Point number 2

If it was not 'necessary' to tempt them...

While they were still 'perfect'...

What was necessary then?

It did happen though.

Did God allow that?

I have yet to see creativesoul do that ... his questions are just that ... questions ... I have yet to see him initiate any kind of attack... I have, however, seen him attacked ... repeatedly ... and through it all remained calm and respectful...

yes the could obey because they were given free will. Anyway when the bible says they are prefect I believe it means without sin. They were not created with original sin and there was only one law, not to eat from the tree of knowledge. Once they did they sinned and were no longer perfect.

If eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil (or the tree of knowledge of morality) was the original sin, how did those two even know that disobeying God was the wrong thing to do to begin with?

Hiya artsy!!!


spider:

I just went to the apologetics website...



The simple answer is that there are always both ends of the spectrum... good and bad... warm and cold... etc. etc.

This is good logic... no problem. That is indeed completely within my own belief structure also.

The problem is the logic fitting into the Biblical scripture...

Remember what that Bible says in proverbs?



Where words are too many, sin is not absent.


Fit it simply... or quit trying to describe that which words are incapable of describing...


You see my friend... Jesus said 'I am the way, the truth, and the light...

THAT is of taoist thought.

I wonder spider, you have posted websites for me. I have visited them, and had already heard most of the explanations before, but went anyway.

Have you went to any that I have posted?

I suggested a book from Miguel Ruiz called 'The Four Agreements' a while ago... have you read that book?


It should be required for mankind if you ask me...

If one puts into practice the four principles of healthy thought
within that book one will never be the same again... less anger, less assumption, less self resentment, a wonderful piece of Toltec Wisdom...

You can disregard the religious aspect without losing the importance of those four agreements... if practiced... and they do not go against Christian belief... it will help anyone to be much less judgemental and assumptive.

Uhh lets see. God told them the only thing they were not supposed to do is eat from that tree. thats how.

My point was this:

Prior to eating from the tree, they had to FIRST decide to eat from it. How could they have known even with God's decree that it was immoral since they hadn't actually eaten the fruit? They had no knowledge of immorality. That's the paradox.

Kids dont understand things that are moral but they know when their parents say they don't want them to do something. Its the same thing. They don't know that its evil, but they understand that God doesn't want them to do it.

Chaz,

We'll have to agree to disagree I think.

I will give one more explanation and then if you still don't get what I am saying then we can agree to disagree.

When I was a kid sometimes my mom wouldn't let me do things and I would never know why. When I would ask she would say "because I said so." Kind of like that. They didn't know why they couldn't all they knew was "because God said so".

Oh my God Whiteboy! You’re a genius!!!!

I would have never thought of that. You are so right!!!!

How can someone who doesn’t yet know of good and evil even have a frigg’in clue that doing something could be wrong!!!

I’m not joking either. This is seriously profound Whiteboy! From a serious philosophical point of view this is an extremely legitimate argument. I can’t believe that I have never this argument before. It is so simple yet so profound.

How could God expect someone who knows nothing of good and evil have a clue what it would mean to do something wrong???

Clearly a person would have to understand the concept of good and evil before they could “understand it”!

Duh!!!

So the idea of perfectly innocent beings “disobeying” God by knowingly choosing to do evil by eating fruit from a tree of the knowledge of good and evil doesn’t even make any sense at all!

Whew! Heavy stuff Whiteboy!

This is seriously profound. A crystal clear logical contradiction!

Yes, truly a paradox Whiteboy, not doubt about it!

This is a Bible killer here.

Because God told them to not eat the fruit. No child must be told that lying or stealing is a sin. They will lie about lying and they will lie about stealing once they have reached the right age. But Adam and Eve had no inborn sense of right and wrong. The only wrong they knew was eating the fruit of the tree. Any other sin they might have commited wouldn't have actually been a sin, because they were blind to sin.

God didn't tempt Adam and Eve. It was never God desire to tempt Adam and Eve. The tree was placed in the garden, because Adam and Eve needed a way to disobey God. God only gave them the one rule. There was plenty of food in the garden, so hunger couldn't tempt them. They were tempted by the lies of satan and by their own pride. It's very likely that Adam and Eve would have taken the fruit even without temptation from Satan. Yes, God knew that Satan would tempt Eve, BUT God only knew that because it would happen.

If God stopped Satan from tempting Eve, then God wouldn't have known that Satan would tempt Eve, so God wouldn't have stopped Satan, so Satan would have tempted Eve and God would have stopped Satan from tempting Eve, etc. Paradox. Therefore, God manipulates the present, with knowledge and acceptance of the future. We see time and again in the OT that God knows of a future event, expresses regret and remorse that the event will take place, but does nothing to stop it.

Your reasoning here is not logical Spider simply because God had intervened in things like at the tower of Babel, turning Lot’s wife to a pillar of salt, creating Noah’s flood.

