has also explained this to you how your complaints are based solely on how YOU prefer that God SHOULD have behaved, not how He CHOSE to do so.

No. My arguments are simply based in logic. "Preference" has not much to do with it.

Who do you think you are to tell God what He should do? Does He seek YOUR counsel before doing things? Do you not trust His ability to make decisions that conflict with yours?

This ol' straw man again Bill? You and I both know that, from my perspective, God did everything perfectly. He did the very best possible with the eternal intelligences that He had to work with. The very fact that Had to work with flawed entities with free will is why we find sin and suffering in our world. It is not because God created flawed spirits Ex Nihilo.

it is nothing more than a whiny complaint.

Do you think that repeating the terms "whiny" and "complaint" are sufficient to overcome the arguments of free will that you wish could exist in your theology Bill? You are going to have to do better than that. Try a substantive response for once.

While you think on that, I will have a Calvinist preach to you:

"In Calvinism, there is no conflict between the will and nature of God and the nature of ultimate reality, or the basic laws of reality. Whereas in an Arminian or an LDS view, sin and suffering, to the extent that they occur, are indications of the failure of God to attain his desires and reminders that God is limited by a universe he did not create and over which he does not have full control, in the Calvinist view, sin and suffering, like all things, are outworkings of the free plan of God. There are no “lawlike structures or principles” which are coeternal and not identical with God himself. Rather, in Calvinism, all the laws of reality are rooted in him, in his nature and will. He is in full control of reality. ...

Creation ex nihilo implies a radical metaphysical dependence upon God, one that logically guarantees that the creature will not be independent from God or be capable of independent contributions to reality in the ways envisioned in Arminian thought. In fact, creation ex nihilo logically leads directly to Calvinistic determinism. So, there is a conflict between ex nihilo creation and some of the central features of the Arminian universe. ...

To put it another way, the explanation for the particular choices free creatures make, in the Arminian view, cannot be found in the fact that God gave his creatures free agency. God’s act of creation was a cause that had some effects. By definition, an effect is something that exists by means of having been determined by some preceding action as its cause. If our choices are undetermined by God and first-causal by nature, they therefore cannot be effects of God’s creative activity. They cannot be explained by it or traced back to it. They are wholly self-existent or self-originated. God cannot create uncaused choices, directly or indirectly. " - Mark Hausam

-7up

[seven7up]

duh. It's called free will.

Even Evangelical Christians usually admit that God is not omnipotent in the sense that there are no logical contradictions. God cannot, for example, create a circle with four corners.

The argument that you are attempting to use here fails under this category. I explained it in the video; you simply have not grasped it. I provided a quote to Bill which explains the concept in summary. Please read it carefully.

Not if he gives them free will. Apparently your idea of an omnipotent God isn't really omnipotent if he can't create free will.

You have not even begun to demonstrate any understanding that is necessary for the level of discussion being addressed here. I will try to be patient.


-7up

[seven7up]

Ex Nihilo as veiled pantheism

7UP: In mainstream Christian theology, where does your spirit come from? When does your spirit come into existence?

It is created during conception. I don't believe that God chooses to personally make your spirit. I believe it is all part of the process of being conceived.

You are just trying to be "indirect" about it. It doesn't matter how "indirectly" you try to twist your way out of it. An omniscient and omnipotent God has complete unilateral control. Reality will be EXACTLY what God created it to be and what God envisioned in His own mind before He even created it, down to the very most intricate detail, including what you "decided" to eat for breakfast this morning.

Christian Philosopher Thomas Oord relates two significant points as follows:

*Problem of Evil: If God once had the power to create from absolutely nothing, God essentially retains that power. But a God of love with this capacity appears culpable for failing to prevent evil.

*Empire Problem: The kind of divine power implied in creatio ex nihilo supports a theology of empire, based upon unilateral force and control of others.

Let me ask you a question. When your God creates spirit babies, who decides which intelligences will inhabit them out of the infinite number of intelligences out there? How was the intelligence of Jesus chosen from among those intelligences and put into a spirit baby?

