Envy

How does envy 'work'? Where does the emotion come from?

Proverbs 27:4: Anger is cruel and fury overwhelming, but who can stand before jealousy?

James 3:14-16: But if you are bitterly jealous and there is selfish ambition in your heart, don't cover up the truth with boasting and lying. For jealousy and selfishness are not God's kind of wisdom. Such things are earthly, unspiritual, and demonic. For wherever there is jealousy and selfish ambition, there you will find disorder and evil of every kind.

1 Corinthians 13:4: Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.

Envy is a somewhat unusual emotion in that it has no 'good' aspect at all. For instance, when Aristotle was forming his 'doctrine of the mean', he tried to find a 'good' aspect to every emotion (as part of his system where virtue is between two opposite extremes). E.g. anger is good when it protects the vulnerable. Fear is good when it stops us from being complete idiots. Being trusting is good unless we are too trusting and someone takes advantage, and so on. But he could find no 'good' aspect to envy.

To find out what envy is about we need to look at what condition(s) needs to be fulfilled for anyone to experience envy. That is, what is something that needs to happen before you can experience envy?

There may be several answers, but one answer is not being content.

For example, can you think of any situation where someone is really content about XYZ and also feels a lot of envy about XYZ? For example, suppose that someone was really content about how much money they had and frankly did not care about having more money, because it doesn't matter to them at all - they have enough. Can that person feel envious towards someone for having more money than them, given their contentment about money?

Lack of contentment seems to be a basic condition for envy.

OK, so what do envious people do? They make life difficult for the person who they envy if they can.

Now, why is it that a lack of contentment would 'spill over' into basically having something against other people? How does A. Lack of contentment in any way cause B. Having something against other people?

The answer could be that acting enviously gives the envious person a practical benefit...

But it doesn't seem that envy is a 'strategy' to get what the other person has. For example, if you envy someone who has a lot more money than you, then you probably don't think you'll be able to get some of their money by making life hard for them.

In almost all cases of envy, someone's envy will not allow someone to get, practically speaking, what they are envious about. It will also not make society more equal because one envious person will not make society more equal on their own (however, if everyone was envious, then maybe society would be more equal, but it would be a rather unhappy, nasty sort of equality).

Actually, I can't figure out what selfish strategy envy is part of. Even if someone is a complete psycho, cares only about themselves, and has no good emotions at all, I simply don't know what selfish benefit they can get from envy, and I haven't even talked about how unhappy it makes the person that envies.

But I find it hard to believe that there isn't some kind of selfish benefit to envy, even one that is almost never realised. Otherwise envy is a very peculiar kind of selfish act - a selfish act that does not benefit the selfish person.

A second possibility is that envy is not a strategy but an automatic process. Envy could simply be a result of the brain accepting two or three facts: 1. I am not content about XYZ and 2. Someone has XYZ and probably 3. I will let myself feel envy. In this view, envy is like thinking that Pluto is no longer a planet after you hear the news, just an automatic reaction that can happen if you are not content and see people with what you desire.

Anyway, we can map the process of envy something like this:

I am not content about something => a selfish strategy or an automatic process => I feel envy and feel like I am 'against' the person who has whatever it is I'm not content about.

This may be one reason why the Bible teaches people to be content. In other words, the Bible doesn't teach us to be content to make us docile and passive, but because a lack of contentment causes people to experience envy and makes it harder for us to love other people.

Hebrews 13:5: Don't love money; be satisfied with what you have. For God has said, "I will never fail you. I will never abandon you."

1 Timothy 6:6-8: Yet true godliness with contentment is itself great wealth. After all, we brought nothing with us when we came into the world, and we can't take anything with us when we leave it. So if we have enough food and clothing, let us be content.

Broken free will

We like to think that we have free will and can decide our own values and to act on those values. But let's say someone's free will wasn't working properly. There are probably a number of ways this could manifest, but what would be the main problem that you'd see if it did happen?

Let's say that I have a certain principle that in certain circumstances people should do XYZ, including me. And that's not a principle I reluctantly accept, but one that I want other people to follow and for me to follow.

A free will that doesn't work properly would be a free will where I'm unable to act consistently on the principles that I hold near and dear. That sort of free will would be like a car that occasionally breaks down for no reason, or a computer that crashes every now and then for no reason. Because a free will like that is a free will where someone is effectively unable sometimes to choose what they have chosen.

