You came into a conversation I was having with someone else about Gods morality and you asked for scientific support for God which was irrelevant for proving morality.
As far as Gods morality is concerned objective moral values are rooted in God's nature and not in His will so by nature he cannot be evil and is morally good. Gods goodness is expressed to us with his moral laws for which become a Christians moral duties. So objective morality doesn't exist independent of God, they are God and he cannot be or do anything else.
You just contradicted yourself in back to back paragraphs.... How on one hand can you claim that morality itself is rooted in god, however the fact that god may not actually exist is irrelevant.
The reality is, until we have good reason to believe the god you are referring to exists, then you have no solid foundation to build any other argument on in regards to that god.
But God is not a finite being and is not restricted by our understanding of time and space.
I don't see how that has any relevance...
Do you have any support for this as even if you could support this you would not know what to look for. Good would mean nothing without evil like love would mean nothing without hate. These are essential values that need to be recognized as they are the basis for human endeavor and existence. I think your drawing a long bow that cannot be verified so it is easier said than done.
It's not hard to figure out... if you take all of the evil acts out of the world, and people carry on with their lives as all else was normal, then the only choices they'd have are what we'd consider to be morally good, or morally neutral.
I guess in a sense in many situations you'd have a contrast between a good act and a neutral act, so you could still identify good. But there's no reason to believe that eliminating evil would also eliminate good. There's simply no reason to believe that to be true.
There are certain common factors and the fact is serial killers are either born or made they don't just pop up out of thin air from a so called normal person who has no history or neurological disorders. Humans have a survival instinct where anyone could kill but most people are able to rationalize things to know that it is wrong in most situations. Serial killers don't have that ability. There are certain common factors such as childhood abuse and trauma that certainly causes them to not be able to think and act like most people.
Many serial killers are survivors of early childhood trauma of some kind – physical or sexual abuse, family dysfunction, emotionally distant or absent parents. Trauma is the single recurring theme in the biographies of most killers.
What makes a serial killer?
Ok.... I don't disagree with any of that, but again I'm not sure how it's relevant to my argument
No I said Gods creation was perfect and then it was corrupted by sin. This has allowed things to deteriorate and become imperfect. If God makes creates with free will then by nature there has to be the possibility of consequences of choice if there is good and evil. Wrong choices can lead to bad consequences which may mean things become corrupted and put in chaos. That leads to the loss of God given free will.
If it was vulnerable to corruption via sin, then it wasn't perfect. It had a flaw. A perfect universe would not have been vulnerable to sin entering it.
Alternatively the only way this design could be perfect is if god intended for the world to be corrupted as it went in the story. That means things went perfectly as to his plan, however his plan was for the world to fall into sin.
If I am defending Gods actions morally I am doing it from a biblical position of what the bible says. That is different to you injecting your views onto God restricting him to our time, space and understanding. God thinks infinitely and we think finitely for one. The bible tells us why God did things. Jesus clearly tells us how we should act morally.
A lot of things you have claimed is either based on your own personal interpretation, and not everything you are arguing is explicitly stated in the bible. Quoting the bible at me isn't enough, you must show the claims you are making are true.
But your critiquing God from a atheistic and worldly perspective when God also occupies a divine and spiritual realm beyond our reality of time and space. I qualify when I try to explain things in human terms to try and explain things. I don't say that is is how things are but that these may be possibilities to consider to try and show how the context may be beyond what we understand.
For example, your claims here aren't really supported by the bible. There isn't much said about what heaven is, or any realm that god may or may not inhabit. You're basing your claims on theology that came well after the fact.
This explanation of how God relates to us is common knowledge and derived from an understanding of what the bible says. It is not just plain speculation. You make criticize God without reading or understanding the bible. It would be like a layperson criticizing a mechanics work when they have never read a car manual.
I've read the bible, and I'm quite familiar with it. I don't claim to be a scholar on the subject, however you're making more unjustified (and in this case demonstrably false) claims. If how god relates to us was common knowledge, then there would be a unified worldwide church dedicated to this god. Instead we have tens of thousands of denominations, and large parts of the world have no significant christian presence.
On the contrary, the reason for the continually fracturing church is because there's nothing more than subjective speculation, and whenever a dispute arises there's no objective way to determine who's interpretation is correct, hence a new sect breaks away with a modified theology. This wouldn't happen at all if what god wants is clear and common knowledge.
That is the common view of most critics. Sam Harris's moral landscape is certain no verified idea and has many inconsistencies and problems so I don't thin we can place too much faith in it as a foundation for objective morally. The very fact that people are debating the interpretation of it points to its subjectivity. What one person views human well-being is based on happiness and pleasure another person will disagree so we are back to subjectivity.
The irony is I could say the exact same about your moral arguments so far. However, at least we know the concept of human well-being is a real thing whereas we don't know if your god is.
Once again you are restricting things to human logic and God is beyond this. What if his plan is still ongoing and is not completed yet. What if as the bible says that in the end a perfect situation is achieved. It just means that it has to take a certain path for that perfection to be established.
You again are claiming to know the mind of god. How do you know that god has some kind of logic that we don't have access to? And how would that even work given that the laws of logic are also objective?
