From: hartigan@ac.dal.ca
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc
Subject: Jarek's "heresy"
Date: 10 Sep 92 16:24:02 -0300
Organization: Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada



In which Sean gets a lesson in theology...

> In <1992Sep5.183321.7357@ac.dal.ca> Sean Hartigan writes about problems
> to reconcile omniscience and benevolence of God with free will of human
> souls and with the concepts of damnation and salvation:

-Jarek:
>>>> God should be ABLE to know all future free actions, 
>>>> not HAVE to know all future free actions
-Sean:
>> he surely asked [...] "What things do I need to know?"
>>
>
> And he learns: "If I learn about X (what Sean will drink tonight), then
> Y (he will have no choice). If I don't learn about X, then Z (Sean will
> have a free choice and the world won't be destroyed)". So He says: "Let
> the choice be his. I won't learn in advance what his choice will be".  

Seems fair enough.

-Sean:
>[Thus God] found out all the answers he would ever need 
>[and became] effectively OMNISCIENT. 
>
> Exactly. And He allowed for a free will - if He chose to. Thus we have
> incorporated both omniscience and free will into one, consistent model. 

Well, I actually never had problems with the omniscience/free will
stuff, anyway. Boethius explained all that for me...but the next one is
trickier.

> Next, you refer to another problem: You say that this able-omniscience
> does not remove the "problem of evil":

Yeah!

-Sean:
>> How could a loving God NOT look ahead and see who was going to damn
>> themselves, and them mercifully decline to create them?
>
> There is a number of solutions to this paradox. Let's assume that God
> would indeed look ahead. Let's also assume that He means the best for
> His creation and that He uses NN's own criteria to determine what's the
> best for NN. 

NN is a person, right?  Heck, if God uses MY criteria to determine what's
best for me, than we'll get along fine!
 
> The immediate conclusion is that, from a certain moment on,
> His creation will feel satisfied with what it will have and that it will
> not blame God for its past missfortunes and suffernigs. Is it possible
> to reconcile this conclusion with the notion of eternal Hell?   

I'm afraid I don't understand where this conclusion comes from. Normally
your English is pretty darn good, but every now and then you use a 
weird phrasing that throws me. Can you rephrase that paragraph for me?
 
> There are at least two directions in which our thinking can go. First,
> we may try to remove the contradiction between eternality spent in Hell
> (a place of suffering) >>>> and satisfaction from certain moment on saying
> that suffering is a relative thing.

The bit from ">>>>" on - can you rephrase that? I'm not sure what you mean 
here.

> Second, we may try to remove this
> contradiction by the analysis of the term 'eternal'. Let's try both:

Yeah, lets! :)

> 1) Hell is, first of all, a place of separation from God. Therefore, by
> definition, it is a place of suffering for all those who want God. This
> means that people who don't want God may enjoy Hell in their own way,

What about people that WOULD want God, if they thought he existed?
 
> though from a theist's point of view this is a kind of masochistic fun:
> When a theist imagines himself in this situation, he shrugges. The fiery
> pictures of Hell are thus understood as a message to those who want God:
> "If you want God, be true to your feelings and follow Him for you cannot
>  find a real peace until you come to Him".

This is an intriguing idea of Hell - one that kind of fits a popular
slogan of adolescent rebels: "I don't want to go to Heaven, I'd rather
be in Hell with all my friends! Down there is where the party will be!"

I agree - this conception of Hell removes the contradiction between
a God of love and a God of justice...PROVIDING that the fellows in Hell
can go to Heaven if they change their minds and decide that they want God.
If they are stuck down there forever, even if they change their minds,
then God is a S.O.B., in my opinion. 
 
Another, (sort of) related point:
What if your true feelings lead you to Buddhism, etc.?

> 2) Does 'eternal' necessarily indicate infinite duration in time? Or is
> it only a way to describe incredibly long period of time (for example,
> longer than the lifetime of our Universe)? 

My understanding is that "eternal" means "outside of the realm of time."
 
> Or maybe it refers to a state
> with infinitisimal but non-zero transition probability (in this case the
> chances to go from Hell to Heaven are negligible for any period of time,
> so there's no hope; still, the transition will happen and there will be
> another infinity to be enjoyed in Heaven)? 

That still sounds pretty bad!

> Or maybe it means that this
> probablity is strictly zero and a person in Hell will never go to Heaven
> UNLESS he/she will completely change its feelings about what he/she is:
> If Jarek-in-Hell could feel the 'I am' of the future Jarek-in-Heaven, he
> would not recognize this guy Jarek-in-Heaven as himself (Jarek-in Hell
> is damned forever, but the true Jarek will be saved as Jarek-in Heaven)?

I assure you - if I thought for one minute that God existed, I'd 
be as happy as a clam to do what he wanted.  If they give me this kind
of chance in Hell...my feelings about what's what will be sufficiently
changed (now KNOWING that God exists) that I'll stand on my head and
spit nickels if that's what the Big Guy wants!
 
> I tend to combine option 1) with the last answer of option 2), but this
> is only my personal preference. And I believe that there are other ways
> to get rid of this paradox. After all, it doesn't matter which solution
> one chooses because the only purpose of such theological models is to 
> remove artificial intellectual barriers on our way to God.

Well, you're one slick old theologian. I guess my contention that
the salvation/damnation doctrine is incompatible with a loving God only
applies to the old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone theology that we see
so much of on the net. 

Still, though...when they tell us to worship God, what they do is present
us with a theological model and tell us to believe/not-believe in its
absolute truth.  It sounds like this is not how you understand the process
of belief.  What is the act of faith, in your view, if it's NOT a matter
of accepting a theology as being The Truth?

-Sean:
>Your able-omniscient God, then, still creates the same theological problems
>(with a slight heretical twist...:) as the old omniscient one. 
>
> As you see, I disagree. I also disagree that it's a heresy. I COULD have 
> made it a heresy by discarding the notion of Hell. All paradoxes would
> then have disappeared. But I see no need for any heresy. All we need to
> understand the ancient descriptions of God is to translate them into a
> modern language. Human thinking changes. God remains the same. 

I guess you're right. From the point of view of the fundamentalist
Protestants raging around the net, you're a vile heretic indeed...but 
who made THEM the final arbiters of what's Christian and what's not? 
It's a shame, but THEY are what your average net.atheist equates with
the word "Christian," just because they are the most vocal. One forgets
that there are other ways to understand the Gospels than Jimmy Swaggart's.
 
> Best wishes,
>             Jarek

Sean Hartigan
hartigan@ac.dal.ca

"Are you a sceptic, then?"
"Never, my dear. Scepticism is the beginning of Faith." 

Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc