What does it mean for people to be equal?

What does it mean for people to be equal? There aren't any two people in the world who have equal abilities in every respect. Some people are more intelligent, some people are better looking, some people have more wealth, status or power, and so on and so on. So what does it mean for people to be equal?

Equality doesn't mean that I pretend I'm as fast a runner as Usain Bolt so that everyone is equal when it comes to short distance running ability (Usain Bolt is the fastest short distance runner in history). Equality doesn't mean that I and my friends create a socially acceptable delusion whereby, for the sake of equality, we all pretend that we're as fast as Usain Bolt.

So believing in equality has to include a sensible acknowledgment of differences in people's abilities and gifts.

So if equality doesn't involve pretending that people have equal abilities, then what does it mean?

I think equality refers to the way that you process someone being relatively better or worse at something than yourself. It refers to how you choose to act on the fact that people have different abilities.

I think the Bible gives a good explanation of this view here:

Gen 1:27 "And God made man in his image, in the image of God he made him: male and female he made them" (everyone is equally made in God's image).

Rom 2:11 "For one man is not different from another before God" (because everyone is equally made in God's image).

1 Co 4:7 "For who made you better than your brother? or what have you that has not been given to you? but if it has been given to you, what cause have you for pride, as if it had not been given to you?" (everything we have outside of our own choices is a gift from God).

The Bible makes it clear that every good thing we have that's outside of our own choices we received from God (we also receive grace and the rest of our choices are heavily influenced by what God gave us), James 1:17. And what abilities and gifts we received from God we received not because God liked any of us more than anyone else (as we're all equally made in His image), but purely because it fitted more with God's plan for us to receive what we received.

So if someone is better than someone else because of their choices, then maybe there's a reason for boasting there - unless someone's better choices are a result of God's grace, because then they were a gift from God (grace is a gift offered freely to all). But if someone is better than someone else because of what's outside their choices, then they shouldn't boast about it, because everything outside our choices was given to people without God liking anyone more than anyone else.

This means acknowledging differences in people's abilities as long as that difference isn't used to attack someone in some way. Because you can't attack people based on a gift that you received from someone (in this case God), when the gift wasn't intended to privilege you over them.

For freedom Christ has set us free

"It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery." - Gal 5:1.

One of the 'paradoxes' of Christian teaching is that loving and serving God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength and loving our neighbour as we love ourselves actually sets us free rather than 'enslaves' us.

So what's going on with that? Surely loving your neighbour as you love yourself is impossibly difficult.

I think a key element in explaining why it's not some kind of 'slavery' comes from the Christian view of human nature: that when God made us He made our minds like His mind in many ways (the image of God idea). One aspect of God's mind is that it is love (1 John 4:8). So our minds were designed to be just as loving as God's. Just like God fulfills His nature through love, so do we.

We don't feel our minds are really like this (in that you can be happy without being very loving), but that can be explained as a result of people being able to create their own happiness from contradicting this system, as one of the 'powers' of free will, so we can make our own happiness from other things.

The Christian 'system' gets legitimacy because when we act according to the above described view of human nature we are actually acting according to the original 'blueprints'. Because of the 'blueprint' idea God's desire for us to love our neighbour as we love ourselves is not supposed to be this horrible duty we are obligated to fulfill, but, ideally, in some way 'freeing', despite its incredible cost (1 John 5:3).

Okay, this may sound nice in theory, but how does it address the arduous nature of 'love your neighbour as you love yourself'? Why should we beat ourselves up for not following an impossible standard? As the Bible says, it is, after all, impossible to follow even though it's a legitimate standard (1 John 1:8).

One point that Christianity makes is that God just wants us to accept what Jesus has done for us on the cross and doesn't want us to beat ourselves up for failing to keep an impossible, but legitimate, standard that He knows we can't meet (trying to meet it in order to please God would actually contradict the accepting Jesus part according to Gal 5:4). Because of what Jesus has done, we won't need to try hard to follow it one day, but it will, one day, come as naturally as drinking water. I think Phil 3:9 explains some of the mechanics of how this works: "[I have given up everything to] be found in [Christ], not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ."

Where does sin come from?

An interesting theory on where sin ultimately comes from...

God is perfect, but why couldn't He make us perfect just like He is? Where does sin come from?

There's an answer that I find helpful on this issue: because of reason X, which is true in the same way that 2 + 2 = 4 is true, only God can be 100% perfect. That is, only God can be a completely perfect being.

Therefore God cannot make any other being equal to Himself in perfection. So God can make beings that are 99% perfect, or 99.999...% perfect, but only God can be 100% perfect. This is a fundamental limit on the nature of reality and God's power, because only the creator, only God, can be completely perfect.

Of course, in reply, it might be said that a computer program can be made to perfectly calculate someone's tax returns, and what about a perfect circle existing? So some types of perfection can be made outside of God, mainly relating, I guess, to something achieving a defined purpose. But only God can be completely perfect in every way. So a perfect circle cannot be completely perfect like God can be completely perfect. I think this makes sense.

So Adam and Eve could be created 99.9999...% perfect, but not perfect like God is. And neither can we.

And from that tiny, tiny amount of imperfection, after maybe billions and billions of years (it doesn't say how long they were in the Garden), Adam and Eve experienced the 'Fall'. And we would have done so in the same position, because we have a tiny, necessary amount of imperfection as well. The Garden was a good situation but, ultimately, it can't work forever.

The only way around it is for God to insert Himself into reality as a created being, with our vulnerabilities, and overcome our 'necessary imperfection' - our ability to be tempted by evil - by being God as well as human.

The way it works for God as a created being is that, for instance, Jesus would never sin in any possible situation because He is God although He was tempted because He is human (Heb 4:15).

Then God-as-a-created being absorbed all the effects of our necessary imperfection - our sin - into Himself on the cross, as a result of which everyone can "be found in [Jesus], not having a righteousness of [their] own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ" (Phil 3:9).

That solves the problem created by our necessary imperfection, which is the way it always led to sin - it's not a problem if you have a goodness which is not your own, but which is Christ's.

Ultimately, God found a way to forever sidestep our necessary imperfection through the cross, in a way that wasn't available in the 'Eden setup', although the Eden setup was 'very good' (Gen 1:31).

