There has been a lot of talk about about creation in the past few years. Following is what I believe. I believe there is a creation force. As such I believe there are three options to describe this force.

1) Random chance.
This option makes religion not necessary because there will be no judgment since there isn't anything to do the judging.

2) Intelligent design that is all knowing and all powerful.
This option makes religion not necessary because by the definition of all knowing this entity could tell you at the instant of your birth everything that you are going to do. I don't believe this entity would judge a person for doing everything exactly as it wanted it done and knew it would be done.

3) Intelligent design that is not all knowing and all powerful. This option does leave open the possibility of judgment, but judgment still doesn't seem to likely. Judgment from this entity would be equivalent to someone building a car that had flaws and blaming the car. This option seems to be more likely to involve reincarnation than judgment. The person is flawed in some way and as such needs to be fixed and given another chance.

I don't know which of the three options is true and I also believe there are other possibilities that I haven't considered. Right now I believe the most logical choice is number three, but I hope that anyone that sees flaws in my analysis will respond to the post. I am still, and hope to always be, a seeker of the truth.

spreid

Sounds fairly logical to me

You forgot that we have Free Will.

I could say that point two is flawed, but I suppose I could also say that there is another option which you have not considered.

4) Intelligent design that is all knowing and all powerful, within reason.
God is not truly all-powerful as some think of the term. God cannot make a square circle, it's a logical impossibility. In the same way, God cannot know something that someone will do unless the person is actually going to commit the action. Because God exists outside of our universe, God has seen everything that will happen within our universe. Time and space are finite and therefore God has seen the beginning and the end. This means that God acts in the present based upon his character, with full understanding and knowledge of the future. Imagine a gunman confronts you. God inspires mercy within the gunman, but the gunman rejected the feeling of mercy and kills you. God knew the final outcome already, but God acted as God's character demands. God tried to cause the gunman's conscience to prevent a murder. God knew that the gunman would ignore his conscience, but it would have been outside of God's character in that instance to not call upon the gunman's conscience. Within this model of an all knowing, all powerful God working with and through free moral agents, the Bible and the world make perfect sense.

spider:

God ""tried"" to cause the gunman's conscience to prevent a murder


tribo:

a god that "tries" and fails is not god!! that is like saying - god tried to make a perfect world knowing it would not be perfect, yet he went right ahead and did it anyway knowing this thing he was doing would fail? why bother? Why prove yourself a failure if your all knowing and all powerful, and all else, especially if your "worried" about how your character is to be perceived by your own creations? What's the point? If you know it's going to fail are you not just proving your own ineptitude?? what kind of perfect being would do that? your remarks are off the wall and yes i did read and understand what you said previous to this which is that god cant create a square circle, i get it, that he can't act out of character, i get it, that's exactly why i don't believe in your god. He sounds just like a man trying to act moral, not a god who is past human frailties. get it? got it - good.

my choice, there is a creative force! it exist and always has and always will, it has no human like qualities or any other qualities at all, it is the source of creative material that all else is made of.You cannot know it, it's beyond comprehension, beyond knowing, it does not interfere with mankind or any other kind, it's only purpose is to bring forth material which brings about all else.

It could care less what you do or how you act or if you live or die, it has no "concerns" at all. It's consciousness, for lack of a better word, is not aware of what is taking place with the material it provides, it just does so, for that is its purpose. It has no morals, or honor or anything else to protect from someone thinking its a good or bad thing it's neither good or bad. or happy or sad, jealous or angry or vengeful or anything else that man desires it to be so. "IT JUST IS"

if there's a lesser god such as the monotheistic one spoken of, then so be it, but he is not "the" creative force, he is man's idea of what god should be like.

I vote for option two. Was that, like, an option on a telephone tree?

Come here, Mr. Watson, I want to create the earth!

We are all free moral agents, we have a conscience, but it doesn't dictate our actions. So God can try and fail to motivate us into certain actions and that in no way indicates a failure on God's part. If God wanted to strip us of our free will, God could certainly do so, but God chooses not to out of love for us. Our conscience is a goad, which God uses to make us righteous. Ignore the goad long enough and your conscience becomes calloused. If we respond to our conscience or not is our choice, we are given free will for a reason and it is not in God's plan to remove free will from us.

If you understood my post, please explain this: How could God know that Adam and Eve would sin, if they never got the chance to? God couldn't, it's a paradox, a logical impossibility. If Adam and Eve lived and sinned, how could God then roll back that event? God couldn't, it had already happened. God's choices were A) Allow Adam and Eve to live their lives or B) Kill Adam and Eve and start over. God choose A.

God doesn't try to be moral, God is moral. God does not commit evil acts and does not think evil thoughts. God never acts against his character. So God is nothing like a man and God has no frailties.

God will be glorified by the people who are saved. How much greater is the glory when people can live in such a terrible world as we live in and yet still be righteous? The failure of man to stick to God's plan and the fall of Satan will only work to greater glory for God.