Using that standard it seems that possibly everyone has a free will that is broken in some ways, because we all seem to affirm principles that we hold near and dear, and yet no one, unless those principles are very prosaic, can consistently act on those principles 100% of the time. So our free will, if we have it, is broken in some way. It doesn't work the way you'd expect it to work in theory, and perhaps the way it was intended to work.

These thoughts were prompted by a reflection on John 8:34-6: "Jesus answered them, 'Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son does remain forever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.'"

And Romans 7:15: "I don't really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don't do it. Instead, I do what I hate. But if I know that what I am doing is wrong, this shows that I agree that the law is good. So I am not the one doing wrong; it is sin living in me that does it."

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).

Two kinds of forgiveness

The Bible describes two kinds of forgiveness, one of which is a lot more 'powerful' than the other.

The first kind of forgiveness works like this: imagine a thief who keeps stealing someone's stuff - let's say John's stuff. John is so nice that whenever the thief steals from him, he forgives the thief. But the thief never changes his behaviour. John can forgive the thief all he wants, but it doesn't deal with the thief's wrongdoing. Forgiving the thief doesn't make the thief a better person.

John's kind of forgiveness doesn't do much. John's forgiveness won't make the thief stop stealing, it will only prevent John from taking revenge or seeking justice.

If God's forgiveness is like John's forgiveness then God's forgiveness won't accomplish that much. It will do something, but it won't really deal with humanity's issues.

The second kind of forgiveness is more powerful because it changes the person who gets forgiven.

The second kind would work like this: imagine that John accepted the thief's apology and somehow took away from the thief whatever it was that made the thief ignore the badness of stealing. So the thief didn't steal again (unless there was some exception that made it OK).

The Christian view is that to solve humanity's problems, God needed the second kind of forgiveness. Otherwise people would keep doing the wrong thing and apologising for it in a never-ending cycle of wrongdoing and forgiveness.

Col 2:13: "You were dead because of your sins and because your sinful nature was not yet cut away. Then God made you alive with Christ, for he forgave all our sins."

The Bible says that for God to use the second kind of forgiveness Jesus had to die on the cross for us (Matt 26:39). God made it so that "our old sinful selves were crucified with Christ" (Rom 6:6), and "It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me" (Gal 2:20). Some kind of 'goodness transfer' happened.

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.

Did Paul say that the body is evil? The idea of 'the flesh'

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.

Based on verses such as these (and there are a lot) some people have thought that Paul is saying that the body is evil. How could the body not be evil if 'the flesh' causes us to do evil? It sounds like all of our problems will go away once we get a spiritual body that doesn't have the setbacks of our physical bodies. But that makes you wonder why God didn't start humans off in spiritual bodies, and saying that the body is evil seems to go against common sense.

I think Paul is being a lot more abstract than this, and that 'the flesh' is another word for 'game theoretic reasoning'.

Game theory is a branch of mathematics that deals with what the most self-interested option is; what happens when people act purely from self-interest. It just so happens that our reason, the reason of our brain, finds it very easy to understand game theoretic principles (even if most people never hear about game theory). The same reasoning ability that helps us understand 2 + 2 = 4 will also, it seems, be able to understand game theory if it is clever enough.

Because our brain understands game theory so well, we get constant temptations to act from motives of self-interest without properly regarding what the moral point-of-view is. As long as we have a brain, this situation will be the case. Being able to reason means being able to understand game theoretic principles, even if we don't call it such.

I don't think Paul is saying that there's anything evil about the brain or our bodies. He's speaking of something more general and abstract. Any brain, whether physical or spiritual, needs to be able to understand self-interest if it is able to reason. That means any brain, whether physical or spiritual, is probably tempted all the time. So 'the flesh' really refers to the way our reason finds it so easy to think in terms of game theoretic considerations. It's not saying that the body is evil, it's a more general comment on reason that is the case for any conceivable brain.

Does this mean that reason is evil? No, for three reasons. First of all, if people had no reason then they could not exist. To be made in God's image we need to be able to think. Secondly, we share reason with calculators and computers, and they aren't evil. Because calculators and computers don't have free will, they can't be evil, and thus evil is 'owned' by persons who choose wrongly and not reason. Thirdly, the vast majority of the time we use reason for good or neutral purposes, like working out how to help someone, or what to buy. So reason is actually more like a good thing (like a car) which can be used for evil (like driving recklessly) - we wouldn't say that cars are evil because they can be used for evil.