The intelligences are entities of free will. If you have thought long and hard about this theological framework, we can consider the possibility that these entities themselves decide to enter into that spiritual form.

The difference is that when placed at a higher level of existence, this entity may begin to act out its free will in a more meaningful way. This is especially true for us as human beings living by faith in mortality. Right now we are given tremendous amounts of freedom, outside of God's presence, to see what we are really made of.



7up: IF you wanted to make a statue out of superior characteristics, ex nihilo, let's say out of gold for example, .... I would be stuck with working on sandstone, or whatever material I had available to work with.

I was using an example of coming up with the same statue by two different means: You doing it by carving, me doing it by fiat.

And you decide to miss the point of that analogy. The intelligences (and subsequently spirits) that became these individuals had unique characteristics.

John the Baptist, for example, would have been an entity/intelligence, represented by gold, with superior characteristics which eventually resulted in better moral decision making when "tested by fire" , than ... let's say ... the decision making of Cain, or Hitler, which is represented by sandstone and results in poor moral decision making.

Your own God had to create a universe from his own mind too. He just used existing material to shape the universe and the real God created the material and the universe. No difference in free will.

Contrary to the Ex Nihilo view, the world we live in today is the result, not only ultimately of the plan of God being carried out, but it is influenced by the different wills, sometimes contrary voices, which are "self-determined" and "first-causal" in nature. LDS do not accept your theological framework, which is based on the Greek philosophical view (Greek philosophical monotheism) known as the single "Unmoved Mover", which was turned into God the Father in order to make Christianity more acceptable to the Roman world.

The reality that we witness is not only the result of the will and plan of God, but also the result of the wills of all those who have free agency, whether they be human, spiritual, divine, angelic, etc. In other words, the history of the world is not written solely by God, while I admit that his hand is in all of it, but history is also coauthored by all of us. LDS theology allows for true interpersonal relationships. God does not simply to enjoy himself and his own contributions to reality which are entirely a result of his own imagination; this would be nothing more than a relationship with Himself, or the diverse aspects of God's own mind. Instead, God wants to be enriched by relationships with independent beings who truly add something to reality other than God's own self projections.

As I have discussed previously, Ex Nihilo creation theology is a veiled form of Pantheism, whereby the created Universe is a projection of God's own creative imagination which results in nothing more and nothing less than what God imagined it would be in His own mind before deciding to create it.

-7up

[seven7up]

Back to the original idea of this thread: If God is omnipotent, then he is still "on the hook" in some sense for the way the universe is, ex nihilo creation or not.

As you will be forced to see in this discussion, the hook and barb are much larger in the Ex Nihilo view. Christian theologians continue to insist on Ex Nihilo doctrine. It is one of the reasons that critics have so successfully demonstrated philosophical problems with this view of God and creation; and rightly so. By continuing to preach "creation from nothing", you are only helping the adversary undermine Christianity. You are unwittingly working against yourselves ... and God, by presenting a false religion that cannot stand up to scrutiny. Even as a teenager, I could see the flaws in your system of dogma.

God created me and Bill to call you to Christ, through whose life and death and resurrection you can be reckoned right before God through faith, not through various efforts to keep God's commands.

Feel free to start a thread concerning the relationship between Faith, Grace, and Works. I will be happy to address that topic with you, time permitting. Just know that it is large groups within the Evangelical community that have fooled countless people into believing that they are saved without repentance. That will be on your heads (or their heads), not mine. Fortunately, I have seen a change for the better in some of these Christian circles, as some of them are actually turning more towards a balanced, and quite frankly, a more LDS view. Refusing to take grace as a "license to sin" is not the same as supposedly trying to earn your way into heaven. I hope that you all can appreciate that contrast.

-7up

[Sparko]

Even Evangelical Christians usually admit that God is not omnipotent in the sense that there are no logical contradictions. God cannot, for example, create a circle with four corners.

The argument that you are attempting to use here fails under this category. I explained it in the video; you simply have not grasped it. I provided a quote to Bill which explains the concept in summary. Please read it carefully.






