Believe is Shaken

[Lily_Bernans]

Then we have two separate entities: God, who is unchanging, and God’s actions, which do change. One single entity cannot both be changing and unchanging. Since they are separate entities, then God is still unable to act, since the actions are all down to the changing entity.

In particular the act of creation is down to the second entity, not to the original unchanging God. The unchanging God is not, and cannot be, a creator since the act of creation requires change.

You will have to go through all the applicable properties of the compound “God and His actions” to separate them out into properties of the unchanging God and properties of God’s changing actions. You will find that your unchanging God has a many fewer properties than is often assumed.

Then the change in the sea was not done by god, but by the separate entity God’s actions.

What you are doing here is starting out on the philosophical path that least to the Jewish sephirot or the Gnostic Demiurge. By separating God from His actions you have two separate entities to deal with, and a great deal of work to do.

rossum

No, that’s not what I’m doing. I’m a theology professor. God never changes his nature. That is Catholic teaching. If you want a philosophical argument, you can start a thread in the philosophy forum.

It’s all explained in the links. You will NEVER find an educated Catholic who says that God changes, and the OP’s post revolves around the Catholic faith. I respect the Buddhist faith, and Buddhists are welcome here, but not to challenge the Catholic faith.

 

[rossum]

God never changes his nature.

Then we still have two separate entities: God’s-nature, which is unchanging and God’s-actions which do change. You have said that God does not change while His actions do.

Since one single entity cannot both change and not change, then we appear to agree that we are dealing with two different entities here.

I respect the Buddhist faith, and Buddhists are welcome here, but not to challenge the Catholic faith.

If the Catholic faith cannot withstand challenges, then how has it survived for so long? Out in the worldwide religious marketplace it is being challenged all the time.

You might find it interesting to read some Nagarjuna. He has a very different philosophical perspective on many things, on unchanging natures in particular.

rossum

 

[Lily_Bernans]

I really don’t want to go off-topic. The OP is talking about the Catholic faith.

Of course the Catholic faith can and does survive many arrows and slingshots, and it always will.

Thank you for the reading suggestion. As a professor of Roman Catholic theology, I am surrounded by books here that I have to finish, and I find myself more and more pressed for time. I can’t read now because I’m sitting at my desk in front of my class posting as I write my dissertation and my class reads some scripture passages for discussion.

As I said, if you want to debate the topic, I’m sure people would do so in the philosophy forum. The Catholic faith can and is challenged in that forum, and we have some posters who are very skilled in philosophy and debate, who you might enjoy.

Right now, though, you’re in the apologetics forum.

 

[JB_Brother_4446]

Then we still have two separate entities: God’s-nature, which is unchanging and God’s-actions which do change. You have said that God does not change while His actions do.

Since one single entity cannot both change and not change, then we appear to agree that we are dealing with two different entities here.

If the Catholic faith cannot withstand challenges, then how has it survived for so long? Out in the worldwide religious marketplace it is being challenged all the time.

You might find it interesting to read some Nagarjuna. He has a very different philosophical perspective on many things, on unchanging natures in particular.

rossum

Yet there is an Ultimate Truth: God is love.

Yes people within the Church change but the Church cannot change.

 

[Lily_Bernans]

Yet there is an Ultimate Truth: God is love.

Yes people within the Church change but the Church cannot change.

 

[NM505StKate]

When you insult a prophet of God, you blaspheme God himself. Fear of the Lord, right? Scripture is not a historical book though some of the events actually happened, like Moses.
And those men had chosen their lot. Moses called those who were on the Lord’s side to stand with him. Those guys didn’t and condemned themselves. Fear of the Lord, right?
You need to do some re-reading.

Human life is God’s and He decides who lives or dies. Where we go in the next life is determined by our actions.

Sorry mate but Moses didn’t happen. No evidence has ever been found for such a thing. The Egyptians don’t have any records nor are there any archeological records.