One interpretation of original sin and the Fall

One interpretation of Original Sin and the Fall that I like is that there are two kinds of free will that you can have. In the first kind of free will (which we have) you can be a good or bad person in every choice. In the second kind, God protects you so that you will make every choice for good, but you can choose to 'opt out' of this system and have the first kind of free will, where it can be a struggle to be good in every choice.

In the first kind, God lets you know good and evil for yourself, in the second kind, God gives you His perspective on good and evil, ensuring your perfect goodness (Gen 3:1-5).

So Adam and Eve had a kind of free will where they were guaranteed to be perfect, so long as they didn't choose to work out good and evil for themselves. But God left them the freedom to work out good and evil from their own perspective, and they chose to 'opt out' of His protection. That destroyed their relationship with God, because without looking at things from God's perspective it is impossible not to sin if you have the ability to think in terms of selfish interest (Rom 7:18-24).

But why not just redo the whole thing with a different Adam and Eve? And how come we don't get to be in the Garden and decide this for ourselves (isn't that unfair)?

I think that without experiencing sin and evil, eventually *everyone* chooses to 'opt out' of God's protection, because we just don't know well enough why we should let God protect our choices. So we all share in Adam's sin indirectly, in the sense that we are all born with personalities that would have Fallen if we had started off in the Garden (but after our life, we have learned not to want or do that).

Christ's atonement lets us go back to a state where we see people in the way that God does, which puts perfection within the reach of anybody without regard to their former works, achievements, personality and character traits.

Check out Romans 11:32: "For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all". Maybe we could have started off in the Garden like Adam and Eve, but God skipped this so He could set history up in a way that could save the elect (in my interpretation, anyone who God knew would not resist what Christ had done for them on the cross).

Link to some more speculation on original sin and the fall...

God cannot do evil. Does this raise problems?

The Bible says that God cannot do wrong:

James 1:13 "When tempted, no one should say, "God is tempting me." For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone"

Titus 1:2 "in hope of eternal life which God, who cannot lie, promised before time began"

Does this raise problems?

Some argue this means that God doesn't have free will. If God cannot do wrong, then how is God free to do wrong?

One response to this argument is that there are actually two kinds of 'cannot':

Cannot 1
Cannot 2

For example:

"I cannot throw this rock into space from my backyard." Cannot 1.

"So you think I should make money by robbing banks? I could never do something like that!" Cannot 2.

I would say that 'cannot 1' applies to physical impossibility. 'Cannot 2' applies to the inability to be tempted by something.

'Cannot 1' applies to physical objects. I cannot throw a rock into space because my body is physically unable to do so.

'Cannot 2' applies to persons, and deals with an inability to find reasons for doing something. Without a reason for doing something, I can't do it. For me to rob banks, I would need to have a reason to rob banks. But robbing banks is evil. As long as I remember that robbing banks is evil, then it's impossible for me to find a reason to rob banks. So I literally cannot rob banks as long as I remember that it's evil.

'Cannot 1', when applied to persons, takes away free will. If someone is put in prison, then they cannot ('cannot 1') go outside. They are not 'free' to go outside.

This is OK when it comes to God. Because 'cannot 1' doesn't apply to God, 'cannot 2' does. Christians think that God, being all-powerful, is physically able to do evil. The issue with God is that God cannot be tempted to do evil.

So the question is: does 'cannot 2' take away free will?

I don't think so. Consider this: as long as someone remembers that it's evil to murder someone, then they cannot be tempted to murder someone. No one could be tempted to murder someone while they were thinking that it's an evil thing to do. Think about it. It's impossible. And yet would anyone say that this being the case takes away free will?

Of course not. Someone doesn't lose their free will because they can't be tempted to murder someone while they remember that it's an evil thing to do.

So 'cannot 2' seems fine for free will, at least in some situations (described above).

And so it seems that God's free will is fine. It doesn't seem to hurt God's free will that He cannot do evil as long as the 'cannot' is 'cannot 2' (note: this analysis might only work with regard to evil).

So why doesn't God make 'cannot 2' apply to humans as well as to Himself?

