The Fall & Free Will
Based on the orthodox Christian view of the devil's origins, Lucifer was created as an archangel, who used his free will to rebel against God, and was subsequently kicked out of heaven. Then he tempted Adam & Even into using their free will to disobey God and eat the apple, resulting in evil entering the world.
Several things:
1. Lucifer was also said to have been perfectly created. Why would a perfect being rebel? It's also stated that his motivation was pride. Why would a perfect being become proud? Imagine if you had a perfect will to live, and God put a cliff before you. Realizing that you had free will to jump off the cliff to your death, would you become suicidal, because free will?
2. Why would God give Lucifer a free will? What's the value in Lucifer rebelling? What's the value in you being able to jump off a cliff to your death, when you have a perfect will to live? What is the point in allowing evil choices? Is it actually a good thing that people can choose to do bad things?
3. How did Adam & Eve have free will, given that they didn't understand the consequences, and the snake (Lucifer according to traditional Christianity) fooled them? They were innocents. Are your choices free if you're incapable of understanding the results of such choices?
4. Is Lucifer rebelling because of pride deterministic? IOW, if pride was his motivation, was he free not to rebel, or did his pride determine his choice? If it did not, then why is pride the motivation given in the story?
5. Was it all a setup by God? If God knew what Lucifer would freely choose to do, why create Lucifer? Did God want it to go down that way? Is God ultimately responsible for the free will choices of his creation?
Several things:
1. Lucifer was also said to have been perfectly created. Why would a perfect being rebel? It's also stated that his motivation was pride. Why would a perfect being become proud? Imagine if you had a perfect will to live, and God put a cliff before you. Realizing that you had free will to jump off the cliff to your death, would you become suicidal, because free will?
2. Why would God give Lucifer a free will? What's the value in Lucifer rebelling? What's the value in you being able to jump off a cliff to your death, when you have a perfect will to live? What is the point in allowing evil choices? Is it actually a good thing that people can choose to do bad things?
3. How did Adam & Eve have free will, given that they didn't understand the consequences, and the snake (Lucifer according to traditional Christianity) fooled them? They were innocents. Are your choices free if you're incapable of understanding the results of such choices?
4. Is Lucifer rebelling because of pride deterministic? IOW, if pride was his motivation, was he free not to rebel, or did his pride determine his choice? If it did not, then why is pride the motivation given in the story?
5. Was it all a setup by God? If God knew what Lucifer would freely choose to do, why create Lucifer? Did God want it to go down that way? Is God ultimately responsible for the free will choices of his creation?
Comments (39)
If you aspire to be a believer then you have to accept that your finite intellect will never be able to understand the ways of an infinte intentionailty. IF you deny infinite intentionality then you are left with Spinoza's God.
If you are not satisfied with Spinoza's God then just be an atheist. What's the problem?
Self knowledge, in the sense of a projected identity into the future and a reflective identity on the past, creates moral knowledge because it identifies my point of view as a view of itself and your point of view as the unseen other. It also creates awareness of death, which is always a projection to the future. So it is this knowledge that throws us out of nature, and out of the garden, and gives rise to 'work', as the sweat of one's brow as a projection to the future. Thus we no longer hunt because we are hungry, but because we will be hungry in the future.
Thus will as free-will is identical with the projection that constitutes psychological time, and the separation that constitutes both the fall from innocence and the ejection from paradise. Unfortunately, this way of reading the story does not allow me to make much sense of the questions you ask, which seem to depend on a rather literal understanding.
What it's all about is that the passages are not and were never intended to be a coherent story. Some are metaphors. Some are manners of speaking. Some are revelations hidden in dreams. Some are cautionary tales.
I'm not knocking the OP. There are some good questions here. Especially: is it actually a good thing that people can choose to do bad things?
Is it actually a good thing that children who've crossed the 18 mark have to think for themselves?
In giving us free will (to do anything) god offers us an opportunity to mature as responsible members of our world. Some (most?) fail this simple task. However, hat doesn't diminish the value of free will.
Haha. I've never heard it put that way before. Usually it's, "Why did God let that happen to me?", which turns into it being an opportunity for growth or forgiveness or God's ways are mysterious. But it's never thanking God for free will.