Objective morality

Atheists and Christians often argue about what makes morality 'objective', and whether you need God for morality to be 'objective'. But what does 'objective' in 'objective morality' mean, exactly? And why is a world without God unable to express whatever it means?

Instead of answering this directly, I'd prefer to imagine a situation that makes morality pack the most 'punch' out of any situation I can imagine.

This is the situation: suppose that humans are made to be perfectly loving towards each other and relate to one another in an 'ideal' way. So it's impossible to really live out your nature without relating to others in an 'ideal' way. That way, even though doing evil can make people happy, no one can really be themselves - who they really are - without relating to others in an 'ideal' way.

This situation would seem to make morality pack quite a punch. So maybe morality is more' objective' if this situation is the case than if it's not. Also, clearly, it's easier to believe this if you're a religious person plus you believe that things have somehow 'gone off the rails' for humanity so that, somehow, no one lives out their true nature in a complete way (at least in this life).

Does going to heaven involve missing out on the richness and variety of human experience?

There's a common perception that going to heaven involves being 'lobotomized'. That it means being turned into a perpetually happy 'machine' where you are unable to express natural emotions like sadness, cynicism, and so on. Meanwhile you are constantly 'high' on love which enables the saints in heaven to care about people and God the way God wants, like a parody of 'positive thinking' gone wrong.

This view is based on a misunderstanding of how the saints in heaven will be different. The entire difference is summed up thus: whereas now we don't treat other people the way we would ideally like other people to treat us, the saints in heaven will. Whereas now we don't follow the Golden Rule perfectly, the saints in heaven will (Matt 7:12).

Jesus (who is God) felt sadness (John 11:33-36), anger (Mark 3:5), cynicism (when justified, Mark 12:14-15), extreme anxiety (Luke 22:42-44). Jesus felt a full spectrum. He felt every emotion that was compatible with treating others the way Jesus would have ideally liked to be treated.

Heaven won't change people so that they can't get sad, lonely, feel grief, pain, feel cynical (as long as it allows for giving people the benefit of the doubt), anger (when justified) and so on. It only means that we will follow the standard above, which goes along with loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. When someone adds something to this then they are in danger of adding something to heaven that heaven doesn't have - this is where the 'heaven involves a lobotomy' view comes from.

So if our idea of heaven involves missing out on the richness of human experience, then either a) following the Golden Rule perfectly means missing out on the richness of human experience, or b) something has been added to our understanding of heaven that heaven doesn't have.

The Christian view of human nature

Here is a visual illustration of the Christian view of human nature, below. Click on it to see it full size:



(I'd like to note that even though I refer to God using male pronouns, God is not a guy. God has no specific gender, but has chosen to refer to Himself in the Bible using male pronouns. I think that's mainly for two reasons. First of all, using a gender neutral pronoun is a bit awkward ('It created the universe') given the way our language works. Secondly, when God came to earth He chose to be born as a man (Jesus), rather than a woman, and so that probably led to every member of the trinity being referred to as a 'He'.)

How does human nature change in heaven?

A lot of skeptics have this question about heaven: why won't people in heaven do bad things? Especially when you consider how Christians cannot avoid sinning in this life.

Is it that God changes human nature? Well then why didn't God create Adam and Eve with a nature that wouldn't sin? It doesn't make sense. But what other explanation is there?

So does God prevent evil in heaven by changing human nature?

In one sense yes, in another sense no. The answer lies in what Jesus did on the cross for us.

You could say that humans are made out of two components: a body-brain, and a soul-mind.

People will always have a body-brain (whether physical, spiritual, or glorified resurrected body) and a soul-mind. So in the sense of the 'components' of human nature, human nature never changes.

Is it a problem that the components of human nature never change?

Yes. For some reason God can't make anyone with these components like Himself when it comes to sin. By this I mean, only God can never be tempted by sin (James 1:13). And we're smart enough to know that if we mess other people around then we can often fulfill our needs and wants better. And if God hadn't given us needs and wants then we would be self-contained social islands (not a good alternative).

So how can God make heaven perfect if we're stuck with these components of human nature, and these components lead to sin?

Part of the answer is that human nature isn't the only issue. There is also the issue of our own individual moral characters.

We have free will, so in theory, heaven could have no evil in it if people just chose not to do evil there (despite our bad track record on earth).

But in practice, having free will doesn't really help things that much. We are smart enough to know that selfishness/evil often makes a lot of sense, and so we can't make ourselves do something like 'be perfect' that is clearly against our self-interest.

But maybe, the problems of human nature could be sidestepped if just one person lived a morally perfect life.

How so?

Well, if one person lived a flawless life with a body-brain and soul-mind, then perhaps God could 'give' their moral character (pattern of moral choices) to others... That would make the human nature problem irrelevant.

If God could just 'give us' a morally perfect character, then we'd still have our human nature, but it wouldn't be a problem because now everyone would have a perfect moral character.

There was such a perfect person, according to Christianity. Although Jesus had a body-brain and soul-mind exactly as we do (Rom 8:3), for Jesus sin wasn't ever a problem. This is because Jesus had God's soul (John 10:36). So Jesus had the soul of someone (i.e. God) who had chosen to never sin from eternity.

We don't exactly know how it works, but Jesus' moral character (pattern of moral choices) can be handed out to others. On the cross our sinful selves somehow died with Christ, and in return Christ now lives in us (Rom 6:6, Gal 2:20). This is referred to as getting a new nature and being a new creation (2 Pe 1:4; 2 Co 5:17).

This world is the 'choosing period', where people decide whether this is something they want. For some reason, God waits until after we die to 'fully manifest' the effects of the 'swap' - but the 'swap' is fully accomplished as soon as someone genuinely believes in Christ (Col 3:3).

So heaven makes sense. We will still have a body-brain and soul-mind, but this time there will not be any problems. Because our moral character has been changed through the cross.

[1] Part of the idea of Adam and Eve is that you can have a body-brain and a soul-mind and nevertheless avoid sinning. I think this is possible because the 'Garden of Eden' situation is one where God protects our understanding of good and evil. So we rely on God's understanding of what to do, whether to get angry with someone, or help someone, for example, rather than our own. The 'Fall' seems to be a situation where people decide to rely on themselves for working out good and evil and to let go of God's protection.