The reason why God can't do this is that creatures must be able to think in terms of self-interest. This is because finite creatures need something to think with, for finite creatures this means finite reasoning, and the nature of finite reasoning is such that it always thinks in terms of self-interest (e.g. game theory). God can protect us from this 'dark side' to being a creature (as in the Garden of Eden) but the allure to think in terms of self-interest is always going to be there.

So for humans (especially after a 'Fall' like in the Garden of Eden) free will requires the ability to be tempted by evil, because of our self-interested mode of reasoning. But this isn't the case for God, who has a mode of reasoning (not finite) such that He doesn't think in terms of self-interest. We can't even imagine what this is like (Isaiah 55:8).

What's going on with the whole 'original sin' thing?

This is very speculative but I think it hangs together as a good explanation of the whole 'original sin' thing and the difference between humans, angels, and fallen angels. The Bible doesn't talk about the argument in this essay, but speculation can sometimes be helpful.

Let's say that God made billions and billions of souls, but didn't put them into bodies just yet. Let's also imagine that God couldn't make just the souls that would choose the way God wanted (as part of the mysterious nature of 'free will'). Yet, even though God couldn't make or not make souls on the basis of their choices, God had the power to predict how every soul would choose in an infinity of possible situations. Before putting them into bodies, suppose that God searched out how every soul would choose in an infinity of possible situations, to be better informed about what sort of bodies to put each soul into. There is also "no respect of persons with God" (absolute equality between all souls) - Acts 10:34; Rom 2:11.

Suppose that everyone has the option of looking at good and evil from God's perspective, or from their own. Imagine that without God's protection, everyone faces constant temptations to sin, as only God is certainly good ("on the day that you eat thereof you shall surely die" - Genesis.)

The 'tree of knowledge' symbolises a person rejecting God's way of looking at good and evil, in favour of looking at good and evil in a way determined by oneself. The fruit was not literal, it was the option to reject God's protection of our choices - God's way of looking at people and moral choices.

Suppose that there were some souls who would never have eaten of the tree of knowledge if God told them not to. In other words, it is possible to be in the Garden forever and never give in to the temptation.

These souls could be the souls of good angels. In other words, God put the souls of those who would have eternally rejected Adam and Eve's temptation into the bodies of good angels. These souls serve God faithfully forever and never experience a 'Fall' because with God's help they can be made 'strong' enough to eternally reject the temptation of Adam and Eve.

The souls that God couldn't make 'strong' or 'faithful' enough to avoid the temptation of Adam and Eve forever were put into human bodies. There's something about us (them) that means we are drawn to reject God's protection of our free will, and not even God can teach us not to do that without a 'Fall' happening. Because every one of us would have eaten of the tree if we had personally been there, Adam's 'curse' was placed on all of us even though only a few of us were actually in 'the Garden'.

OK, that deals with good angels and humans, but where do fallen angels come from?

Let's modify this a bit, and say that after deciding to work out good and evil for oneself (which is what the 'tree' symbolises) some souls decide to become completely evil, and some souls hold on to a sense of goodness.

The souls that would have decided to hold on to a sense of goodness after eating of the tree were put into human bodies and put into history at various times.

God can still win those souls back to Him by convicting us of our failure to live up to our own and God's standards, through the Holy Spirit (Luke 19:10: "For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.")

The souls that (after 'eating of the tree') would have decided to become completely evil were allocated into the bodies of the fallen angels. They 'started off' in heaven with the good angels, and were given every opportunity to be like the good angels. But God knew that they would reject His protection of their choices and that's exactly what they did. When these souls rejected God's protection of their choices (in their own 'Fall') in heaven, they became completely evil and became the 'fallen angels' of the Bible. These souls didn't hold to a sense of goodness like the souls that God made into humans.

Because these souls rejected all goodness (after 'eating of the tree') they were never put on earth to hear the gospel because they have eternally rejected all goodness. There could be nothing for God to appeal to, in order to win them back to Him.

God decided to use these fallen angels for a good purpose. Through manipulating necessary suffering and sin, these angels give many the desire to be like the prodigal son and go back to God, and make Christians develop into being more like Christ through special kinds of adversity.