 

[NM505StKate]

Your problem is in rejecting the reality that the omnipotent God created Adam and Eve in a world in harmony, and with free-will. Having chosen to disobey God’s command they suffered the consequences.

The inability to reason based on reality causes myopic dilemmas.
The world and everything in it was created for the benefit of mankind, as good, and Adam was given a specific order/warning NOT to commit a specific act, which he disobeyed, losing for his descendants Sanctifying Grace, Integrity, Immortality, Happiness, and Enlightenment. Justice, charity and hope were restored in the Redemption by God the Son.

Adam failed himself and God, resulting in his downfall. God acted to punish disobedience as forewarned, in His super human being and his descendants. Without punishment from God evil would run riot and thus the obvious examples of Sodom etc. as fair warning. The devil entices to evil. Failure to accept the facts is no excuse for confusion. Obviously God acts with the perfection of His infinite goodness.

Any attempt to deny free-will to act for good or evil is totally unreasonable. Naturally, failing to examine and to accept these facts results in confusion and false conclusions.

Questioning based on false assumptions, without knowing the fundamentals of Christ’s Life and Resurrection, of the miracles and the reality of His Church and the Sacred Scriptures which She gave us, can result only in chaos.

Okay. I will try to tackle some of your points. Where does it say they had free will in the bible? How could they know they were doing wrong when the concept of “good and evil” was not known to them. Since many here have agreed that the Genesis is not to be taken as being literal why assume that Adam and Woman existed? Same with Sodom because though we may have found a place that may be Sodom that says nothing about the story being true. Unless you can find me a solid piece of historical or archeological proof there is nothing.

 

[NM505StKate]

No. If He were absolutely unchangeable then He could not have created the world. Twenty billion years ago He had not yet triggered the Bib Bang. He changed from “I will trigger the Big Bang” to “I am triggering the Big Bang” to “I have triggered the Big Bang”. Any action requires change from “I will act” to “I am acting” to “I have acted”. Without that change He is stuck at “I will act” and the action never takes place.

An unchanging entity is either unable to act, or can only repeat the same unchanging actions over and over and over. The God of the Bible is not such an entity. If He were, then Genesis would read something like:

On the first day, God said, “Let there be light,” and on the second day, God said, “Let there be light,” and on the third day, God said, “Let there be light,” and on the fourth day …

There are huge philosophical problems with an absolutely unchanging God.

rossum

Assumption of anything causing the Big Bang. That is a “god of the gaps” fallacy. Modern science doesn’t know what set off the Big Bang and we may not know it in our lifetimes but we should not assume it was god because why look for an answer when one can shout “God did it!”?

 

[JB_Brother_4446]

Sorry mate but Moses didn’t happen. No evidence has ever been found for such a thing. The Egyptians don’t have any records nor are there any archeological records.

Absence of evidence is not absence of fact. And given that we have Sacred Scripture, I stand with my opinion.

 

[JB_Brother_4446]

Okay. I will try to tackle some of your points. Where does it say they had free will in the bible? How could they know they were doing wrong when the concept of “good and evil” was not known to them. Since many here have agreed that the Genesis is not to be taken as being literal why assume that Adam and Woman existed? Same with Sodom because though we may have found a place that may be Sodom that says nothing about the story being true. Unless you can find me a solid piece of historical or archeological proof there is nothing.

I can.
fellowshipoftheminds.com/2012/07/29/archeologists-find-evidence-of-the-obliteration-of-sodom-gomorrah/
God nuked the place for their sin of mistreating His messengers and wanting to violate them.

Read Isaiah 42 and 51 on free will.
Also check today’s first reading.

Joseph said that he could not sin against God when facing the temptation of Potiphar’s wife.

 

[Lily_Bernans]

Sorry mate but Moses didn’t happen. No evidence has ever been found for such a thing. The Egyptians don’t have any records nor are there any archeological records.

