IAmSabrina:

I'm sorry but i can only accept this argument if you can demonstrate that spirits exist.

NnennaG6:

There are states of mind that are euphoric, brought on by collective enthusiasm, emotional chord progressions, and the like. These are not necessarily the Holy Ghost.

Lots of people leave the church, find another religion, or disbelieve and turn to another worldview. Religious ecstacies happen in anti-Christ faiths. None of this disproves the work of the Holy Ghost.

The primary issue here is salvation. Was that real??

Some imagine that salvation lies on a table in a library full of apologetic books. They think that it's up to them to weigh the evidence and then, if they think this God is worthy, reach out for the salvation that God has set out for them.

But God is God. He saves whom he will. He speaks to whom he will.

NnennaG6:

Perhaps what you fail to realize is that there are many benefits to God's divine hiddenness that hold supreme value

Any world in which the superintendence of God is an obvious fact is a world in which significant moral liberty is almost impossible. God can vouchsafe us significant moral choice is by temporarily situating himself at an epistemic distance. It grants us responsibility to discern ultimate truths about reality

God hides himself to make it possible for us to perform potentially selfless and unrewarded good actions and so form a very good moral character. It is as such a plausible feature of a temporary antecedent world created by God with a view to producing creatures who are morally fit for an eternal one.

If God intervened too frequently in the antecedent world (such as by answering almost every prayer or intervening to prevent almost every wrongdoing), don't you think the world would lack this crucial regularity and the feasibility of a world of morally free agents would be compromised?

UceeGod:


It's not left for me to demonstrate the existence of spirits. God Himself, your Creator and the Divine Spirit will reveal Himself to you only by Faith.
Spiritual realities can only be experienced by Faith. Believe before you experience divine realities, experience doesnt come before belief.

NnennaG6:

The problem is you people are making confident assumptions of how God is supposed to act. Have you people ever considered that maybe our finite minds can't formulate reliable observational criteria for an entity of abyssal intelligence, unlimited power and perfect love?

What if the your expectations about God are fundamentally dysfunctional, unreasonable and wrong? In that case, God would want you to overcome them and conforming to them would mislead and harm. And even the further objection that God, being all powerful and all knowing, would be able to find some appropriate way to make his existence obvious to each of his creatures, whatever their expectations, does not escape the problem. For just the same God either conforms to the unbeliever's expectations or he does not. And so my confidence in the divine hiddenness of God is only as strong as my confidence in the tenability of your expectations about God.

And here NO confidence is justified. It is logical: a being who can control every atom in the universe by a basic action and who views us under the aspect of infinite intelligence and perfect morality may have ways of fulfilling his loving purposes for us that do not meet our expectations - purposes in which, perhaps, even our doubt and unbelief have their preordained place.

Your argument seems to rest on a gross failure of imagination concerning the one subject about which limitations are unjustified. You can't pin God Almighty down like a butterfly in a showcase.

LordReed:


Don't forget intuition, that seemingly magical faculty we have that nobody knows how it works but some people think is the "holy ghost", LoL.

IAmSabrina:

The giant hole in this kind of argument is i don't really see how knowledge of God negates freely choosing God. Surely if we're talking about Yahweh the Bible seems to give reasons as to why we shouldn't expect that to be the case.

IAmSabrina:

The giant hole in this kind of argument is i don't really see how knowledge of God negates freely choosing God. Surely if we're talking about Yahweh the Bible seems to give reasons as to why we shouldn't expect that to be the case.

Ihedinobi3:
NnennaG6, I am very happy to see you. I am incredibly encouraged to read you. It seems to me as if you have come some way since the last time I read you here.

Grace from the Lord be with you.

Ihedinobi3:

But your sight is terrible.

NnennaG6:

But that's not the argument. The argument is that continuous propositional knowledge of God (a state in which the perception of God is equivalent to the perception of the external world or of the self: continuous and incorrigible) would diminish the availability and universality of the "higher order goods" namely, the ability to exercise significant and unmitigated moral liberty, the ability to manifest the virtue of choosing to do the good for the sake of the good; the ability to selflessly seek the good and God, and so on.