Why are people selfish? Evolutionary psychology vs original sin

People are selfish. Why? Here are two accounts.

Evolutionary psychology: evolution made us act good, but we are not actually good

There's a big difference between someone acting good and someone being good. 'Acting' good is doing the right thing when there is some kind of selfish benefit to doing it. If people see me help someone out, then they will be more likely to respect me and I'll get a selfish benefit from it. Evolution can explain that very easily. 'Being' good on the other hand is being good even when there is no selfish benefit to you at all - and you know it. Being good is doing the right thing even when you know that gossip, tit for tat, getting something later, is not going to reward you for doing the right thing.

In evolutionary terms, creatures who are good and are not just 'acting' good are at a large disadvantage in passing on their genes. A person who donates money to a charity in front of everyone may get a selfish benefit from it because people will respect them. But a person who gives a lot of money to a charity without anyone knowing will probably hurt their selfish interests. Enough of those sorts of decisions will hurt your chances of reproduction. So evolution works against people 'being' good rather than 'acting' good.

This is why people are selfish in evolutionary psychology - evolution made us act good, but we are not actually good. In evolutionary terms, everything good we do is for the sake of appearances, higher social status, and later benefits (with the exception of kin selection).

Original sin: people have a 'good essence' in the image of God, but we are enslaved to 'selfish self-interest', which comes from being able to reason and think critically about how we could get ahead in life

In original sin, people have a basically good essence in that we are all made in God's image. Just like God is love, so humans were meant to care for each other and God in the way that God does. We have a moral sense that holds us accountable to the way the 'image of God' should act. But we are also pretty clever and we can tell that if we mess other people around then we can get ahead in life. This isn't the way we were meant to operate, but it's true that being selfish can get you ahead in life. So even though we have a good essence, with free will + being able to think of how we could pursue our interests without regard to others = you get original sin.

We have this devious ability to think because everyone has chosen to rely on themselves for knowledge of good and evil rather than God (although only Adam and Eve literally were in such a situation, we would have all made the same choice, so we are all 'in' Adam).

What God wants instead of this situation is for all our moral decisions to be made on the basis of 'faith in doing the right thing', which in practice, we cannot consistently do. In the Christian view, humanity has free will and thinks in terms of 'rational self-interest', which often leads to selfishness - humanity is not made selfish from evolution. Evolution is how humanity was created, but it never gives us a 'free pass' when we do the wrong thing, because it's not why we do the wrong thing. We do the wrong thing because, out of a devious understanding of self-interest, we ignore God's command to do unto others.

Answers to tough questions: suffering

When we see suffering going on in the world, often not connected to wrongdoing, it is hard to see how a loving God exists. Suffering is also pretty random. The traditional Christian answer is that because we live in a fallen world, therefore terrible suffering must happen.

I think there are some gaps in this explanation. Here is my attempt to fill them:

We are mental and physical beings. Mentally, we have a mind which is not the same as our brain. Physically, we have a brain and a body. The mind is based off the brain, but it is not the same thing as the brain.

I think that the mind lives in a mental world that follows different rules to the physical world around us.

I think that one of these 'mental' rules works kind of like gravity. Say you throw a rock up into the air. It will fall down due to gravity. In an analogous way, in the Christian view, a mind is naturally connected to its creator, God, in the mental world. God is the 'super-mind' from which all other minds come, creating this connection.

But in the Christian/Judaic view, if a mind sins then it gets pushed away from its creator, God (in the mental world). Sin pushes a mind away from God sort of like a rock suddenly flying out into space instead of falling to the ground (for some reason).

When a mind is connected to God it feels infinite happiness. It is enjoying what God feels all the time. But when a mind is 'pushed away' from God due to sin, the mind suffers, and loses ultimate happiness.

The stuff I just described only goes on in the mental world. It does not happen physically. So physically, everything can be fine. Someone can be in good health, be having a good time etc., but if our minds are cut off from God due to sin then we must suffer no matter what is going on physically.

God makes our mind getting cut off from God go along with physical suffering, like e.g. a disease. It doesn't have to go along with physical suffering like disease. But whether it does or not, the suffering we must all feel is roughly the same. So God should not be blamed for making this process go along with physical suffering, because the same suffering must happen regardless.

I think this is how saying 'We live in a fallen world' can make sense of suffering, and yet 'God is love' and all-powerful.

Two questions remain:

1) Why does our mind get cut off from God due to sin?
Answer: Because the mind is connected to God, and God simply cannot be connected to a soul that does wrong. It's impossible for such a connection to be maintained, because God is holy. Even though God is all-powerful, God cannot allow sin in His presence (for a reason we may not fully know).

2) Why do some people suffer much more than others?
Answer: I'm not sure, but this argument does explain why there must be horrible suffering... even if we can't explain why some people suffer more than others. This must simply be left unexplained, and so the argument is not complete. But this argument is at least something...

Does sin explain why people don't use their free will that much?

"Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin. And the servant abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son abideth ever. If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." - John 8:34-36.

Two interesting facts:

1) We have a very strong, gut feeling that we have free will.
2) It often seems that hardly anyone uses it. Most of the time our personalities don't change throughout our life in very significant ways... we usually choose the same way.

Think about it. If you're an introvert you probably don't feel you could suddenly decide to become a very outgoing person. If you have a short-temper you probably don't feel like you could flick a switch and become very calm in all situations.

Yet we feel we have this thing called 'free will', which should ideally allow us to do what I've just described. If free will is true, then we should be able to change our personality if we feel like it, and choose to do anything physically possible for us. But even though we feel that we have this power, we hardly ever change/use it. The person who starts off liking certain choices will probably stay that way regarding most of them.

I think that the reason why we find it hard to change comes from sin.

How so?

Well to begin with, the greatest commandment is that you should 'love God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind'. This is basically saying that we should love and serve God with every fibre of our being.

Now, if you were doing this, it wouldn't detract from your freedom at all. Because God is good, and honours our free will, it would basically mean that you never sin. It wouldn't actually detract from your freedom in any other area, except you would not sin. Your personality would actually stay the same, except regarding the areas where your personality is morally flawed.