Well, I'm certainly with you on all your reasoning. The excuses for the judgemental God who created flawed humans and trying to blame it all on the idea of free will is nothign short of sick.

It's either #1 or #3. Any God fitting the description of #2 should be on the FBI's list of most wanted terrorists.

Oh by the way, the idea that the Free Will justifies #2 doesn't wash. The simple reason is that Free Will works perfectly fine in #3.

Yet #3 is much more intelligent.

So any truly intelligent God who wants to provide free will can do it perfectly well using method #3.

The need for free will does not justify the ignorance and lack of wisdom required for scenario #2. It's just an inferior scenario all around and there is no justification for it.

I can tell you this much Spreid, scenario #3 represents the wisest and most intelligent of the three scenarios. So if we wish to believe that God is truly all-wise, then God would have clearly come up with scenario #3 long before we did.

How could mere mortal men have come up with a scenario for creation that is actually better than the one God used? I don't think they could. Therefore #3 is the wisest choice thus far.

TRIBO:
i defer you back to my last response to you before your present response.

Stick to god's plan??

If god "knew" that Adam and eve were eventually going to do what they did, he put himself in the position to have to make a choice that would not have to have been made, had he just not created them to begin with or anything or anybody else, his flaws so to say is that if he could see all that was going to take place before he even started creation and he did not like the results, he should have not went through with creation to begin with!!

Where was my or your free will before he put us here? I was not asked if i would like to experiment with leading a life here? if i had been given all the factors before i was born as to how this life and all other life was going to turn out and that I would have to exist eternally with him somewhere in what i consider a very boring "eternal" existence from how its been described, my answer would have been absolutely not!!

Instead i exist to be played with like some toy or animal or scientific experiment at his whims. According to HIS PLAN and rules i had no chance to agree to. That is not free will to me. that is dictatorship.

If a supreme being "knows" I'm not going to accept him as god and follow him the way he wants me to, then he was "wrong" for bringing me into this world, just as billions of others. To put me here and then having to have me/us suffer some consequences just because i think hes not god, is stupid and selfish and non wise to say the least.

look, he already had millions or billions of angels to worship and adore him and even that went wrong? does he not learn from his mistakes?

why even bother creating man? he is infinitly "VAIN" no wonder no one has ever seen him, he cant drag his self away from staring at himself in his infinite mirror!! I will not beilive in a god so "SELF CENTERED" that all he can think about is what pleases him, as to what happens to his creation that he supposedly loves. your god is a useless dichotomy brought about by man for mans own vanity.

Tribo,

I'm afaid that you aren't grasping the concept I'm trying to get across.

Do you see the logical flaw with this statement?



You see, if God knows the future, that means the future will happen. If God changes the future, then God knows a lie. If God knew Satan was going to tempt Eve and he removed Satan from the Garden, then one of two things would occur:
A) God would know a lie: Satan tempted Eve
B) God would forget that given the chance, Satan would tempt Eve.

If A were true, then God would know something which wasn't true and would therefore not be perfect.

If B were true, then God would be stuck in an infinite loop of removing Satan from the garden and putting him back.

No, the simple fact is that God knows what is going to happen because it will happen. Any other view of omniscience makes no sense.

Future: Something that will happen in the time to come.

If God knew the future, then that means that what God knew would come to pass.

In order for events to happen "in the future" they MUST, in fact, happen.

God couldn't know the future unless the future were going to happen, could he? That's a paradox. Therefore, for God to know the future, the future events must happen at some point in time.

In order for events to happen "in the future" they MUST, in fact, happen.

tribo:


"just my point" - if god is able to see and know the future, seeing he is the one who is "about" to create it (bring it into bieng)He then has the choice to not do so. your talking of whats within the happenstance of that which has been created, I'm talkin from a core perspective of gods choice before creation took place. Did he not know the future of what he was about to bring forth before it was brought forth?? if the answer is "yes" than he is at fault for bringing it forth knowing that once he proceeded to do so it would turn out as it has. he still remains a vain self centered being that is only doing so for humans to adore him.

It's still a paradox, no matter how you look at it. So it doesn't matter how you look at it because it's a paradox either way.

This is all up to personal interpretation anyway.

I believe that we do not know the "reason" for the evolution of living things yet. I believe it is outside our realm of scientific thought. That being said all other theories existing today are therefore inaccurate by a long shot.

I do not find the belief of a 'GREAT BEING OF ANGER AND LOVE' logical at ANY level. He so loves the earthlings that he sends satan to the earth to torture and do bad things to his beloved earthlings, oh yea, and as proof of his "love" he sends his illegitimate son down to be tortured and die but be risen within three days to show proof of his love for the earthlings. And the more you recite of it the more ridiculous it gets.

My opinion of course.

There is no proof that evolution even occured .

Evolution is a theory with no proof it even occured . I for one do not believe in it .