[Nje to Marilyn:]
"You fail to grasp what "omnipotence" really means.
If an omnipotent being existed and desired it's creations to know something, why bother having them learn through suffering, when it'd be just as easy to create them in possesion of that knowledge or wisdom?  It also could allow them to learn anything without the need for pain."
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Nje, you make the most elementary philosophical error in your treatment of the problem of pain.  You ignore the implications of a radical divine respect for free will.   If God simply created us all-wise, then our wisdom would not be the product of free striving and would therefore lack moral value.  God's love does not long for communion with robots!  The moral value of free will is a function of its capacity to overcome severe limitations and compelling contrary inclinations.  I'd take Marilyn's hard-won lessons through suffering over your simple-minded philosophizing.  You might as well ask, "Why would God create anything at all, since an omnipotent, omniscient being has nothing to learn and could gain no benefit from creating?

[Nje to Marilyn:]
"`Omnipotence'- please look this term up in the dictionary before you respond to my posts again."
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I agree that Marilyn should desist from replying to your posts again--until you learn to season your penchant for snideness with a modicum of rigor.
A man can't determine if his girlfriend loves him by looking up "love" in a dictionary.  Nor can the meaning of "omnipotence" be determined from a dictionary when the claims of the Judeo-Christian tradition are being scrutinized.   One must grasp this term through an understanding of the ancient Hebrew mindset and the nuances of biblical languages.  Otherwise, you are debating an irrelevant caricature.  

The dumbest definition of "omniscience" is: "power and authority with no limits, not even the law of noncontradiction."  On this view, one deems it sensible to ask, "Can God make an object so heavy that even He cannot lift it?"  This question is equivalent to nonsense like: "Can God outperform Himself?"  Biblically speaking, omnipotence is in fact a mystery and means that God can do anything that is actually possible (not logically possible).  But we are not competent to determine what is actually possible. It is a basic phiosophical insight that the meaning of key terms like "omnisciennce" and "omnipotence" must be determined from the cultural language games in which they play a role and not from a detached dictionary definition, which is in the final analysis irrelevant to any meaningful discussion of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Consider the relationship between omniscience and free will.  If God perceives an X factor in your mind that infallibly enables Him to predict all your choices, then by definition that X factor determines your choices and robs you of your freedom.  But, you say, if God transcends time He knows what all my free choices will be.  Forget for the moment that this sweeping claim is not justified by Scripture.  If God foreknows how I will misuse my free will, then He can do nothing to prevent me from making those choices.  Why not?  Because if He prevented my choices, my decisions would then not be manifested in time for Him to preview!  Thus, in Scripture divine foreknowledge logically precedes predestination (Romans 8:29), not vice versa; and the future is not entirely fixed for a biblical prophet's clairvoyance.  

Divine providence is best grasped in terms of an analogy.  Suppose God is the world chess champion and humanity is the novice player.  The champion has no control over the novice's freely chosen moves.  But the champion knows he can almost always manipulate the game to conclude in the way he wishes.   How much God is willing to intervene in response to our prayers and faith remains a mystery which requires further research.

Why is there something rather than nothing at all?  Because for one thing God expands `His' horizons through the unpredictable aspects of `His' creation, especially of free and intelligent beings like humans.  Thus, at times the biblical God can "regret" human choices.  

Don

P.S. Brendan's endearingly irrelevant post (reply #44) overlooks the distinction between what God, as the ground of Being, can perceive through our current limited egos and what God can predetermine about the freely chosen future.

I'm leaving that definition crap alone.  I've always hated how so many words can mean so many different things, and this is exactly why.

About that free will thing- You can claim it's a "radical divine respect for free will", but all one has to do to solve this issue is consider the damned- you know, 'negs' 'demons' and whatever..  Because of their disposition, their own free will choices render them in that state of damnation, proving once and for all the responsibiity of the truly benevolent divine- to out-right deny free will of such beings, for their own good.

This is my "elementary" philosophy, as you said.
Call it what you will, I believe in these ideals so profoundly, I don't even feel my ego being hurt when they're criticized.

I realize this adds nothing to the debate on this thread, but I wanted to say to Don & Marilyn, who have been adversaries at times,  that I have been moved by the spiritual genorisity shown in your responses to Nje's comments.