Now, if you followed this greatest commandment, you could really exercise your free will. You could always make the choices you know are the best. How? Well, by loving God with such a great love, you would only do what God wanted. So you could say to God 'Today I feel like making such-and-such choices', and God would say 'That's what I want for you then' and you would do it, because you would prioritise God's will with infinite importance.

That would enable someone to easily make whatever choices they wanted (apart from sinful ones) very easily; instantly.

Maybe this is the 'default' setting for the people that God creates in His image. In the 'default' setting we have free will and we use it. If anyone chooses a certain way, it's because that's how they genuinely want to be.

It's ONLY due to our fallen, sinful nature that we get 'locked into' certain choices. So it's ONLY because of our sin that we have the phenomenon where someone is addicted to something and can't break out, and so on. Or someone can't change in a way they want to change. That's not something that 'naturally' comes with free will, but can only come with free will + our fallen nature. That's why it sometimes seems as though people don't have free will even though we all do.

Podcast: How did God become a man?

Podcast summary:

How did God become a man? First we must look at the image of God. When it comes to being a person, having a mind and intentions, we're exactly like God. That implies there can be a kind of 'crossover' between finite and infinite. An analogy: you could say that our body and brain is on one side of a mirror, and our mind/person is on the other side in a subjective reality. For Jesus the man, the mind on the other side of the body/brain was God in God's reality.

Title: The incarnation
Time: 18:21 minutes
Size: 8.4 MB mp3

Direct link to the audio file (Right click and 'Save As')
Link to the audio file page

Further Reading:

Free will megapost

A collection of short essays (except the last one) in one post on various issues/problems to do with the idea of 'free will' in Christianity.

1. Summary of free will in a paragraph
2. Does God's foreknowledge contradict the idea of free will?
3. Why didn't God only make people who would follow Him?
4. Is God responsible for how everything has turned out?
5. How can God have free will if He can never be tempted to do evil?
6. Does the fact that we have original sin mean that humans are not responsible for our evil?
7. Wouldn't serving God take away our independence and free will?
8. Does the Bible say that humans don't have free will?

1. Summary of free will in a paragraph

What is free will? An answer I favour is that our intellectual reason isn't like what God has - ('My thoughts are not your thoughts' - Isaiah 55:8; Romans 11:34). But our soul, or something like that is like what God has (John 10:34). We get free will from the latter, but because the former isn't really like what God has it can never understand free will (from the latter) adequately. Something not like God is on the wrong 'level', or category of reality, to understand something that is like what God has. Moreover, to paraphrase Bertrand Russell, this means that we will always unconsciously translate anything to do with free will into non-free will language our intellect can understand.

2. Does God's foreknowledge contradict the idea of free will?

The 'God's foreknowledge contradicts free will, because we can't make God wrong' argument ONLY works if free will is something that exists within what you might call the 'three known causal categories'. The three known causal categories are: a) randomness, b) probability, and c) determinism. For a human the whole idea of a 'prediction' necessitates these categories. 0% certainty = randomness = no clue at all, 50% certainty = probability = it could go either way, 100% certainty = determinism = no chance of it not happening. We can never think outside of these known categories, or even imagine how any being possibly could... Determinism is the predicting category of the three, and that pretty much kills the idea of free will (for obvious reasons).

But free will doesn't necessarily have to exist within the 'three known causal categories'. Maybe it can exist in a completely different causal category, outside of cause/effect/probability/random 'space'. If so, then unfortunately we can never understand it (and it's very mystical). Yet it may not have to exist within those categories. If so, God could know something without forcing it to happen.

3. Why didn't God only make people who would follow Him?

I think if we understood it really well then we'd know that free will is *like* a random process in a couple of ways. Creating a person is kind of like flipping a coin that will come up 50/50 heads or tails. This is important because if a process is random then you can't make it go heads or tails. So God making a person is kind of like flipping the coin in the sense that God can't make someone on the basis of how they're going to choose, just like I can't make a random coin toss go the way I want. But unlike flipping the coin God *can* predict how we'll turn out - He just can't make only the people who will choose the way He wants.

So in some ways free will is *like* randomness, but it's not really random because randomness is a terrible thing in people. It's somehow a 'third option' out of cause and effect that mimics randomness in this aspect, but is overall a genuine, great thing to have.

In Matt 13:24-29 God says that there's some kind of ratio of people who'll choose the way He wants and people who won't. Salvation is kind of like a statistical generalisation of e.g. X:Y ratio that becomes meaningless on an individual level because individually everyone has the power to choose the way God wants. It's just that on a generalised statistical level God knows X:Y ratio will be saved. It's like individually most philosophy students can choose to study metaphysics but statistically only a certain proportion will. Individually every Internet user can visit Apple.com but statistically only a certain proportion will.

4. Is God responsible for how everything has turned out?

Question: isn't God responsible for how everything has turned out, by choosing to make things in the way that He did?

I think at some point, one has to make an intellectual leap and say that as beings with finite reasoning, our reasoning is on the 'wrong level' to understand the infinity of God effectively, which also includes the image-of-God in humans. This frees us from having to work out in-depth how something like free will could work, which might come from something Godlike (infinite) that human brains make use of (Ecc 3:11; John 10:34-36).

So I don't think that Christians can be expected to explain how a) God could predict something without narrowing everything down to only one possible outcome, and, b) how we could possess a 'thing' called free will where multiple outcomes were possible, although only one outcome in fact occurred (which is part of our intuitive grasp of the concept of free will).

This means that we can trust from our feeling that we have free will, that although God knew what would happen by creating the world, the fact that there is evil in the world is our responsibility.

5. How can God have free will if He can never be tempted to do evil?

To begin with, in Christian theology just like being physical is part of our concept of 'a stone,' so loving and rejoicing in doing the right thing is part of what it means to be a 'mind' or 'conscious.' Love and goodness is to consciousness what being physical, or existing in the universe, is to a rock. Mind/consciousness is a kind of substance or thing that follows different rules to physical stuff. One of these aspects of mind, different to rocks, is loving and being good. So mind is love.

Following this, there are two possible reasons why people are tempted by God is not.

The first is that because God is God, He's never tempted. Because we're not, we must be tempted. Never being tempted is a 'perfection' that only God can have.