So this quite neatly explains why the whole 'tree of knowledge' and 'original sin' set-up had to be the way it is:

1. God made a lot of souls but didn't put them into bodies just yet.
2. God knew that some souls would not choose to eat of the tree, some souls would and would still have goodness left in them, and some souls would and would become completely evil.
3. Based on how God knows they will choose, God allocates everyone into bodies, respectively, the good angels, humans, and the fallen angels.
4. We were put on earth to hear the gospel, unlike the fallen angels, because we chose to hold to some goodness, and thus God can appeal to us to 'return' (in a sense) to a state where we act according to the image of God (shown by Christ and the good angels), through the cross of Christ.

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 determines the degree of 'sinfulness' the human race gets from original sin?

Continued from here.

Suppose that there is something called 'original sin' that biases humanity's choices towards evil. Why does it bias the human race to the specific amount of evil that we do? Why isn't the human race much nicer, with fewer awful events, or much worse, with more evil? What determines our sinfulness as a group affected by original sin?

The 'weight' of original sin is basically the push on the human will to make decisions in terms of game theory, and rational self-interest, rather than blindly doing the right thing.

So for example, in the prisoners dilemma, the rational thing to do is to act wrongfully (edit: meant to illustrate a principle; it's a good thing for those who commit crimes to get arrested).

From Wikipedia:

"Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies (defects from the other) for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent (cooperates with the other), the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act?

...In this game, as in all game theory, the only concern of each individual player (prisoner) is maximizing his/her own payoff, without any concern for the other player's payoff. The unique equilibrium for this game is a Pareto-suboptimal solution, that is, rational choice leads the two players to both play defect, even though each player's individual reward would be greater if they both played cooperatively... Since in any situation playing defect is more beneficial than cooperating, all rational players will play defect, all things being equal."

Similarly, in the tragedy of the commons the rational thing to do is to act wrongfully. This has been proved mathematically. That is the self-interested thing.

The tragedy of the commons:

"As a means of illustrating these, [Garrett Hardin] introduces a hypothetical example of a pasture shared by local herders. The herders are assumed to wish to maximize their yield, and so will increase their herd size whenever possible. The utility of each additional animal has both a positive and negative component:

* Positive: the herder receives all of the proceeds from each additional animal.
* Negative: the pasture is slightly degraded by each additional animal.

Crucially, the division of these costs and benefits is unequal: the individual herder gains all of the advantage, but the disadvantage is shared among all herders using the pasture. Consequently, for an individual herder the rational course of action is to continue to add additional animals to his or her herd. However, since all herders reach the same rational conclusion, overgrazing and degradation of the pasture is its long-term fate. Nonetheless, the rational response for an individual remains the same at every stage, since the gain is always greater to each herder than the individual share of the distributed cost.

Because this sequence of events follows predictably from the behaviour of the individuals concerned, Hardin describes it as a "tragedy"."

So in sum, original sin 'weights' our choices in the sense that it makes game theory and rational self-interest very important in how we decide things. Original sin is the 'curse' (some would say blessing) to evaluate moral decisions based on game theoretic considerations, instead of 'blindly' doing the right thing.

Why people are bad (it's not because of evolution); why original sin is so intractable

Humans are like someone standing with one foot in the sea and one foot on land. The foot in the sea is our physical body and brain, the foot on land is our 'mind' in the 'world of conscious awareness'.

A brain is distinct from a mind. Although the mind is based off the brain, the mind is not the brain. The mind arises out of the brain, and has many distinct properties (e.g. qualia) not possessed by the brain.

What do the brain and mind each contribute to making us who we are?

Brain/body:

Every act of intellectual reasoning
All knowledge (except knowledge given through the Spirit - 1 Cor 2:13-14)
Something to express free choices with

Mind:

Consciousness / Mind / Qualia
Love / A moral sense
Free will

So we don't work out the answer to any problem in the world of mind. Every act of intellectual reasoning comes from the brain.

This helps to explain why humans are bad (it's not because of evolution) and why original sin is impossible to overcome even though we have genuine free will.

Our intellectual reasoning and moral sense belong to different worlds. Our intellectual reasoning belongs to our brain in the universe, and is shared by such things as computers and calculators. Our moral sense belongs to the image of God, which is not the same thing as the brain, in whatever kind of thing/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 only way to circumvent original sin would be to act 100% on faith, to not even think about one's choices but just do the right thing all the time. That's the only way that someone could act on their moral sense in every possible situation. That's impossible for humans, like walking purely by faith.

That's why original sin is so devastating to morality: no one is going to act on their moral ideals all the time because there is no way that our intellectual reason can understand why we should ever do that. It's not because of evolution, but because God had to make us with a form of intellectual reasoning that makes selfishness make sense from a rational point-of-view.

I'm not saying that intellectual reasoning is bad, by the way. Like everything that God has made, it's good. We need intellectual reasoning to do stuff. But it has bad side-effects when it tempts us to do evil. And we couldn't have God's form of intellectual reasoning which doesn't have this side-effect.

Here's an overview of this:

Human sinfulness = free will + self-interest appealing to our rational faculty (think of game theory, tit-for-tat, reciprocal altruism, and the like...)

Original sin = free will + self-interest appealing to our rational faculty + God not protecting us from thinking in terms of rational self-interest.

God cannot be tempted by evil = free will + a moral sense + a second level added to the moral sense that is intellectual, not intuitive. This 'rational' moral sense is how God thinks intellectually, and always honours moral intuitions. Only God gets to have this.

Continued here.

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.

Original sin and God's terrible compromise

Introduction: God's terrible compromise

In a nutshell, where does our moral badness and suffering come from?

It's a result of what you might call the 'great compromise' (or terrible compromise) that God had to make to create beings that were something like Him.

Think about this: can God make another God? Can God make another being fully equal to Himself?

The answer seems to be no. God cannot make another God.

Why?

Because whatever God is, it's a 'possessive' kind of thing. Only God gets to be God, in other words. No one else can be God.

So right away, we know that to make beings in His image, God will need to make some kind of compromise. God will never be able to make beings with all the great things that He has. Other beings can never be all of what God is.

So God cannot make another God. But can He make a 'half-god', as it were? Can God make something like Himself, without making another full God?

The answer would seem to be yes. God is a possessive kind of thing that doesn't allow for another God (that's the idea behind monotheism). But He should be able to make 'half-gods', things sharing in Godness to some degree.

That's what we basically are: half-gods. We share in the 'possessive' kind of thing that God is, without being another 'full' God.

The terrible compromise that God had to make, is that the stuff making us 'half-gods' rather than a 'full' God is totally alien, totally different to God. Otherwise there'd be stuff lying around the place that is as great as God that isn't God or connected to God. So God had to make humans using stuff that has literally nothing in common with Him, because we're 'half-gods'. And that leads to problems.

Which parts of us come from God - are 'Godlike' - and which parts of us are different to God - 'less-than-God'?

We can tell what parts of humans are 'Godlike' and which parts are 'less-than-God' by comparing ourselves with the idea of a perfect, personal God.

Our reasoning and knowledge is 'less-than-God', clearly, because we don't know everything that God knows.

Our body is 'less-than-God' because we're not everywhere like God is.

Our moral sense, free will and consciousness are 'Godlike', exactly like what God has, because we are held to God's moral standard, we have free will like God, and we are self-aware like God.

Our love and other emotions are 'Godlike' because God is loving (and feels other emotions).

So our reasoning, knowledge and body have to be made out of something totally alien to God, in keeping with the idea that we're 'half-gods'. But not our moral sense, free will, consciousness, love and other emotions, that come from God (and are 'Godlike').

If the former things are in the 'less-than-God' category, and the latter things in the 'Godlike' category, then does this present any problems?

This view predicts that reason should have a quirky and uncomfortable relationship with morality, free will, consciousness, and emotions, because our reason is from the 'less-than-God' category while those other things are from the 'Godlike' category.

That's true indeed. Reason views emotion as irrational; it views free will and consciousness as a mystery; and it can just barely work out a moral system through reason by appealing to self-interest. But as self-interest is a product of irrational emotion (self-love) then even there, reason doesn't have anything to say about morality by itself.

Specifically, one of the side-effects of 'less-than-God' reason is that our reason doesn't support what our moral sense says. Our 'Godlike' moral sense says that we should always do the right thing, but our 'less-than-God' reason, in the specific way shown above, has no relationship with morality.

So our mind is pulled in different directions. On the one hand, our 'Godlike' moral sense pulls us in the direction of always doing the right thing, and our 'less-than-God' reason pulls us into passivity or to ignore our moral sense. The arbiter of which side wins out is our free will, which is in the 'Godlike' category.