I’ve said it before, bur absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

 

[JB_Brother_4446]

I can.
fellowshipoftheminds.com/2012/07/29/archeologists-find-evidence-of-the-obliteration-of-sodom-gomorrah/
God nuked the place for their sin of mistreating His messengers and wanting to violate them.

Read Isaiah 42 and 51 on free will.
Also check today’s first reading.

Joseph said that he could not sin against God when facing the temptation of Potiphar’s wife.

So Kate here thinks Jesus was knowingly celebrating a fable when he ate the Passover?

 

[Abu]

NM505StKate #168
Okay. I will try to tackle some of your points. Where does it say they had free will in the bible?

Such a lack of knowledge again reveals the confusion displayed.
What is free-will?
**FREE WILL. **The power of the will to determine itself and to act of itself, without compulsion from within or coercion from without. It is the faculty of an intelligent being to act or not act, to act this way or another way, and is therefore essentially different from the operations of irrational beings that merely respond to a stimulus and are conditioned by sensory objects.
Modern Catholic Dictionary by Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.
therealpresence.org/cgi-bin/getdefinition.pl

Thus it enables everyone to choose what, or what not, to do and Adam and Eve had extraordinary gifts from God, which they then lost.

How could they know they were doing wrong when the concept of “good and evil” was not known to them.

Yet another error.

Don’t you know? Read Genesis 2:16-17, where it is crystal clear.

Since many here have agreed that the Genesis is not to be taken as being literal why assume that Adam and Woman existed?

No knowledgeable individual claims that Genesis is without history.

We don’t “assume” anything. Jesus the Christ who worked so many miracles, formed His Catholic Church, Resurrected, and enabled His Chosen Apostles to also work many miracles as recorded. His Church authorised the Sacred Scriptures and thus authenticated the O.T.

The reality is that “Since, therefore, all that the inspired authors, or sacred writers, affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture, firmly, faithfully and without error, teach the truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the sacred Scriptures.” CCC #107].:

The miracles of the Sun at Fatima, the medically attested miracles at Lourdes and the many Eucharistic miracles cannot be evaded except by a bent towards a selfist and dysfunctional disbelief.

 

[Lily_Bernans]

Okay. I will try to tackle some of your points. Where does it say they had free will in the bible? How could they know they were doing wrong when the concept of “good and evil” was not known to them. Since many here have agreed that the Genesis is not to be taken as being literal why assume that Adam and Woman existed? Same with Sodom because though we may have found a place that may be Sodom that says nothing about the story being true. Unless you can find me a solid piece of historical or archeological proof there is nothing.

Have you ever noticed that in the Resurrection stories of the Bible, God appears only to those who believe? He didn’t appear to the Romans or to the members of the Sanhedrin. He appeared to those who believed. The one exception seems to have been Paul. It’s that way today. People who report private revelations, which we can’t go into deeply here, almost always are people who already believe in and love the Lord. Christ comes to all who invite him in, but like any gracious guest, he does not come uninvited.

The Bible doesn’t have to say Adam and Eve had free will. We know ir because God commanded them not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and they chose to disobey God because they, themselves, wanted to be like God. And they knew they were doing wrong because the moral law is first and foremost written on our hearts. When they did wrong, they first thing they did was to cover themselves in shame. A very small child knows when he’s done something “wrong,” something that shouldn’t be done. The three fonts of morality are object or act, circumstances, and intention. Why is murder wrong? Why is theft, especially if the theft doesn’t really harm anyone? Do you avoid wrong simply so you won’t be locked in jail? Why are there laws against stealing from the super rich who won’t even miss it?

By your reasoning, we have to write off every person in history for whose existence we have no tangible proof. We also have to write off every event. And every place that yields no archeological evidence.

How do you believe you came to be? Your parents? The first person, whoever that first person, in your eyes may be? Life doesn’t spring from nonlife. How do you think the universe came to be? If you believe in the Big Bang how do you think the material for the Big Bang got to be there? If you’re going to go down the atheist road, you have to be prepared to answer those questions and more.