A second possible reason is that our mind is localised in a brain, and the brain isn't sort of made out of love like our mind is. It's not bad or evil in any way, it's just not 'love', or has the connection to love, that 'mind' does. Our mind pulls us in the direction of loving others unconditionally. But since we use our brain to think, and the brain isn't love, we can step 'outside the box', as it were, and do anything.

The question is: why did God make us brain-Minds instead of 'Mind' by itself? Couldn't God have taken away the possibility of evil? The answer is that to be pure mind you basically have to be God, I think. So the above setup (which makes sin very likely) needs to be the case.

So for us, free will MUST INCLUDE the possibility of sin. But for God, genuine free will comes without the possibility of sin...

6. Does the fact that we have original sin mean that humans are not responsible for our evil?

Our intellectual reasoning and moral sense belong to different worlds. Our intellectual reason belongs to our brain in the universe, our moral sense belongs to the image of God... in whatever kind of reality that involves.

Our moral sense gives us our highest moral ideals, and tells us that we should never do wrong. But our intellectual reasoning can't understand how a person could have reasons for doing the right thing in every circumstance.

The closest that intellectual reasoning can come to morality is 'You should do the right thing out of rational self-interest' - game theory. 'You do a good thing for me and I'll do a good thing for you' - tit-for-tat morality (the flip-side of tit-for-tat is 'Hurt me and you're going to suffer horribly').

This is a bad thing in circumstances where the self-interested thing is the wrong thing morally.

If you combine this reasoning with free will, then what you get is everyone choosing to sin because our reasoning leads us to make choices in a certain 'rational' (i.e. game theoretic) way.

You don't need to appeal to evolution to explain why humans are basically selfish - you can appeal to humans having a form of intellectual reasoning that tempts us with game theory, tit-for-tat, self-interested, etc. reasons for acting.

So original sin is essentially the curse that we'll work out good and evil for ourselves, instead of copying what God thinks.

The fact that we think this way doesn't seem to take away our free will, or excuse our actions. If we want to do the right thing our moral sense makes it plain to us. If we want to reject original sin then God provides the answer in Jesus Christ. Original sin makes it impossible to do the right thing consistently, because it creates constant, tantalizing temptations to sin, but in each individual act we are free.

7. Wouldn't serving God take away our independence and free will?

Mat 4:8-10: "Again, the Evil One took him up to a very high mountain, and let him see all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them; And he said to him, All these things will I give you, if you will go down on your face and give me worship. Then said Jesus to him, Away, Satan: for it is in the Writings, Give worship to the Lord your God and be his servant only."

One way of thinking about serving God is that it's like the ultimate 'protection mechanism'. Let's say that you had two people in a really heated argument, it would be very difficult not to say hurtful things to the other person which would hurt your relationship with them down the road. But if they were both focused completely on serving God, then they wouldn't even think of doing hurtful things because they wouldn't be concerned with what they wanted at that particular time, but only what God wants at that time. And God always wants people to love others. So by only focusing on what God wants, that protects us from doing what we think is right (but isn't) at a particular time. Serving God with all our heart and mind ensures that we will always do God's will, which is a 'protective cover' for helping us always love others and God as we should.

On a similar note, it's in the nature of God that God cannot be tempted by evil. All other creatures must be tempted at some point. This makes God the perfect person to refer decisions to, assuming our communication with God was clear.

Another argument that we should serve God starts by assuming that what makes us people is that we have minds. And having a mind makes you worthy of love and respect. People should care for you because you have a mind and have feelings, can suffer etc. Well, this is a little tricky to really convey, but God is not a mind on the 'human' level. He's a 'super-mind' which somehow encompasses more 'mind' than humans have. A 'super-mind', as opposed to a human-style mind, can do more stuff. A 'super-mind' can understand free will, everything about minds, is all-powerful, eternal, and so on. So the argument says that if humans deserve love because we have minds, then a 'super-mind' deserves even more love and respect, which is what God is.

Also regarding some issues we clearly think that limits to freedom enhance freedom. So it's illegal to yell 'fire' in a crowded theater without cause. So if you assume that humans are made to be 'love' like God, then it would enhance freedom to serve God in such a way that humans are love (i.e. by serving God like Jesus did).

8. Does the Bible say that humans don't have free will?

Rom 9:17-23: "For the holy Writings say to Pharaoh, For this same purpose did I put you on high, so that I might make my power seen in you, and that there might be knowledge of my name through all the earth.
So then, at his pleasure he has mercy on a man, and at his pleasure he makes the heart hard.
But you will say to me, Why does he still make us responsible? who is able to go against his purpose?
But, O man, who are you, to make answer against God? May the thing which is made say to him who made it, Why did you make me so? Or has not the potter the right to make out of one part of his earth a vessel for honour, and out of another a vessel for shame?
What if God, desiring to let his wrath and his power be seen, for a long time put up with the vessels of wrath which were ready for destruction: And to make clear the wealth of his glory to vessels of mercy, which he had before made ready for glory"

Does this verse say that humans have no free will? This has been used to argue that the Bible itself contradicts the idea of free will, since God is alleged to determine what people choose (for His glory).

I think that if a) and b) are true below, then one can show in a way that fits with Romans 9:17-23 that God wants everyone to be saved, offers salvation to everyone (in the next life if they never hear about Jesus) and that through a miracle by God everyone can say 'Yes'.

a) In one of the paradoxes of free will, although God knows before we're born how everyone will freely choose in an infinity of possible situations, God can't use this knowledge to make only the people who will freely choose in the way that God wants.

So if God knows that out of a hundred people He makes that 33 will choose to reject grace and 67 will not reject it, God can't use this knowledge to make only the 67 people who will be saved.

More about this here.

b) Given (a), God must deliberately make people who He knows will be damned in order to make anyone who is saved at all.

E.g. if the ratio of people who reject God versus not reject is 33:67, then God has to knowingly make an individual who will make 'cursed' choices (Matt 25:41) in order to make two individuals who will be happy forever.

You could describe the cursed individuals as 'clay vessels ready for destruction'. But they do the cursing themselves. But God knew they would do so before He made them! So God bears some responsibility. But it was nonetheless good to make them because their creation was a necessary part of making the saved given the 33:67 ratio or whatever it is.

