If a man pushes a button that launches a thousand nuclear bombs, is it just for him to avoid punishment on the grounds of complete ignorance?
That means that if Adam and Eve had not eaten the fruit then they would have been punished for the sins that they committed out of ignorance.
As I understand the theology, until they had eaten the fruit, the only thing that they could do that was a sin was to eat the fruit. Which they had been specifically warned not to do.
education is still important to reduce sin
Indeed. But God didn’t provide any. In fact, He specifically commanded A&E to remain ignorant.
He commanded them not to eat the fruit. Their sin was to eat the fruit, so the command itself might be considered sufficient education to tell them that what they were doing was something they should not be doing.
And then, later, God educated Moses with the Ten Commandments and a long list of laws.
Huh? I don’t understand that at all. Your claim was that any designed entity “cannot do or calculate anything that its designer can’t do or calculate”. I exhibited a computer that can calculate a trillion digits of pi as a counterexample. What does the fact that evolution took a long time to produce the first computer have to do with it? The fact remains that computers can do things that their human designers can’t.
Okay, let me re-state my argument.
1) Any designed object is either limited to actions that its designer can calculate and understand (in theory, given infinite time and paper to write on).
2) In the case of a calculating device like a computer, this means that, given infinite time and infinite paper and stationary, the designer of a computer can in theory perform any calculation that the computer can. (A real designer can’t calculate a trillion digits of pi on pencil and paper because his life is not long enough).
3) The universe has been around for something like 14 billion years.
4) If the universe has a designer, and if the purpose of the universe is to perform some calculation using the processing power of the intelligence that has developed in the universe, then could the universe provide the answer to that calculation any more quickly than the designer of the universe with pencil, paper, and a 14-billion-year head start?
In fact, just about anything that humans build can do things humans can’t do; that’s kind of the whole point of building them. Bulldozers. Can openers. Hammers. Paper airplanes. All of these things can do things that their human designers can’t do.
Yes, but we can predict what they will do given knowledge of all relevant inputs. In the special case of computers, predicting what they will calculate is equivalent to doing the calculation oneself.
[if] someone, somewhere, might know with certainty what I will decide in a given set of circumstances is logically incompatible with the idea that I might choose something else.
Exactly. This is necessarily part of the definition of free will. If you’re predictable to an external agent but not to yourself then it must be the case that there is something that determines your future actions that is accessible to that agent but not to you.
Knowledge of the future is not the same as control of the future.
To take a simpler example; let us say you flip a fair coin ten times, and come up with HHHHHTTHHT. After you have done so, I write down HHHHHTTHHT on a piece of paper and use a time machine to send it to the past, before you flipped the coin.
Thus, when you flip the coin, there exists a piece of paper that says HHHHHTTHHT. This matches with the series of coin-flips that you then make. In what way is this piece of paper influenced by anything that controls the results of the coin-flips?
but nowhere is it explained what that means
Sorry about that. I tried to write a pithy summary but it got too long for a comment. I’ll have to write a separate article about it I guess. For the time being I’ll just have to ask you to trust me: time travel into the past is ruled out by quantum mechanics. (This should be good news for you because it leaves open the possibility of free will!)
It does not, actually. The same quantum-mechanical argument tells me (if I understand the diagrams correctly) that there are no free variables in any observation; that is to say, the result of every experiment is predetermined, unavoidable… predestined.
I still don’t understand the argument, but it certainly looks like an argument against free will to me. (Maybe that is because I don’t understand it).
Let me know if/when you write that separate article.
Yes!!! Exactly!!! That is in fact the whole point of my OP: the quale of the Presence of the Holy Spirit has also been directly observed and therefore does exist (despite the fact that the Holy Spirit does not).
I’ll agree that the quale of the Presence of the Holy Spirit does exist, and I’ll agree that this is not, in and of itself, sufficient evidence to prove beyond doubt the existence of the Holy Spirit. (I will argue that it is evidence in favour of the existence of the Holy Spirit, on the basis that everything which there is a quale for and which is directly measurable in itself does exist—even if the quale can occasionally be triggered without the thing for which the quale exists).
Coming to the realization that free will (and even classical reality itself) are illusions doesn’t make those illusions any less compelling. You can still live your life as if you were a classical being with free will while being aware of the fact that this is not actually true in the deepest metaphysical sense.
Fair enough, but that seems to be the case when you are not using the skill of being certain that your free will is an illusion.
Sorry, that didn’t parse. What is “that”?
The idea that “You can still live your life as if you were a classical being with free will”.
Yes. Did you read “31 flavors of ontology”?
I did. The author of the blog post claims that things can be real to different degrees; that Mozilla Firefox is real in a fundamentally different way to the tree outside my window, which in turn is real in a fundamentally different way to Frodo Baggins.
I don’t see why this means that existence needs to be more than a continuum, though. All it is saying is that points on that continuum (Frodo Baggins, the tree outside my window) are different points on that continuum.
If a man pushes a button that launches a thousand nuclear bombs, is it just for him to avoid punishment on the grounds of complete ignorance?
Of course it is just. How could you possibly doubt it? I mean, imagine the scene: you’re at home watching TV when you suddenly realize that there’s a button on your universal remote that you’ve never pressed and you have no idea what it does. You’re too lazy to get up off the couch to get the manual (and you have no idea where it is anyway, you probably threw it out) so you just push it to see what it does. Nothing happens.
The next day you turn on the TV to discover that nuclear armageddon has broken out at 100 million people are dead. An hour later the FBI shows up at your door and says, “You didn’t push that red button on your remote last night, did you?” “Why yes, yes I did,” you reply. “Is that a problem?” “Well, yes, it rather is. You see, that button launched the nuclear missiles, so I’m afraid you are now the greatest mass murderer in the history of humanity and we’re going to have to take you in. Turn around please.”
As I understand the theology, until they had eaten the fruit, the only thing that they could do that was a sin was to eat the fruit.
Yeah, this theory has always struck me as rather bizarre. So before eating the fruit it’s perfectly OK to torture kittens, perfectly OK to abuse and rape your children, and after you eat the fruit suddenly these things are not OK. Makes no sense to me.
He commanded them not to eat the fruit. Their sin was to eat the fruit,
But why is this a sin? Remember, at this point this is a command issued (according to your theory) by a deity who thinks it’s perfectly OK to torture kittens and rape children. Such a deity does not have a lot of moral authority IMHO.
And then, later, God educated Moses with the Ten Commandments and a long list of laws.
Yeah, that’s another weird thing. God educated Moses. Why not educate everyone? Why should Moses get the benefit of seeing God directly while the rest of us have to make do with second-hand accounts of what God said? And why should we trust Moses? Prophets are a dime a dozen. Why Moses and not Mohammed? Or Joseph Smith? Or L. Ron Hubbard?
And as long as we’re on the topic, why wait so long to educate Moses? By the time we get to Moses, God has already committed a long string of genocides to punish people for sinning (the Flood, Sodom) despite the fact that they have not yet had the benefit of any education from God, even second-hand. That feels very much like the button scenario above, which I should hope grates on your moral intuition as much as it does on mine.
Any designed object is either...
Your either-or construct is missing the “or” clause.
could the universe provide the answer to that calculation any more quickly than the designer
Of course it could. Why would you doubt it?
we can predict what they [computers] will do given knowledge of all relevant inputs
Knowledge of the future is not the same as control of the future.
I didn’t say it was. But reliable knowledge of the future requires that the future be determined by the present. If it is possible to reliably predict the outcome of a coin toss, then the coin toss is deterministic, and therefore the coin cannot have free will. So unless you want to argue that a coin has free will, your example is a complete non-sequitur.
The same quantum-mechanical argument tells me … that there are no free variables in any observation
No, you’ve got this wrong. Quantum randomness is the only thing in our universe (that we know of) that is unpredictable even in principle. So it is possible that free will exists because quantum randomness exists. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that quantum effects have any bearing on human mental processes. So while one cannot rule out the possibility that quantum randomness might lead to free will in something there is no evidence that it leads to free will in us.
Let me know if/when you write that separate article.
it is evidence in favour of the existence of the Holy Spirit
Yes, of course it is. That was my whole point.
Coming to the realization that free will (and even classical reality itself) are illusions doesn’t make those illusions any less compelling. You can still live your life as if you were a classical being with free will while being aware of the fact that this is not actually true in the deepest metaphysical sense.
Fair enough, but that seems to be the case when you are not using the skill of being certain that your free will is an illusion.
Sorry, that didn’t parse. What is “that”?
The idea that “You can still live your life as if you were a classical being with free will”.
Ah. Then yes, I agree. You can live in the Matrix with or without the knowledge that you are living in the Matrix. Personally, I choose the red pill.
I don’t see why this means that existence needs to be more than a continuum, though.
There are different ways of existing. There is existence-as-material-object (trees, houses). There is existence-as-fictional-character (Frodo). There is existence-as-patterns-of-bits-in-a-computer-memory (Firefox). Each of these is orthogonal to the other. George Washington, for example, existed as a physical object, and he also exists as a fictional character (in the story of chopping down the cherry tree). Along each of these “dimensions” a thing can exist to varying degrees. The transformation of a tree into a house is a gradual process. During that process, the tree exists less and less and the house exists more and more. So you have multiple dimensions, each of which has a continuous metric. That’s a vector space.
The real point, though, is that disagreements over whether or not something exists are usually (but not always) disagreements over the mode in which something exists. God clearly exists. The question is what mode he exists in. Fictional character? Material object? Something else?
Of course it is just. How could you possibly doubt it? I mean, imagine the scene: you’re at home watching TV when you suddenly realize that there’s a button on your universal remote that you’ve never pressed and you have no idea what it does. You’re too lazy to get up off the couch to get the manual (and you have no idea where it is anyway, you probably threw it out) so you just push it to see what it does. Nothing happens.
The next day you turn on the TV to discover that nuclear armageddon has broken out at 100 million people are dead. An hour later the FBI shows up at your door and says, “You didn’t push that red button on your remote last night, did you?” “Why yes, yes I did,” you reply. “Is that a problem?” “Well, yes, it rather is. You see, that button launched the nuclear missiles, so I’m afraid you are now the greatest mass murderer in the history of humanity and we’re going to have to take you in. Turn around please.”
For the analogy to match the Garden of Eden example, the red button needs to be clearly marked “Do Not Press”.
And I’m not saying that the just punishment should be same for something done in ignorance. But, at the very least, having pushed the button on the remote, the person in this analogy needs to be very firmly told that that was something that he should not have done. A several-hour lecture on not pushing buttons marked “do not press” is probably justified.
Yeah, this theory has always struck me as rather bizarre. So before eating the fruit it’s perfectly OK to torture kittens, perfectly OK to abuse and rape your children, and after you eat the fruit suddenly these things are not OK. Makes no sense to me.
Put like that, is does seem odd. But consider—biting a kitten’s tail would be a form of torturing kittens. Is it okay for a three-month-old baby, who does not understand what it is doing, to bite a kitten’s tail? (And is it okay for the kitten to then claw at the baby?)
Yeah, that’s another weird thing. God educated Moses. Why not educate everyone? Why should Moses get the benefit of seeing God directly while the rest of us have to make do with second-hand accounts of what God said? And why should we trust Moses? Prophets are a dime a dozen. Why Moses and not Mohammed? Or Joseph Smith? Or L. Ron Hubbard?
Delegation?
And as long as we’re on the topic, why wait so long to educate Moses? By the time we get to Moses, God has already committed a long string of genocides to punish people for sinning (the Flood, Sodom) despite the fact that they have not yet had the benefit of any education from God, even second-hand. That feels very much like the button scenario above, which I should hope grates on your moral intuition as much as it does on mine.
Lots of other people had some idea of what was right and wrong, even before Moses. Consider Cain and Abel—Cain knew it was wrong to kill Abel, but did it anyway. (I have no idea where that knowledge was supposed to have come from, but it was there)
Your either-or construct is missing the “or” clause.
Whoops.
Any designed object is either limited to actions that its designer can calculate and understand (in theory, given infinite time and paper to write on) or cannot be guaranteed to continue to perform to specification.
we can predict what they [computers] will do given knowledge of all relevant inputs
No, we can’t. (link to the Halting Problem)
Okay, but we can still predict the output of the computer at any given, finite, time step.
I didn’t say it was. But reliable knowledge of the future requires that the future be determined by the present. If it is possible to reliably predict the outcome of a coin toss, then the coin toss is deterministic, and therefore the coin cannot have free will.
The important thing in the coin example is not the coin, but the time traveller. The prediction of the coin tosses is not made from knowledge of the present state of the world, but rather from knowledge of the future state of the world; that is to say, the state in which the coin tosses have already happened. The mechanism by which the coin tosses happen is thus irrelevant (the coin tosses can be replaced by a person with free will calling out “head!” and “tail!” in whatever order he freely desires to do).
No, you’ve got this wrong. Quantum randomness is the only thing in our universe (that we know of) that is unpredictable even in principle.
...I’m going to read your further explanation article before I respond to this.
There are different ways of existing. There is existence-as-material-object (trees, houses). There is existence-as-fictional-character (Frodo). There is existence-as-patterns-of-bits-in-a-computer-memory (Firefox).
Agreed.
Each of these is orthogonal to the other.
Why? I can see how the rest of your argument follows from this; I’m not seeing why these different types of existence must be orthogonal, why they can’t be colinear.
(Incidentally, I’d consider “George Washington the physical object” and “George Washington the fictional character” to be two different things which, confusingly, share the same name).
For the analogy to match the Garden of Eden example, the red button needs to be clearly marked “Do Not Press”.
Not quite. It needs to have TWO labels. On the left it says, “DO NOT PRESS” and on the right it says “PRESS THIS BUTTON”. (Actually, a more accurate rendition might be, “Do not press this button” and “Press this button for important information on how to use this remote”. God really needs a better UI/UX guy.)
Is it okay for a three-month-old baby, who does not understand what it is doing, to bite a kitten’s tail?
No. Of course not. Why would you doubt it?
(And is it okay for the kitten to then claw at the baby?)
Yes. Of course. Why would you doubt it?
Delegation?
Huh??? Why would an omnipotent deity need to delegate?
Cain knew it was wrong to kill Abel
How do you know that? Just because he denied doing it? Maybe he thought it was perfectly OK to kill Abel, but wanted to avoid what he saw as unjust punishment.
Also, let’s look at man’s next transgression:
“Ge6:5 And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”
In other words, God’s first genocide (the Flood) was quite literally for thought crimes. Does it seem likely to you that the people committing these (unspecified) thought crimes knew they were transgressing against God’s will?
Okay, but we can still predict the output of the computer at any given, finite, time step.
Really? How exactly would you do that? Because the only way I know of to tell what a computer is going to do at step N once N is sufficiently large is to build a computer and run it for N steps.
the coin tosses can be replaced by a person with free will calling out “head!” and “tail!” in whatever order he freely desires to do
I really don’t get what point you’re trying to make here. My position is that people do not have free will, only the illusion of free will. If it were possible to actually do this experiment, that would simply prove that my position is correct.
why they can’t be colinear.
Because you lose critical information that way, and that leads to unproductive arguments that are actually about the information that you’ve lost.
I’d consider “George Washington the physical object” and “George Washington the fictional character” to be two different things
See, this is exactly what I’m talking about. This is kind of like arguing over whether Shakespeare’s plays were really written by Shakespeare, or by someone else who happened to have the same name. You’ve lost critical information here, namely, that there is a connection between GW-the-historical-person and GW-the-myth that goes far beyond that fact that they have the same name.
Or take another example: Buzz Lighyear started out existing as as an idea in someone’s head. At some later point in time, Buzz Lightyear began to exist also as a cartoon character. These are distinct because Buzz-as-cartoon-character has properties that Buzz-as-idea doesn’t. For example, Buzz-as-cartoon-character has a voice. Buzz-as-idea doesn’t.
But these two Buzz Lightyears are not two separate things that just happen to have the same name, they are one thing that exists in two different ontological categories.
Not quite. It needs to have TWO labels. On the left it says, “DO NOT PRESS” and on the right it says “PRESS THIS BUTTON”.
Hmmmm. Not sure that’s quite right. The serpent wasn’t an authority figure. Maybe label the button “DO NOT PRESS” and add a stranger (a door-to-door insurance salesman, perhaps) who claims that you’ll never know what the button does until you try it?
Is it okay for a three-month-old baby, who does not understand what it is doing, to bite a kitten’s tail?
No. Of course not. Why would you doubt it?
(And is it okay for the kitten to then claw at the baby?)
Yes. Of course. Why would you doubt it?
Okay, in both cases, the situation is basically the same—a juvenile member of one species attacks and damages a juvenile member of another species. Why do you think one is okay and the other one is not?
Delegation?
Huh??? Why would an omnipotent deity need to delegate?
Because it’s really boring to have to keep trying to individually explain the same basic principles to each of a hundred thousand near-complete idiots?
Cain knew it was wrong to kill Abel
How do you know that? Just because he denied doing it? Maybe he thought it was perfectly OK to kill Abel, but wanted to avoid what he saw as unjust punishment.
If so, then he sought to avoid what it from every other person in the world (Genesis 4, end of verse 14: “anyone who finds me will kill me”). Either he thinks that everyone else is arbitrarily evil, or he thinks they’d have reason to want to kill him.
Also, let’s look at man’s next transgression:
“Ge6:5 And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”
In other words, God’s first genocide (the Flood) was quite literally for thought crimes. Does it seem likely to you that the people committing these (unspecified) thought crimes knew they were transgressing against God’s will?
I’d always understood the Flood story as they weren’t just thinking evil, but continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren’t even considering doing non-evil stuff.
Okay, but we can still predict the output of the computer at any given, finite, time step.
Really? How exactly would you do that? Because the only way I know of to tell what a computer is going to do at step N once N is sufficiently large is to build a computer and run it for N steps.
Simulate the algorithm with pencil and paper, if all else fails. (Technically, you could consider that as using your brain as the computer and running the program, except you can interrupt it at any point and investigate the current state)
the coin tosses can be replaced by a person with free will calling out “head!” and “tail!” in whatever order he freely desires to do
I really don’t get what point you’re trying to make here. My position is that people do not have free will, only the illusion of free will. If it were possible to actually do this experiment, that would simply prove that my position is correct.
The point I’m trying to make with the coin/time-traveller example is that knowledge of the future—even perfect knowledge of the future—does not necessarily imply a perfectly deterministic universe.
See, this is exactly what I’m talking about. This is kind of like arguing over whether Shakespeare’s plays were really written by Shakespeare, or by someone else who happened to have the same name. You’ve lost critical information here, namely, that there is a connection between GW-the-historical-person and GW-the-myth that goes far beyond that fact that they have the same name.
(Side note: I don’t actually know GW-the-myth. It’s a bit of cultural extelligence that I, as a non-American, haven’t really been exposed to. I’m not certain whether it’s important to this argument that I should)
Or take another example: Buzz Lighyear started out existing as as an idea in someone’s head. At some later point in time, Buzz Lightyear began to exist also as a cartoon character. These are distinct because Buzz-as-cartoon-character has properties that Buzz-as-idea doesn’t. For example, Buzz-as-cartoon-character has a voice. Buzz-as-idea doesn’t.
Hmmm. An interesting point. A thing can certainly change category over time. An idea can become a character in a book can become a character in a film can become ten thousand separate, distinct ideas can become a thousand incompatible fanfics. At some point, the question of whether two things are the same must also become fuzzy, and non-binary.
Consider; I can create the idea of a character who is some strange mix of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker (perhaps, to mix in some Star Trek, they were merged in a transporter accident). It would not be true to say that this is the same character as Luke, but it would also not be true to say that it’s entirely not the same character as Luke. Similarly with Han. But it would be true to say that Han is not the same character as Luke.
So whether two things are the same or not is, at the very least, a continuum.
How could Eve have known that? See my point above about Eve not having the benefit of any cultural references.
Why do you think one is okay and the other one is not?
Because the kitten is acting in self defense. If the kitten had initiated the violence, that would not be OK.
Because it’s really boring
Seriously?
he sought to avoid what it from every other person in the world
No he didn’t. He was cursed by God (Ge4:12) and he’s lamenting the result of that curse.
he thinks they’d have reason to want to kill him.
Yes, because he’s cursed by God.
I’d always understood the Flood story as they weren’t just thinking evil, but continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren’t even considering doing non-evil stuff.
If that were true then humans would have died out in a single generation even without the Flood.
Simulate the algorithm with pencil and paper, if all else fails.
But that doesn’t work. If you do the math you will find that the even if you got the entire human race to do pencil-and-paper calculations 24x7 you’d have less computational power than a single iPhone.
perfect knowledge of the future—does not necessarily imply a perfectly deterministic universe.
Of course it does. That’s what determinism means. In fact, perfect knowledge is a stronger condition than determinism. Knowable necessarily implies determined, but the converse is not true. Whether a TM will halt on a given input is determined but not generally knowable.
I don’t actually know GW-the-myth.
Sorry about making that unwarranted assumption. Here’s a reference. The details don’t really matter. If you tell me your background I’ll try to come up with a more culturally appropriate example.
the question of whether two things are the same must also become fuzzy, and non-binary
How could Eve have known that? See my point above about Eve not having the benefit of any cultural references.
Eve could have known that God was an authority figure, from Genesis 2 verse 20-24, in which God created Eve (from Adam’s rib) and brought her to Adam.
Why do you think one is okay and the other one is not?
Because the kitten is acting in self defense. If the kitten had initiated the violence, that would not be OK.
So you accept self-defense as a justification, but not complete (but not wilful) ignorance?
Because it’s really boring
Seriously?
Well, I’m guessing, but yes, it’s a serious guess. Omnipotence means the ability to do everything, it does not mean that everything is pleasant to do. And I certainly know I’d start to lose patience a bit after explaining individually to the hundredth person why stealing is wrong.
he thinks they’d have reason to want to kill him.
Yes, because he’s cursed by God.
The curse, in and of itself, is not what’s going to make people want to kill him (if it was, then God could merely remove that aspect of the curse, rather than install a separate Mark as a warning to people not to do that). No, the curse merely prevented him from farming, from growing his own food. I’m guessing it also, as a result, made his guilt obvious—everyone would recognise the man who could not grow crops, and know he’d killed his brother.
But the curse is not what’s making Cain expect other people to kill him. He clearly expects that other people will freely choose to kill him, and that suggests to me that he knew he had done wrong.
I’d always understood the Flood story as they weren’t just thinking evil, but continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren’t even considering doing non-evil stuff.
If that were true then humans would have died out in a single generation even without the Flood.
I don’t see how that follows. I can imagine ways to produce a next generation consisting of entirely evil (or, at best, morally neutral) actions. What do you think would prevent the appearance of a new generation?
Simulate the algorithm with pencil and paper, if all else fails.
But that doesn’t work. If you do the math you will find that the even if you got the entire human race to do pencil-and-paper calculations 24x7 you’d have less computational power than a single iPhone.
Yes, and over fourteen billion years, how many digits of pi can they produce?
I’m not saying it’s fast. Compared to a computer, pen-and-paper is really, really slow. That’s why we have computers. But fourteen billion years is a really, really, really long time.
perfect knowledge of the future—does not necessarily imply a perfectly deterministic universe.
Of course it does. That’s what determinism means. In fact, perfect knowledge is a stronger condition than determinism. Knowable necessarily implies determined, but the converse is not true. Whether a TM will halt on a given input is determined but not generally knowable.
That’s provided that the perfect knowledge of the future is somehow derived from a study of the present state of the universe. The time traveller voids this implicit assumption by deriving his perfect knowledge from a study of the future state of the universe.
Sorry about making that unwarranted assumption. Here’s a reference. The details don’t really matter. If you tell me your background I’ll try to come up with a more culturally appropriate example.
Ah, thank you. That explains it all quite neatly.
I’m not sure it’s really worth the bother of coming up with a different example at this point—your point was quite clearly made, even without knowledge of the story. (If it makes any difference, I’m South African, which is probably going to be less helpful than one might think considering the number of separate cultures in here).
the question of whether two things are the same must also become fuzzy, and non-binary
The serpent wasn’t an authority figure.
How could Eve have known that?
Eve could have known that God was an authority figure
That’s a red herring. The question was not how she could have known that God was an authority figure. The question was how she could have known that the snake was NOT an authority figure too.
it’s a serious guess
Oh, come on. Even if we suppose that God can get bored, you really don’t think he could have come up with a more effective way to spread the Word than just having one-on-one chats with individual humans? Why not hold a big rally? Or make a video? Or at least have more than one freakin’ person in the room when He finally gets fed up and says, “OK, I’ve had it, I’m going to tell you this one more time before I go on extended leave!” ???
Sheesh.
everyone would recognise the man who could not grow crops, and know he’d killed his brother
You do know that this is LessWrong, right? A site dedicated to rationality and the elimination of logical fallacies and cognitive bias? Because you are either profoundly ignorant of elementary logic, or you are trolling. For your reasoning here to be valid it would have to be the case that the only possible reason someone could not grow crops is that they had killed their brother. If you can’t see how absurd that is then you are beyond my ability to help.
I don’t see how that follows.
Because “the good stuff” is essential to our survival. Humans cannot survive without cooperating with each other. That’s why we are social animals. That’s why we have evolved moral intuitions about right and wrong.
Yes, and over fourteen billion years, how many digits of pi can they produce?
What difference does that make? Yes, 14B years is a long time, but it’s exactly the same amount of time for a computer. However much humans can calculate in 14B years (or any other amount of time you care to pull out of your hat) a computer can calculate vastly more.
I’m South African
I’ve been to SA twice. Beautiful country, but your politics are even more fucked up than ours here in the U.S., and that’s saying something.
That’s a red herring. The question was not how she could have known that God was an authority figure. The question was how she could have known that the snake was NOT an authority figure too.
Oh, right. Hmmm. Good question.
...I want to say that it’s common sense that not everyone who claims to be an authority figure is one, and that preferably one authority figure should introduce another on first meeting. But… Eve may well have been only hours old, and would not have any experience to back that up with.
Oh, come on. Even if we suppose that God can get bored, you really don’t think he could have come up with a more effective way to spread the Word than just having one-on-one chats with individual humans? Why not hold a big rally? Or make a video? Or at least have more than one freakin’ person in the room when He finally gets fed up and says, “OK, I’ve had it, I’m going to tell you this one more time before I go on extended leave!” ???
There are plenty of ways to handle it, yes. All of which work very well for one generation. Twenty, thirty years’ time there’s a new batch turning up. One either needs a recording or, better yet, get them to teach their children...
everyone would recognise the man who could not grow crops, and know he’d killed his brother
You do know that this is LessWrong, right? A site dedicated to rationality and the elimination of logical fallacies and cognitive bias? Because you are either profoundly ignorant of elementary logic, or you are trolling. For your reasoning here to be valid it would have to be the case that the only possible reason someone could not grow crops is that they had killed their brother. If you can’t see how absurd that is then you are beyond my ability to help.
Yes, I know exactly what site this is. Yes, I know that the reasoning “he can’t grow crops, therefore he killed his brother” is badly flawed. But the question is not whether people would think like that. The question is why would Cain, a human with biases and flawed logic, why would he think that people would reason like that?
And I think that the answer to that question is, because Cain had a guilty conscience. Because he had a guilty conscience, he defaults to expecting that, if anyone else sees something that is a result of his crime, they will correctly divine the reason for what they see (Cain was very much not a rationalist).
I don’t think that there is any evidence to suggest that anyone else actually thought like Cain expected them to think.
Because “the good stuff” is essential to our survival. Humans cannot survive without cooperating with each other. That’s why we are social animals. That’s why we have evolved moral intuitions about right and wrong.
On a tribal level, yes, a cooperative tribe will outcompete a “pure evil” tribe easily. But even the “pure evil” tribe might hang around for two, maybe three generations.
I’m not claiming they’d be able to survive long-term, by any means. I just think one generation is a bit short.
What difference does that make? Yes, 14B years is a long time, but it’s exactly the same amount of time for a computer. However much humans can calculate in 14B years (or any other amount of time you care to pull out of your hat) a computer can calculate vastly more.
That is true. However, in this case, if the universe if a computer, then the computer appears to have just sat around and waited for the first 14B years doing nothing. If it’s intended to find the answer to some question faster than its creator could, then it must be a pretty big question.
I’ve been to SA twice. Beautiful country, but your politics are even more fucked up than ours here in the U.S., and that’s saying something.
Yeah… wonderful climate, great biodiversity, near-total lack of large-scale natural disasters (as long as you stay off the floodplains), even our own private floral kingdom… absolutely horrible politicians.
why would Cain, a human with biases and flawed logic, why would he think that people would reason like that?
Maybe because God has cursed him to be a “fugitive and a vagabond.” People didn’t like fugitives and vagabonds back then (they still don’t ).
I don’t think that there is any evidence to suggest that anyone else actually thought like Cain expected them to think.
Well, God seemed to think it was a plausible theory. His response was to slap himself in the forehead and say, “Wow, Cain, you’re right, people are going to try to kill you, which is not an appropriate punishment for murder. Here, I’d better put this mark on your forehead to make sure people know not to kill you.” (Funny how God was against the death penalty before he was for it.)
even the “pure evil” tribe might hang around for two, maybe three generations.
How are they going to feed themselves? They wouldn’t last one year without cooperating to hunt or grow crops. Survival in the wild is really, really hard.
If it’s intended to find the answer
This universe is not (as far as we can tell) intended to do anything. That doesn’t make your argument any less bogus.
Well, God seemed to think it was a plausible theory. His response was to slap himself in the forehead and say, “Wow, Cain, you’re right, people are going to try to kill you, which is not an appropriate punishment for murder. Here, I’d better put this mark on your forehead to make sure people know not to kill you.” (Funny how God was against the death penalty before he was for it.)
I read it as more along the lines of “No, nobody’s going to kill you. Here, let me give you a magic feather just to calm you down.”
How are they going to feed themselves? They wouldn’t last one year without cooperating to hunt or grow crops. Survival in the wild is really, really hard.
...fair enough. Doesn’t mean they weren’t doing a lot of evil, though, even if they were occasionally cooperating.
I read it as more along the lines of “No, nobody’s going to kill you.
You are, of course, free to interpret literature however you like. But God was quite explicit about His thought process:
“Ge4:15 And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.”
I don’t know how God could possibly have made it any clearer that He thought someone killing Cain was a real possibility. (I also can’t help but wonder how you take sevenfold-vengeance on someone for murder. Do you kill them seven times? Kill them and six innocent bystanders?)
Doesn’t mean they weren’t doing a lot of evil, though
You have lost the thread of the conversation. The Flood was a punishment for thought crimes (Ge6:5). The doing-nothing-but-evil theory was put forward by you as an attempt to reconcile this horrible atrocity with your own moral intuition:
I’d always understood the Flood story as they weren’t just thinking evil, but continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren’t even considering doing non-evil stuff.
You seem to have run headlong into the fundamental problem with Christian theology: if we are inherently sinful, then our moral intuitions are necessarily unreliable, and hence you would expect there to be conflicts between our moral intuitions and God’s Word as revealed by the Bible. You would expect to see things in the Bible that make you go, “Whoa, that doesn’t seem right to me.” At this point you must choose between the Bible and your moral intuitions. (Before you choose you should read Jeremiah 19:9.)
You are, of course, free to interpret literature however you like. But God was quite explicit about His thought process:
“Ge4:15 And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.”
That wasn’t a thought process. That was spoken words; the intent behind those words was not given. What we’re given here is an if-then—if anyone slays Cain, then that person will have vengeance taken upon him. It does not say whether or not the “if” is at all likely to happen, and may have been intended merely to calm Cain’s irrational fear of the “if” part happening.
(I also can’t help but wonder how you take sevenfold-vengeance on someone for murder. Do you kill them seven times? Kill them and six innocent bystanders?)
I think it’s “kill them and six members of their clan/family”, but I’m not sure.
You have lost the thread of the conversation. The Flood was a punishment for thought crimes (Ge6:5). The doing-nothing-but-evil theory was put forward by you as an attempt to reconcile this horrible atrocity with your own moral intuition:
I’d always understood the Flood story as they weren’t just thinking evil, but continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren’t even considering doing non-evil stuff.
Yes, and then we discussed the viability of continually doing evil, as it pertains to survival for more than one generation. You were sufficiently persuasive on the matter of cooperation for survival that I then weakened my stance from “continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren’t even considering doing non-evil stuff” to “doing a whole lot of evil stuff a lot of the time”.
In fact, looking at Genesis 6:5:
When the Lord saw how wicked everyone on earth was and how evil their thoughts were all the time,
...it mentions two things. It mentions how wicked everyone on earth was and how evil their thoughts were all the time. This is two separate things; the first part seems, to me, to refer to wicked deeds (with continuously evil thoughts only mentioned after the “and”).
You seem to have run headlong into the fundamental problem with Christian theology: if we are inherently sinful, then our moral intuitions are necessarily unreliable, and hence you would expect there to be conflicts between our moral intuitions and God’s Word as revealed by the Bible. You would expect to see things in the Bible that make you go, “Whoa, that doesn’t seem right to me.” At this point you must choose between the Bible and your moral intuitions.
But my moral intuitions are also, to a large degree, a product of my environment, and specifically of my upbringing. My parents were Christian, and raised me in a Christian environment; I might therefore expect that my moral intuition is closer to God’s Word than it would have been had I been raised in a different culture.
And, looking at human history, there most certainly have been cultures that regularly did things that I would find morally objectionable. In fact, there are still such cultures in existence today. Human cultures have, in the past, gone to such horrors as human sacrifice, cannibalism, and so on—things which my moral intuitions say are badly wrong, but which (presumably) someone raised in such a culture would have much less of a problem with.
“The LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him”. Again, I don’t see how God could have possibly made it any clearer that the intent of putting the mark on Cain was to prevent the otherwise very real possibility of people killing him.
I think it’s “kill them and six members of their clan/family”, but I’m not sure.
If you’re not sure, then you must believe that there could be circumstances under which killing six members of a person’s family as punishment for a crime they did not commit could be justified. I find that deeply disturbing.
the first part seems, to me, to refer to wicked deeds
No, it simply refers to an evil state of being. It says nothing about what brought about that state. But it doesn’t matter. The fact that it specifically calls out thoughts means that the Flood was at least partially retribution for thought crimes.
But my moral intuitions are also, to a large degree, a product of my environment, and specifically of my upbringing.
Sure, and so are everyone else’s.
my moral intuition is closer to God’s Word than it would have been had I been raised in a different culture
A Muslim would disagree with you. Have you considered the possibility that they might be right and you are wrong? It’s just the luck of the draw that you happened to be born into a Christian household rather than a Muslim one. Maybe you got unlucky. How would you tell?
But you keep dancing around the real question: Do you really believe that killing innocent bystanders can be morally justified? Or that genocide as a response to thought crimes can be morally justified? Or that forcing people to cannibalize their own children (Jeremiah 19:9) can be morally justified? Because that is the price of taking the Bible as your moral standard.
CCC may be claiming that the Bible (in this translation?) does not accurately represent God’s motive here. But that just calls attention to the fact that—for reasons which escape me even after trying to read the comment tree—you’re both talking about a story that seems ridiculous on every level. Your last paragraph indeed seems like a more fruitful line of discussion.
“The LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him”. Again, I don’t see how God could have possibly made it any clearer that the intent of putting the mark on Cain was to prevent the otherwise very real possibility of people killing him.
Looking at another translation:
So the Lord put a mark on Cain to warn anyone who met him not to kill him.
And the Lord set a [protective] [b]mark (sign) on Cain, so that no one who found (met) him would kill him.
(footnote: “Many commentators believe this sign not to have been like a brand on the forehead, but something awesome about Cain’s appearance that made people dread and avoid him. In the Talmud, the rabbis suggested several possibilities, including leprosy, boils, or a horn that grew out of Cain. But it was also suggested that Cain was given a pet dog to serve as a protective sign.”)
The Lord put a sign on Cain so that no one who found him would assault him.
And the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest any who found him should attack him.
So the Lord put a mark on Cain, so that no one would kill him at sight.
Then the Lord put a mark on Cain to warn anyone who might try to kill him.
Yahweh appointed a sign for Cain, so that anyone finding him would not strike him.
Looking over the list, most of them do say something along the lines of “so that no one would kill him”, but there are a scattering of others. I interpret is as saying that the sign given to Cain was a clear warning—something easily understood as “DO NOT KILL THIS MAN”—but I don’t see any sign that it was ever actually necessary to save Cain’s life.
If you’re not sure, then you must believe that there could be circumstances under which killing six members of a person’s family as punishment for a crime they did not commit could be justified. I find that deeply disturbing.
There is a fallacy at work here. Consider a statement of the form, “if A then B”. Consider the situation where A is a thing that is never true; for example 1=2. Then the statement becomes “if 1=2 then B”. Now, at this point, I can substitute in anything I want for B, and the statement remains morally neutral; since one can never be equal to two.
Now, the statement given here was as follows: “If someone kills Cain, then that person will have vengeance laid against them sevenfold”. Consider, then, that perhaps no-one killed Cain. Perhaps he died of pneumonia, or was attacked by a bear, or fell off a cliff, or drowned.
the first part seems, to me, to refer to wicked deeds
No, it simply refers to an evil state of being. It says nothing about what brought about that state. But it doesn’t matter. The fact that it specifically calls out thoughts means that the Flood was at least partially retribution for thought crimes.
I don’t see how it’s possible to be in an evil state of being without at least seriously attempting to do evil deeds.
my moral intuition is closer to God’s Word than it would have been had I been raised in a different culture
A Muslim would disagree with you.
I see I phrased my point poorly. Let me fix that. My moral intuition is closer to what is in the Bible than it would have been had I been raised in a different culture. While the theoretical Muslim and I may have some disagreements as to what extent the Bible is God’s Word, I think we can agree on this rephrased point.
Have you considered the possibility that they might be right and you are wrong? It’s just the luck of the draw that you happened to be born into a Christian household rather than a Muslim one. Maybe you got unlucky. How would you tell?
I have considered the possibility. My conclusion is that it would take pretty convincing evidence to persuade me of that, but it is not impossible that I am wrong.
But you keep dancing around the real question: Do you really believe that killing innocent bystanders can be morally justified? Or that genocide as a response to thought crimes can be morally justified? Or that forcing people to cannibalize their own children (Jeremiah 19:9) can be morally justified? Because that is the price of taking the Bible as your moral standard.
Are you familiar with the trolley problem? In short, it raises the question of whether or not it is a morally justifiable action to kill one innocent bystander in order to save five innocent bystanders.
Now, the statement given here was as follows: “If someone kills Cain, then that person will have vengeance laid against them sevenfold”. Consider, then, that perhaps no-one killed Cain.
Ordinary English doesn’t work like that. “If X, then Y will happen” includes possible worlds in which X is true.
“If you fall into the sun, you will die” expresses a meaningful idea even if nobody falls into the sun.
Exactly. “Did not” is not the same as “can not.” Particularly since God’s threats are intended to have a deterrent effect. The whole point (I presume) is to try to influence things so that evil acts don’t happen even though they can.
But we don’t even need to look to God’s forced familial cannibalism in Jeremiah. The bedrock of Christianity is the threat of eternal torment for a thought crime: not believing in Jesus.
I wasn’t speaking about “did not”. I was speaking about “will not”, which is distinct from “can not” and is a form that can only be employed by a speaker with sufficient certainty about the future—unknown to me, but not to an omniscient being.
But we don’t even need to look to God’s forced familial cannibalism in Jeremiah. The bedrock of Christianity is the threat of eternal torment for a thought crime: not believing in Jesus.
Every man who is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it, can be saved.
In other words, trying to do the right thing counts.
At best, that means that trying to do the right thing counts if you’re ignorant of Christianity. Most people aren’t ignorant of Christianity, and rampant proselytization makes things much worse since with more people who have heard of Christianity, fewer can use that escape clause.
In fact, it doesn’t just apply to knowing Christianity’s existence. The more you understand Christianity, according to that, the more you have to do to be saved.
And even then, it has loopholes you can drive a truck through. “Can be saved”, not “will be saved”—it’s entirely consistent with that statement for God not to save anyone.
It could be that (1) if you are ignorant of Christianity you can escape damnation by living a good life, but (2) living a good enough life is really hard, especially if you don’t know it’s necessary to escape damnation, and that (3) for that reason, those who are aware of Christianity have better prospects than those who aren’t.
(Given that the fraction of people aware of Christianity who accept it isn’t terribly high, that would require God to be pretty nasty, but so does the whole idea of damnation as commonly understood among Christians. And it probably sounded better back when the great majority of people who knew of Christianity were Christians at least in name.)
I don’t think that you are, in a practical sense, disagreeing with me or lisper, even if on some abstract level Christianity lets some nonbeliever be saved.
The only thing I’m disagreeing with you about here is the following claim: that from “nonbelievers can be saved” or even “nonbelievers can be saved, and a substantial number will be” you can infer “proselytizing is bad for the people it’s aimed at because it makes them more likely to be damned”.
“The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that’s where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won’t do if they don’t know about it. This explains why it is so important to shoot missionaries on sight.”—Terry Pratchett, Eric
At best, that means that trying to do the right thing counts if you’re ignorant of Christianity. Most people aren’t ignorant of Christianity, and rampant proselytization makes things much worse since with more people who have heard of Christianity, fewer can use that escape clause.
I disagree. Most people are ignorant of Christianity.
I don’t mean that most people haven’t heard of it. Most people have. A lot of them have heard (and believe) things about it that are false; or have merely heard of it but no more; or, worse yet, have only heard of some splinter Protestant groups and assumed that all Christians agree with them.
It is quite possible that a large number of people, hearing of the famous Creationism/Evolution debate, believe that Christianity and Science are irreconcilable and thus, in pursuit of the truth, reject what they have heard of Christianity and try to do what is right. This, to my understanding, fits perfectly in to being a person who “is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it”.
In fact, it doesn’t just apply to knowing Christianity’s existence. The more you understand Christianity, according to that, the more you have to do to be saved.
I don’t see how that follows. Seeking the truth and doing God’s will in accordance with your best understanding thereof seems to be what everyone should be doing. What “more” do you think one should be doing with a better understanding of Christianity?
And even then, it has loopholes you can drive a truck through. “Can be saved”, not “will be saved”—it’s entirely consistent with that statement for God not to save anyone.
That is true. If God were malevolent, opposed to saving people, then He could use those loopholes.
A lot of them have heard (and believe) things about it that are false
They didn’t get them from thin air. They got them from Christians. This amounts to a no true Scotsman defense—all the things all those other Christians say, they aren’t true Christianity.
It is quite possible that a large number of people...in pursuit of the truth, reject what they have heard of Christianity and try to do what is right.
If that counts as being ignorant, the same problem arises: It’s better to be ignorant than knowledgeable.
What “more” do you think one should be doing with a better understanding of Christianity?
Christianity says you should do X. If you are only required to follow Christianity to your best understanding to be saved, and you don’t understand Christianity as requiring X, you don’t have to do X to be saved. But once you really understand that Christianity requires you to do X, then all of a sudden you better do X. Following it to the best of your understanding means that the more you understand, the more you have to do.
And I’m sure you can think of plenty of things which Christianity tells you to do. It’s not as if examples are particularly scarce.
I don’t think that God is malevolent.
The way God is described by Christians looks just like malevolence. If God really saves people who follow Christianity to the best of their understanding, without loopholes like “maybe he will save them but maybe he won’t so becoming more Christian is a safer bet”, Christians wouldn’t proselytize.
In some cases they got them only very indirectly from Christians. And in some cases they got them from the loudest Christians; it would be no-true-Scotsman-y to say that those people aren’t Christians, but it’s perfectly in order to say “those ideas are certainly Christian ideas, but they are not the only Christian ideas and most Christians disagree with them”.
If you are only required to follow Christianity to your best understanding [...] you don’t have to do X. But once you really understand [...] all of a sudden you better do X.
It sounds as if you’re assuming that improved understanding of Christianity always means discovering more things you’re supposed to do. But it could go the other way too: perhaps initially your “best understanding” tells you you have to do Y, but when you learn more you decide you don’t. In that case, a rule that you’re saved iff you act according to your best understanding would say that initially you have to do Y but later on you don’t.
(E.g., some versions of Christianity say that actually there’s very little you have to do. You have to believe some particular things, and hold some particular attitudes, and if you do those then you’re saved. Whether you murder people, give money to charities, help your landlady take out the garbage, etc., may be evidence that you do or don’t hold those attitudes, but isn’t directly required for anything. In that case, converting someone to Christianity—meaning getting them to hold those beliefs and attitudes—definitely makes their salvation more likely.)
I’m sure you can think of plenty of things which Christianity tells you to do.
I bet he can. But that’s not the same as being able to think of plenty of things Christianity says you have to do, on pain of damnation.
The way God is described by Christians looks just like malevolence.
I do largely agree with this, with the qualification that it depends which Christians. I think some do genuinely have beliefs about God which, if true, would mean that he’s benevolent. (I think this requires them to be not terribly orthodox.)
it’s perfectly in order to say “those ideas are certainly Christian ideas, but they are not the only Christian ideas and most Christians disagree with them”.
I think CCC is trying to say that those aren’t Christian ideas at all and that people who think that that’s what Christianity is like are mistaken, not just choosing a smaller group of Christians over a larger one.
It sounds as if you’re assuming that improved understanding of Christianity always means discovering more things you’re supposed to do. But it could go the other way too
It isn’t “you do the exact set of things described by your mistaken understanding of Christianity, and you are saved”. It’s “imperfect understanding is an excuse for failing to meet the requirement”. Improved understanding can only increase the things you must do, never reduce it. In other words, if you falsely think that Christianity requires being a vegetarian, and you fail to be a vegetarian (thus violating your mistaken understanding of it, but not actually violating true Christianity), you can still be saved.
But that’s not the same as being able to think of plenty of things Christianity says you have to do, on pain of damnation.
Everything that Christianity says you should do, is under pain of damnation (or has no penalty at all). It’s not as if God has some other punishment short of damnation that he administers instead when your sin is mild.
Everything that Christianity says you should do, is under pain of damnation (or has no penalty at all). It’s not as if God has some other punishment short of damnation that he administers instead when your sin is mild.
There are plenty of punishments short of eternal damnation that an omnipotent being can hand out.
Yet certain temporal consequences of sin remain in the baptized, such as suffering, illness, death, and such frailties inherent in life as weaknesses of character, and so on, as well as an inclination to sin that Tradition calls concupiscence, or metaphorically, “the tinder for sin” (fomes peccati);
I think CCC is trying to say that those aren’t Christian ideas at all [...]
I realise that it’s totally unclear to me exactly which ideas we’re talking about right now. CCC’s original comment mentioned things widely believed about Christianity that are just false, and things that are taught by “splinter Protestant groups” but not widely accepted by Christians. I don’t know what he’d put in each category.
Improved understanding can only increase the things you must do, never reduce it.
Well, that’s exactly the position I explicitly argued against. I’m afraid I haven’t grasped on what grounds you disagree with what I said; it looks like you’re just reiterating your position.
(I think it’s likely that some Christians do hold opinions that, when followed through, have the consequence that teaching someone about Christianity makes them less likely to be saved. I am saying only that I see no reason why Christians holding that some non-Christians will escape damnation by living a good life according to what understanding they have are in no sense required to hold opinions with that consequence.)
Everything that Christianity says you should do, is under pain of damnation (or has no penalty at all).
The details depend on the variety of Christianity, but e.g. for Roman Catholicism this is flatly false. And for many Protestant flavours of Christianity, it’s saved from being false only by that last parenthesis: there are things you should do but that do not have a penalty. (So why do them? Because you believe God says you should and you want to do what he says. Because you want to. Because you think doing them makes it less likely that you will eventually do something that is bad enough to lose your salvation. Because you believe God says you should and has your best interests at heart, so that in the long run it will be good for you even if it’s difficult now. Etc.)
Well, that’s exactly the position I explicitly argued against. I’m afraid I haven’t grasped on what grounds you disagree with what I said;
I’m not stating a position, I’m observing someone else’s position. “God may save someone who misunderstands Christianity”, when stated by Christians, seems to mean that God won’t punish someone for not following a rule that he doesn’t know about. It doesn’t mean that God will punish someone for not following a rule that he thinks is real but isn’t.
I’ve never heard a Christian say anything like “if you think God requires you to stand on your head, and you don’t stand on your head, God will send you to Hell”.
The details depend on the variety of Christianity, but e.g. for Roman Catholicism this is flatly false.
I stand corrected for Catholicism, but the substance of my criticism remains. Just replace “Hell” with “Hell or Purgatory”.
My observations do not yield the same results as yours.
seems to mean
How can you tell? Usually the question just isn’t brought up. I mean, usually what happens is that someone says “isn’t it unfair for people to be damned on account of mere ignorance?” and someone else responds: yeah, it would be, but actually that doesn’t happen because those people will be judged in some unknown fashion according to their consciences. And generally the details of exactly how that works are acknowledged to be unknown, so there’s not much more to say.
But for what it’s worth, the nearest thing to a statement of this idea in the actual Bible, which comes in the Letter to the Romans, says this:
They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them
(emphasis mine) which you will notice has “accuse” as well as “excuse”.
This doesn’t explicitly address the question of what happens if that conscience is bearing false witness and the wrong law is written in their hearts; again, that question tends not to come up in these discussions.
Just replace “Hell” with “Hell or Purgatory”
But doing so completely breaks your criticism, doesn’t it? Because Purgatory comes in degrees, or at least in variable terms, and falls far short of hell in awfulness. So, in those Christians’ view, God has a wide range of punishments available that are much milder than eternal damnation. (Though some believers in Purgatory would claim it isn’t exactly punishment.)
I have also heard, from Protestants, the idea that although you can escape damnation no matter how wicked a life you lead and attain eternal felicity, there may be different degrees of that eternal felicity on offer. So it isn’t only Catholics who have possible sanctions for bad behaviour even for the saved.
(This seems like a good point at which to reiterate that although I’m kinda-sorta defending Christians here, I happen not to be among their number and think what most of them say about salvation and damnation is horrible morally, incoherent logically, or both.)
which you will notice has “accuse” as well as “excuse”.
I would interpret “accuse” to mean “they claim they are violating the law because they don’t know better, but itheir thoughts show that hey really do know better”—not to mean “they believe something is a law and if so they will be punished for not following the nonexistent law”.
But doing so completely breaks your criticism, doesn’t it?
No, the criticism is that either
God punishes people for things they can’t reasonably be expected to avoid (like non-Christians who don’t follow Christian commands), or
God doesn’t punish people for things they can’t reasonably be expected to avoid, in which case the best thing to do is make sure people don’t know about Christianity.
1 is bad because people are punished for something that isn’t their fault; 2 would blatantly contradict what Christians think is good.
This doesn’t depend on the punishment being infinite or eternal.
1 is bad because people are punished for something that isn’t their fault; 2 would blatantly contradict what Christians think is good.
Hmmmm. Here’s a third option; the punishment for a sin committed in ignorance is a lot lighter than the punishment for a sin committed deliberately. “A lot lighter” implies neither infinite nor eternal; merely a firm hint that that is not the way to go about things.
In this case, letting people know what the rules are will save them a lot of trouble (and trial-and-error) along the way.
I think I misunderstood what you meant by “my criticism”. (You’ve made a number of criticisms in the course of this thread.) In any case, the argument you’re now offering looks different to me from the one you’ve been making in earlier comments, and to which I thought I was responding.
In any case, I think what you’re offering now is not correct. Consider the following possible world which is, as I’ve already said, roughly what some Christians consider the actual world to be like:
If you are not a Christian, you are judged on the basis of how good a life you’ve led, according to your own conscience[1]; if it’s very good, you get saved; if not, you get damned.
If you are a Christian, you are saved regardless of how good a life you’ve led.
[1] Perhaps with some sort of tweak so that deliberately cultivating shamelessness doesn’t help you; e.g., maybe you’re judged according to the strictest your conscience has been, or something. I suspect it’s difficult to fill in the details satisfactorily, but not necessarily any harder than e.g. dealing with the difficulties utilitarian theories tend to have when considering actions that can change how many people there are.
In this scenario, what comes of your dichotomy? Well: (1) God only punishes people for things their own conscience tells them (or told them, or could have told them if they’d listened, or something) to be wrong. So no, he isn’t punishing people for things they couldn’t reasonably be expected to avoid. But (2) making sure people don’t know about Christianity will not benefit them, because if they fail to live a very good life they will be damned if they don’t know about Christianity but might be saved if they do. (And, Christians would probably add, if they know about Christianity they’re more likely to live a good life because they will be better informed about what constitutes one.)
Again: I think there are serious problems with this scenario (e.g., damning anyone seems plainly unjust to me if it means eternal torture) so we are agreed on that score. I just think your analysis of the problems is incorrect.
Consider the following possible world which is, as I’ve already said, roughly what some Christians consider the actual world to be like:
I don’t think many Christians consider the world to be like that. It would produce bizarre results such as the equivalent of Huckleberry Finn going to Hell because he helped a runaway slave but his conscience told him that helping a runaway slave is wrong. For a modern equivalent, a gay person whose conscience tells him that homosexuality is wrong would go to Hell for it.
I don’t think many Christians consider the world to be like that.
Do you have any evidence for that, other than the fact that it has consequences you find bizarre? (Most versions of Christianity have quite a lot of consequences—or in some cases explicitly stated doctrines—that I find bizarre and expect you find at least as bizarre as I do.)
I have at least one piece of evidence on my side, which is that I spent decades as a Christian and what I describe is not far from my view as I remember it. (I mostly believed that damnation meant destruction rather than eternal torture; I don’t think that makes much difference to the sub-point currently at issue.) I think if actually asked “so, does that mean that someone might be damned rather than saved on account of doing something he thought wrong that was actually right?” my answer would have been (1) somewhat evasive (“I don’t claim to know the details of God’s policy; he hasn’t told us and it’s not obvious what it should be… ”) but (2) broadly in line with what I’ve been describing here (”… but if I have to guess, then yes: I think that doing something believing it to be wrong is itself a decision to act wrongly, and as fit to make the difference between salvation and damnation as any other decision to act wrongly.”)
I don’t recall ever giving much consideration to the question of people who do good things believing them to be evil, which I take as evidence for my suggestion earlier that most Christians holding that non-Christians may be judged “on their merits” likewise don’t think about it much if at all, which in case it’s not obvious I think is relevant because it means that even if you’re correct that thinking hard enough about it would show an incoherence in the position I described, that won’t actually stop many Christians holding such a position: because scarcely any will think hard enough about it.
47 “The servant who knows what his master wants but is not ready, or who does not do what the master wants, will be beaten with many blows! 48 But the servant who does not know what his master wants and does things that should be punished will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded. And from the one trusted with much, much more will be expected.
...which implies that, while there is a punishment for sin committed in ignorance, it is far less than that for sin committed knowingly.
(Proverbs 24:12 also seems relevant; and there’s a lot of probably-at-least-slightly relevant passages linked from here).
They didn’t get them from thin air. They got them from Christians. This amounts to a no true Scotsman defense—all the things all those other Christians say, they aren’t true Christianity.
You make an excellent point. There are a number of things being proposed by groups that call themselves Christian, often in the honest belief that they are right to propose such things (and to do so enthusiastically), which I nonetheless find myself in firm disagreement with. (For example, creationism).
To avoid the fallacy, then, and to deal with such contradictions, I shall define more narrowly what I consider “true Christianity”, and I shall define it as Roman Catholicism (or something sufficiently close to it).
Christianity says you should do X. If you are only required to follow Christianity to your best understanding to be saved, and you don’t understand Christianity as requiring X, you don’t have to do X to be saved. But once you really understand that Christianity requires you to do X, then all of a sudden you better do X. Following it to the best of your understanding means that the more you understand, the more you have to do.
And I’m sure you can think of plenty of things which Christianity tells you to do. It’s not as if examples are particularly scarce.
One example of X that I can think of, off the top of my head, is “going to Church on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation”.
It is true that one who does want to be a good Christian will need to go to Church, while one who is ignorant will also be ignorant of that requirement. Hmmmm. So you have a clear point, there.
The way God is described by Christians looks just like malevolence. If God really saves people who follow Christianity to the best of their understanding, without loopholes like “maybe he will save them but maybe he won’t so becoming more Christian is a safer bet”, Christians wouldn’t proselytize.
I think that one reasonable analogy is that it’s a bit like writing an exam at university. Sure, you can self-study and still ace the test, but your odds are a lot better if you attend the lectures. And trying to invite others to attend the lectures improves their odds of passing, as well.
I think a lot of Christians would say that the eternal torment isn’t for the crime of not believing in Jesus but for other crimes; what believing in Jesus would do is enable one to escape the sentence for those other crimes.
And a lot of Christians, mostly different ones, would say that the threat of eternal torment was a mistake that we’ve now outgrown, or was never intended to be taken literally, or is a misunderstanding of a threat of final destruction, or something of the kind.
the eternal torment isn’t for the crime of not believing in Jesus but for other crimes
Not for “other crimes”, but specifically because of the original sin. The default outcome for humans is eternal torment, but Jesus offers an escape :-/
Not for “other crimes”, but specifically because of the original sin.
Some Christians would say that, some not. (Very very crudely, Catholics would somewhat agree, Protestants mostly wouldn’t. The Eastern Orthodox usually line up more with the Catholics than with the Protestants, but I forget where they stand on this one.)
Many would say, e.g., that “original sin” bequeaths us all a sinful “nature” but it’s the sinful thoughts and actions we perpetrate for which we are rightly and justly damned.
(But yes, most Christians would say that the default outcome for humans as we now are is damnation, whether or not they would cash that out in the traditional way as eternal torment.)
“original sin” bequeaths us all a sinful “nature” but it’s the sinful thoughts and actions we perpetrate for which we are rightly and justly damned.
Wouldn’t Protestants agree that without the help of Jesus (technically, grace) humans cannot help but yield to their sinful nature? The original sin is not something mere humans can overcome by themselves.
They probably would (the opposite position being Pelagianism, I suppose). But they’d still say our sins are our fault and we are fully responsible for them.
(Your way of phrasing the question suggests you might be looking for a pointless argument with me. If that’s the case, please stop.)
My remark was not about the “fully responsible” part, but about the “your fault” part.
Note that guilt has nothing to do with being responsible for your own choices. The feeling of guilt is counterproductive regardless of what you choose to do.
Telling people “this is your fault” is a pretty good way to ensure that they feel guilty.
(Your way of phrasing the question suggests you might be looking for a pointless argument with me. If that’s the case, please stop.)
No, that is not the case. It does appear that I had misunderstood what you said, though.
My remark was not about the “fully responsible” part, but about the “your fault” part.
This being the misunderstanding.
I think I now see more clearly what you were saying. You were saying that a statement along the lines of “Everything wrong in your life is YOUR FAULT!” would be making people feel guilty on purpose. This I agree with.
(What I thought you were saying—and what I did not agree with—is now unimportant.)
Sorry for that accusation, it was caused by your phrasing which (to me) sounded suggestive of indignation, and following the scheme often found in unpleasant arguments, i.e. repeating someone’s words (or misinterpreted words) in a loud-angry-questioning tone. As a suggestion, remember that this way of phrasing questions can be misunderstood?
I apologise for my error.
Nothing happened that requires apologies :) It’s cool :)
As a suggestion, remember that this way of phrasing questions can be misunderstood?
I shall try to bear that in mind in the future. Tonal information is stripped from plain-text communication, and will be guessed (possibly erroneously) by the reader.
(I knew that already, actually, but it’s not an easy lesson to always remember)
a lot of those “other crimes” are thought crimes too
Oh yes. I wasn’t saying “Christianity is much less horrible than you think”, just disagreeing with one particular instance of alleged horribilitude.
Jesus was pretty clear about this.
Actually, by and large the things he says about hell seem to me to fit the “final destruction” interpretation better than the “eternal torture” interpretation. Matthew 13:42 and 50, e.g., refer to throwing things into a “blazing furnace”; I don’t know about you, but when I throw something on the fire I generally do so with the expectation that it will be destroyed. Mark 16:16 (1) probably wasn’t in the original version of Mark’s gospel and (2) just says “will be condemned” rather than specifying anything about what that entails; did you intend a different reference?
There are things Jesus is alleged to have said that sound more like eternal torture; e.g., Matthew 25:46. Surprise surprise, the Bible is not perfectly consistent with itself.
It seems pretty obvious to me that descriptions of hell could easily be just metaphorical. There is a perpetual, persistent nature to sin—it’s like a never-ending fire that brings suffering and destruction in way that perpetuates itself. Eternal fire is a great way to describe it if one were looking for a metaphor. It’s this fire you need saving from. Enter Jesus.
Honestly, it’s a wonder to me hell isn’t treated as an obvious metaphor, but rather it is still a very real place for many mainstream Christians. I suppose it’s because they must also treat the resurrection as literal, and that bit loses some of it’s teeth if there is no real heaven/hell.
I don’t know about you, but when I throw something on the fire I generally do so with the expectation that it will be destroyed.
There is a perpetual, persistent nature to sin—it’s like a never-ending fire
That’s ingenious, but it really doesn’t seem to me easy to reconcile with the actual Hell-talk in the NT. E.g., Jesus tells his listeners on one occasion: don’t fear men who can throw your body into prison; rather fear God, who can destroy both soul and body in hell. And that passage in Matthew 25, which should scare the shit out of every Christian, talks about “eternal punishment” and is in any case clearly meant to be happening post mortem, or at least post resurrectionem. And that stuff in Revelation about a lake of burning sulphur, which again seems clearly to be for destruction and/or punishment. And so on.
If all we had to go on was the fact that Christianity has a tradition involving sin and eternal torment, I might agree with you. But what we have is more specific and doesn’t seem to me like it fits your theory very well.
because they must also treat the resurrection as literal
Yes, I think that’s at least part of it. (There’s something in C S Lewis—I think near the end of The problem of pain—where he says (or maybe quotes someone else as saying) that he’s never encountered anyone with a really lively hope of heaven who didn’t also have a serious fear of hell.)
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego
I don’t think “sometimes an omnipotent superbeing can stop you being consumed when you’re thrown into a furnace” is much of an argument against “furnaces are generally better metaphors for destruction than for long-lasting punishment” :-).
Hm. Not worth getting into a line-by-line breakdown, but I’d argue anything said about hell in the Gospels (or the NT) could be read purely metaphorically without much strain.
A couple of the examples you’ve mentioned:
Jesus tells his listeners on one occasion: don’t fear men who can throw your body into prison; rather fear God, who can destroy both soul and body in hell.
Seems to me he could just be saying something like: “They can take our lives and destroy our flesh, but we must not betray the Spirit of the movement; the Truth of God’s kingdom.”
This is a pretty common sentiment among revolutionaries.
And that stuff in Revelation about a lake of burning sulphur, which again seems clearly to be for destruction and/or punishment. And so on.
I think it’s a fairly common view that the author of Revelation was writing about recent events in Jerusalem (Roman/Jewish wars) using apocalyptic, highly figurative language. I’m no expert, but this is my understanding.
The Greek for hell used often in the NT is “gehenna” and (from my recall) refers to a garbage dump that was kept outside the walls of the city. Jesus might have been using this as a literal direct comparison to the hell that awaited sinners… but it seems more likely to me he just meant it as symbolic.
Anyway, tough to know what original authors/speakers believed. It is admittedly my pet theory that a lot of western religion is the erection of concrete literal dogmas from what was only intended as metaphors, teaching fables, etc. Low probability I’m right.
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego
This was just a joke funny to only former fundamentalists like me. :)
the author of Revelation was writing about recent events
Yes, but more precisely I think he was writing about recent events and prophesying doom to the Bad Guys in that narrative. I’m pretty sure that lake of burning sulphur was intended as part of the latter, not the former.
gehenna
Yes, that’s one reason why I favour “final destruction” over “eternal torture” as a description of what he was warning of. In an age before non-biodegradable plastics, if you threw something into the town dump, with its fire and its worms, you weren’t expecting it to last for ever.
a lot of western religion is the erection of concrete literal dogmas from what was only intended as metaphors, teaching fables, etc.
It’s an interesting idea. I’m not sure how plausible I find it.
a joke
For the avoidance of doubt, I did understand that it was a joke. (Former moderate evangelical here. I managed to avoid outright fundamentalism.)
Yes, that’s one reason why I favour “final destruction” over “eternal torture” as a description of what he was warning of. In an age before non-biodegradable plastics, if you threw something into the town dump, with its fire and its worms, you weren’t expecting it to last for ever.
The Biblical text as a whole seems very inconsistent to me if you are looking to choose either annihilationism or eternal conscious torment. The OT seems to treat death as final; then you have the rich man and Lazarus and “lake of fire” talk on the other side of the spectrum.
It is my sense that the Bible is actually very inconsistent on the issue because it is an amalgamation of lots of different, sometimes contradictory, views and ideas about the afterlife. You can find a common thread if you’d like...but you have to glaze over lots of inconsistencies.
For sure the Bible as a whole is far from consistent about this stuff. Even the NT specifically doesn’t speak with one voice. My only claim is that the answer to the question “what is intended by the teachings about hell ascribed to Jesus in the NT?” is nearer to “final destruction” than to “eternal torture”. I agree that the “rich man & Lazarus” story leans the other way but that one seems particularly clearly not intended to have its incidental details treated as doctrine.
I think there’s a joke to the effect that if you’re bad in life then when you die God will send you to New Jersey, and I don’t know anything about translations of earlier versions of the bible but I kind of hope that it’s possible for us to interpret the Gehenna comparison as parallel to that.
If someone told me that when I die God would send me to New Jersey, I’d understand that he was joking and being symbolic. But I would not reason “well, people in New Jersey die, so obviously he is trying to tell me that people in Hell get destroyed after a while”.
Nope, because dying is not a particularly distinctive feature of life in New Jersey; it happens everywhere in much the same way. So being sent to New Jersey wouldn’t make any sense as a symbol for being destroyed. What if someone told you that God will send you to the electric chair when you die?
If someone said that, I would assume he is trying to tell me that God will punish me in a severe and irreversible manner after I die.
It’s true that actual pits of flame kill people rather than torture them forever, but going from that to Hell being temporary is a case of some parts of the metaphor fighting others. He used a pit of flame as an example rather than dying in your sleep because he wanted to emphasize the severity of the punishment. If the metaphor was also meant to imply that Hell is temporary like a fire pit, the metaphor would be deemphasizing the severity of the punishment. A metaphor would not stand for two such opposed things unless the person making it is very confused.
I agree that he wanted to emphasize the severity, but that doesn’t have to mean making it out to be as severe as it could imaginably be. Fiery (and no doubt painful) total and final destruction is pretty severe, after all.
Eve could have known that God was an authority figure
I don’t follow the reasoning you’re expecting her to have used. She couldn’t possibly have seen God taking one of Adam’s ribs and making her out of it, for the excellent reason that for most of that process she didn’t even exist. Is she supposed to accept God as an authority figure just because he tells her he made her?
No, but she would have seen God taking her to Adam. And Adam also behaving as if it had been God who had made her.
...admittedly, it would have been incredibly easy (even probable) for her to have missed this sort of delicate social cue when she was, perhaps, mere hours old.
If a man pushes a button that launches a thousand nuclear bombs, is it just for him to avoid punishment on the grounds of complete ignorance?
Yes, if in fact he was completely enough ignorant. What do I mean by “enough”? Well, if you come across a mysterious button then you should at least suspect that pushing it will do something dramatic you would on balance prefer not to have done, and if you push it anyway then that’s a bit irresponsible. You aren’t completely ignorant, because you have some idea of the sorts of things mysterious buttons might do when pushed.
If a man walking in the woods steps on a twig that was actually attached to a mechanism that launches a thousand nuclear bombs, is it just for him to avoid punishment on the grounds of complete ignorance? Of course it is.
He commanded them not to eat the fruit. Their sin was to eat the fruit, so the command itself might be considered sufficient education to tell them that what they were doing was something they should not be doing.
What’s the underlying principle here? I mean, would you endorse something like this? “If you find yourself in a nice place with no memory of anything before being there, and someone claiming to be its creator and yours gives you instructions, it is always wrong to disobey them.”
Leaving aside the question of the culpability of Adam and Eve in this story, it seems clear to me that God is most certainly culpable, especially in the version of the story endorsed by many Christians where the Fall is ultimately responsible for sending billions of people to eternal torment. He puts A&E in this situation where if they Do The Thing then the consequences will be unimaginably horrendous. He tells them not to do it—OK, fair enough—but he doesn’t tell them accurately what the consequences will be, he doesn’t give them evidence that the consequences will be what he says[1], and most importantly he doesn’t in any way prepare them for the fact that in the garden with them is someone else—the serpent—who will with great cunning try to get them to do what God’s told them not to.
If I put my child in a room with a big red button that launches nuclear missiles, and also put in that room another person who is liable to try to get her to press the button, and if I know that in that case she is quite likely to be persuaded, and if all I say is “now, Child, you can do what you like in the room but don’t press that button”—why then, I am much more at fault than she is if those missiles get launched.
[1] In fact, the only consequence the story represents God as telling them about does not happen; God says that if they eat it then “in that day you will surely die”, and they don’t; the serpent tells Eve that they won’t, and they don’t.
If a man walking in the woods steps on a twig that was actually attached to a mechanism that launches a thousand nuclear bombs, is it just for him to avoid punishment on the grounds of complete ignorance? Of course it is.
I take your point—it is just to avoid punishment for ignorance so complete. (Mind you, whoever deliberately connected that twig to the nuclear launch silo should get into some trouble).
What’s the underlying principle here? I mean, would you endorse something like this? “If you find yourself in a nice place with no memory of anything before being there, and someone claiming to be its creator and yours gives you instructions, it is always wrong to disobey them.”
When I was a small child, I found myself in a nice place with two people who called themselves my parents. I did not remember anything before then; my parents told me that this was because I had not yet been born. They claimed to have somehow had something to do with creating me. They informed me, once I had learned to communicate with them, of several rules that, at the time, appeared arbitrary (why was I allowed to colour in in this book, but not my Dad’s expensive encyclopedias? Why was I barred from wandering out onto the road to get a close look at the cars? Why should I not accept candy from a stranger?) They may have tried to explain the consequences of breaking those rules, but if they did, I certainly didn’t understand them. If some stranger had attempted to persuade me to break those rules, then the correct action for me to take would be to ignore the stranger.
(Which makes the Adam and Eve story a cautionary tale for small children, I guess.)
In fact, the only consequence the story represents God as telling them about does not happen; God says that if they eat it then “in that day you will surely die”, and they don’t; the serpent tells Eve that they won’t, and they don’t.
I’d understood that to mean “on that day your death will become inevitable”—since they were thrown out of the Garden and away from the Tree of Life (which could apparently confer immortality) their eventual deaths did become certain on that day.
I don’t think you answered my question: what’s the underlying principle?
I agree that it is generally best for people who, perhaps on account of being very young, are not able to survive effectively by making their own decisions to obey the people taking care of them. But I’m not sure this is best understood as a moral obligation, and surely sometimes it’s a mistake—some parents and other carers are, one way or another, very bad indeed. And Adam and Eve as portrayed in the Genesis narrative don’t seem to have been anything like as incapable as you were when you had no idea why scribbling in one book might be worse than scribbling in another.
But let’s run with your analogy for a moment, and suppose that in fact Adam and Eve were as incompetent as toddler-you, and needed to be fenced about with incomprehensible absolute prohibitions whose real reasons they couldn’t understand. Would your parents have put toddler-you in a room with a big red button that launches the missiles, sternly told you not to push it, and then left you alone? If they had, what would you think of someone who said “oh, it’s all CCC’s fault that the world is a smoking ruin. He pushed that button even though his parents told him not to.”?
a cautionary tale for small children
It certainly makes more sense that way than as history. But even so, it comes down to something like this: “Remember, kids! If you disobey your parents’ arbitrary instructions, they’re likely to throw you out of the house.” Ah, the piercing moral insight of the holy scriptures.
on that day your death will become inevitable
That’s an interpretation sometimes put on the text by people with a strong prior commitment to not letting the text have mistakes in it. But does what it says actually admit that interpretation? I’m going entirely off translations—I know maybe ten words of Hebrew—but it sure looks to me as if God says, simply and straightforwardly, that eating the fruit means dying the same day. Taking it to mean “your death will become inevitable” or “you will die spiritually” or something of the kind seems to me like rationalization.
But, again, I don’t know Hebrew and maybe “in that day you will surely die” really can mean “in that day it will become sure that on another day you will die”. Anyone want to enlighten me further?
I don’t think you answered my question: what’s the underlying principle?
I’m not actually sure.
I do think that there’s really incredibly good evidence that the Adam and Eve story is not literal, that it’s rather meant as a fable, to illustrate some important point. (It may be some sort of heavily mythological coating over an internal grain of historical truth, but if so, then it’s pretty deeply buried).
I’m not entirely sure what that point is. Part of it may be “the rules are there for a reason, don’t break them unless you’re really sure”. Part of it may be intended for children—“listen to your parents, they know better than you”. (And yes, some parents are bad news; but, by and large, the advice “listen to your parents” is very good advice for toddlers, because most parents care about their toddlers).
And Adam and Eve as portrayed in the Genesis narrative don’t seem to have been anything like as incapable as you were when you had no idea why scribbling in one book might be worse than scribbling in another.
I do wonder, though—how old were they supposed to be? It seems that they were created in adult bodies, and gifted from creation with the ability to speak, but they may well have had a toddler’s naivete.
Would your parents have put toddler-you in a room with a big red button that launches the missiles, sternly told you not to push it, and then left you alone?
Not if they had any option.
If they had, what would you think of someone who said “oh, it’s all CCC’s fault that the world is a smoking ruin. He pushed that button even though his parents told him not to.”?
Toddler-me would probably have expected that reaction. Current-me would consider putting toddler-me in that room to be horrendously irresponsible.
It certainly makes more sense that way than as history. But even so, it comes down to something like this: “Remember, kids! If you disobey your parents’ arbitrary instructions, they’re likely to throw you out of the house.” Ah, the piercing moral insight of the holy scriptures.
I see it as more “obey your parents, or you’re going to really hate what comes next”. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty broadly applicable.
on that day your death will become inevitable
That’s an interpretation sometimes put on the text by people with a strong prior commitment to not letting the text have mistakes in it. But does what it says actually admit that interpretation?
If you know ten words of Hebrew, then you know ten more words of Hebrew than I do.
there’s really incredibly good evidence that the Adam and Eve story is not literal
Do you mean there’s incredibly good evidence that it’s not literally true, or there’s incredibly good evidence that it’s not intended literally? I agree with the former but am unconvinced by the latter. (But, for the avoidance of doubt, I have absolutely zero problems with Christians or Jews not taking it literally; I was among their number for many years.)
ten words of Hebrew
I started writing a list and realised that maybe the figure is more like 30; the words I know are all in dribs and drabs from various sources, and I’d forgotten a few sources. I suspect you actually know at least some of the same ones I do. (Some likely examples: shalom, shema, adam.) Of course the actual point here is that neither of us knows Hebrew, so we’re both guessing about what it means to say (as commonly translated into English) “in the day that you eat it, you shall surely die”.
Do you mean there’s incredibly good evidence that it’s not literally true, or there’s incredibly good evidence that it’s not intended literally?
I think there’s incredibly good evidence that it’s not literally true, and (at least) very good evidence that it’s not intended literally. I consider the fact that there is incredibly good evidence that it’s not literally true to, in and of itself, be pretty good evidence that it’s not intended literally..
I started writing a list and realised that maybe the figure is more like 30; the words I know are all in dribs and drabs from various sources, and I’d forgotten a few sources. I suspect you actually know at least some of the same ones I do. (Some likely examples: shalom, shema, adam.)
Shalom—I think that’s “peace”, right? I’m not sure. I don’t know shema at all, and adam I know only as the name of the first man.
So, it seems I know more Hebrew than I thought; but nonetheless, you are perfectly correct about the point.
Yup, shalom is peace. (Related to salaam in Arabic.) I thought you might know shema from the famous declaration of monotheism, which goes something like Shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, adonai ekhad”, meaning “Hear, Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one”. (It comes from Deuteronomy, and is used liturgically.) I think adam* actually means “man” as well as being the name of the first one.
There are some other Hebrew words you might know because they’re used to make Biblical names; e.g., Isaac = Yitzhak and means something like “he laughs”, which you might remember from the relevant bit in the Bible. (I think I remember you saying you’re a Christian, which is why I thought you might know some of those.)
I thought you might know shema from the famous declaration of monotheism, which goes something like Shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, adonai ekhad, meaning “Hear, Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one”. (It comes from Deuteronomy, and is used liturgically.)
I don’t think I’m personally familiar with that phrase.
I think adam actually means “man” as well as being the name of the first one.
That makes sense. I think I recall seeing a footnote to that effect.
...if I had a perfect memory, I probably would know a lot more Hebrew than I do. I’ve seen the derivations of a lot of Biblical names, I just haven’t really thought of them as being particularly important enough to memorise. There are plenty of things about Isaac more important than the etymology of his name, after all.
Understood, and I hope I didn’t give the impression that I think anyone is obliged to remember this sort of thing. (It happens that my brain grabs onto such things pretty effortlessly, which I guess is partial compensation for the other things it’s rubbish at.)
I consider the fact that there is incredibly good evidence that it’s not literally true to, in and of itself, be pretty good evidence that it’s not intended literally.
How good that evidence is depends on whether the incredibly good evidence was available to (and incredibly good evidence for) the original writers.
A lot of the best reasons for thinking that the early chapters of Genesis are not literally true were (so far as anyone knows) completely unknown when those chapters were written.
According to Genesis 2 verse 10-14, the Garden was watered by a stream, which later split into four rivers. Two of those have, according to a brief Google search, gone missing in the time since Genesis was written, but the Tigris and the Euphrates would have been well known, even then. So checking up on Eden would have simply required heading up one of those rivers.
...which, now that I think about it, would have required someone willing to leave home for perhaps several days at a time and travel into the unknown, just to see what’s there.
checking up on Eden would have simply required heading up one of those rivers.
Nah. If you head up those rivers and don’t find Eden, the obvious conclusion is just that God removed it some time after Adam and Eve left because it was surplus to requirements. It doesn’t (at least not obviously, so far as I can see) refute the Genesis story.
Genesis says it was protected by an angel with a flaming sword. I think it might be reasonable not to expect to find the Garden… but one could expect to find the angel with the flaming sword. After all, if something’s there as security, it’s generally put where unauthorised people can find it.
It’s not an obvious refutation, but it’s more likely the result of a non-literal than a literal Garden of Eden.
If Eden was removed as surplus to requirements, so presumably was the angel. And this all seems like such an obvious thing for an Eden-literalist to say after trekking up the river and finding nothing that I really don’t see how the (then) present-day absence of the GoE and angel could possibly have been much evidence against a literal Eden.
You might want to know that you have accidentally replied to my comment instead of CCC’s. (In particular, your reply won’t have made CCC’s inbox icon light up.)
If a man pushes a button that launches a thousand nuclear bombs, is it just for him to avoid punishment on the grounds of complete ignorance?
As I understand the theology, until they had eaten the fruit, the only thing that they could do that was a sin was to eat the fruit. Which they had been specifically warned not to do.
He commanded them not to eat the fruit. Their sin was to eat the fruit, so the command itself might be considered sufficient education to tell them that what they were doing was something they should not be doing.
And then, later, God educated Moses with the Ten Commandments and a long list of laws.
Okay, let me re-state my argument.
1) Any designed object is either limited to actions that its designer can calculate and understand (in theory, given infinite time and paper to write on).
2) In the case of a calculating device like a computer, this means that, given infinite time and infinite paper and stationary, the designer of a computer can in theory perform any calculation that the computer can. (A real designer can’t calculate a trillion digits of pi on pencil and paper because his life is not long enough).
3) The universe has been around for something like 14 billion years.
4) If the universe has a designer, and if the purpose of the universe is to perform some calculation using the processing power of the intelligence that has developed in the universe, then could the universe provide the answer to that calculation any more quickly than the designer of the universe with pencil, paper, and a 14-billion-year head start?
Yes, but we can predict what they will do given knowledge of all relevant inputs. In the special case of computers, predicting what they will calculate is equivalent to doing the calculation oneself.
Knowledge of the future is not the same as control of the future.
To take a simpler example; let us say you flip a fair coin ten times, and come up with HHHHHTTHHT. After you have done so, I write down HHHHHTTHHT on a piece of paper and use a time machine to send it to the past, before you flipped the coin.
Thus, when you flip the coin, there exists a piece of paper that says HHHHHTTHHT. This matches with the series of coin-flips that you then make. In what way is this piece of paper influenced by anything that controls the results of the coin-flips?
It does not, actually. The same quantum-mechanical argument tells me (if I understand the diagrams correctly) that there are no free variables in any observation; that is to say, the result of every experiment is predetermined, unavoidable… predestined.
I still don’t understand the argument, but it certainly looks like an argument against free will to me. (Maybe that is because I don’t understand it).
Let me know if/when you write that separate article.
I’ll agree that the quale of the Presence of the Holy Spirit does exist, and I’ll agree that this is not, in and of itself, sufficient evidence to prove beyond doubt the existence of the Holy Spirit. (I will argue that it is evidence in favour of the existence of the Holy Spirit, on the basis that everything which there is a quale for and which is directly measurable in itself does exist—even if the quale can occasionally be triggered without the thing for which the quale exists).
The idea that “You can still live your life as if you were a classical being with free will”.
I did. The author of the blog post claims that things can be real to different degrees; that Mozilla Firefox is real in a fundamentally different way to the tree outside my window, which in turn is real in a fundamentally different way to Frodo Baggins.
I don’t see why this means that existence needs to be more than a continuum, though. All it is saying is that points on that continuum (Frodo Baggins, the tree outside my window) are different points on that continuum.
Of course it is just. How could you possibly doubt it? I mean, imagine the scene: you’re at home watching TV when you suddenly realize that there’s a button on your universal remote that you’ve never pressed and you have no idea what it does. You’re too lazy to get up off the couch to get the manual (and you have no idea where it is anyway, you probably threw it out) so you just push it to see what it does. Nothing happens.
The next day you turn on the TV to discover that nuclear armageddon has broken out at 100 million people are dead. An hour later the FBI shows up at your door and says, “You didn’t push that red button on your remote last night, did you?” “Why yes, yes I did,” you reply. “Is that a problem?” “Well, yes, it rather is. You see, that button launched the nuclear missiles, so I’m afraid you are now the greatest mass murderer in the history of humanity and we’re going to have to take you in. Turn around please.”
Yeah, this theory has always struck me as rather bizarre. So before eating the fruit it’s perfectly OK to torture kittens, perfectly OK to abuse and rape your children, and after you eat the fruit suddenly these things are not OK. Makes no sense to me.
But why is this a sin? Remember, at this point this is a command issued (according to your theory) by a deity who thinks it’s perfectly OK to torture kittens and rape children. Such a deity does not have a lot of moral authority IMHO.
Yeah, that’s another weird thing. God educated Moses. Why not educate everyone? Why should Moses get the benefit of seeing God directly while the rest of us have to make do with second-hand accounts of what God said? And why should we trust Moses? Prophets are a dime a dozen. Why Moses and not Mohammed? Or Joseph Smith? Or L. Ron Hubbard?
And as long as we’re on the topic, why wait so long to educate Moses? By the time we get to Moses, God has already committed a long string of genocides to punish people for sinning (the Flood, Sodom) despite the fact that they have not yet had the benefit of any education from God, even second-hand. That feels very much like the button scenario above, which I should hope grates on your moral intuition as much as it does on mine.
Your either-or construct is missing the “or” clause.
Of course it could. Why would you doubt it?
No, we can’t.
I didn’t say it was. But reliable knowledge of the future requires that the future be determined by the present. If it is possible to reliably predict the outcome of a coin toss, then the coin toss is deterministic, and therefore the coin cannot have free will. So unless you want to argue that a coin has free will, your example is a complete non-sequitur.
No, you’ve got this wrong. Quantum randomness is the only thing in our universe (that we know of) that is unpredictable even in principle. So it is possible that free will exists because quantum randomness exists. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that quantum effects have any bearing on human mental processes. So while one cannot rule out the possibility that quantum randomness might lead to free will in something there is no evidence that it leads to free will in us.
Will do. (UPDATE: the article is here )
Yes, of course it is. That was my whole point.
Ah. Then yes, I agree. You can live in the Matrix with or without the knowledge that you are living in the Matrix. Personally, I choose the red pill.
There are different ways of existing. There is existence-as-material-object (trees, houses). There is existence-as-fictional-character (Frodo). There is existence-as-patterns-of-bits-in-a-computer-memory (Firefox). Each of these is orthogonal to the other. George Washington, for example, existed as a physical object, and he also exists as a fictional character (in the story of chopping down the cherry tree). Along each of these “dimensions” a thing can exist to varying degrees. The transformation of a tree into a house is a gradual process. During that process, the tree exists less and less and the house exists more and more. So you have multiple dimensions, each of which has a continuous metric. That’s a vector space.
The real point, though, is that disagreements over whether or not something exists are usually (but not always) disagreements over the mode in which something exists. God clearly exists. The question is what mode he exists in. Fictional character? Material object? Something else?
(BTW, the author of “31 flavors” is me.)
For the analogy to match the Garden of Eden example, the red button needs to be clearly marked “Do Not Press”.
And I’m not saying that the just punishment should be same for something done in ignorance. But, at the very least, having pushed the button on the remote, the person in this analogy needs to be very firmly told that that was something that he should not have done. A several-hour lecture on not pushing buttons marked “do not press” is probably justified.
Put like that, is does seem odd. But consider—biting a kitten’s tail would be a form of torturing kittens. Is it okay for a three-month-old baby, who does not understand what it is doing, to bite a kitten’s tail? (And is it okay for the kitten to then claw at the baby?)
Delegation?
Lots of other people had some idea of what was right and wrong, even before Moses. Consider Cain and Abel—Cain knew it was wrong to kill Abel, but did it anyway. (I have no idea where that knowledge was supposed to have come from, but it was there)
Whoops.
Okay, but we can still predict the output of the computer at any given, finite, time step.
The important thing in the coin example is not the coin, but the time traveller. The prediction of the coin tosses is not made from knowledge of the present state of the world, but rather from knowledge of the future state of the world; that is to say, the state in which the coin tosses have already happened. The mechanism by which the coin tosses happen is thus irrelevant (the coin tosses can be replaced by a person with free will calling out “head!” and “tail!” in whatever order he freely desires to do).
...I’m going to read your further explanation article before I respond to this.
Agreed.
Why? I can see how the rest of your argument follows from this; I’m not seeing why these different types of existence must be orthogonal, why they can’t be colinear.
(Incidentally, I’d consider “George Washington the physical object” and “George Washington the fictional character” to be two different things which, confusingly, share the same name).
Not quite. It needs to have TWO labels. On the left it says, “DO NOT PRESS” and on the right it says “PRESS THIS BUTTON”. (Actually, a more accurate rendition might be, “Do not press this button” and “Press this button for important information on how to use this remote”. God really needs a better UI/UX guy.)
No. Of course not. Why would you doubt it?
Yes. Of course. Why would you doubt it?
Huh??? Why would an omnipotent deity need to delegate?
How do you know that? Just because he denied doing it? Maybe he thought it was perfectly OK to kill Abel, but wanted to avoid what he saw as unjust punishment.
Also, let’s look at man’s next transgression:
“Ge6:5 And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”
In other words, God’s first genocide (the Flood) was quite literally for thought crimes. Does it seem likely to you that the people committing these (unspecified) thought crimes knew they were transgressing against God’s will?
Really? How exactly would you do that? Because the only way I know of to tell what a computer is going to do at step N once N is sufficiently large is to build a computer and run it for N steps.
I really don’t get what point you’re trying to make here. My position is that people do not have free will, only the illusion of free will. If it were possible to actually do this experiment, that would simply prove that my position is correct.
Because you lose critical information that way, and that leads to unproductive arguments that are actually about the information that you’ve lost.
See, this is exactly what I’m talking about. This is kind of like arguing over whether Shakespeare’s plays were really written by Shakespeare, or by someone else who happened to have the same name. You’ve lost critical information here, namely, that there is a connection between GW-the-historical-person and GW-the-myth that goes far beyond that fact that they have the same name.
Or take another example: Buzz Lighyear started out existing as as an idea in someone’s head. At some later point in time, Buzz Lightyear began to exist also as a cartoon character. These are distinct because Buzz-as-cartoon-character has properties that Buzz-as-idea doesn’t. For example, Buzz-as-cartoon-character has a voice. Buzz-as-idea doesn’t.
But these two Buzz Lightyears are not two separate things that just happen to have the same name, they are one thing that exists in two different ontological categories.
Hmmmm. Not sure that’s quite right. The serpent wasn’t an authority figure. Maybe label the button “DO NOT PRESS” and add a stranger (a door-to-door insurance salesman, perhaps) who claims that you’ll never know what the button does until you try it?
Okay, in both cases, the situation is basically the same—a juvenile member of one species attacks and damages a juvenile member of another species. Why do you think one is okay and the other one is not?
Because it’s really boring to have to keep trying to individually explain the same basic principles to each of a hundred thousand near-complete idiots?
If so, then he sought to avoid what it from every other person in the world (Genesis 4, end of verse 14: “anyone who finds me will kill me”). Either he thinks that everyone else is arbitrarily evil, or he thinks they’d have reason to want to kill him.
I’d always understood the Flood story as they weren’t just thinking evil, but continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren’t even considering doing non-evil stuff.
Simulate the algorithm with pencil and paper, if all else fails. (Technically, you could consider that as using your brain as the computer and running the program, except you can interrupt it at any point and investigate the current state)
The point I’m trying to make with the coin/time-traveller example is that knowledge of the future—even perfect knowledge of the future—does not necessarily imply a perfectly deterministic universe.
(Side note: I don’t actually know GW-the-myth. It’s a bit of cultural extelligence that I, as a non-American, haven’t really been exposed to. I’m not certain whether it’s important to this argument that I should)
Hmmm. An interesting point. A thing can certainly change category over time. An idea can become a character in a book can become a character in a film can become ten thousand separate, distinct ideas can become a thousand incompatible fanfics. At some point, the question of whether two things are the same must also become fuzzy, and non-binary.
Consider; I can create the idea of a character who is some strange mix of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker (perhaps, to mix in some Star Trek, they were merged in a transporter accident). It would not be true to say that this is the same character as Luke, but it would also not be true to say that it’s entirely not the same character as Luke. Similarly with Han. But it would be true to say that Han is not the same character as Luke.
So whether two things are the same or not is, at the very least, a continuum.
How could Eve have known that? See my point above about Eve not having the benefit of any cultural references.
Because the kitten is acting in self defense. If the kitten had initiated the violence, that would not be OK.
Seriously?
No he didn’t. He was cursed by God (Ge4:12) and he’s lamenting the result of that curse.
Yes, because he’s cursed by God.
If that were true then humans would have died out in a single generation even without the Flood.
But that doesn’t work. If you do the math you will find that the even if you got the entire human race to do pencil-and-paper calculations 24x7 you’d have less computational power than a single iPhone.
Of course it does. That’s what determinism means. In fact, perfect knowledge is a stronger condition than determinism. Knowable necessarily implies determined, but the converse is not true. Whether a TM will halt on a given input is determined but not generally knowable.
Sorry about making that unwarranted assumption. Here’s a reference. The details don’t really matter. If you tell me your background I’ll try to come up with a more culturally appropriate example.
Indeed.
Eve could have known that God was an authority figure, from Genesis 2 verse 20-24, in which God created Eve (from Adam’s rib) and brought her to Adam.
So you accept self-defense as a justification, but not complete (but not wilful) ignorance?
Well, I’m guessing, but yes, it’s a serious guess. Omnipotence means the ability to do everything, it does not mean that everything is pleasant to do. And I certainly know I’d start to lose patience a bit after explaining individually to the hundredth person why stealing is wrong.
The curse, in and of itself, is not what’s going to make people want to kill him (if it was, then God could merely remove that aspect of the curse, rather than install a separate Mark as a warning to people not to do that). No, the curse merely prevented him from farming, from growing his own food. I’m guessing it also, as a result, made his guilt obvious—everyone would recognise the man who could not grow crops, and know he’d killed his brother.
But the curse is not what’s making Cain expect other people to kill him. He clearly expects that other people will freely choose to kill him, and that suggests to me that he knew he had done wrong.
I don’t see how that follows. I can imagine ways to produce a next generation consisting of entirely evil (or, at best, morally neutral) actions. What do you think would prevent the appearance of a new generation?
Yes, and over fourteen billion years, how many digits of pi can they produce?
I’m not saying it’s fast. Compared to a computer, pen-and-paper is really, really slow. That’s why we have computers. But fourteen billion years is a really, really, really long time.
That’s provided that the perfect knowledge of the future is somehow derived from a study of the present state of the universe. The time traveller voids this implicit assumption by deriving his perfect knowledge from a study of the future state of the universe.
Ah, thank you. That explains it all quite neatly.
I’m not sure it’s really worth the bother of coming up with a different example at this point—your point was quite clearly made, even without knowledge of the story. (If it makes any difference, I’m South African, which is probably going to be less helpful than one might think considering the number of separate cultures in here).
Your point is well made.
That’s a red herring. The question was not how she could have known that God was an authority figure. The question was how she could have known that the snake was NOT an authority figure too.
Oh, come on. Even if we suppose that God can get bored, you really don’t think he could have come up with a more effective way to spread the Word than just having one-on-one chats with individual humans? Why not hold a big rally? Or make a video? Or at least have more than one freakin’ person in the room when He finally gets fed up and says, “OK, I’ve had it, I’m going to tell you this one more time before I go on extended leave!” ???
Sheesh.
You do know that this is LessWrong, right? A site dedicated to rationality and the elimination of logical fallacies and cognitive bias? Because you are either profoundly ignorant of elementary logic, or you are trolling. For your reasoning here to be valid it would have to be the case that the only possible reason someone could not grow crops is that they had killed their brother. If you can’t see how absurd that is then you are beyond my ability to help.
Because “the good stuff” is essential to our survival. Humans cannot survive without cooperating with each other. That’s why we are social animals. That’s why we have evolved moral intuitions about right and wrong.
What difference does that make? Yes, 14B years is a long time, but it’s exactly the same amount of time for a computer. However much humans can calculate in 14B years (or any other amount of time you care to pull out of your hat) a computer can calculate vastly more.
I’ve been to SA twice. Beautiful country, but your politics are even more fucked up than ours here in the U.S., and that’s saying something.
Oh, right. Hmmm. Good question.
...I want to say that it’s common sense that not everyone who claims to be an authority figure is one, and that preferably one authority figure should introduce another on first meeting. But… Eve may well have been only hours old, and would not have any experience to back that up with.
There are plenty of ways to handle it, yes. All of which work very well for one generation. Twenty, thirty years’ time there’s a new batch turning up. One either needs a recording or, better yet, get them to teach their children...
Yes, I know exactly what site this is. Yes, I know that the reasoning “he can’t grow crops, therefore he killed his brother” is badly flawed. But the question is not whether people would think like that. The question is why would Cain, a human with biases and flawed logic, why would he think that people would reason like that?
And I think that the answer to that question is, because Cain had a guilty conscience. Because he had a guilty conscience, he defaults to expecting that, if anyone else sees something that is a result of his crime, they will correctly divine the reason for what they see (Cain was very much not a rationalist).
I don’t think that there is any evidence to suggest that anyone else actually thought like Cain expected them to think.
On a tribal level, yes, a cooperative tribe will outcompete a “pure evil” tribe easily. But even the “pure evil” tribe might hang around for two, maybe three generations.
I’m not claiming they’d be able to survive long-term, by any means. I just think one generation is a bit short.
That is true. However, in this case, if the universe if a computer, then the computer appears to have just sat around and waited for the first 14B years doing nothing. If it’s intended to find the answer to some question faster than its creator could, then it must be a pretty big question.
Yeah… wonderful climate, great biodiversity, near-total lack of large-scale natural disasters (as long as you stay off the floodplains), even our own private floral kingdom… absolutely horrible politicians.
Maybe because God has cursed him to be a “fugitive and a vagabond.” People didn’t like fugitives and vagabonds back then (they still don’t ).
Well, God seemed to think it was a plausible theory. His response was to slap himself in the forehead and say, “Wow, Cain, you’re right, people are going to try to kill you, which is not an appropriate punishment for murder. Here, I’d better put this mark on your forehead to make sure people know not to kill you.” (Funny how God was against the death penalty before he was for it.)
How are they going to feed themselves? They wouldn’t last one year without cooperating to hunt or grow crops. Survival in the wild is really, really hard.
This universe is not (as far as we can tell) intended to do anything. That doesn’t make your argument any less bogus.
I read it as more along the lines of “No, nobody’s going to kill you. Here, let me give you a magic feather just to calm you down.”
...fair enough. Doesn’t mean they weren’t doing a lot of evil, though, even if they were occasionally cooperating.
You are, of course, free to interpret literature however you like. But God was quite explicit about His thought process:
“Ge4:15 And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.”
I don’t know how God could possibly have made it any clearer that He thought someone killing Cain was a real possibility. (I also can’t help but wonder how you take sevenfold-vengeance on someone for murder. Do you kill them seven times? Kill them and six innocent bystanders?)
You have lost the thread of the conversation. The Flood was a punishment for thought crimes (Ge6:5). The doing-nothing-but-evil theory was put forward by you as an attempt to reconcile this horrible atrocity with your own moral intuition:
You seem to have run headlong into the fundamental problem with Christian theology: if we are inherently sinful, then our moral intuitions are necessarily unreliable, and hence you would expect there to be conflicts between our moral intuitions and God’s Word as revealed by the Bible. You would expect to see things in the Bible that make you go, “Whoa, that doesn’t seem right to me.” At this point you must choose between the Bible and your moral intuitions. (Before you choose you should read Jeremiah 19:9.)
That wasn’t a thought process. That was spoken words; the intent behind those words was not given. What we’re given here is an if-then—if anyone slays Cain, then that person will have vengeance taken upon him. It does not say whether or not the “if” is at all likely to happen, and may have been intended merely to calm Cain’s irrational fear of the “if” part happening.
I think it’s “kill them and six members of their clan/family”, but I’m not sure.
Yes, and then we discussed the viability of continually doing evil, as it pertains to survival for more than one generation. You were sufficiently persuasive on the matter of cooperation for survival that I then weakened my stance from “continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren’t even considering doing non-evil stuff” to “doing a whole lot of evil stuff a lot of the time”.
In fact, looking at Genesis 6:5:
...it mentions two things. It mentions how wicked everyone on earth was and how evil their thoughts were all the time. This is two separate things; the first part seems, to me, to refer to wicked deeds (with continuously evil thoughts only mentioned after the “and”).
But my moral intuitions are also, to a large degree, a product of my environment, and specifically of my upbringing. My parents were Christian, and raised me in a Christian environment; I might therefore expect that my moral intuition is closer to God’s Word than it would have been had I been raised in a different culture.
And, looking at human history, there most certainly have been cultures that regularly did things that I would find morally objectionable. In fact, there are still such cultures in existence today. Human cultures have, in the past, gone to such horrors as human sacrifice, cannibalism, and so on—things which my moral intuitions say are badly wrong, but which (presumably) someone raised in such a culture would have much less of a problem with.
“The LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him”. Again, I don’t see how God could have possibly made it any clearer that the intent of putting the mark on Cain was to prevent the otherwise very real possibility of people killing him.
If you’re not sure, then you must believe that there could be circumstances under which killing six members of a person’s family as punishment for a crime they did not commit could be justified. I find that deeply disturbing.
No, it simply refers to an evil state of being. It says nothing about what brought about that state. But it doesn’t matter. The fact that it specifically calls out thoughts means that the Flood was at least partially retribution for thought crimes.
Sure, and so are everyone else’s.
A Muslim would disagree with you. Have you considered the possibility that they might be right and you are wrong? It’s just the luck of the draw that you happened to be born into a Christian household rather than a Muslim one. Maybe you got unlucky. How would you tell?
But you keep dancing around the real question: Do you really believe that killing innocent bystanders can be morally justified? Or that genocide as a response to thought crimes can be morally justified? Or that forcing people to cannibalize their own children (Jeremiah 19:9) can be morally justified? Because that is the price of taking the Bible as your moral standard.
CCC may be claiming that the Bible (in this translation?) does not accurately represent God’s motive here. But that just calls attention to the fact that—for reasons which escape me even after trying to read the comment tree—you’re both talking about a story that seems ridiculous on every level. Your last paragraph indeed seems like a more fruitful line of discussion.
Looking at another translation:
(footnote: “Many commentators believe this sign not to have been like a brand on the forehead, but something awesome about Cain’s appearance that made people dread and avoid him. In the Talmud, the rabbis suggested several possibilities, including leprosy, boils, or a horn that grew out of Cain. But it was also suggested that Cain was given a pet dog to serve as a protective sign.”)
Looking over the list, most of them do say something along the lines of “so that no one would kill him”, but there are a scattering of others. I interpret is as saying that the sign given to Cain was a clear warning—something easily understood as “DO NOT KILL THIS MAN”—but I don’t see any sign that it was ever actually necessary to save Cain’s life.
There is a fallacy at work here. Consider a statement of the form, “if A then B”. Consider the situation where A is a thing that is never true; for example 1=2. Then the statement becomes “if 1=2 then B”. Now, at this point, I can substitute in anything I want for B, and the statement remains morally neutral; since one can never be equal to two.
Now, the statement given here was as follows: “If someone kills Cain, then that person will have vengeance laid against them sevenfold”. Consider, then, that perhaps no-one killed Cain. Perhaps he died of pneumonia, or was attacked by a bear, or fell off a cliff, or drowned.
I don’t see how it’s possible to be in an evil state of being without at least seriously attempting to do evil deeds.
I see I phrased my point poorly. Let me fix that. My moral intuition is closer to what is in the Bible than it would have been had I been raised in a different culture. While the theoretical Muslim and I may have some disagreements as to what extent the Bible is God’s Word, I think we can agree on this rephrased point.
I have considered the possibility. My conclusion is that it would take pretty convincing evidence to persuade me of that, but it is not impossible that I am wrong.
Are you familiar with the trolley problem? In short, it raises the question of whether or not it is a morally justifiable action to kill one innocent bystander in order to save five innocent bystanders.
Ordinary English doesn’t work like that. “If X, then Y will happen” includes possible worlds in which X is true.
“If you fall into the sun, you will die” expresses a meaningful idea even if nobody falls into the sun.
Exactly. “Did not” is not the same as “can not.” Particularly since God’s threats are intended to have a deterrent effect. The whole point (I presume) is to try to influence things so that evil acts don’t happen even though they can.
But we don’t even need to look to God’s forced familial cannibalism in Jeremiah. The bedrock of Christianity is the threat of eternal torment for a thought crime: not believing in Jesus.
I wasn’t speaking about “did not”. I was speaking about “will not”, which is distinct from “can not” and is a form that can only be employed by a speaker with sufficient certainty about the future—unknown to me, but not to an omniscient being.
According to official Catholic doctrine:
In other words, trying to do the right thing counts.
Jesus very plainly disagreed:
“Mark16:16 He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.”
At best, that means that trying to do the right thing counts if you’re ignorant of Christianity. Most people aren’t ignorant of Christianity, and rampant proselytization makes things much worse since with more people who have heard of Christianity, fewer can use that escape clause.
In fact, it doesn’t just apply to knowing Christianity’s existence. The more you understand Christianity, according to that, the more you have to do to be saved.
And even then, it has loopholes you can drive a truck through. “Can be saved”, not “will be saved”—it’s entirely consistent with that statement for God not to save anyone.
It could be that (1) if you are ignorant of Christianity you can escape damnation by living a good life, but (2) living a good enough life is really hard, especially if you don’t know it’s necessary to escape damnation, and that (3) for that reason, those who are aware of Christianity have better prospects than those who aren’t.
(Given that the fraction of people aware of Christianity who accept it isn’t terribly high, that would require God to be pretty nasty, but so does the whole idea of damnation as commonly understood among Christians. And it probably sounded better back when the great majority of people who knew of Christianity were Christians at least in name.)
I don’t think that you are, in a practical sense, disagreeing with me or lisper, even if on some abstract level Christianity lets some nonbeliever be saved.
The only thing I’m disagreeing with you about here is the following claim: that from “nonbelievers can be saved” or even “nonbelievers can be saved, and a substantial number will be” you can infer “proselytizing is bad for the people it’s aimed at because it makes them more likely to be damned”.
“The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that’s where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won’t do if they don’t know about it. This explains why it is so important to shoot missionaries on sight.”—Terry Pratchett, Eric
I disagree. Most people are ignorant of Christianity.
I don’t mean that most people haven’t heard of it. Most people have. A lot of them have heard (and believe) things about it that are false; or have merely heard of it but no more; or, worse yet, have only heard of some splinter Protestant groups and assumed that all Christians agree with them.
It is quite possible that a large number of people, hearing of the famous Creationism/Evolution debate, believe that Christianity and Science are irreconcilable and thus, in pursuit of the truth, reject what they have heard of Christianity and try to do what is right. This, to my understanding, fits perfectly in to being a person who “is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it”.
I don’t see how that follows. Seeking the truth and doing God’s will in accordance with your best understanding thereof seems to be what everyone should be doing. What “more” do you think one should be doing with a better understanding of Christianity?
That is true. If God were malevolent, opposed to saving people, then He could use those loopholes.
I don’t think that God is malevolent.
They didn’t get them from thin air. They got them from Christians. This amounts to a no true Scotsman defense—all the things all those other Christians say, they aren’t true Christianity.
If that counts as being ignorant, the same problem arises: It’s better to be ignorant than knowledgeable.
Christianity says you should do X. If you are only required to follow Christianity to your best understanding to be saved, and you don’t understand Christianity as requiring X, you don’t have to do X to be saved. But once you really understand that Christianity requires you to do X, then all of a sudden you better do X. Following it to the best of your understanding means that the more you understand, the more you have to do.
And I’m sure you can think of plenty of things which Christianity tells you to do. It’s not as if examples are particularly scarce.
The way God is described by Christians looks just like malevolence. If God really saves people who follow Christianity to the best of their understanding, without loopholes like “maybe he will save them but maybe he won’t so becoming more Christian is a safer bet”, Christians wouldn’t proselytize.
In some cases they got them only very indirectly from Christians. And in some cases they got them from the loudest Christians; it would be no-true-Scotsman-y to say that those people aren’t Christians, but it’s perfectly in order to say “those ideas are certainly Christian ideas, but they are not the only Christian ideas and most Christians disagree with them”.
It sounds as if you’re assuming that improved understanding of Christianity always means discovering more things you’re supposed to do. But it could go the other way too: perhaps initially your “best understanding” tells you you have to do Y, but when you learn more you decide you don’t. In that case, a rule that you’re saved iff you act according to your best understanding would say that initially you have to do Y but later on you don’t.
(E.g., some versions of Christianity say that actually there’s very little you have to do. You have to believe some particular things, and hold some particular attitudes, and if you do those then you’re saved. Whether you murder people, give money to charities, help your landlady take out the garbage, etc., may be evidence that you do or don’t hold those attitudes, but isn’t directly required for anything. In that case, converting someone to Christianity—meaning getting them to hold those beliefs and attitudes—definitely makes their salvation more likely.)
I bet he can. But that’s not the same as being able to think of plenty of things Christianity says you have to do, on pain of damnation.
I do largely agree with this, with the qualification that it depends which Christians. I think some do genuinely have beliefs about God which, if true, would mean that he’s benevolent. (I think this requires them to be not terribly orthodox.)
I think CCC is trying to say that those aren’t Christian ideas at all and that people who think that that’s what Christianity is like are mistaken, not just choosing a smaller group of Christians over a larger one.
It isn’t “you do the exact set of things described by your mistaken understanding of Christianity, and you are saved”. It’s “imperfect understanding is an excuse for failing to meet the requirement”. Improved understanding can only increase the things you must do, never reduce it. In other words, if you falsely think that Christianity requires being a vegetarian, and you fail to be a vegetarian (thus violating your mistaken understanding of it, but not actually violating true Christianity), you can still be saved.
Everything that Christianity says you should do, is under pain of damnation (or has no penalty at all). It’s not as if God has some other punishment short of damnation that he administers instead when your sin is mild.
There are plenty of punishments short of eternal damnation that an omnipotent being can hand out.
From here:
I realise that it’s totally unclear to me exactly which ideas we’re talking about right now. CCC’s original comment mentioned things widely believed about Christianity that are just false, and things that are taught by “splinter Protestant groups” but not widely accepted by Christians. I don’t know what he’d put in each category.
Well, that’s exactly the position I explicitly argued against. I’m afraid I haven’t grasped on what grounds you disagree with what I said; it looks like you’re just reiterating your position.
(I think it’s likely that some Christians do hold opinions that, when followed through, have the consequence that teaching someone about Christianity makes them less likely to be saved. I am saying only that I see no reason why Christians holding that some non-Christians will escape damnation by living a good life according to what understanding they have are in no sense required to hold opinions with that consequence.)
The details depend on the variety of Christianity, but e.g. for Roman Catholicism this is flatly false. And for many Protestant flavours of Christianity, it’s saved from being false only by that last parenthesis: there are things you should do but that do not have a penalty. (So why do them? Because you believe God says you should and you want to do what he says. Because you want to. Because you think doing them makes it less likely that you will eventually do something that is bad enough to lose your salvation. Because you believe God says you should and has your best interests at heart, so that in the long run it will be good for you even if it’s difficult now. Etc.)
I’m not stating a position, I’m observing someone else’s position. “God may save someone who misunderstands Christianity”, when stated by Christians, seems to mean that God won’t punish someone for not following a rule that he doesn’t know about. It doesn’t mean that God will punish someone for not following a rule that he thinks is real but isn’t.
I’ve never heard a Christian say anything like “if you think God requires you to stand on your head, and you don’t stand on your head, God will send you to Hell”.
I stand corrected for Catholicism, but the substance of my criticism remains. Just replace “Hell” with “Hell or Purgatory”.
My observations do not yield the same results as yours.
How can you tell? Usually the question just isn’t brought up. I mean, usually what happens is that someone says “isn’t it unfair for people to be damned on account of mere ignorance?” and someone else responds: yeah, it would be, but actually that doesn’t happen because those people will be judged in some unknown fashion according to their consciences. And generally the details of exactly how that works are acknowledged to be unknown, so there’s not much more to say.
But for what it’s worth, the nearest thing to a statement of this idea in the actual Bible, which comes in the Letter to the Romans, says this:
(emphasis mine) which you will notice has “accuse” as well as “excuse”.
This doesn’t explicitly address the question of what happens if that conscience is bearing false witness and the wrong law is written in their hearts; again, that question tends not to come up in these discussions.
But doing so completely breaks your criticism, doesn’t it? Because Purgatory comes in degrees, or at least in variable terms, and falls far short of hell in awfulness. So, in those Christians’ view, God has a wide range of punishments available that are much milder than eternal damnation. (Though some believers in Purgatory would claim it isn’t exactly punishment.)
I have also heard, from Protestants, the idea that although you can escape damnation no matter how wicked a life you lead and attain eternal felicity, there may be different degrees of that eternal felicity on offer. So it isn’t only Catholics who have possible sanctions for bad behaviour even for the saved.
(This seems like a good point at which to reiterate that although I’m kinda-sorta defending Christians here, I happen not to be among their number and think what most of them say about salvation and damnation is horrible morally, incoherent logically, or both.)
I would interpret “accuse” to mean “they claim they are violating the law because they don’t know better, but itheir thoughts show that hey really do know better”—not to mean “they believe something is a law and if so they will be punished for not following the nonexistent law”.
No, the criticism is that either
God punishes people for things they can’t reasonably be expected to avoid (like non-Christians who don’t follow Christian commands), or
God doesn’t punish people for things they can’t reasonably be expected to avoid, in which case the best thing to do is make sure people don’t know about Christianity.
1 is bad because people are punished for something that isn’t their fault; 2 would blatantly contradict what Christians think is good.
This doesn’t depend on the punishment being infinite or eternal.
Hmmmm. Here’s a third option; the punishment for a sin committed in ignorance is a lot lighter than the punishment for a sin committed deliberately. “A lot lighter” implies neither infinite nor eternal; merely a firm hint that that is not the way to go about things.
In this case, letting people know what the rules are will save them a lot of trouble (and trial-and-error) along the way.
I think I misunderstood what you meant by “my criticism”. (You’ve made a number of criticisms in the course of this thread.) In any case, the argument you’re now offering looks different to me from the one you’ve been making in earlier comments, and to which I thought I was responding.
In any case, I think what you’re offering now is not correct. Consider the following possible world which is, as I’ve already said, roughly what some Christians consider the actual world to be like:
If you are not a Christian, you are judged on the basis of how good a life you’ve led, according to your own conscience[1]; if it’s very good, you get saved; if not, you get damned.
If you are a Christian, you are saved regardless of how good a life you’ve led.
[1] Perhaps with some sort of tweak so that deliberately cultivating shamelessness doesn’t help you; e.g., maybe you’re judged according to the strictest your conscience has been, or something. I suspect it’s difficult to fill in the details satisfactorily, but not necessarily any harder than e.g. dealing with the difficulties utilitarian theories tend to have when considering actions that can change how many people there are.
In this scenario, what comes of your dichotomy? Well: (1) God only punishes people for things their own conscience tells them (or told them, or could have told them if they’d listened, or something) to be wrong. So no, he isn’t punishing people for things they couldn’t reasonably be expected to avoid. But (2) making sure people don’t know about Christianity will not benefit them, because if they fail to live a very good life they will be damned if they don’t know about Christianity but might be saved if they do. (And, Christians would probably add, if they know about Christianity they’re more likely to live a good life because they will be better informed about what constitutes one.)
Again: I think there are serious problems with this scenario (e.g., damning anyone seems plainly unjust to me if it means eternal torture) so we are agreed on that score. I just think your analysis of the problems is incorrect.
I don’t think many Christians consider the world to be like that. It would produce bizarre results such as the equivalent of Huckleberry Finn going to Hell because he helped a runaway slave but his conscience told him that helping a runaway slave is wrong. For a modern equivalent, a gay person whose conscience tells him that homosexuality is wrong would go to Hell for it.
Do you have any evidence for that, other than the fact that it has consequences you find bizarre? (Most versions of Christianity have quite a lot of consequences—or in some cases explicitly stated doctrines—that I find bizarre and expect you find at least as bizarre as I do.)
I have at least one piece of evidence on my side, which is that I spent decades as a Christian and what I describe is not far from my view as I remember it. (I mostly believed that damnation meant destruction rather than eternal torture; I don’t think that makes much difference to the sub-point currently at issue.) I think if actually asked “so, does that mean that someone might be damned rather than saved on account of doing something he thought wrong that was actually right?” my answer would have been (1) somewhat evasive (“I don’t claim to know the details of God’s policy; he hasn’t told us and it’s not obvious what it should be… ”) but (2) broadly in line with what I’ve been describing here (”… but if I have to guess, then yes: I think that doing something believing it to be wrong is itself a decision to act wrongly, and as fit to make the difference between salvation and damnation as any other decision to act wrongly.”)
I don’t recall ever giving much consideration to the question of people who do good things believing them to be evil, which I take as evidence for my suggestion earlier that most Christians holding that non-Christians may be judged “on their merits” likewise don’t think about it much if at all, which in case it’s not obvious I think is relevant because it means that even if you’re correct that thinking hard enough about it would show an incoherence in the position I described, that won’t actually stop many Christians holding such a position: because scarcely any will think hard enough about it.
I’ve found a few other passages that seem to have a bearing on this question.
Luke 12:47-48 states:
...which implies that, while there is a punishment for sin committed in ignorance, it is far less than that for sin committed knowingly.
(Proverbs 24:12 also seems relevant; and there’s a lot of probably-at-least-slightly relevant passages linked from here).
You make an excellent point. There are a number of things being proposed by groups that call themselves Christian, often in the honest belief that they are right to propose such things (and to do so enthusiastically), which I nonetheless find myself in firm disagreement with. (For example, creationism).
To avoid the fallacy, then, and to deal with such contradictions, I shall define more narrowly what I consider “true Christianity”, and I shall define it as Roman Catholicism (or something sufficiently close to it).
One example of X that I can think of, off the top of my head, is “going to Church on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation”.
It is true that one who does want to be a good Christian will need to go to Church, while one who is ignorant will also be ignorant of that requirement. Hmmmm. So you have a clear point, there.
I think that one reasonable analogy is that it’s a bit like writing an exam at university. Sure, you can self-study and still ace the test, but your odds are a lot better if you attend the lectures. And trying to invite others to attend the lectures improves their odds of passing, as well.
I think a lot of Christians would say that the eternal torment isn’t for the crime of not believing in Jesus but for other crimes; what believing in Jesus would do is enable one to escape the sentence for those other crimes.
And a lot of Christians, mostly different ones, would say that the threat of eternal torment was a mistake that we’ve now outgrown, or was never intended to be taken literally, or is a misunderstanding of a threat of final destruction, or something of the kind.
Not for “other crimes”, but specifically because of the original sin. The default outcome for humans is eternal torment, but Jesus offers an escape :-/
Some Christians would say that, some not. (Very very crudely, Catholics would somewhat agree, Protestants mostly wouldn’t. The Eastern Orthodox usually line up more with the Catholics than with the Protestants, but I forget where they stand on this one.)
Many would say, e.g., that “original sin” bequeaths us all a sinful “nature” but it’s the sinful thoughts and actions we perpetrate for which we are rightly and justly damned.
(But yes, most Christians would say that the default outcome for humans as we now are is damnation, whether or not they would cash that out in the traditional way as eternal torment.)
Wouldn’t Protestants agree that without the help of Jesus (technically, grace) humans cannot help but yield to their sinful nature? The original sin is not something mere humans can overcome by themselves.
They probably would (the opposite position being Pelagianism, I suppose). But they’d still say our sins are our fault and we are fully responsible for them.
This sounds like making people feel guilty on purpose.
Saying “you are responsible for your own choices” is making people feel guilty on purpose?
(Your way of phrasing the question suggests you might be looking for a pointless argument with me. If that’s the case, please stop.)
My remark was not about the “fully responsible” part, but about the “your fault” part.
Note that guilt has nothing to do with being responsible for your own choices. The feeling of guilt is counterproductive regardless of what you choose to do.
Telling people “this is your fault” is a pretty good way to ensure that they feel guilty.
No, that is not the case. It does appear that I had misunderstood what you said, though.
This being the misunderstanding.
I think I now see more clearly what you were saying. You were saying that a statement along the lines of “Everything wrong in your life is YOUR FAULT!” would be making people feel guilty on purpose. This I agree with.
(What I thought you were saying—and what I did not agree with—is now unimportant.)
I apologise for my error.
Sorry for that accusation, it was caused by your phrasing which (to me) sounded suggestive of indignation, and following the scheme often found in unpleasant arguments, i.e. repeating someone’s words (or misinterpreted words) in a loud-angry-questioning tone. As a suggestion, remember that this way of phrasing questions can be misunderstood?