You have not even begun to demonstrate any understanding that is necessary for the level of discussion being addressed here. I will try to be patient.


-7up

It is you who does not grasp it.

Free will is not logically impossible under ex nihilo. That's just idiotic.

[Sparko]

7UP: In mainstream Christian theology, where does your spirit come from? When does your spirit come into existence?



You are just trying to be "indirect" about it. It doesn't matter how "indirectly" you try to twist your way out of it. An omniscient and omnipotent God has complete unilateral control. Reality will be EXACTLY what God created it to be and what God envisioned in His own mind before He even created it, down to the very most intricate detail, including what you "decided" to eat for breakfast this morning.

Christian Philosopher Thomas Oord relates two significant points as follows:

*Problem of Evil: If God once had the power to create from absolutely nothing, God essentially retains that power. But a God of love with this capacity appears culpable for failing to prevent evil.

*Empire Problem: The kind of divine power implied in creatio ex nihilo supports a theology of empire, based upon unilateral force and control of others.

Just making such a claim does not make it true, 7up. There is no reason a God who creates out of nothing could not make beings with free will.

The intelligences are entities of free will. If you have thought long and hard about this theological framework, we can consider the possibility that these entities themselves decide to enter into that spiritual form.

So basically, you are saying that it was just pure luck that God's first born was Jesus and not YOU? Or Satan? That the Father had no say in the matter? I thought the LDS believed that the "intelligences" had no actual mind, able to make decisions or do anything until they were placed in spirit form?

Here is another problem with eternal and infinite intelligences floating around out there. If there truly are an infinite number of them, then there is no way they can all become spirit beings or humans. No matter how many you take from the pool of infinite intelligences, there will be an infinite number left. So the LDS idea of intelligences basically condemns these beings to an eternity of limbo. And if as you suggest they are conscious, then it is torture to exist forever with a mind but no body or ability to do anything but float around. No spirit, no body, just basically a "brain in a jar" existence. Forever and ever, for an infinite number of intelligences.

The LDS doctrines of intelligences is worse than any hell you guys accuse Christians of coming up with.

As I have discussed previously, Ex Nihilo creation theology is a veiled form of Pantheism, whereby the created Universe is a projection of God's own creative imagination which results in nothing more and nothing less than what God imagined it would be in His own mind before deciding to create it.

-7up

If anything christian theology is not pantheistic, but more panentheistic. At least try to understand the terms you toss about. So far you have shown you have no understanding of ex nihilo, the trinity, infinity, eternity, free will, and pantheism.

[Bill the Cat]

No. In Calvinism (or Ex Nihilo), God WILLS people to go to hell, and therefore they do.

Calvinism, yes. Ex Nihilo, not necessarily. Calvinism is a systematic theology while Ex Nihilo is a theory of creation. Apples and oranges. What you are using is the determinism of Calvinism and equating that to a method of creation.

If God did not want them to go to hell 1) He could have created those particular individuals differently OR 2) He could have refrained from creating those individuals to begin with.

And here is the whine I predicted at the beginning. What God COULD do and what He DOES are two different things that EVERY system suffers from, including yours. It would be unjust for God to decide not to create them based solely on what He knows they will do.

Calvinism is the logical conclusion that is drawn from Ex Nihilo creation theology.

It is A conclusion that can be drawn from Ex Nihilo. Molinism is another.

No. My arguments are simply based in logic. "Preference" has not much to do with it.

What an entity "Could" or "should" have done is not a logical argument. It is a preference that places your own wisdom above the decision making of the entity's.

This ol' straw man again Bill? You and I both know that, from my perspective, God did everything perfectly. He did the very best possible with the eternal intelligences that He had to work with. The very fact that Had to work with flawed entities with free will is why we find sin and suffering in our world. It is not because God created flawed spirits Ex Nihilo.

It's not a straw man. Either your god is impotent, clueless about the future, or he doesn't give a flying crap that he is in charge, and ultimately responsible for allowing the lost to even come to earth. If he knew satan was eventually going to rebel, and allowed satan to be spirit born in the first place, he is just as culpable as what you claim he is in Ex Nihilo.