So in a tricky way, both human freedom and divine sovereignty overlap here, and Paul is describing the 'divine sovereignty' side of things, where God bears some responsibility. But was God wrong to do what He did? Creating 'vessels ready for destruction' was needed to make 'vessels of mercy', so no.

To be more exact, God's actions are morally OK from our point-of-view as long as they fit with two requirements:

1. The ratio of the damned to the saved isn't too worrisome. E.g. if 90% of people are going to hell then it seems unlikely that God should create people even if it's based on a fair process. I'm not sure what ratio is 'alright', but as long as there's more happiness than sadness in reality overall, then it seems OK for God to make 'cursed' people as long that is needed to make saved people.

2. It's the outcome of a fair process. In the idea of grace there's nothing stopping the unsaved from coming to God; God offers salvation to both the unsaved and the saved and no one gets an advantage over anyone else in accepting it (over this and the next life). Every damned individual could be saved at any point over an eternity if they simply changed their mind and didn't reject grace(!) So damnation is the outcome of a fair process - the saved are only treated differently to the damned because they don't reject God's grace ("there is no respect of persons with God" - Rom 2:11).

(Note: What I just said is a bit confusing given the concept of heaven and hell. I wrote an article on a good way of looking at hell here).

It's a mystery how a) and b) works. Libertarian free will doesn't make sense from the perspective of finite reasoning so it's not a huge step from the not-making-sense nature of free will to accepting that free will works in a way consistent with a) and b). You have to accept the idea that free will is a mystery and somehow fits with a) and b) for this argument to work.

If you read the Romans passage above in light of these arguments, then I believe that you can reasonably interpret them in a way where God wants everyone to be saved but people reject His offer of salvation. For those who reject, God uses them for a dishonourable purpose to help the saved come to Him forever. It's only because God knows they will reject Him - and are a clay vessel made for destruction in the understandable way I talked about above - that God hardens their heart to use them for a dishonourable purpose if that is somehow needed to bring people to Him (through creating adversity in ways that God knows will do that).

What does the soul actually do? A discussion

From a forum discussion...

...As a philosophy undergraduate at my university I find myself in the interesting position of being probably the only really traditional dualist (among philosophy students) that I know of. I think a lot of Christians are moving to a less expansive view of the soul.

A good way I think of distinguishing the soul and the brain can be found from analysing David Chalmers' 'hard problem of consciousness' (Wikipedia article).

Say you have a brain that is structured in a certain way, so that it does a lot of things. The makeup of the brain can completely explain why it does a lot of stuff. The question is, could you have a brain without the brain actually feeling something like our experience of subjective phenomena? Could you have a brain that does lots of stuff without anybody actually being 'in there'? It seems that there is a kind of gap between having a brain doing stuff and that brain having a subjective awareness (note: subjective, unobservable consciousness is also referred to as 'qualia').

I would place the soul as what provides the subjective awareness. It is the extra thing, the missing piece, that transforms a brain that does stuff into a brain that does stuff and has a subjective awareness. So the soul and brain work together - the soul is the extra thing making us conscious (animals also have souls but not understanding, I would say, lest I deny animals consciousness).

(Note for readers: what is Chalmer's argument?

1. We can theoretically imagine physical bodies and brains acting roughly like we do but which have no inner subjective experiences (i.e. are not conscious)
2. If we can imagine it, then it is theoretically possible.
3. If it is theoretically possible, then there is an explanatory gap that we have not figured out between our brains and consciousness, that we need to figure out in order to fully understand why our brains are conscious.
4. For various reasons, this link is not likely to come from further scientific discoveries in understanding the brain. It can only come through philosophical speculation.

The discussion continues...)

...I would agree with the comments here that from what we can know from philosophy it certainly makes sense that this apparent 'gap' between functional states (or identity theory) and qualia could just be a result of missing, important knowledge of some kind. The 'water doesn't seem to have to equal H20 if you don't know much science, but in reality it does' type of response is a pretty good response.

So I would definitely say that it could be called an 'explanatory gap' rather than a gap that destroys physicalism... nevertheless, it is *some* kind of explanatory gap. I'm attracted to turning this 'explanatory gap' into a place for a real, dualist soul for a few reasons (soul defined as originator of qualia).

I'm quite perplexed by the libertarian free will problem, or how to have a really great kind of free will. Ultimately, any way I've read of explaining libertarian free will has fallen flat.

So in this 'explanatory gap' (provided by arguments like Chalmers') I'm attracted to placing a soul as a kind of substance that is totally unlike anything we can ever rationally talk about. The soul I see as something that draws on God in some way without being God... so from a world our reason can never access. It's because we can never fully understand this world that we a) Have free will, but b) Can never explain it satisfactorily.

That would probably be the primary reason I'm attracted to dualism... not necessarily because I'm a Christian. These days it seems that a lot of Christians are moving to a physicalist account of the mind. That sounds OK, as long as God can preserve our unique personalities when we die.

(Comment on how getting brain damaged affects personality)

...It's quite interesting the degree to which our conscious states are affected by physical states for any dualist. I think that the most a dualist can realistically say (such as myself) would be that the soul-qualia is basically the 'cherry on the top' of the 'cake' of a person, the cake being the physical brain. So we're significantly a physical brain, and the soul-qualia adds a bit of qualia.

But I add a caveat to this analogy: since we consider a person to be their mind, the 'cherry on the top' is actually the person, and the cake allows the cherry to 'sit somewhere', and thus exist in that way.

I'm not an epiphenomenalist like Chalmers. So I think that the soul-qualia, even though it's just the 'cherry on the top' does some important stuff. I think it somehow has the ability to remake the brain, which allows free will, somehow. So our qualia can influence our brain. I would say that the phenomenon of neuroplasticity is our soul-qualia exercising its free will (neuroplasticity being a very interesting area of research into how we can change our personalities by changing our patterns of thinking).

(Link - click show transcript - to account of research on neuroplasticity. This is a real, scientific area of research saying that we have the freedom, with a huge amount of effort, to 'choose' to change our basic personality, and is empirical evidence of free will.)

Do humans get the image of God through Jesus?

Some speculation on Jesus being the image of God versus humans being in the image of God...

For Christ:

Colossians 1:15-16: "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him."

Colossians 2:9-10: "For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority."

John 5:26: "For even as the Father has life in himself, so he has given to the Son to have life in himself."