[Craig: "In my judgment, people who love themselves less - do more to help others. thus the statement of is not greatly based upon fact, a recent program about overweight woman was on tv the other day, a woman had a stomach band fitted, and she lost alot of weight, when she was fat she was a super mother, great wife - after she lost the weight, she was a bad mother, bad wife, cared only for herself."
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Here you ignore the well-grounded consensus of modern psychology.   People who loathe themselves are generally angry at those who contributed to their low self-esteem.  Their hang-outs inhibit them from expressing altruism.   In any case, your example is irrelevant to your point.   There is no reason to believe that the fat lady hated herself as well as her appearance.   Conversely, her self-absorbed vanity after her weight loss is best understood as a function of lingering insecurities rather than as an indictment of the value of a healthy self-esteem.

[Craig:] "We should have free will over how much pain one is allowed to suffer."
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Once you agree that pain is essential to the development of pain-dependent virtues like courage, you can always ask why there there is not less pain.  So your objection is meaningless.  Besides, you ignore 3 relevant facts:

(1) The biblical God voluntarily surrendered complete control of the universe to enhance its unpredictability.  So much of our pain is beyond God's micromanagement.  You have no objective grounds for blaming God for this unpredictability.  God is love in the sense that He fulfils His promises and has acted in Christ for our benefit.  But God is not love in your limited anthropomorphic sense.  

(2) As a result of God's surrender of complete control over creation, our freely chosen future is flexible, not predetermined.  According to the Bible, our preliminary destiny can be altered in response to our prayers, faith, and faithful service, but these changes in response to our desperately expressed needs may not be positive when we challenge God's revealed will.

For example, Hezekiah, one of Israel’s greatest kings, becomes mortally ill and is told by the prophet Isaiah that God decrees this illness as the vehicle for his predestined death (see Isaiah 38).   But in a moment of weakness, Hezekiah bitterly intercedes with God to extend his life.   Through Isaiah, God reveals that the script has now been changed and that Hezekiah will be granted 15 more years.  But the moral of the story is this: be careful what you ask for; you just may get it.  In those 15 years, Hezekiah gives birth to a son, Manasseh, who turns out to be one of Israel’s most evil kings.  In retrospect, it seems preferable that Hezekiah would have gracefully accepted his death at the scripted time.  That way, Israel would have been spared the evil reign of Manasseh.

Yet sometimes God can use even our poor decisions to accomplish a great purpose (Romans 8:28).  The story of Joseph is the story of how immoral acts that God never intended were blended into a divine plan to preserve Israel’s ancestors and save Egypt from mass starvation in a time of famine. Joseph's brothers were rightfully displeased by his egotistical flaunting of his self-aggrandizing dreams.  But they were wrong to sell him into slavery and then lie about it to their father Jacob.  Still, in Joseph’s later dramatic reunion with his brothers, he implies that God molded the consequences of these immoral acts into a glorious purpose.  As Joseph puts it,  “Even though you intended to harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people (Genesis 50:20).”  Much of how all this works admittedly remains mysterious, but this mystery does not disprove God's loving nature.  

(3) Earthly suffering is just one small step in a very long spiritual journey that began before we were born and will continue in future challenges in highly varied heavenly planes.   Yes, the Bible teaches the doctrine of the preexistence of the soul (Jeremiah 1:5; John 9:1-2; Wisdom of Solomon 8:19-20)!   Our earthly sufferings might  be a function of lessons required by our preearthly existence.  We can be compensated for our earthly suffering by its role in enhancing our spiritual capacities in future postmortem challenges.

[Craig:]  "We would have morals without god, we did so for thousands of years before he decided to show his face...Morals, are based upon 30% instinct 70 percent education."
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Here you totally miss the point.  Moral beliefs may be based on instinct, education, and cultural conditioning.  The real issue is this: what makes right actions right and binding?  Without God, you cannot explain why I should not violate your moral rules and rape and pillage whenever doing so makes me happy and I can get away with it.  If you reply, "If everyone did that, the world would be reduced to a living Hell!",  I might reply: "True, but not everyone will follow my lead.  So I can rape and pillage and still live a satisfying life. If I don't get caught, you have nothing morally meaningful to say that should restrain me."

[Craig:] "Proper moral order? Who's morals? God's? "
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You bet!  Without God, morality lacks any objective grounds for accountability.  

[Craig:] "As you said yourself - the christian god is not omnipotent in the meaning of all power, all knowing etc. thus he can be exaggerated."
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No, I never denied God omnipotence.  Biblically speaking, the word means" the power to do anything that is actually possible [not logically possible]."   So His power cannot be exaggerated.  There is no basis for an comparison with some other being who can do what God cannot.