The only way that your “logic” could hold water is if God never intervenes at all. But that’s not the case with this picture of God. So your logic isn’t applicable with this picture of God.

This God does intervene when he chooses to do so! And that means that he could intervene at any time. To claim that he can’t intervene because then things wouldn’t have happened they way they did simply can’t be applied to a God who does intervene when he feels like it.

So your logic is nothing more than a believer trying to “have his cake and eat it too”.

Your so-called ‘logic’ doesn’t hold water because this God DOES intervene on occasion

And that’s why your so-called logical falls flat on it’s face. It simply holds no water. It’s illogical “logic”.

Your logic would only make sense applied to a God that never intervenes.

Really? I thought the Bible was so full of contradictions...blah blah blah. Why are you still looking for a "Bible killer" if you are so sure the Bible is full of contradictions?

Also, why do you say "Bible killer"? Why do you have to put things in such a violent light? That's how you think maybe, but I'm a very peaceful and loving person.

^^
Sarcasm. I know what you meant by "bible killer" and I know it's not a treat or a suggestion of violence. Just like you know that "Christian soldier" doesn't indicate violence, but you continue to insist that it does.

We'll probably have to agree to disagree since I don't think Adam and Eve's behavior is synonymous with children, but more importantly the DECISION TO DISOBEY anything (choice A or choice B) presumes that one has the knowledge in which to distinguish right from wrong (choice A from choice B). God told them he didn't want them choosing B, but how could they possess the concept of what's right and wrong (A and B) since they hadn't eaten the fruit first to gain that knowledge? That's the paradox.

Thanks for the debate.

I’m not thinking about this in terms of a personal quest. I was reacting to the profound nature of this concept with respect to philosophical circles.

I must confess that my post in response to this was almost a spontaneous reaction of talking to myself.

I just think that Whiteboy made a really great observation. My post was a spontaneous reaction due to the mathematician in me more than anything else I think.

God intervenes because of the present state of affairs, not the future state of affairs. When God gave Abraham the promised land, he said "But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites [is] not yet full.". Meaning that Abraham's decendants couldn't have Canaan for 400 years, because the Amorites didn't yet deserve God's judgement. 400 years later, the Israelites were given the land of Canaan, because the Canaanites were so wicked. God works in the present. I have explained this time and again and I really can't explain it any better. If you don't get it, read the Old Testament. Watch for where God says "This will happen" or "That will happen" and notice that God warns, but does nothing else to stop the behavior. It's clear from the OT that God waits until a present situation deserves his actions before God acts.

You seriously don’t understand the difference between how we view the Bible Spider.

Let me genuinely try to explain this to you so that hopefully you might gain a bit of insight in to how I view the Bible.

Let’s say we’re going to go watch a movie together. We sit down and watch it, and during the course of the movie one of the characters is constantly foretelling what will happen in the future. And everything he predicts always comes true. After the movie is over, you start talking in terms of the characters in the movie and you say how amazing it was that they had this incredible power of prediction.

I smile and say, but Spider it was just a movie. The producers and screenwriters all knew what they were going to write next, the characters weren’t real. They didn’t really have these powers of prediction that the movie instills in us.

Well, this is precisely how I view the Bible. You believe the stories are real. Therefore you stand in awe at their power of prediction etc.

I believe that men wrote the bible. So I’m not impressed that they knew what they were going to write next (or that future authors wrote stories to match was previous authors had suggested might happen). The stories were always written down after the fact. They were made up.

This is especially true of the New Testament. Everything was written down after the fact. It’s easy to write down that Jesus knew that Judas would betray him before he died. The story is being written down after the fact. I’m not impressed because I see how the producers of these stories can make it look like people knew what was going to happen next when in reality it never happened that way.

You are impressed because you believe the stories are true.

I’m not going to be impressed no matter how many times I read them because I believe that men wrote them.

There’s no way that I’m going to go back to believing that the stories are accurate accounts of history. So asking me to read the OT to see for myself is redundant. I have no doubt that everything you say is true. I’m not impressed. It’s still just mortal authors making this stuff all up.

I simply don’t believe that the stories are true. They are man made fairytales, and the inconsistencies and contradictions contained within the stories are living proof that they are the fabrications of man as far as I’m concerned.

That’s where I’m at today and I’ve been at this conclusion for quite some time. I’m not about to go back to viewing it as a movie again. It’s just not going to happen.

I just wanted to add that I can see too much of the "screenwriters" in it anymore.

Every time I come to something absurd and have to ask "Why would God do such an absurd thing, or make this contradiction". I have no answer and it leaves me wondering how God could be so lame.

But if I ask the question, "Why would the screenwriters write this into the story?",... Ah ha! Now I clearly see why they would write that in there.

In short, I'm onto the screenwriters.

It’s like once you see the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain, it’s hard to focus your attention back onto the ‘show’.

Toto keeps yanking at the curtain distracting me.