For humans:

Genesis 1:26: "Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness"

James 3:9: "With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in God's likeness."

John 1:4: "In him was life, and that life was the light of men."

John 1:9: "The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world."

The question is: how can humans be made in God's image, since God is infinite and humans are finite?

Another question is: what does it mean to speak of an infinite God? What does 'infinity' in that context mean?

One answer is to say that the infinite is essentially a person, and a unified whole.


(Click to enlarge)

Suppose that the only way that something can be a person is through being infinite. Infinity, and only infinity gives consciousness, love, morality and free will.


(Summary of this view, click to enlarge)

I think what these verses COULD mean is that God incarnated Himself into creation as Jesus, as someone that could have both infinite and finite aspects. The infinite part of Jesus was God, God's soul and therefore personality, and the finite aspect of Jesus was His physical body in the universe (although all finite things are also held together in Jesus - Col 1:17).

I think that the way God made finite creatures in His image is that through Jesus God somehow gives finite humans access to His infinite qualities like personhood etc. Jesus gives 'light' (or 'image-of-Godness') to finite creatures.

So humans take on the 'image of God' through Jesus, through whom every human has access to infinite qualities like personhood, consciousness/mind, love, morality, and free will.

Jesus is the 'door' through which humans are made in God's image.

This explains how we have free will, consciousness, a moral sense that holds us accountable before God's standards, even though we can never explain it. Since our reason is finite. But we're not Gods - Jesus is God and we get these things through our existence in Christ, which people who never come to God will one day lose.

Picture illustrating this site's theology

This picture summarises this site's theology in one go. Click on it to view it normal size.



God is infinity. Literally. See an essay arguing for this view here.

From infinity comes consciousness (speculated on here) and love through the same process.

Humans are the finite mixed with the infinite.

An essay here is on the implications for this when it comes to figuring out free will, consciousness, the nature of God, the problem of evil, and so on.

What does the Bible mean when it says 'our flesh wars against our soul'? Part 1

Romans 8:5-8 For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. (ESV)

1 Peter 2:11 Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.

Gal 5:17 For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do.

I guess the basic question I want to ask here is: why does our 'flesh' have to war against our 'soul'? Why can't God just arrange for us to have brains that help us always do the right thing?

I ask this because it's becoming common to say that people behave the way they do purely because of their genes. Accordingly, many people would probably criticise God for shooting Himself in the foot. Since evil is merely the result of our genes, God could avoid all sin and evil merely by giving us better genes. In fact, God could ensure that absolutely everyone in the whole world will be perfect by giving them more helpful genes... so this way of thinking goes.

The problem with this view is that it goes against the concept of 'free will'. Let me explain where the mistake is.

The Bible says that God made us in His image, but not everything about humans is made in God's image. Consider Isaiah 55:8: "My thoughts are not your thoughts" (also Romans 11:33-34). Our emotions, free will, moral sense, and consciousness is clearly made in God's image because God has those things just like we do. But our intellectual reason obviously isn't made in God's image, or we would know all that God knows.

We can either look at free will intuitively or intellectually. Intuitively it's 'case closed'. We know that we have free will. Intellectually it's 'case closed' that we don't have free will, because free will doesn't make sense on an intellectual level.

This is because the only thing that can understand something made in God's image is a thing made in God's image. Since our intellectual reason isn't made in God's image, it cannot grasp the things of God or the image-of-God (it can, however, grasp the things of the universe, since the universe isn't made in God's image).

That said, you can think of free will like this:

a) if humans have free will and God does NOT exist, then we simply don't understand it.
b) if humans have free will and God gave it to us because we're made in His image, then we can never understand it. Our reason would be on the wrong level since it's not made in God's image.

Bertrand Russell once said that 'a stupid man's report of what a clever man has said is never accurate because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand.' You could say something like that about humanity trying to understand free will.

If free will exists 'outside' of what our intellect can know then we will unconsciously translate our feeling that we have free will into terms that our intellect can understand, terms where there is no free will.

So to go back to the question: why doesn't God just create 'flesh' that is at peace with the 'soul'? To answer this, we first need to ask ourselves, do we really know what we're talking about?

I say this because if free will comes from the image-of-God in humans, then our different-to-God intellect could never understand it well.

So we can't say with much confidence that God could fix all sin and evil by merely giving us flesh that never wars against the soul/Spirit. That presumes that we have a good vantage point on the issue when we really don't.

More in part 2.

The incarnation

(A helpful picture for understanding the point-of-view of this article below, click to enlarge).



An interesting way of thinking about the incarnation (where God became a man - Jesus) might proceed along these lines:

First off, let's say that consciousness is kind of similar to our concept of 'infinity.' You can never have more than one actual infinity, e.g. infinity plus infinity equals infinity. Let's say that, like infinity, 'mind' is possessive. So you can never have more than one being who is completely made out of mind. The being who is completely made out of mind we call 'God.' So there can be only one God.

Because you can't have more than one person who is 'completely mind' (one God) all other minds must be 'half-minds.' Being a 'half-mind' means that your mind needs to be based off a physical brain. Humans are 'half-minds' because unlike God, our mind is dependent on and makes use of a physical brain.

Let's say that normally, when God makes a half-mind (like you or me), we immediately have our OWN personality the moment mind and brain meet. This personality is totally unique for each of us and different to God's personality.

The way the incarnation worked is that instead of creating another unique personality when He made Jesus' body (which God did for everyone else), God used HIS OWN mind in the body of Jesus. So Jesus did not have a separate 'mind' to the Father but Jesus had the Father's mind matched to His brain. So Jesus had the soul/personality of God Himself. Therefore the soul of Jesus was the soul of someone who had chosen to do the right thing for an eternity (God) in every possible situation. Thus Jesus found Himself always choosing to do the right thing - because His soul was a perfect soul. Accordingly, He was sinless even although He was tempted in all ways as we (Heb 4:15)! And of course this means that Jesus and the Father are one (John 10:30) as they are the same soul (even though Jesus has a physical body, unlike God who is 'completely mind').

So Jesus and the Father are one - Jesus' soul is the soul of God, although the Father has more 'mind' than just a soul. The Father is 'completely mind' as opposed to 'half-mind-half-brain' like you, me, and the incarnate Jesus (note: being completely mind makes God a trinity, allows Him to look at minds like we can look at a painting, among other things).