Do you think that repeating the terms "whiny" and "complaint" are sufficient to overcome the arguments of free will that you wish could exist in your theology Bill? You are going to have to do better than that. Try a substantive response for once.

Your claims are whiny complaints against what God "should" have done. You are placing YOUR morals and reason above God's.

While you think on that, I will have a Calvinist preach to you:

"In Calvinism, there is no conflict between the will and nature of God and the nature of ultimate reality, or the basic laws of reality. Whereas in an Arminian or an LDS view, sin and suffering, to the extent that they occur, are indications of the failure of God to attain his desires and reminders that God is limited by a universe he did not create

Straw man #1. In an Arminian view, God DID create the universe. And God does NOT always get His desires, so this guy is bating a big fat ".000" from the get-go...

and over which he does not have full control,

Straw man #2. We believe God is in full control. We do not believe He is MAKING every action occur though. That's not control. That's doing it yourself.

in the Calvinist view, sin and suffering, like all things, are outworkings of the free plan of God.

Translation: It's all one big puppet show.

There are no “lawlike structures or principles” which are coeternal and not identical with God himself.

That's your guys burden to bear, not Arminians.

Rather, in Calvinism, all the laws of reality are rooted in him, in his nature and will. He is in full control of reality. ...

Arminians have no issue with that statement in its context.

Creation ex nihilo implies a radical metaphysical dependence upon God, one that logically guarantees that the creature will not be independent from God or be capable of independent contributions to reality in the ways envisioned in Arminian thought.

Back that bull dozer up on this pile of stinking poo... This guy is basically arguing that God runs a giant puppet show and is incapable of allowing His creation to act at all. it is ultimately God acting through them. That means that God is the one who is responsible for the sin of mankind. God, through Adam, broke His own commandment. Therefore, it is God, and not man, who is responsible for the first sin, and thus, God is the real sinner. That's the logic that must flow out of Calvinistic determinism when it is described the way this fellow is doing.

In fact, creation ex nihilo logically leads directly to Calvinistic determinism.

This assumes that man is acting as a puppet, and thus, not responsible for their own sin.

So, there is a conflict between ex nihilo creation and some of the central features of the Arminian universe. ...

Utterly false. There is a conflict between determinism and Arminianism, but Ex Nihilo still functions within Arminianism just fine.

To put it another way, the explanation for the particular choices free creatures make, in the Arminian view, cannot be found in the fact that God gave his creatures free agency.

Sure it can. Knowledge of the choice does not imply causation of the choice, even by creation of the being that chooses it.

God’s act of creation was a cause that had some effects.

Which makes God responsible for the consequences, not the creation.

By definition, an effect is something that exists by means of having been determined by some preceding action as its cause.

So, blaming the effect for the action of the cause is unjust.

If our choices are undetermined by God and first-causal by nature, they therefore cannot be effects of God’s creative activity.

They are consequences of God's creating our nature, not inevitibilities forced by it. or else, there would be no such thing as "acting contrary to your nature".

They cannot be explained by it or traced back to it.

They can be products of it. Without the choice being real, it is unjust to punish someone for the results.

They are wholly self-existent or self-originated.

False. They are consequences of a created nature, which God DID create. They are not independent of our existence, and no Arminian claims that. For something to truely be "self-existent", it has to be able to exist without any other factor. So, remove the individual, and the choice should still exist if it were "self-existent". But it is contingent on our existence. So, strawman #3

God cannot create uncaused choices, directly or indirectly. " - Mark Hausam

Nor can choices truly exist independent from the chooser or the object to be chosen.

[Bill the Cat]

An omniscient and omnipotent God has complete unilateral control. Reality will be EXACTLY what God created it to be and what God envisioned in His own mind before He even created it, down to the very most intricate detail, including what you "decided" to eat for breakfast this morning.
-7up

How does this differ from your god? Does yours not have the control over which intelligences to organize into spirit children? If he could choose Christ first, why could he not choose only the ones who would not rebel, like Lucifer did? If he knows what will happen (through omniscience), and allows that agent to come into existence, why is he not just as guilty as what you accuse ours of?

