Free-will: the ability to say “No” to God.
Nope. Try again. This time: don’t make a blatant assertion and evade. Hint: you can’t get around it. So don’t try. I know you’ll whine and cry. Fine. Be all offended. Don’t care.
I’ve already explained it clearly: everything that is good, is rooted in God. There is no need to wonder if something is good because God proclaims its good, or if God proclaimed the things he proclaimed because they were good, because everything that is good is rooted in God.
Angels don’t have free-will
Such as ? Of course, you can’t tell because they are ‘undiscovered’.
See, I can come up with any absurd thought - for instance, the world is made of chocolate cookies - although it doesn’t look like chocolate cookies , but that’s because an undiscovered phenomenon prevent us from knowing the true nature of the world.
Now, although physics is limited that doesn’t mean that any absurd claim such as - gravity will stop working - is valid. A principle like mass-energy conservation is not going to stop working … unless you believe in magic …
caritas means love, not good.
To you, there is no reality. Existence isn’t even provable. I don’t go that far. There can be no point debating with you, because for all we know, we’re not even here debating. It might all prove to be a hallucination, and we are all figments of a nonexistent nothing’s nonexistent pre-imagination.
Since there is no point in discussing anything with you, I will stop. If I quote you, I don’t need a response, rather I will be using your words to prove things to people who actually believe reality exists and things can be absolutely proved or absolutely disproved.
In other words: angels have free-will.
To use N.N. Taleb’s terminology, black swans do exist, and we, as mere men, cannot dictate to the universe what it can, and cannot do. At best, we can understand its phenomena through theses, but they are the falliable creation of man, a judgment that seeks to approximate truth, but cannot ever attain it.
To declare that gravity will always function as it does now is an absurd concept for the universe’s forces might change with the state of the universe itself, and gravity, as we know it, may be a mere temporary phenomena that will eventually change along with the universe’s conditions. Its really not that strange of an idea as long as man remains skeptical with respect to the quality of his knowledge.
caritas means love, not good.
Indeed, but keep in mind that, in Christianity, caritas is the highest of all goods, and “ubi caritas ibi Deus” is, in my opinion, far more to the point than “ubi bonum ibi Deus” - anyone who can translate the latin, can also connect the theological dots.
I graciously, and humbly, might I add, accept your capitulation; if you do not capitulate, then please give me a deduction of natural law ethics from an objective, empirical reality - I don’t think that would be hard for anyone who truly believes in natural law. By the way, I’ve been accused of many things, but it must be the first for not believing in an objective reality, esspecially seeing that I have a strong Popperian bent, maybe its just Rand reacting to the Kantian in me.
You said the laws of gravity are not laws and that gravity is not provable. To you, therefore, nothing is provable, least of all an objective, empirical reality.
How ?
Here’s the thing Lam. You deny natural philosophy, you deny moral philosophy and you keep on talking as if your revealed religion is the only piece of true knowledge available. Frankly your position is completely untenable.
Yes, I’ve heard that cop-out before. Now: since rights can be described without any need to invoke any deity, it’s quite clear that said deity is extraneous. And since rights and morality are inexorably intertwined, attempting to invoke some deity requires actual justification.
Just trying to move this somewhat back on topic, you see.
Nature has evolved men who take more life-threatening risks and who have earlier senescence than women. Nature has evolved men who kill their male competitors, in order to capture their women. Nature has evolved rapists who restrain their wives from freely choosing which men they can have sex with.
Some reject murder and rape as “unnatural” when nature has evolved criminals who murder and rape. Those people define the terms “nature” and “natural” with their biased and corrupted rationalizations about morality.
That is not political philosophy. That is physics. And chemistry. And biology.
That merely states that angels have will, that doesn’t mean they are free to wield it. Also God is supposedly all-knowing, so even before he/she/it created Lucifer, he/she/it already knew that Lucifer was going to rebel against he/she/it. Yet he/she/it still created Lucifer. God brought forth evil into this world for why was there a snake in the garden of Eden? Was it not God’s paradise? You have to either concede that the devil is as powerful as God [ and thus break orothdox Christianity ] or you have to concede that God created evil and allowed it to fester in his/her/its most holy of domains.
again more with your non-sense…lol
A law is as good as it is enforced.
There, your laws are irrelevant.
What I ‘get’, is that you have no real methodology. You have no objective standard to judge whether something is in human nature or not. And you have shifting boundaries of what is ‘good’ and ‘evil.’
Man cannot attain the “laws” of gravity, he is limited to theories that attempt to approximate the truth, but which are still falliable. Our understanding of phenomena is purely conjectural, that knowledge simply cannot be raised to the certainty of knowing the universe’s laws.
I don’t know, my knowledge is simply not comprehensive enough to know.
What is “natural philosophy” - do you mean a enlightenment era relic that has been replaced by contemporary science?
Give me a quote where I have taken such a position. I have denied that there can be a non-theistic natual law philosophy, in the past, but I have not denied that there could be a non-theistic moral philosophy. In addition, I’m asserting the conjectural nature of our knowledge about the physical world, that man cannot claim to know the “natural laws” upon which the world works, but if you believe that conjectural knowledge is not true knowledge, which I for one don’t believe, you’re free to do so.
I disagree, only once I’m strawmanned is my position “untenable”.
Angels have will, they can say “No” to God. That’s very basic Christian theology - I don’t care if you reject Christian theology, but if you’re to argue in its context, then you have to obey its doctrines to make sense.
God gave Lucifer the free choice of obeying Him for God does not take prisoners, God does not shackle an angel, or man into following His laws; rather, both are free moral agents who have the choice of choosing evil. Giving the choice to choose evil is not creating evil, rather it is creating a moral responsibility on the part of the free moral agent to choose good over evil, and that is what God expects from his creation.
Both Lucifer, and man are free moral agents, both are free to choose good over evil, or evil over good. Eve did disobey God because of Lucifer’s temptations, rather she disobeyed God out of her own moral choice. Again, its basic Christian theology.
No they are not. What is irrelevant is your lack of understanding free-will which a principle of human nature. When you speak about laws not being enforceable this is easily the point in which I can surmise your own inability to not commit horrendous crimes and your own inability of self-restraint namely behaviors of incontinence.
It’s science and the social studies Stephen. That’s as real as a methodology can get. A combination that rises above separate departments in which the sciences join the social studies, including philosophy, etc… It is considering culture by any person that wants to study and apply such a subject as well as the biologist using forensics, etc…, etc…
Your lack of knowledge on the subject is obvious now and you tried to step into the conversation earlier as if you knew something but I knew that was a front.