Nothing happened that requires apologies :) It’s cool :)
I shall try to bear that in mind in the future. Tonal information is stripped from plain-text communication, and will be guessed (possibly erroneously) by the reader.
(I knew that already, actually, but it’s not an easy lesson to always remember)
Could be. (For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not endorsing any of this stuff: I think it’s logically dodgy and morally odious.)
[EDITED to fix an autocorrect error. If you saw “I’m not encoding any of this stuff”, that’s why.]
I liked the version with “encoding” :) It makes sense in its own way, if you have some programming background :)
Only an extremely limited kind of sense :-).
Fair enough, but a lot of those “other crimes” are thought crimes too, e.g. Exo20:17, Mat5:28.
Jesus was pretty clear about this. Mat13:42 (and in case you didn’t get it the first time he repeats himself in verse 50), Mark16:16.
Oh yes. I wasn’t saying “Christianity is much less horrible than you think”, just disagreeing with one particular instance of alleged horribilitude.
Actually, by and large the things he says about hell seem to me to fit the “final destruction” interpretation better than the “eternal torture” interpretation. Matthew 13:42 and 50, e.g., refer to throwing things into a “blazing furnace”; I don’t know about you, but when I throw something on the fire I generally do so with the expectation that it will be destroyed. Mark 16:16 (1) probably wasn’t in the original version of Mark’s gospel and (2) just says “will be condemned” rather than specifying anything about what that entails; did you intend a different reference?
There are things Jesus is alleged to have said that sound more like eternal torture; e.g., Matthew 25:46. Surprise surprise, the Bible is not perfectly consistent with itself.
On hell:
It seems pretty obvious to me that descriptions of hell could easily be just metaphorical. There is a perpetual, persistent nature to sin—it’s like a never-ending fire that brings suffering and destruction in way that perpetuates itself. Eternal fire is a great way to describe it if one were looking for a metaphor. It’s this fire you need saving from. Enter Jesus.
Honestly, it’s a wonder to me hell isn’t treated as an obvious metaphor, but rather it is still a very real place for many mainstream Christians. I suppose it’s because they must also treat the resurrection as literal, and that bit loses some of it’s teeth if there is no real heaven/hell.
Yeah but Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.
That’s ingenious, but it really doesn’t seem to me easy to reconcile with the actual Hell-talk in the NT. E.g., Jesus tells his listeners on one occasion: don’t fear men who can throw your body into prison; rather fear God, who can destroy both soul and body in hell. And that passage in Matthew 25, which should scare the shit out of every Christian, talks about “eternal punishment” and is in any case clearly meant to be happening post mortem, or at least post resurrectionem. And that stuff in Revelation about a lake of burning sulphur, which again seems clearly to be for destruction and/or punishment. And so on.
If all we had to go on was the fact that Christianity has a tradition involving sin and eternal torment, I might agree with you. But what we have is more specific and doesn’t seem to me like it fits your theory very well.
Yes, I think that’s at least part of it. (There’s something in C S Lewis—I think near the end of The problem of pain—where he says (or maybe quotes someone else as saying) that he’s never encountered anyone with a really lively hope of heaven who didn’t also have a serious fear of hell.)
I don’t think “sometimes an omnipotent superbeing can stop you being consumed when you’re thrown into a furnace” is much of an argument against “furnaces are generally better metaphors for destruction than for long-lasting punishment” :-).
Hm. Not worth getting into a line-by-line breakdown, but I’d argue anything said about hell in the Gospels (or the NT) could be read purely metaphorically without much strain.
A couple of the examples you’ve mentioned:
Seems to me he could just be saying something like: “They can take our lives and destroy our flesh, but we must not betray the Spirit of the movement; the Truth of God’s kingdom.”
This is a pretty common sentiment among revolutionaries.
I think it’s a fairly common view that the author of Revelation was writing about recent events in Jerusalem (Roman/Jewish wars) using apocalyptic, highly figurative language. I’m no expert, but this is my understanding.
The Greek for hell used often in the NT is “gehenna” and (from my recall) refers to a garbage dump that was kept outside the walls of the city. Jesus might have been using this as a literal direct comparison to the hell that awaited sinners… but it seems more likely to me he just meant it as symbolic.
Anyway, tough to know what original authors/speakers believed. It is admittedly my pet theory that a lot of western religion is the erection of concrete literal dogmas from what was only intended as metaphors, teaching fables, etc. Low probability I’m right.
This was just a joke funny to only former fundamentalists like me. :)
Yes, but more precisely I think he was writing about recent events and prophesying doom to the Bad Guys in that narrative. I’m pretty sure that lake of burning sulphur was intended as part of the latter, not the former.
Yes, that’s one reason why I favour “final destruction” over “eternal torture” as a description of what he was warning of. In an age before non-biodegradable plastics, if you threw something into the town dump, with its fire and its worms, you weren’t expecting it to last for ever.
It’s an interesting idea. I’m not sure how plausible I find it.
For the avoidance of doubt, I did understand that it was a joke. (Former moderate evangelical here. I managed to avoid outright fundamentalism.)
The Biblical text as a whole seems very inconsistent to me if you are looking to choose either annihilationism or eternal conscious torment. The OT seems to treat death as final; then you have the rich man and Lazarus and “lake of fire” talk on the other side of the spectrum.
It is my sense that the Bible is actually very inconsistent on the issue because it is an amalgamation of lots of different, sometimes contradictory, views and ideas about the afterlife. You can find a common thread if you’d like...but you have to glaze over lots of inconsistencies.
For sure the Bible as a whole is far from consistent about this stuff. Even the NT specifically doesn’t speak with one voice. My only claim is that the answer to the question “what is intended by the teachings about hell ascribed to Jesus in the NT?” is nearer to “final destruction” than to “eternal torture”. I agree that the “rich man & Lazarus” story leans the other way but that one seems particularly clearly not intended to have its incidental details treated as doctrine.
I think there’s a joke to the effect that if you’re bad in life then when you die God will send you to New Jersey, and I don’t know anything about translations of earlier versions of the bible but I kind of hope that it’s possible for us to interpret the Gehenna comparison as parallel to that.
If someone told me that when I die God would send me to New Jersey, I’d understand that he was joking and being symbolic. But I would not reason “well, people in New Jersey die, so obviously he is trying to tell me that people in Hell get destroyed after a while”.
Nope, because dying is not a particularly distinctive feature of life in New Jersey; it happens everywhere in much the same way. So being sent to New Jersey wouldn’t make any sense as a symbol for being destroyed. What if someone told you that God will send you to the electric chair when you die?
If someone said that, I would assume he is trying to tell me that God will punish me in a severe and irreversible manner after I die.
It’s true that actual pits of flame kill people rather than torture them forever, but going from that to Hell being temporary is a case of some parts of the metaphor fighting others. He used a pit of flame as an example rather than dying in your sleep because he wanted to emphasize the severity of the punishment. If the metaphor was also meant to imply that Hell is temporary like a fire pit, the metaphor would be deemphasizing the severity of the punishment. A metaphor would not stand for two such opposed things unless the person making it is very confused.
I agree that he wanted to emphasize the severity, but that doesn’t have to mean making it out to be as severe as it could imaginably be. Fiery (and no doubt painful) total and final destruction is pretty severe, after all.
Yeah, that’s a better example.
I don’t follow the reasoning you’re expecting her to have used. She couldn’t possibly have seen God taking one of Adam’s ribs and making her out of it, for the excellent reason that for most of that process she didn’t even exist. Is she supposed to accept God as an authority figure just because he tells her he made her?
No, but she would have seen God taking her to Adam. And Adam also behaving as if it had been God who had made her.
...admittedly, it would have been incredibly easy (even probable) for her to have missed this sort of delicate social cue when she was, perhaps, mere hours old.
Yes, if in fact he was completely enough ignorant. What do I mean by “enough”? Well, if you come across a mysterious button then you should at least suspect that pushing it will do something dramatic you would on balance prefer not to have done, and if you push it anyway then that’s a bit irresponsible. You aren’t completely ignorant, because you have some idea of the sorts of things mysterious buttons might do when pushed.
If a man walking in the woods steps on a twig that was actually attached to a mechanism that launches a thousand nuclear bombs, is it just for him to avoid punishment on the grounds of complete ignorance? Of course it is.
What’s the underlying principle here? I mean, would you endorse something like this? “If you find yourself in a nice place with no memory of anything before being there, and someone claiming to be its creator and yours gives you instructions, it is always wrong to disobey them.”
Leaving aside the question of the culpability of Adam and Eve in this story, it seems clear to me that God is most certainly culpable, especially in the version of the story endorsed by many Christians where the Fall is ultimately responsible for sending billions of people to eternal torment. He puts A&E in this situation where if they Do The Thing then the consequences will be unimaginably horrendous. He tells them not to do it—OK, fair enough—but he doesn’t tell them accurately what the consequences will be, he doesn’t give them evidence that the consequences will be what he says[1], and most importantly he doesn’t in any way prepare them for the fact that in the garden with them is someone else—the serpent—who will with great cunning try to get them to do what God’s told them not to.
If I put my child in a room with a big red button that launches nuclear missiles, and also put in that room another person who is liable to try to get her to press the button, and if I know that in that case she is quite likely to be persuaded, and if all I say is “now, Child, you can do what you like in the room but don’t press that button”—why then, I am much more at fault than she is if those missiles get launched.
[1] In fact, the only consequence the story represents God as telling them about does not happen; God says that if they eat it then “in that day you will surely die”, and they don’t; the serpent tells Eve that they won’t, and they don’t.
I take your point—it is just to avoid punishment for ignorance so complete. (Mind you, whoever deliberately connected that twig to the nuclear launch silo should get into some trouble).
When I was a small child, I found myself in a nice place with two people who called themselves my parents. I did not remember anything before then; my parents told me that this was because I had not yet been born. They claimed to have somehow had something to do with creating me. They informed me, once I had learned to communicate with them, of several rules that, at the time, appeared arbitrary (why was I allowed to colour in in this book, but not my Dad’s expensive encyclopedias? Why was I barred from wandering out onto the road to get a close look at the cars? Why should I not accept candy from a stranger?) They may have tried to explain the consequences of breaking those rules, but if they did, I certainly didn’t understand them. If some stranger had attempted to persuade me to break those rules, then the correct action for me to take would be to ignore the stranger.
(Which makes the Adam and Eve story a cautionary tale for small children, I guess.)
I’d understood that to mean “on that day your death will become inevitable”—since they were thrown out of the Garden and away from the Tree of Life (which could apparently confer immortality) their eventual deaths did become certain on that day.
I don’t think you answered my question: what’s the underlying principle?
I agree that it is generally best for people who, perhaps on account of being very young, are not able to survive effectively by making their own decisions to obey the people taking care of them. But I’m not sure this is best understood as a moral obligation, and surely sometimes it’s a mistake—some parents and other carers are, one way or another, very bad indeed. And Adam and Eve as portrayed in the Genesis narrative don’t seem to have been anything like as incapable as you were when you had no idea why scribbling in one book might be worse than scribbling in another.
But let’s run with your analogy for a moment, and suppose that in fact Adam and Eve were as incompetent as toddler-you, and needed to be fenced about with incomprehensible absolute prohibitions whose real reasons they couldn’t understand. Would your parents have put toddler-you in a room with a big red button that launches the missiles, sternly told you not to push it, and then left you alone? If they had, what would you think of someone who said “oh, it’s all CCC’s fault that the world is a smoking ruin. He pushed that button even though his parents told him not to.”?
It certainly makes more sense that way than as history. But even so, it comes down to something like this: “Remember, kids! If you disobey your parents’ arbitrary instructions, they’re likely to throw you out of the house.” Ah, the piercing moral insight of the holy scriptures.
That’s an interpretation sometimes put on the text by people with a strong prior commitment to not letting the text have mistakes in it. But does what it says actually admit that interpretation? I’m going entirely off translations—I know maybe ten words of Hebrew—but it sure looks to me as if God says, simply and straightforwardly, that eating the fruit means dying the same day. Taking it to mean “your death will become inevitable” or “you will die spiritually” or something of the kind seems to me like rationalization.
But, again, I don’t know Hebrew and maybe “in that day you will surely die” really can mean “in that day it will become sure that on another day you will die”. Anyone want to enlighten me further?
I’m not actually sure.
I do think that there’s really incredibly good evidence that the Adam and Eve story is not literal, that it’s rather meant as a fable, to illustrate some important point. (It may be some sort of heavily mythological coating over an internal grain of historical truth, but if so, then it’s pretty deeply buried).
I’m not entirely sure what that point is. Part of it may be “the rules are there for a reason, don’t break them unless you’re really sure”. Part of it may be intended for children—“listen to your parents, they know better than you”. (And yes, some parents are bad news; but, by and large, the advice “listen to your parents” is very good advice for toddlers, because most parents care about their toddlers).
I do wonder, though—how old were they supposed to be? It seems that they were created in adult bodies, and gifted from creation with the ability to speak, but they may well have had a toddler’s naivete.
Not if they had any option.
Toddler-me would probably have expected that reaction. Current-me would consider putting toddler-me in that room to be horrendously irresponsible.
I see it as more “obey your parents, or you’re going to really hate what comes next”. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty broadly applicable.
If you know ten words of Hebrew, then you know ten more words of Hebrew than I do.
In short, I have no idea.
Do you mean there’s incredibly good evidence that it’s not literally true, or there’s incredibly good evidence that it’s not intended literally? I agree with the former but am unconvinced by the latter. (But, for the avoidance of doubt, I have absolutely zero problems with Christians or Jews not taking it literally; I was among their number for many years.)
I started writing a list and realised that maybe the figure is more like 30; the words I know are all in dribs and drabs from various sources, and I’d forgotten a few sources. I suspect you actually know at least some of the same ones I do. (Some likely examples: shalom, shema, adam.) Of course the actual point here is that neither of us knows Hebrew, so we’re both guessing about what it means to say (as commonly translated into English) “in the day that you eat it, you shall surely die”.
I think there’s incredibly good evidence that it’s not literally true, and (at least) very good evidence that it’s not intended literally. I consider the fact that there is incredibly good evidence that it’s not literally true to, in and of itself, be pretty good evidence that it’s not intended literally..
Shalom—I think that’s “peace”, right? I’m not sure. I don’t know shema at all, and adam I know only as the name of the first man.
So, it seems I know more Hebrew than I thought; but nonetheless, you are perfectly correct about the point.
Yup, shalom is peace. (Related to salaam in Arabic.) I thought you might know shema from the famous declaration of monotheism, which goes something like Shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, adonai ekhad”, meaning “Hear, Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one”. (It comes from Deuteronomy, and is used liturgically.) I think adam* actually means “man” as well as being the name of the first one.
There are some other Hebrew words you might know because they’re used to make Biblical names; e.g., Isaac = Yitzhak and means something like “he laughs”, which you might remember from the relevant bit in the Bible. (I think I remember you saying you’re a Christian, which is why I thought you might know some of those.)
I don’t think I’m personally familiar with that phrase.
That makes sense. I think I recall seeing a footnote to that effect.
...if I had a perfect memory, I probably would know a lot more Hebrew than I do. I’ve seen the derivations of a lot of Biblical names, I just haven’t really thought of them as being particularly important enough to memorise. There are plenty of things about Isaac more important than the etymology of his name, after all.
Understood, and I hope I didn’t give the impression that I think anyone is obliged to remember this sort of thing. (It happens that my brain grabs onto such things pretty effortlessly, which I guess is partial compensation for the other things it’s rubbish at.)
No worries, you didn’t give that impression at all.
How good that evidence is depends on whether the incredibly good evidence was available to (and incredibly good evidence for) the original writers.
A lot of the best reasons for thinking that the early chapters of Genesis are not literally true were (so far as anyone knows) completely unknown when those chapters were written.
According to Genesis 2 verse 10-14, the Garden was watered by a stream, which later split into four rivers. Two of those have, according to a brief Google search, gone missing in the time since Genesis was written, but the Tigris and the Euphrates would have been well known, even then. So checking up on Eden would have simply required heading up one of those rivers.
...which, now that I think about it, would have required someone willing to leave home for perhaps several days at a time and travel into the unknown, just to see what’s there.
Nah. If you head up those rivers and don’t find Eden, the obvious conclusion is just that God removed it some time after Adam and Eve left because it was surplus to requirements. It doesn’t (at least not obviously, so far as I can see) refute the Genesis story.
Genesis says it was protected by an angel with a flaming sword. I think it might be reasonable not to expect to find the Garden… but one could expect to find the angel with the flaming sword. After all, if something’s there as security, it’s generally put where unauthorised people can find it.
It’s not an obvious refutation, but it’s more likely the result of a non-literal than a literal Garden of Eden.
If Eden was removed as surplus to requirements, so presumably was the angel. And this all seems like such an obvious thing for an Eden-literalist to say after trekking up the river and finding nothing that I really don’t see how the (then) present-day absence of the GoE and angel could possibly have been much evidence against a literal Eden.
...I take your point. If there had been Eden literalists back then, then that evidence alone would have been insufficient to convince them otherwise.
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You might want to know that you have accidentally replied to my comment instead of CCC’s. (In particular, your reply won’t have made CCC’s inbox icon light up.)
Doh! Thanks for the heads-up.
Here you go.