[seven7up]

It is you who does not grasp it.

Free will is not logically impossible under ex nihilo. That's just idiotic.

Yes. It is logically impossible. Watch the videos (1a and 1b) and pay attention closely. So far, your commentary has demonstrated that you have not grasped the depth being addressed here.

Let it simmer.

-7up

[seven7up]

How does this differ from your god? Does yours not have the control over which intelligences to organize into spirit children?

Complete unilateral control, in the sense that God has in Ex Nihilo creation? No. He does not. I would say that God COULD control these intelligences. In other words, God has the power to force them, but that would be oppressive.

If he could choose Christ first, why could he not choose only the ones who would not rebel, like Lucifer did?

It isn't only a matter of God choosing. We are talking about eternal entities of free-will. They have a choice in any action as well.

If he knows what will happen (through omniscience), and allows that agent to come into existence, why is he not just as guilty as what you accuse ours of?

God did not "allow that agent to come into existence." The agent already existed.

Let's see how David Ray Griffin addresses the issue:

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I find the following 7-step statement to be most helpful in eliminating ambiguities, thereby allowing one to see just which premise is being rejected by the various theodicies.

1. To be God, a being must be omnipotent (with an “omnipotent being” defined as one whose power to bring about what it wills is essentially unlimited––except [perhaps] by logical impossibilities).
2. An omnipotent being could unilaterally bring about a world devoid of genuine evil (with “genuine evil” defined as anything that makes the world worse than it could have otherwise been).
3. To be God, a being must be morally perfect.
4. A morally perfect being would want to bring about a world devoid of genuine evil.
5. If there is a God, there would be no genuine evil.
6. But there is genuine evil in the world.
7. Therefore there is no God.
...

....

I now turn to the solution I favor, to which the rejection of creatio ex nihilo is fundamental. In fact, the problem of evil is uniquely a problem for those theistic positions that hold the doctrine of omnipotence implied by the doctrine of creation out of nothing. For, the problem of evil can be stated as a syllogism entailing the non-existence of deity only if deity is defined as omnipotent in the sense of having no essential limitations upon the exercise of its will. And it is precisely omnipotence in this sense that the speculative hypothesis of creatio ex nihilo is designed to support.

Two issues are involved. First, if God in creating our world necessarily worked with some pre-existent actualities, these actualities might well have some power of their own with which they could partially thwart the divine will. Second, there might be some eternal, uncreated, necessary principles (beyond purely logical truths) about the way these actualities can be ordered which limit the sorts of situations that are really possible. But if God created this world out of absolutely nothing, then the beings of this world are absolutely dependent upon God. Any power they have is not at all inherent, but is totally a gift of God, and as such can be overridden (or, which amounts to the same thing, withdrawn) at any time. And if there has not always been a multiplicity of finite actualities, it does not make sense to think of any uncreated and hence necessary principles as to how the actualities of the world can be ordered. Any such principles would be purely contingent ones, created along with the actualities whose behavior they describe, and hence alterable at (divine) will.

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-7up

[seven7up]

If anything christian theology is not pantheistic, but more panentheistic. At least try to understand the terms you toss about.

I understand the terms Sparko.

If you were to have actually watched my video series, you will see that I specified quite clearly that the form of pantheism that is implied by Ex Nihilo is in fact, panENtheism.

That video is found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qduIGkSy1Ro

-7up

[Sparko]

Yes. It is logically impossible. Watch the videos (1a and 1b) and pay attention closely. So far, your commentary has demonstrated that you have not grasped the depth being addressed here.

Let it simmer.

-7up

I watched the videos. You are wrong. Everything you have argued so far is basically, as Bill said, whining. Your reasoning is not logical. There is no reason God can't create people with free will. Despite you repeating yourself and wanting people to watch your dumb videos which basically just repeat the same whining.

Lay it out for us in a logical statement with no LDS preconceptions. Go for it.