Re: O'Reilly shows us we can't have religion in sc
All of those points can be answered with the simple phrase, he knew what would happen, and went ahead and did it anyway. Buck stops with your god. What sort of perfect, all-knowing cosmic being creates something with the desire for it to be perfect also, but then creates three beings (Adam Eve and most importantly, Auld Nick,) that he knows fine well will fuck up his whole plan?
My best guess is that whatever He wanted to achieve required the risk -- and even knowing what the risk was going to yield, He considered the goal worth the effort.
Remember -- by choosing a path that required the possibility of rebellion, He also chose a path in which God the Son was going to have to be crucified. Now, when mountain biking, I've chosen paths that entailed the possibility of flying head over heels (and heels over head), and about as often as not come to that pass -- but if it also meant that if I did take the tumble, at the end I'd have to let someone pound nails through my wrists (big, square, rough & rusty Roman nails, at that), there'd have to be a lot bigger prize out of it that just reaching the end of the trail.
And don't get me wrong Kuli, ridiculous though I find your attempts to quantify this shit, I have a lot of respect for you not copping out with "it's all part of gods plan," or "he moves in mysterious ways."
Well, it is all part of God's plan, but in my experience when looking into all these things, the people who have that as their "answer" aren't worth listening to -- I regard them as akin to the guy who quits preparing a plan for orbiting the moon because "from here it's just algebra".
That "He moves in mysterious ways" is far, far over-used. It has more to do with Thompson's poem
Hound of Heaven than with escaping the need to think. It applies at root to the two great things Paul calls "mysteries": the "mystery" of godliness, and the "mystery" of ungodliness (the latter, btw, being the question you're asking: why is there sin?, or, why did God go ahead with a plan that was going to get screwed up?).
And thinking of thinking, one great reason in favor of Christianity is that it is a thinker's religion -- those who don't are like the screaming fans in a crowd: they come with the concert, but they have very little to do with the music. Early on, Christian thinkers hammered out things like the Trinity, which came as the result of applying logic and refusing to toss out things that were uncomfortable (as the Athanasian Creed puts it, "the Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God, yet there are not three Gods, but One God" -- which isn't a dogmatic declaration, but a summary of the apparently contradictory data) or strange.
Contrary to the ignorant strain in this thread (and other ones), Christianity is not illogical -- it just has a data set that doesn't comport well with modern notions of how the world works. Setting aside the mystics, the history of Christian thought is one of honing ever finer the blades of logic, and sticking with the data no matter what. That tradition, btw, is what gave us Occam's Razor -- Occam was a churchman (a Franciscan!), and he first coined his rule with regard to theology (for that matter, there's a form of it in Aquinas, which may be where Occam got the notion). And thinking of Occam, I return to a maxim that my upper-level philosophy professors held up by Occam's
lex parsimoniae: logic judges no system, except from the inside.
Following that, a second look at things which seem utterly foolish to us, such as "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" take on a different color. In the thought of the day (remember it was perhaps more Aristotelian than biblical), that was a question on par with "How many neutrons can a nucleus hold?", or perhaps more appropriately, "Does a photon have mass?" Without realizing it, in fact, they were dealing with an issue of detectability; our version of the question might very well be, "How many angels must be present in a particular space before their presence can be measured?" Of course that's
if their presence can be measured, but that was part of the question.
And more to the topic, those sorts of things are ones I wouldn't mind seeing in schools -- not as religious lessons, but as exercises in the application of logic, that it is neutral by itself, and depends on the axioms of a system (alongside them one could put some of the exercises in logic that a physics department once foisted on its students: assuming that the behavior of objects in the Road Runner cartoons obey some set of physical laws, what are those laws?). There are also some excellent bits of logic from some of the ancient Babylonian rabbis, with (to us) bizarre sets of premises, but which are perfectly logical within the parameters of those premises. I haven't encountered any such in other ancient religious texts I've dealt with (most ancient near-east stuff is magical, which doesn't lend itself to being logical), nor in the texts of Hinduism (also magical, and mystical), but if there are any good examples, bring them in, too. I suspect there should be some in Buddhism; what I have read has the flavor of something that is hardly an enemy to logic.
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