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Ok - it just seemed that you were calling this a misrepresentation in your previous posts.
Glad it´s got clarified.
You're going to want to back away from this line of thought, if only because it makes a portion of God's knowledge about the state of things dependent on the human condition, which has unsettling consequences for me.
You're going to want to back away from this line of thought, if only because it makes a portion of God's knowledge about the state of things dependent on the human condition, which has unsettling consequences for me.
I agree. And this last post of yours has nothing to do with the previous one you made.
If the conditions of possibility for evil post-date God, then you've demonstrated that which is not immanent in God, and hence made evil contingent upon humans... and thus God's knowledge of evil contingent on humans.
So, let me offer a different definition. I think we can both agree to this definition and it'll resolve this problem nicely.
I think we can safely decide that objective morality derives from God, thus, two otherwise similar actions can have different moral outcomes. Taking my sword and striking someone down because I want their wife is bad. Taking my sword and striking someone down because the Lord commands me isn't bad.
So from various Biblical examples we can otherwise assume that objective morality is going about one's life in a way that would please God, and being immoral would be going about one's life in a way that displeases God.
So, if we take it to be the case that morality derives from staying within God's limits or going outside of God's limits (morally speaking) we can establish that evil has existed forever and does not derive from human actions, it derives from God's expectations.
In other words, as soon as God makes a decision about how He wants humans to behave, He has created the conditions of possibility necessary for both Good and Evil. Eating the fruit from the tree was the first evil act by humans. Lucifer's rebellion was the first evil act by something not a human, but neither invented evil.
In this definition, the possibility for evil is created the moment God creates the possibility for good, since one is just the opposite of the other. This both allows us to make evil immanent to God in a way that doesn't make God evil, justifies the existence of evil in the world, and doesn't hurt any definitions of free will.
I hope I explained this well.
God's will is immanent; it is also transcendent. It is also necessary. It is also holy.I agree with you, but for the sake of correctness, you're confusing your terms. You should replace necessary with immanent.
God does not control what you want to do. God loves you and wish you would come to Him. But if you don't, God will let you go. This has nothing to do with God's understanding or knowledge.
"God does not control"; what exactly is beyond God's control?
What idea do you have that God comes to know?
What choice do you make that God comes to learn?
That which "God does not control" has everything to do with God's understanding and knowledge or your implied lack thereof.
Evil is that which displeases God, regardless of whether or not any evil act is performed.
The only point I'm trying to make is that evil doesn't depend on humans. Evil ACTIONS do, but not evil itself.
No no.
You do not control the behavior of your young son, does not mean he will do something you do not understand. You just let him do, without telling him what or how to do.
Whatever we do, God fully understand, including your decision to reject Him or to disobey Him.
What I said was: These horrible things "happened". We don't have to think about them or to know the bad to act them out.
God sees our actions. God does not have to be evil so to make us do evil. God does not need to put evil in our mind. On the contrary, God explicitly tells Adam: DON'T eat that fruit. It does not mean the fruit is evil. God simply says: don't eat it. If Adam does not have a free will, how could he eat it?
Every idea, even the ideas that are unlike God, the evil ideas, are originally conceived by God.
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