Lucifer is the highest angel, not perfect. To be perfect would be to equate Lucifer with God. That is exactly Lucifer's sin, he thought he was God or equivalent to God, when he was really created by God and therefore less perfect. He experienced all the powers given to him by God, and upon experiencing all this great power, he thought he was God, and this false thinking is his imperfection, the greatest sin.
But that's a get out of jail free card for anything a believer wishes to attribute to God or the divine story of why things are the way they are.
Say you were granted the power to create your own world of your choosing (just another planet). Would you grant the creatures living there the ability to freely will all manner of evil?
What would that world look like, if it were up to you? Would you prevent "all manner of evil," or only certain kinds of evil? What abilities would you grant and deny the creatures living there in order to achieve that end? How do you define evil in the first place?
Let's say it's an Earth-like planet, and I was introducing humans to it, but I got to modify the potential human beings as I saw fit before doing so. And let's say one of the things I could do is change their genes so that sociopaths couldn't be born into that world.
I would do so, and moreover, I would increase the genes responsible for feeling empathy and experiencing love.
In that sense, I would act in a way to constrain their free will from behaving in a manner that is without consideration for others. But that's only as a start.
Well, sure if I had the power I would give creatures there the freedom to err, I would not make a world of p-zombies, where all thoughts and actions are rigidly determined, a world without creativity. It's not possible to make a world where only what is good can be chosen because in such a world there is no freedom.
There is no freedom to do what, though? No freedom over what I choose to eat for lunch, or whom I hang out with today, or no freedom to bludgeon someone over the head?
Must all freedom get lumped together, such that terrible evils can't be prohibited, while other freedoms can be permitted?
Yes, that's right, if you can only do good, then what you choose for lunch, who you associate with and whatever acts you do or don't must conform to goodness...it suggests a mindless society of do-gooders, which sounds impossible as well as incredibly boring & robotic, where no one eats bacon.
You are presupposing that being a sociopath, feeling empathy, and experiencing love are all entirely a matter of genetics. In other words, you are already ruling out the possibility of libertarian free will before you even start setting up your world. Obviously the free will defense is grounded in a different assumption - while genetics contributes to these aspects of humanity, we are still responsible for making our own choices. Evil in the actual world is not God's fault, it is our own; that is the whole point of the story of the Fall.
Quoting Marchesk
That seems pretty vague. Evil behavior is limited to that which is "without consideration for others"? What does "consideration" mean in this context? How much "consideration" is sufficient to make an action good, rather than evil?
What other abilities would you grant and deny the creatures living in your world? I am looking for a comprehensive response. If that seems unreasonable, maybe creating a better world than the one we have is harder than you think.
No doubt it's beyond my limited ability. But giving birth to more empathetic humans is only part of it. Another part of it is having an environment that prevents the most serious crimes, like murder. We humans can't manage that, but God could.
I think that if humans could manage it, we would, or most of us would (excepting those who wish to commit murder).
Maintaining this kind of humility would be a significant step toward properly understanding the free will defense.
Creation has never been good, unless one is so callous as to call the processes just described as "good." Some theologians do this. They say the lion eating the lamb is good for the lion but bad for the lamb. Therefore the lion does no wrong. Yet to admit that the bad existed alongside the good still means that the pre-fallen world was not good, or not wholly so. So what accounts for this state of affairs? To answer this question with "the fall" would have to mean that it affected two temporal dimensions: the past and the future, not just the future, as traditionally believed and as implied in Genesis. If granted, whatever it means, we must then ask what accounts for the fall. The traditional answer is that our ancestors were tempted by Satan to rebel. But now, having pushed back the problem of evil to Satan, we seem to have reached a dead end. In other words, if the natural evil in the world is due to the corrupting influence of Satan and his minions, both pre and post-fall, and moral evil is due to the choice of human beings tempted by Satan to do evil, then we have satisfactorily explained the problem of evil with respect to the world. However, we are still left with accounting for Lucifer's fall. It appears as a dead end because there isn't a second Satan who tempted the first to rebel. One fall explains the other, but the first, the fall of the angels, seems to admit of no good explanation.
