A Problem with God

[Ainsley]

We are assuming here that God is good in a traditional biblical sense. Just because God is all knowing and all seeing does that necessarily make him all good? I'm not agreeing with myself here, just posing the question.

Anyway.....

One thing we have as human beings is free will. God can never take this away from us (or I like to think so). So yes Pete, A murder in a sense can never be completely undone. If it's rewound, it still happened. Why just change the act though? Why not change the human being or never allow that person into the world in the first place?

Maybe we're the 'control' timeline in his experiment......just seeing how bad we mess things up. The other being a timeline without evil, with all of our 'mistakes' rectified by the big G. Child murdering b******s aside, imagine a world with no evil - and by that I mean just think what you deem to be evil just in this present world we live in.......I know I can't imagine it. Now multiply that by thousands of years as well. All the bloodshed, death and destruction over the years and we're not even close to how evil we can be as a race.

However, if he took away that 'free will', what really would we be left with? Thunderbirds are go......

 

[TEKLOFTY]

ah i kinda see what your getting at. So yeah i guess no matter what at some point the murders happened. And if you retain the memory of the action of reversing time, then it doesn't not matter if nobody else is aware that the events never ever will take place you will know they did.

so ultimately God would know and perhaps the person who committed the act of travelling back and altering the past. Provided there memory of what would now be there future (as they have travelled back) is not erased due to the fact of them stopping the events from ever transpiring.

so the answer is at least in my eyes is Yes god can change the past for the world but Not for himself, now whether or not that counts as him being unable to change the past is up for debate

that is at least my take on it

Ah think I get it now, in that case I agree with this point of view but it also posits a new question in my mind - is simply knowing that something happened enough to prove it did happen?

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[ReservoirFrog]

Ah think I get it now, in that case I agree with this point of view but it also posits a new question in my mind - is simply knowing that something happened enough to prove it did happen?

And conversely, if nobody knows something happened, does that mean it didn't?
Like the old Zen proverb/thought exercise, if a tree falls in a wood and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? (or do all the other trees laugh at it?)

 

[TEKLOFTY]

And conversely, if nobody knows something happened, does that mean it didn't?
Like the old Zen proverb/thought exercise, if a tree falls in a wood and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? (or do all the other trees laugh at it?)

Quite

As for the Zen proverb the answer is no, no-one hears it because 'sound' is a human definition of audible vibrations in the air; if there is no-one around to define the vibrations the tree falling makes, ergo it makes no 'sound'.

 

[ReservoirFrog]

Quite

As for the Zen proverb the answer is no, no-one hears it because 'sound' is a human definition of audible vibrations in the air; if there is no-one around to define the vibrations the tree falling makes, ergo it makes no 'sound'.

Of course! But it served to illustrate the point, and segue to a bad joke.

 

[TEKLOFTY]

Of course! But it served to illustrate the point, and segue to a bad joke.

Ah

 

[Robbo]

....and so the penny drops

but......all that does is to make you aware of the problem and doesn't solve it and maybe it's one of those that can't be solved like so many of the other paradoxes, my personal favourite being the prisoner paradox

 

[Duncan Berry]

well if i finally understood it, i think it is unanswerable due to humans never being able to know what god is and how he works (assuming we are stating he is 100% real)

to answer this problem we would need to be able to completely understand God which by his very being is impossible.


its problems like these that make me glad I'm agnostic

 

[TEKLOFTY]

....and so the penny drops

but......all that does is to make you aware of the problem and doesn't solve it and maybe it's one of those that can't be solved like so many of the other paradoxes, my personal favourite being the prisoner paradox

Well the problem depends on personal opinion; there is nothing tangible that can prove the paradox one way or the other - which brings me back to what I said earlier, religion is about faith.

 

[Robbo]

ah i kinda see what your getting at. So yeah i guess no matter what at some point the murders happened. And if you retain the memory of the action of reversing time, then it doesn't not matter if nobody else is aware that the events never ever will take place you will know they did.

so ultimately God would know and perhaps the person who committed the act of travelling back and altering the past. Provided there memory of what would now be there future (as they have travelled back) is not erased due to the fact of them stopping the events from ever transpiring.

so the answer is at least in my eyes is Yes god can change the past for the world but Not for himself, now whether or not that counts as him being unable to change the past is up for debate


that is at least my take on it

Go to the top of the class young man !!!!


......As you ask, does it count if god is the only one aware?

If you think about it Duncan, I am suggesting me and you are now aware of this limitation he might or might not have, and even though we might not have a specific example to work with, we do however have a theoretical one and on that basis, 'yes', it does count if God were to be the only being after the rewind to be aware because it's been flagged up now, no matter what God does subsequently.