 

[NM505StKate]

Absence of evidence is not absence of fact. And given that we have Sacred Scripture, I stand with my opinion.

There is fact though. Fact that there is no evidence it happened. Surely the events that are presented would have been written down by ANYONE else. Plagues would have been recorded, especially to the extreme that is presented in Exodus. It would be like me claiming that Robin Hood happened using only one book. Sorry but no.

 

[NM505StKate]

So Kate here thinks Jesus was knowingly celebrating a fable when he ate the Passover?

Yes because there was no method to checking to see if the fable was true back in those days. Critical thinking was no exactly high priority. Jesus was raised a carpenter’s kid by following the story. Education surely was not there. It was tradition sure but there are traditions today that have no bases in reality.

 

[NM505StKate]

Such a lack of knowledge again reveals the confusion displayed.
What is free-will?
**FREE WILL. **The power of the will to determine itself and to act of itself, without compulsion from within or coercion from without. It is the faculty of an intelligent being to act or not act, to act this way or another way, and is therefore essentially different from the operations of irrational beings that merely respond to a stimulus and are conditioned by sensory objects.
Modern Catholic Dictionary by Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.
therealpresence.org/cgi-bin/getdefinition.pl

Thus it enables everyone to choose what, or what not, to do and Adam and Eve had extraordinary gifts from God, which they then lost.

Yet another error.

Don’t you know? Read Genesis 2:16-17, where it is crystal clear.

No knowledgeable individual claims that Genesis is without history.

We don’t “assume” anything. Jesus the Christ who worked so many miracles, formed His Catholic Church, Resurrected, and enabled His Chosen Apostles to also work many miracles as recorded. His Church authorised the Sacred Scriptures and thus authenticated the O.T.

The reality is that “Since, therefore, all that the inspired authors, or sacred writers, affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture, firmly, faithfully and without error, teach the truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the sacred Scriptures.” CCC #107].:

The miracles of the Sun at Fatima, the medically attested miracles at Lourdes and the many Eucharistic miracles cannot be evaded except by a bent towards a selfist and dysfunctional disbelief.

I found a video that really explains the concept of free will. He does a much better job than I. youtube.com/watch?v=Csh1lX0SCd0

Without error you say. So exactly how did Judas die? Also did the dead walk the earth like in the end of Matthew yet this is not recorded by any other source? The sun miracle is easily explained as people see funny things looking into the sun for a long period of time. Especially since many claims on that day are so widely different also no one else saw this event.

 

[Hicks]

Then we still have two separate entities: God’s-nature, which is unchanging and God’s-actions which do change. You have said that God does not change while His actions do.

Since one single entity cannot both change and not change, then we appear to agree that we are dealing with two different entities here.
rossum

I believe that your argument is unwittingly placing the eternal God in a temporal frame. An unchanging God in time would be a God trapped in amber, unable to so much as part a Red Sea. A changing God would be a God that (in changing) was heading toward or away from perfection. Either way, He would be imperfect, and therefore not God.

The Catholic God is not trapped in an instant of time **or **constantly changing. He is in full possession of himself. As a human, I am not in full possession of myself. Yesterday is inaccessible, tomorrow unimaginable. I gain or lose aspects of myself as time passes. On the other hand, God is in full possession of himself, such that parting the Red Sea, sending His Son in the Incarnation, and the Second Coming are all part of His eternal Now.

God is able to act in time without being changed because He himself is not in time, but its Creator and Master.

Frank Sheed’s “Theology for Beginners” is excellent. Pardon this extended quote, Sheed expresses the thought with great clarity:

"God is changeless because he is infinite. He has all perfections. He cannot lose any of them, so there is no past into which they can flow away. Nor is there any future from which new perfections can flow to him. He has all perfections, in the present, a present which does not change and does not cease. That is eternity. The universe he created is not like that. Things come and go. Change is continuous. Time and the universe started together.