In general I think most arguments against God's hiddenness are based on a crude dichotomy. But there are many possible gradients in between and outside absolute knowledge of God, on the one hand, and the epistemic conditions that appear to obtain in the actual world, on the other.

IAmSabrina:

I'm sorry but this is simply not true.

Let us look at Lucifer and the angels that rebelled against god. Beings who would've, supposedly (according to your argument), not have had significant and unmitigated moral liberty, but still, freely chose to go against him, and thus were cast out of heaven.

They had all-out evidence of god's existence and knew it at the level people would like to know, and thus be convinced. This evidence, even at the highest level of the knowledge of god, STILL free choices were able to be made to ignore that and not believe god.

NnennaG6:

Most theologians I've heard on this subject think that all created intelligences are held at an epistemic distance during their moral development - including angelic beings. Its slightly ridiculous to causally state as though it were a verified datum what conditions obtained for beings about which we know almost nothing in realms about we know almost nothing.

NnennaG6:

Most theologians I've heard on this subject think that all created intelligences are held at an epistemic distance during their moral development - including angelic beings. Its slightly ridiculous to causally state as though it were a verified datum what conditions obtained for beings about which we know almost nothing in realms about we know almost nothing.

IAmSabrina:

Ad hominem. Try again

Ihedinobi3:

I am pretty sure it isn't.

IAmSabrina:

And in this paragraph, you literally obliterated Christianity and contradicted your own response

@bolded Are we just to accept that what "most Theologians think" about created intelligences is true? Or would be more reasonable to conclude, like you've stated, that they know almost nothing? What are we relying on here, Theologians or what the bible says? Because the bible seems pretty clear that angels have undoubtedly more access to the knowledge of God than us mere humans, but yet, they can still freely choose to not believe God, as demonstrated by Lucifer.

This seems like a pretty sure rebuttal to your own argument

If angels can rebel and turn away from God with their level of knowledge by exercising their free will, then it stands to reason that humans can too.

Martinez39:
Most muslim scholars think the quran is valid. Allah akbar.

IAmSabrina:

I'm pretty sure it is

NnennaG6:

IAmSabrina:

And in this paragraph, you literally obliterated Christianity and contradicted your own response

@bolded Are we just to accept that what "most Theologians think" about created intelligences is true? Or would be more reasonable to conclude, like you've stated, that they know almost nothing? What are we relying on here, Theologians or what the bible says? Because the bible seems pretty clear that angels have undoubtedly more access to the knowledge of God than us mere humans, but yet, they can still freely choose to not believe God, as demonstrated by Lucifer.

IAmSabrina:

This seems like a pretty sure rebuttal to your own argument

If angels can rebel and turn away from God with their level of knowledge by exercising their free will, then it stands to reason that humans can too.

Martinez39:
Insha Allah

NnennaG6:

Most theologians I've heard on this subject think that all created intelligences are held at an epistemic distance during their moral development - including angelic beings. Its slightly ridiculous to causally state as though it were a verified datum what conditions obtained for beings about which we know almost nothing in realms about we know almost nothing.

NnennaG6:

I don't get it. Did i miss the joke somewhere?

Ihedinobi3:

Human beings also saw God in the Bible. Adam did. Cain did. Abraham did. Moses did. So did the Israelite assembly at Sinai. So did the 70 elders of Israel. So did Joshua. So did Gideon. So did Manoah's wife. So did Isaiah. So did Ezekiel. So did the apostles. So did Paul. So did John the brother of James.

In none of these cases was the Glory that is God in naked view. Each sighting was deniable on the part of those who saw it. If it wasn't, then the sighting of God would destroy their free will.

A similar principle applied for the angels. During their own time of testing, their knowledge and sighting of God was not such that they could not choose to disobey Him. He was still in essence hidden even to them, although not quite in the same way that He is from us who are flesh and blood.

So you're wrong. The example of the angels does not prove at all that God can appear to men and not destroy their free will. Whenever He has, His appearance has been veiled so that those who saw Him could decide to attribute what they saw to their own imagination or some other source if they pleased.

NnennaG6:

Literally? Are you always this melodramatic? You obviously don't get my point which is that you cannot persuasively use angels and demons as examples here because almost nothing is known about the epistemic conditions that obtained for them.