If the answer is "pride," we can ask: why was Lucifer created to be susceptible to pride? Why also was he created at all, since his creation precipitated the whole tragic history just enumerated? Indeed, why did God create anything at all? Did he have to? If God had a reason to create, then he was determined to do so by that reason and so did not do so freely (or at least isn't free in one sense of the word). If God created freely, then he had no reason to do so, and so is capricious, or seemingly capricious. Perhaps, as you said in the other thread, the only answer to these questions is what we find in Job. But as you also said, this leaves one deeply unsatisfied, as it sounds like a cop out. We might then consider the following mottos: intellectus quaerens fidem et fides quarens intellectum. The former, "understanding seeking faith" is perhaps what you are doing now, inasmuch as you are seeking to believe but find there are theoretical difficulties in doing so due to your understanding of what Christianity claims. So maybe you ought to adopt the latter motto first, i.e. "faith seeking understanding," such that you believe in order that you might understand. Understand what? The meaning of problems like the one you have addressed above. It could be that if you remain on the outside looking in, the problem will never be understood. Perhaps its solution isn't strictly communicable in the form of an air tight syllogism either. Notice the phrase does not say "understanding seeking understanding." Faith is not so much intellectual assent to a set of propositions but a way of life. Try living as if the claims of the religion were true and see where that gets you. It could be nowhere or it could be to understanding. I myself haven't yet made such a leap, but the temptation is there.
Your problem with the Genesis account is that you believe a different account, one that involves "hundreds of millions of years" of "horrendous suffering, evil, and death."
Quoting Thorongil
I prefer to say that faith is not so much belief in a proposition as trust in a Person.
Go on.
The Genesis account does not involve "hundreds of millions of years" of "horrendous suffering, evil, and death."
Not really, I was just unsure what further elaboration you were seeking.
Quoting Thorongil
I still do not see the problem. The Genesis account gives no indication of any suffering, evil, or death until the Fall, which it presents as happening fairly soon after the beginning, not hundreds of millions of years later.
Quoting Thorongil
Like I said before, you believe a different account.
What makes you say this is bad? Isn't this simply the way any world is? How could a world exist without predation, hazard, and death? If something is born, then how is it not going to be subject to death? If it is compounded, then how is it not going to decay?
What is 'the good' in which salvation is said to inhere? Leaving aside clliches and greeting cards with pictures of cherubs on them, what does salvation consist of? The word has the same root as 'salve'. Granted, 'salvation' now has religious connotations, such that to even contemplate its meaning seems to require intellectual assent to the whole package. But if you consider the notion from a cross-cultural perspective, it might help to make more intellectual sense of it. I think the underlying notion of 'salvation', whether it be Christian or another religion or philosophy, is 'realising an identity as something that is not subject to death'. In other words, it is separation from what is transitory, corruptible, subject to death and decay, and so on.
You find allusions to such a purported state of being in all of the higher religious traditions and also in ancient (although certainly not in much modern) philosophy. 'Lay not up your treasure where moths and rust corrupts'. 'All compounded things are subject to decay'. The philosophical ascent of the Platonistic philosopher, the return of the soul to the One - all of these are allusions to a state 'beyond death and decay'.
So according to such teachings, we don't see the world aright. We see through a haze of ignorance, the veil of maya. Accordingly all of our judgements are faulty, as they're based on ignorance. Lucifer's role in this is to confuse you, to deny that this is the case, to tell you to forget about it, and to keep enjoying your corrupted state. That is how he gets his kicks, and he's having a fabulous time at this moment in history.
:-| This is the problem:
Quoting aletheist
Either address it or stop replying.
Quoting Wayfarer
It apparently did, prior to the fall. That's the problem to which I addressed my post. The rest of your post I'll interpret as a general comment.
Address what? You evidently believe that there was life (and death) on earth for hundreds of millions of years before humans appeared. The Genesis account says that God created humans on the sixth day from the beginning, the same day as all other land animals. The two accounts are obviously inconsistent with each other, but there is nothing internally inconsistent with the claim in Genesis that the world before the Fall was "very good."
And I never wished to imply that there was. Why are you being so obtuse?
I am honestly not trying to be obtuse. What more do you want me to say? What is it that you want me to address? If your account is correct, then the Genesis account is wrong, or at least has to be reinterpreted somehow to allow for suffering and death prior to the Fall. If the Genesis account is correct, then your account is wrong, and the world was indeed "very good" prior to the Fall.