We must concentrate upon the concept of eternity; it brings us deep into the meaning of God. You and I and all of us are in time, which means that we are never at any moment the whole of ourselves. What we were last year, what we shall be next year, all belong to our total being; but last year has gone and next year has not arrived. There is never a moment when we are all there. We possess our being, the philosopher say, successively. Not so God. All that he is, he possesses in one single act of being. Eternity does not mean everlasting time, time open at both ends, so that however far you go back into the past there is no beginning, however far you go forward in the future, there is no end. Eternity is not time at all. It is God’s total possession of himself."

 

[NM505StKate]

Have you ever noticed that in the Resurrection stories of the Bible, God appears only to those who believe? He didn’t appear to the Romans or to the members of the Sanhedrin. He appeared to those who believed. The one exception seems to have been Paul. It’s that way today. People who report private revelations, which we can’t go into deeply here, almost always are people who already believe in and love the Lord. Christ comes to all who invite him in, but like any gracious guest, he does not come uninvited.

The Bible doesn’t have to say Adam and Eve had free will. We know ir because God commanded them not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and they chose to disobey God because they, themselves, wanted to be like God. And they knew they were doing wrong because the moral law is first and foremost written on our hearts. When they did wrong, they first thing they did was to cover themselves in shame. A very small child knows when he’s done something “wrong,” something that shouldn’t be done. The three fonts of morality are object or act, circumstances, and intention. Why is murder wrong? Why is theft, especially if the theft doesn’t really harm anyone? Do you avoid wrong simply so you won’t be locked in jail? Why are there laws against stealing from the super rich who won’t even miss it?

By your reasoning, we have to write off every person in history for whose existence we have no tangible proof. We also have to write off every event. And every place that yields no archeological evidence.

How do you believe you came to be? Your parents? The first person, whoever that first person, in your eyes may be? Life doesn’t spring from nonlife. How do you think the universe came to be? If you believe in the Big Bang how do you think the material for the Big Bang got to be there? If you’re going to go down the atheist road, you have to be prepared to answer those questions and more.

Adam and Eve didn’t want to be “like god”. There is no evidence that says that at all in the bible, being the only source we can use. I came from my parents sure and humans came about from a common ancestor. They didn’t know because the tree of knowledge was “forbidden”.

 

[Hicks]

I found a video that really explains the concept of free will. He does a much better job than I. youtube.com/watch?v=Csh1lX0SCd0

Without error you say. So exactly how did Judas die? Also did the dead walk the earth like in the end of Matthew yet this is not recorded by any other source? The sun miracle is easily explained as people see funny things looking into the sun for a long period of time. Especially since many claims on that day are so widely different also no one else saw this event.

1. The two accounts of Judas’s death are hardly irreconcilable. Using a little imagination, we can easily sew them together. Perhaps he hung himself and after he had been hanging for a time the rope snapped and he fell. That would be speculative on our part, but that’s okay. It need not challenge your faith.
2. The passage in Matthew is admittedly mysterious. If I don’t immediately understand, does that make it untrue? And when you consider the paucity of sources for information regarding first century Judea, it’s not surprising that very little of the New Testament can be confirmed with other sources. I once encountered a person in an online debate who thought that the crucifixion could probably be easily disproved by looking at Roman crucifixion records, as though the Roman police blotter for Judea province in 33 A.D. is just a few mouse clicks away. Would that it were!
3. Yes, if you don’t pay any attention to the eyewitness accounts from the event, it isn’t difficult to write it off as the sun playing tricks on people or mass hallucinations. As to the latter, mass hallucinations do not exist. As to the former, a wide variety of people from ardent believers to mocking atheists came away profoundly shocked and moved by the experience that they shared. Fatima is not (and should not be) the pillar of my faith, but I would be very hesitant to write it off if I were you. Were it not a religious event, I suspect you’d have much less difficulty believing it.