If the argument is sound it follows, a priori, that they were held at an epistemic distance. This is what William Lane Craig postulates in his discussion of the subject. Or perhaps unknown psychological laws operate for beings created at a higher pitch of reality. Who knows? But you can't make this an argument when the critical datum is unknowable. That's like saying, "The Bacteria x on planet y can survive at temperature n!" when we don't really know anything about the temperature of planet y or the constitution and structure of bacteria x. It's idle speculation.

Martinez39:
IAmSabrina can help you spot the joke.

IAmSabrina:

You do not see it do you? If you think that Angelology is somehow this area of complete mystery, but yet God, who is next level, is somehow way more attainable and epistemically apparent. Then, you're not making a lot of sense.

@bold is fine and that would be all good if it were generally believed to be the case. But it isn't and even if it was, I would argue you can apply this same line of reasoning to God.


This ignores the fact that theologians the likes of Thomas Aquinas (who I think you'd hold in higher regard than WLC) have written a specific treatise on angels and indeed writes quite extensively about detailed knowledge of their existence and being.

"But the knowledge, whereby according to his natural principles the angel knows God, stands midway between these two; and is likened to that knowledge whereby a thing is seen through the species abstracted from it. For since God's image is impressed on the very nature of the angel in his essence, the angel knows God in as much as he is the image of God."
- Aquinas

This clearly stipulates that it is known that angels are a midway between humans and God. But yet, you seem to think nothing is known, of course, you could read the bible to see some more details about angels?

You need not know great detail to know they are finite beings, like us, but yet obviously have a higher level of access or knowledge of God in order to be angels. But yet, like us, have the ability to freely chose and have done so, even when having that closer level of epistemic knowledge. To pull the "who knows" card seems rather disingenuous.

Cc. Ihedinobi3


I really don't get the joke tho

IAmSabrina:



I really don't get the joke tho

Ihedinobi3:

A more important thing to note, IAmSabrina, is that human beings and angels, while quite similar in many respects, are different orders of beings. Therefore, their tests are different.

Angels are spirits without flesh and blood. Humans are spirits with flesh and blood. Because of the nature of the former, their test was not about whether or not God exists. The angels have never doubted that. The issue, as it actually also is for humans, was whether they trusted Him.

Humans, being flesh and blood on the other hand, are necessarily tested differently. We have a rather larger sphere of deniability. This is possible precisely because of our bodies which shield us from perceiving the spiritual realm. Man was deliberately created to be weaker than the angels in order to demonstrate to the faithful ones that Satan had absolutely no excuse to sin. For this reason, he was made with a handicap, so to speak, one that makes him able to do even what Satan could not do: deny the very existence of God.

In spite of this real handicap, many humans throughout history have done what Satan would not do: they have chosen to trust God beyond the sight of their eyes, the hearing of their ears, and other such evidence that may seem more compelling for physical creatures. Satan never had any such impediments. He saw God. He saw the perfect creation that God made for the angels. He lacked for absolutely nothing. He was the highest ranking moral creature in existence. Yet he sinned.

Believers today are undeniable proof that trusting God does not require all those advantages. One can trust God even in far less desirable circumstances than Satan had.

IAmSabrina:

@bolded Your friend Nnenna is of the opinion that the epistemic status of angels is unknown and can't be known. What have you to say about that?

IAmSabrina:

If you think that Angelology is somehow this area of complete mystery, but yet God, who is next level, is somehow way more attainable and epistemically apparent.....

IAmSabrina:

This ignores the fact that theologians the likes of Thomas Aquinas (who I think you'd hold in higher regard than WLC) have written a specific treatise on angels and indeed writes quite extensively about detailed knowledge of their existence and being.

"But the knowledge, whereby according to his natural principles the angel knows God, stands midway between these two; and is likened to that knowledge whereby a thing is seen through the species abstracted from it. For since God's image is impressed on the very nature of the angel in his essence, the angel knows God in as much as he is the image of God."
- Aquinas

IAmSabrina:

You need not know great detail to know they are finite beings, like us, but yet obviously have a higher level of access or knowledge of God in order to be angels. But yet, like us, have the ability to freely chose and have done so, even when having that closer level of epistemic knowledge. To pull the "who knows" card seems rather disingenuous.