And this is precisely what I did. What more do you want me to say?
The point of your argument is not that predation, hazard and death occur, but that they're evil:
Quoting Thorongil
What about it was 'evil', prior to Adam 'eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil'?
That is the point of the parable, in my view. Evil is inextricably bound up with human judgement, which begins with the advent of self-consciousness (hence, the fig leaf.)
Natural evil. I'm not actually too fond of this term, as I prefer to relegate evil to the sphere of intentional human activity, but it's one that philosophers and theologians use, so that's what I mean by evil prior to the fall.
Nothing at all. I am not the participant in this exchange who said "Go on" and "Either address it or stop replying."
No, it's not because if you cannot understand an infinite intentionality then you cannot attribute anything to it.
How can one with a finite intellect ever hope to possess free will? If what we know is limited, then our choices will be limited. The existence of God, an omniscient being, defies the existence of free will. Why would such a being limit our intellect and then expect us to make intelligent decisions?
What does "infinite intentionality" even mean?
I've read most of the bible - Atheist myself - some works i value, others not so much. I view all works as separate and within the lens of both the author's theme/agenda and the Time it was written.
that means i ignore conventional Christian dogma - including 2000 yr old and counting dogma - and educate myself on both the time the work in question was written (Genesis - 900 yrs BC (from 400 yr older oral tales) and the agenda of the author (in Genesis' author - their (more than one - no Moses did not write the Torah (yes Judaic Dogma mandates this nonsense)) agenda was to fix the "god mandate" of Israel as a place for the Jews................there is no theological dogma outside of this one thing in that work..........all dogma outside of this one particular has been invented by subequent authors of both the old testement and new testament.
fact is:
1. Genesis story is taken from an older oral tale, which was in fact formed from an older written one from both the Akkadians and Summarians (Akkadians took thier tale from the Summarians - Eluma Elish anyone?).
2, there was no "fall".........that Judiac/Christian theology is incorrect - it was placed upon the Genesis myth, but has no logical basis.
3.i proper reading of Genesis was as a Polytheistic Summarian (place yourself in that time as a polytheistic believer)...............so no "Fall" - fact is Adam/Eve Rose to "godhood".............prior to eating of the Tree of Knowledge, Adam/Eve was just another dumb animal, after they became "as gods knowing good from evil" (its all there for anyone to read it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - if you can remove your Christian dogmatic eyes and read the tale as a Summarian!).
4. YHWH (God) became afraid (yes he became afraid that adam/eve would become his equal) - and so removed the other Tree - the one if immortality,
5. so man become stuck in "limbo" - no longer an animal, with the mind of the Gods (yes Genesis is a Polytheistic work - i refer to the "us" and "we" throughout the account - this is the Cananite (and originally Summarian then Akkadian) Heavenly court, but the body of the "beasts of the field" since the God/s removed that other tree.
6. Satan (Balial)......i.e. "The Devil" did not exist until the Jews adopted him (Ahraman) during their 2nd exile in 587 BC. The book of Genesis predates "The Devil" by 300 yrs.
7. "the snake" spoke the truth,
8. "the snake" was not "The Devil", he/it was just another god from the Heavenly Court.
9. none of my interpretation will be affirmed by Christians and is blasphamy,
10. I don't care about #9 above since their dogma is inaccurate, while - even if I do say so myself - mine is far more accurate and honest.
11. understanding history and origin of myths is important, was well as ignoring any dogma one may have as an obstical toward objectivity, when understanding a written work.
12. i had it easy in that i was never a Christian, so never had a dogma to overcome. others may not be like me and so may have to overcome.
13, peace to all - i'm a new poster here - this is my third post - after 9 yrs over in "bible-discussions" forum.............agreeing and agreeing to dissagree with many honest folks there - that forum closed for good last week (breaks my heart - love to discuss - sad that me and other from that place have lost a "home" there.
2-cents.
As for editing posts, the button is invisible (don't ask me why, it is part of technology fads), and appears when you hover over there region next to the posting time at the bottom of the post.
If you highlight text, a quote button will appear somewhere above the text in the post. All like this is highly counterintuitive, but some programmer designers like to be cute even if makes life difficult for users I guess.
Hope you enjoy the forum.