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No, wrong. Or at least you haven't demonstrated this to be the case. We have no access to the more or less deterministic physics that underlie human behavior; we deal with the whole complex process (whether ourselves or someone else) as if it were a single entity. At that level, moral judgments seem to work reasonably well.
Well, that would certainly be an intellectually honest position. And that's what you were looking for, right?
Why is it absurd? Don't just assert it: argue it.
Right. All of that stuff about God hardening Pharaoh's heart, for instance, and loving Jacob but hating Esau before either had done anything, that's not in the Bible.
Sorry, but I manage to parent my kids just fine. Recognizing that human behavior is rooted in biology, in upbringing and genetics, makes me less willing to make ultimate moral judgments about people, but we're already supposed to be avoiding that, aren't we? At least if you take this Christianity business seriously.
You seem to have missed a step in your argument here. What you have to do is show that there is a real difference between mechanical causality and moral culpability, that culpability is not simply what we call mechanical causality when we don't recognize the mechanics. You're simply assuming that your distinction between them is valid.
Good. No one is morally repugnant. There is no reprehensibility. Its just fine if your child murders his sister, or rapes here. You are not one to judge. Whatever. Would you stop with the fake arguments, and stick to the rea l ones please?sfs said:
No, it's not really MY assumption. It's implicit to human behavior - to the very way that you would parent a child. To deny the principle of culpability - and its distinction from mechanical causality - would only contradict your own behavior and assumptions, even though you are currently trying to deny this for the sake of argument.
Your citing the above biblical references does have some evidentiary value. I have no shame in denying this because the fact is that Ive never seen a theological system including my own completely free of problem passages.
Given the weakness of your own arguments, you would do well to be less contemptuous. As a human, I make moral judgments about the actions of others. Doing so is, as you say elsewhere, built into us as humans. What you trying to do is demonstrate that there is a particular ontological foundation to moral agents that justifies those judgments. You haven't done that. All you have done is assume that the judgments must have such a foundation because, well, we make them. That's not an argument.
Sorry, but I have no responsibility to interpret these passages in any way at all. I have no theological system, and tend to view all theological systems, including yours, as nothing but ill-founded speculation.
To post on a Christian forum while claiming to have no theological system means you are either terribly confused or intellectually dishonest, as far as I can see. Care to clarify this puzzling statement?
This is simply false. It is quite possible to that that morality is dependent wholly on human evolution and culture and has no ultimate basis, and still to think that punishment and guilt are useful mechanisms for producing humans who are pleasant to be around and societies that are pleasant to live in. I make no claim that this is true, but it is an intellectually consistent view.
This response misses my point. The argument adduced in the OP is an extrapolation of what we REALLY believe - deep down. It is not an extrapolation of what is logically possible. Yes, it may be logically possible that determinism is true, but the notion that this is what really believe is belied by both Scripture and human behavior. BTW, in my view God holds us accountable for acting according to the best of our knowledge, for acting in accordance with what we REALLY believe to be true.
If you are trying to construct an argument about reality, what matters is what's true, not what humans believe to be true. I certainly agree that most of us think of ourselves in ways that are not consistent with determinism, and that our mental makeup inclines us in that direction. So what? Human gut feelings are a very poor guide to reality, and are quite often wrong. We really believe -- and act as if we believe -- that matter is solid, that objects slow and stop when left alone, that certain numbers are lucky and unlucky, and all sorts of other things. Believing something doesn't make it so.
To be a Christian is to follow Jesus and to rely on him for salvation. A theology is an attempt to explain what's going on in that process. I would say that mistaking belief in a theological system for being a Christian is a very deep confusion indeed.
I think you're missing something fundamental here. Science does not exclude God as an explanation because God is supernatural; science has no definition of "natural" and "supernatural". Science (usually) excludes God because God-explanations on offer are untestable. If you care to specify an explanation for objective observations that includes God, and that can be distinguished from non-God explanations on the basis of further observations, then your explanation can be part of science. Scientists are highly pragmatic, and to date God-based explanations have been singularly useless in predicting future observations.
