Argumentum Ad Baculum and its use in Catholicism

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EndTimes said:
Man’s Free Will… puts the culpability of all our decisions upon Man… .
God does not Force anyone… Not even INTO HIS KINGDOM
He Invites…
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It can be the case that God ought not to have made a harmful environment for us AND that we are culpable for our decisions, so I really don’t feel like you’ve made a sensible objection.
 
Oh! So nothing on God’s green flat earth would harm us?
+++++++++++++++++

This sounds like one needs to go back to the Genesis board…

Were Free Will not given a choice - would Free Will Even Exist?

And Why did God create Man with Free Will?

To make Puppets? 🙂
 
EndTimes said:
This sounds like one needs to go back to the Genesis board…
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Great! I’m glad we agree! Let us consider the Garden of Eden. What did God allow into the garden of Eden? That’s right! The devil!

So now I will up the ante on my earlier analogy. I will claim the following:

God allowing the devil into the garden of Eden is analogous to a parent inviting a child molester into their child’s room, and telling the child to avoid sexual contact.

Why is it analagous?
  1. Allowing the dangerous person into the environment is unnecessary. God could have prevented the devil from entering, just as the parent in this analogy could have prevented the molester.
  2. The devil (like the child molester) is “stronger” insofar as he has greater knowledge and intellect than Adam and Eve. Moreover Adam and Eve did not have the knowledge of good and evil, just as the child does not have full knowledge of what constitutes sexual contact.
  3. Disobedience is in fact harmful to Adam/Eve/the child.
What is the conclusion?

The garden was in fact a harmful environment created by God.
 
EndTimes said:
You really have to go back to the Genesis board …
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We have! And I see you have no objection to my new analogy! So we’re agreed now, that God did create a harmful environment which he ought not to have done, but we are still responsible for our free-will decisions.
 
EndTimes said:
Oh Really… As in, I see said that proverbial blind man. ?
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I’m glad we’ve settled the philosophical discussion to where we both agree, and are now at the point where we just swap humorous philosophical banter. ☺️
 
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That’s weak… Playing Jollility after having one’s face rubbed in the mud? 🤣
 
Just wanted to point out that for the religious, “God is love” or “god is loving” is their equivalent of a brute fact. It’s a base axiom on which their system is built.

They can’t prove it and our attempts at falsifying it will nearly always be met with dismissal. I wouldn’t bother.
 
Khedron said:
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goout:
For example: in this exchange you assume a simplistic fundamentalist God who must do everything that God has the potency to do.
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Only if God wishes to deserve the adjective of “loving”. Unnecessary, gratuitous suffering contradicts “love”.
goout said:
Parents don’t lock their children in the house to prevent suffering, as you propose.
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I would rather you understood what I propose. Because that is NOT what I am talking about. And I have stipulated it a few times.
goout said:
Is your death necessary?
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It is physically necessary, but not logically necessary.
goout said:
Your cruel parents! Giving life to you knowing full well you will rot in the ground for no purpose, unnecessarily.
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Yes, it was a selfish act on their part, and their only excuse is that we are biologically pre-programmed to maintain our species.

God could have created everyone directly into heave, enjoying the beatific vision. He did not, therefore he is not “loving”. That is all I have to say.
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I am sorry for you.
 
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Hume said:
Just wanted to point out that for the religious, “God is love” or “god is loving” is their equivalent of a brute fact.
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I don’t think this is true. We can define Love as “whatever God does” such that the statement “God is loving” becomes basically tautologically true. In that case the theist has to do work to prove that their special “god love” has features that are consistent with “ordinary love.”
 
JapaneseKappa said:
No, that is not how analogies work. We are considering the culpability of God in creating things harmful to us through the use of a parental analogy (i.e. the analogy of a parent deliberately creating a harmful environment for their child.)
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Sure, that’s how analogies work! And, when we create an analogy, we assess it to see where it holds up and where it breaks down. All analogies break down, since they’re only analogies. This particular one breaks down because in this one (human : God :: child : parent), an adult human is generally culpable for his decisions, whereas children are generally not. And, given that “culpability” is the very raison d’etre of the analogy, it follows that this analogy fails pretty spectacularly… 🤷‍♂️
JapaneseKappa said:
Indeed, we claim that parents are culpable in our analogy, the exact opposite of the conclusion you drew.
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Right: by your analogy, children don’t bear responsibility for their actions, and neither do adults. That’s why it’s a poor analogy. 😉
Khedron said:
In a little less formal way: if every possible attribute points to a certain entity, then it is rational to accept that we deal with a certain entity.
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Fair enough. But, how do you know that “every possible attribute” leads to a valid conclusion? Let’s go back to the “five blind men and an elephant” story. Each of them did draw a conclusion from “every possible attribute” accessible to them, and each of them drew a faulty conclusion. Hence my question: how do you know that, when you use the duck principle, you’re using it validly?
Khedron said:
From God’s assumed omni-benevolence it follows logically (!) that unnecessary suffering cannot exist.
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Now you’re catching on! 👍 😉
Khedron said:
Your attempted counter-example was incorrect. God could forgive all of our “trespasses” without the cross. After all if WE can do something, then God can do it, too.
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Except this is a different case. The “trespasses” in question are trespasses against God – that is, the scope of the trespass is orders of magnitude greater than ones we commit against each other. Moreover, merely waving His hand and saying “meh… no biggie” would be neither merciful (understood properly) nor just. So, it is logically necessary that some other means of forgiveness take place.
 
Khedron said:
Of course you are encouraged and expected to stay away from religious arguments. They are meaningless for non-religious people. Stay with the secular (aka rational) arguments.
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🤣 🤣
We’re talking about matters of divinity here. “Stay away from religious arguments”?!?!? OK, then: whatcha think of those Ravens? :roll_eyes:
Hume said:
They can’t prove it and our attempts at falsifying it will nearly always be met with dismissal.
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Two thoughts:
  • Around here (and in this very thread, IIRC), believers are ridiculed when asking for ‘proof’ of axioms. That’s what you just did, here. 😉
  • It’s not “dismissal”, so much as “rebuttal.” Unless you can show that you’re correct… which hasn’t happened yet.
But, if your conclusion is “I wouldn’t bother”, then…
Khedron said:
One cannot willy-nilly declare a “brute fact”. The concept of the “duck principle” does not rest on some empty proclamation, it is founded on zillions of observations.
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So is the axiom “God is love”. 😉
JapaneseKappa said:
In that case the theist has to do work to prove that their special “god love” has features that are consistent with “ordinary love.”
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Actually, it works the other way around. What we call “love” in a human sense is actually analogous to God’s love. See Aquinas’ work on univocal / equivocal / analogical meanings…
 
Gorgias said:
Actually, it works the other way around. What we call “love” in a human sense is actually analogous to God’s love.
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Regardless, the theist has to actually demonstrate the connection.
 
Gorgias said:
Right: by your analogy, children don’t bear responsibility for their actions,
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Sure they do. Children can be responsible for their actions and it can be wrong for the parents to put a bear trap in their room.
 
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