I don't think every single little step happens according to Gods plan. If we have free will I cannot see how that would be the case. Just because God knows what happens and speaks like he knows what happened doesn't mean he controls everything that happens. When a storm or earthquake occurs it is the result of certain laws and conditions that come together (Chaos theory). God is not going to control all these events. He has only created the laws that govern these things.
So he has only created the ability to have free will and it is up to us to choose which way to go. God sees us outside time like the event has already happened because God is not subject to time as we know it. The bible says God was there before time. There is a video I watch on this that explained things well which ends with God is responsible for the fact of freedom but humans are responsible for the act of freedom.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN53uHzOoXs
This is another point, the bible never explicitly says we have free will either, nor at any point does it say god values or protects free will. That also is a position based on extra-biblical theology. In fact there's many verses which talk about predestination or god explicitly violating the free will of certain characters.
You're going to have to back your claim that free will is something that god actually cares about as well, because you're not going to find much about it in scripture.
But like your boss God does not make robots to carry out the plan. Humans are free agents otherwise we would be slaves or robots. So people can choose to follow the plan and just because God knows the end result as to who follow that plan or not does not mean he had any influence or control of the steps taken in implementing that plan by people. A good example is
if you were watching a replay of a footy game and someone told you the score so you knew the end result. Does that mean that the players don;t have free will anymore during the game.
I've already addressed this argument. People can be wired in ways that they have a variety of choices, but would also never make certain choices. For example, I'd never choose to become a serial killer... does that make me a robot?
Of course not. Hence this argument is silly.
No I don't pick and choose verses. I choose to investigate and understand bible verses in context and with a better understanding from others who have studied the bible more comprehensively. Something it seems you don't do and if anything you are the one pulling isolated verses out of the bible and using them to suit your preconceived view that God and the bible are wrong. Here is a commentary that explains things better than I could about Romans 8:29. The author Greg Boyd is an internationally recognized theologian, preacher, teacher, apologist and author.
The text does not imply that God loves certain individuals ahead of time but not others. And the text certainly doesn’t imply that God foreknows who will and will not choose to be in Christ ahead of time. In fact, any attempt to use this text to prove that God foreknows future free acts actually backfires, for the “foreknowledge” Paul speaks about is limited. Paul says “those who God foreknew he predestined…” This implies there are others God did not foreknow.
Nor can this passage be used to support that idea that God predestines who will and will not be in Christ. Read the text carefully. What is predestined is not who will be in or out, but what will happen to all who are in. They will eventually be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ and glorified. God predestines the consequence of the choice to be in Christ or not, but he doesn’t predestine the choice itself. Scripture is clear that God wants every person to put their trust in his Son, and through his Spirit God empowers us toward this end (2 Pet. 3:9).
How do you respond to Romans 8:29-30? - Greg Boyd - ReKnew
Again, how do you justify claiming I am not familiar with the bible just because I disagree with you on it. In fact, a number of studies show the two most biblically literate demographics are Atheists, and Mormons. Many atheists became atheists as a result of reading the bible.
There is one difference between us though, at one point I was a christian. I looked at the evidence and wound up changing my mind. That shows I am open to critical thought and following where the evidence leads. I have no particular attachment to non-belief, and if evidence is shown that justifies belief, then I will believe.
You on the other hand likely have not shown that same willingness to be open to alternative views, and likely have an attachment to your faith and a bias towards it.
God no more created Dahmer that way than he did for the Aussie bush fires. The bush fires are said to be a combination of climate change, droughts and poor land management. As mentioned research shows that most serial killers have been conditioned to end up that way. But even if they were born that way this is often the result of genetic disorders or other influences that effected the brain sometimes through prenatal events or even hereditary such as epigenetics. But certainly not God reaching down and making it that way.
Again, you're claiming to know the mind and actions of god.... how do you know these things?
As mentioned God by nature is all good. He cannot be morally bad. So whatever you perceive as him being bad is your subjective view of morality.
And who did you learn this fact from, god himself? Just because something claims to be morally perfect doesn't make it so. Actions speak louder than words, and god is responsible for a number of immoral acts based on the bible stories.
Gods acts in his time and that time is perfect time so that in the end sin and evil will be defeated. Any other time will not achieve the outcome. The same as when Jesus came. It was at the right time for Christ in our history and happened according to the prophesies. Any other time it would not have brought the right outcome as people were not ready.
If you have the ability to end evil and you choose to not do so, then you at the very least partially responsible for that evil, if not an outright co-conspirator.
That's the difference between me and your god though, if I was aware a child was being raped in the next room, I would do everything in my power to stop it. God apparently doesn't care that much and often allows it to continue.
Based on situations like that, I'm morally superior to your god, and if you would act in the same way I did, then you are too.
That,s what I am trying to do. Sorry if I am not explaining things well. The thing is originally someone was criticizing God morally for killing people. I said we cannot judge God on how we perceive things as God is beyond our realm of time and space. They were trying to tie him down to how we see things. I said that for one we see death differently.
For atheists killing is final as this world is all there is so it has more gravity. For God the taking of a life is not final and is moving people from one dimension to another so it doesn't have the same implications as it does for human understanding. That needs to be taken into consideration what applying our view or morality onto God.
Again, you're going to need to justify these claims.