Is God responsible for how everything has turned out?

Question: isn't God responsible for how everything has turned out, by choosing to make things in the way that He did?

I think at some point, one has to make an intellectual leap and say that as beings with finite reasoning, our reasoning is on the 'wrong level' to understand the infinity of God effectively, which also includes the image-of-God in humans. This frees us from having to work out in-depth how something like free will could work, which might come from something Godlike (infinite) that human brains make use of (Ecc 3:11; John 10:34-36).

So I don't think that Christians can be expected to explain how a) God could predict something without narrowing everything down to only one possible outcome, and, b) how we could possess a 'thing' called free will where multiple outcomes were possible, although only one outcome in fact occurred (which is part of our intuitive grasp of the concept of free will).

This means that we can trust from our feeling that we have free will, that although God knew what would happen by creating the world, the fact that there is evil in the world is our responsibility.

Who are we? How are we made in the image of God?

Who are we, and in what sense are we made in the image of God?

Genesis 1:27 says that humans are made in the image of God, but what does that mean?

Is it our ability to reason, to know that 2 + 2 = 4 and other rational truths, that makes us in the image of God?

Maybe. But then again, computers can reason in a sense. With advanced enough technology, we could easily make thinking computers just as smart as we are. So either humans can design and build stuff in God's image, or being made in God's image is something more than this.

Let's look at the God who made us. There's an important distinction that people often forget about God, which is that He is infinite. Not infinitely good, or infinitely smart, but actually infinite. So we're made in the image of an infinite God.

This raises an interesting question: how can anything finite be made in the image of the infinite? You literally cannot imagine anything more different than a finite object and an infinite object. Humans in one sense have more in common with rocks than with God if we're finite, because at least rocks are finite. Yeah, but rocks can't think, you might say. But if thinking is just a matter of doing mental calculations, then actually we have more in common with computers than with God, because computers can 'think' in a sense and are also finite like we are. And advanced enough computers could think as intelligently as humans or be even more intelligent.

So there are a couple of problems with thinking that we have much in common with God if we're finite and God is infinite. Actually, it's relatively common to think that our finite language and knowledge are utterly inadequate to talk about the infinite hence = agnosticism.

Yet the apparent alternative of saying that humans are infinite like God makes no sense... it's even worse than saying that we're finite. If we were infinite then we could do an infinite number of calculations a second. Obviously, we can't. Being infinite would also make us equal to God, which is not the Christian view. Does this mean that we have to see humans as being *finitely* made in God's image, despite the problems?

But could there be a third option? What if you said that humans are partly infinite and partly finite? That way you could have the best of both worlds. If you said that human reasoning, knowledge and bodies are finite then you could make sense of our limited knowledge, power and understanding. And by saying that we're partly infinite you could show how we're made in the image of an infinite God without making humans in any way equal to God.

But why are we partly infinite rather than completely infinite? It's easy enough to suggest a reason: God *is* the infinite, all that is infinite is God, and there can be only one infinite ("Hear O Israel: the Lord is our God, and the Lord is one" - Deu 6:4). So we can use (or 'borrow') some of the infinite, but not all of it, as then we'd be God.

We're made in the image of God, and that means that we're like God in some way. What is God like? He feels things: happiness, love, hurt, joy, anger and so on. We're like that as well. Where do we get it from? I'd say from our infinite part. God has free will, so we get free will from there as well. And moral knowledge in the same way. Our infinite part could be called our (infinite) 'soul'.

But because we can't be fully infinite, we have to be made out of parts that are not infinite, and that means finite parts. Finite parts are infinitely less than God. So the rest of us, whatever isn't our soul, has to be made out of finite stuff, and that stuff is our physical body in this universe (a 'spirit' as distinct from a 'soul' - Heb 4:12 - is a finite 'nonphysical body'.) Through God's power, the infinite can have some kind of contact with the finite (but the finite cannot of its own power interact with the infinite).

God had to give all His children finite reasoning and understanding because every child of God had to be made partly finite. There's something about having infinite reasoning that is one and the same with being fully infinite, and only God can be fully infinite, see for instance Matt 24:36 "But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only". Also see Ecclesiastes 3:11 "God has set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end". I.e. our soul is infinite, but our reasoning is finite, because only God can be fully infinite.

There's a question of how we can have our own personality if we're actually borrowing our soul from God. I would speculate that as long as not all of infinity is used (i.e. all of God), then God can reuse infinity as many times as He wants to make many creatures. And that through our finite body and infinite soul interacting we take on our own personality different to God's.

But is there any need for a soul? Can't the brain account for why people act the way they do?

Well, just because we see our brain working when we make decisions doesn't mean that the brain is all that a human is. God needs to connect the finite to the infinite to make creatures, because creatures cannot be all-infinite. We must get our reasoning from something in the finite world, so why not use the brain as the source of finite reasoning and knowledge in humans? So clearly God has to give the brain a lot to do, since it is responsible for our reasoning, knowledge, and carrying out the free choices that we make through our soul. When we look at the brain doing lots of things, we're really looking at the brain doing its required tasks as the finite aspect of humanity, whereas we cannot look at the soul, as that's actually infinite (and yet infinity is all around us as shown by Zeno's paradox).

Wait a second, if we get the stuff that makes us like God from the infinite soul, then that means we get feeling from the soul. But don't we get feeling from the brain?

Not in the way that we might think. God wanted to put something in our brains that would allow us to react quickly and easily when something happened in the physical world. So when a person reacts to pain, God wanted there to be something in the brain that would allow a quick response to pain. God wants our bodies to have automatic responses, to deal quickly and easily with situations that come up. And that requires circuitry in the brain that deals with emotions and feelings more generally. But I don't think that the circuitry in the brain actually does feel anything, I think it's just like the circuitry in a computer, only organic and a lot more complicated. It only helps our bodies react/act when we make choices in the infinite world. The circuitry itself feels nothing, any more than a box or a couch feels anything.

God has also given infinite souls to animals and other living things so that they can feel things. We can know this because our moral intuitions tell us that animals need to be protected, that come from God. They are given much less understanding of the things of God, however (Job 39:13-17).