How did Jesus exist without Heavenly Mother in Heaven? Does it just suddenly POP UP somewhere in the universe?
Then tell me, How does God exist itself, without any other Creator?
I see that you can not answer my question directly: I repeat again before God created the entire universe. In which universe or galaxy does God exist itself, without any other Creator?
Me too answered your question with questions. And you dodge to answer directly?
I’m not aware of this argument. Is it possible you are conflating two arguments here? Firstly the one that states that if “God” knows we are going to commit an evil action and does nothing to prevent it, that precludes him from being a loving and caring god. The analogy being: if you knew your child was going to shoot someone who’d done nothing wrong, and you did nothing to prevent it, then you can’t consider yourself to be a good and loving person. That’s not anti free will, that’s an argument against “God” being both all-knowing and good. The only way out of that conclusion is to invoke special pleading.
One of the tenets of Catholicism is that God doesn’t need anything. He doesn’t need our worship. The calling of men and women to him isn’t egotistical. Creating and our worship adds nothing to him. He is at perfect bliss and joy with himself. If he never created, he would not “feel” any incompleteness. Creation was not made to increase God’s glory, but to manifest and share it, and since God has no such ego and wants for nothing, it’s simply a matter of selfless giving.
God shares responsibility for creating, but my personality isn’t just given to me as if I’m something separate from it, it’s essential to who I am. I still choose X or Y based on principles intrinsic to myself, not because I’m moved by puppet strings by the motions of the planets or the whims of the God, as if I had no agency. Even if we can’t control all nature or nurture, we are still beings with agency, and so remain culpable for our actions. If I do bad things, it’s not because some “I” or self separate from my personality was moved to do such things by external strings, but because that I or self is bad (or at least not fully good). That’s who I am intrinsically.
No, not at all. Maybe you’re just working with a bad/incomplete understanding of goodness and also a bad/incomplete understanding of what we mean by God.Sbee0:
I’m not aware of this argument. Is it possible you are conflating two arguments here? Firstly the one that states that if “God” knows we are going to commit an evil action and does nothing to prevent it, that precludes him from being a loving and caring god. The analogy being: if you knew your child was going to shoot someone who’d done nothing wrong, and you did nothing to prevent it, then you can’t consider yourself to be a good and loving person. That’s not anti free will, that’s an argument against “God” being both all-knowing and good. The only way out of that conclusion is to invoke special pleading.
I think if you read the Domican and Jesuit positions on free will, you’d be very surprised to find that what Catholic theologians mean by free will is not what you mean by free will at all.
Your very life and existence demonstrates the operation of free will. You have agency, the capacity to observe, think, and act in a way that is specific to you.Sbee0:
The second argument is merely that there is no evidence for free will. Nobody has ever presented a process by which free will can exist. As far as we can tell, the universe is entirely deterministic at a non-quantum level, and quantum indeterminacy merely introduces chance, it doesn’t provide for free will - so at best our “choices” would be completely random. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, we should consider that free will doesn’t exist; and whatever happens is inevitable.
Neither of these two argument is logically fallacious.