[Craig:] "God wants worship, yet he shows no love in return, if I do something for god, should he not give me something back, which currently he does not, such a relationship in my opinion is bogus and not worth entering."
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Here you are being disingenous.  I challenged you to perform an extended series of prayer experiences and you declined.  To experience God's love, all you have to do is imeet His conditions.  God honors His biblical promises and many on this site, myself included, have powerfully experienced His love.  You can too.

Don

Craig,

You feel it is unjust if God allows someone to die despite saying they don't want to, or despite prayer.  It may not be as unjust as it seems.  What is in the person's best interest if there is an afterlife?  If they are playing the game of life so to speak, have they accomplished their goal (whether known or not to their waking thoughts)?  If so, and if there is an afterlife, their death is merely a transition.  Possibly to a place free of pain and fear. 

Now you tell me, in the scenario I laid out, would you still hold the cancer victim on this planet?  If she had accomplished what she set out to, learned to love herself and others, learned acceptance, and had a place of pure joy to go to?  She might not know of these things until she passed away - but part of her consciousness may indeed have been aware of it.

I know this sounds like a "new age" answer.  But you see, if the soul goes on, if our consciousness exists with or without a body, then what you think is fair of God or unfair may, in fact be radically different.

Matthew

Hi Craig,

I can also see it this way;

The cancer patient is afraid, frightened, passes away in misery, and then, is still there in conscious awareness.  Huh?  How did that happen.  They may see a light/tunnel as in other NDEs, and then loved ones.  Then they may be shown what their trials of life were about.  Understand their lessons of joy and agony.  Send love to their living relatives. 

For those alive who grieve, it is part of the sorrows we all go through in this world.  The sorrow, if one believes in persistence of the soul, is in part out of ignorance, and in part out of love.  It then leads to acceptance many weeks, months or years later, which is a difficult concept for most of us to grasp.

Matthew

And then, my friend, there may be less point to being on earth and incarnate if the punchline were known without doubt by all.  Maybe that is when the sun goes supernova? 

I don't know myself.  I have not spoken to one deceased person.  Well, actually I have, but have not heard back in language.  If it weren't for the verifications I have been getting about the power of our conscious intentions both singly and in a group, I'd have no personal proof of the afterlife yet.

I think Don's point is a good one.  He asks that you pray, even if you don't believe in it.  You set your conditions out (reasonable).  Really, this is identical to a type of meditation where you put a request to your subconscious which connects to everything.  His point, I believe is that prayers may be answered even from those who profess not to believe in God.  The importance of prayer, or intent is that it enters with clarity and strong belief - as if it were accomplished.  Even with congratulations. 

I am a physician.  I can tell you with certainty that those who have faith in their recovery do better overall than those who expect the other shoe to drop. 

Matthew

I don't Craig.  I always give the truth but put the best spin on it I can.  I also have been talking about the patient's attitudes and positive thinking in terms of treatment.  I explain that any medication studied today has to be compared with a placebo pill (sugar pill).  That 25% of people in any study of any kind will show concrete improvement in any malady when given placebo pills.  Why?  Why should a patient with swollen joints from rheumatoid arthritis have fewer swollen joints measured by an objective party after taking a placebo?  The answer is that even western medicine is acknowledging in its own way, that thought creates/effects reality. 

Any physician who robs people of the possibility of recovery and healing should retire or be drummed out. 

If your leaf experiment works, then why would it work?  You transferred energy to the leaf?  Or you are connected in some way to other biological systems in a way science hasn't figured out?

Again, Craig, 15,000 or 15,000,000 wouldn't matter praying for a woman if it was her time to die.  Death comes when appropriate for an individual or when a random act occurs.  What would be more helpful would be to get these 15,000 people together and give them a list of 10 people to pray for daily.  Take 10 people who have identical illnesses and have the not prayed for, and see if there is a difference in the outcome. 

That study has been done in the medical literature, and showed that people who are prayed for do better in the hospital, whether or not they are aware of the prayer for themselves.

Also, prayer is a very personal thing.  How you direct your intention, thought and prayer is very unique to your own psyche.  Don asked you to experiment with prayer, but I don't think he will make you pray only in a certain way. 

Craig, you and I will be old and long in the tooth before absolute proof of the afterlife is shown (if it is in our lifetimes).  This is why many go to the Monroe institute, or meditate, or do partnered exploration, retrievls, etc.  now.  If you wait for proof positive, you may miss the boat on a lot of good experiences.

Matthew