But we won't pick the 'moral' side over millions of contests. So we fail (sin) frequently.

'Sin' is essentially committing a category mistake. It's treating humans as an object when we should be treating others as 'half-gods'. It's putting humans in the wrong category: 'less-than-God' rather than 'half-god'.

Our moral sense tells us what the appropriate conduct towards 'half-gods' is. The problem is that any part of our thinking that comes from the 'less-than-God' will tend to pull us away from the 'Godlike', because it's totally alien to the 'Godlike'.

It's because of sin that the 'Godlike' parts of humans have to be pushed away from God. Sin essentially corrupts the stuff we get from God, and that means that the stuff we get from God (the soul) can't be closely connected to God, which causes suffering.

So in this analysis, all of our moral failings and suffering is the result of a great and terrible compromise that God had to make to create beings in His image. Because we cannot be full Gods we must be half-gods. All of our sin is made possible by the 'less-than-God' aspect of us, which exerts a constant force to make us trip up, and not follow the moral standard of the 'God' part of us. This unfortunately prevents us from having true happiness, because our 'corrupted' God part must then be disconnected from God.

What does this have to do with original sin?

We have to be 'half-gods' - that cannot be different. But God can protect us from the 'gravity-like' pull towards making a category mistake that comes from our 'less-than-God' aspect. That's the idea behind the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve.

The idea of the Garden of Eden is a state where God protects humans from our 'less-than-God' bits by helping us only think good thoughts. That's how Adam and Eve can live with God near the 'tree of life' and not feel ashamed which arguably wasn't necessary for them to feel (shame symbolises awareness of other people's condemnation, and therefore a loss of complete innocence).

Because God didn't want to mentally enslave us, He allowed us to 'opt-out' of this system at any time, and this is what the Fall symbolises. In the Fall, humans chose to 'opt-out' of receiving God's help, which protected us from the 'less-than-God' in humans. That is, Adam and Eve symbolically exercised their free will to make it through life without help; to make choices without God's protection.

That's why Genesis says 'On the day that you, Adam, eat of this tree you shall surely die' (referring to spiritual death, which is disconnection from God). What God is referring to is that there's no way that 'half-gods' cannot sin without God protecting our thoughts, because the 'less-than-God' exerts an extremely strong force on us to get us to make 'less-than-God' choices. Without God's protection, some degree of sin is inevitable.

So on this interpretation, the tree of knowledge of good and evil didn't make us morally responsible, because Adam and Eve already were morally responsible and, up until they fell, were morally faultless. The knowledge of good and evil they received was knowledge of good and evil of their own selves rather than knowledge of good and evil controlled, moderated and mediated by God. Independent rather than dependent knowledge of good and evil (which meant that they would surely make moral mistakes, and get disconnected from God).

So if people had a 'Fall' then why didn't God just reset everything after the Fall happened?

I think the reason is that without experiencing a Fall, and knowing what God is protecting us from, everyone chooses to Fall. That's why it wouldn't have accomplished anything for God to make another Adam, because eventually, everyone chooses to Fall. So God ended up persevering with a world where people start off Fallen.

And God didn't reset Adam to a non-Fallen state because He wanted to honour Adam's choice to have God not protect Adam's thoughts.

We all share in Adam's sin in the sense that a) God foreknows that everyone would choose to Fall if *we* had been in the Garden and not Adam, and b) God honours that hypothetical choice by letting us experiencing morally wrong thoughts (lacking God's protection) to begin with.

That's the sense in which we all share in Adam's sin. Not in a direct way, but in a roundabout, indirect way.

Having a 'Fall' and losing God's protection for our moral choices isn't a completely bad thing, because afterwards people can find themselves in a non-Fallen state on much more solid ground. Why? Because experiencing sin and making a strong decision to go to a non-Fallen state puts your decision to have God protect your thoughts above any possible temptation to Fall. After experiencing sin and evil for ourselves, we know how bad it is for God not to protect humans' thoughts. That's why the people who choose to go back to a non-Fallen state, after experiencing suffering and sin, will last in a non-Fallen state forever.

In Christ, God will once again protect us from making category mistakes (sins) through grace, by the Holy Spirit working within people.

The period after original sin, and the period before the Kingdom of God, is an interregnum period. In this middle period God doesn't do anything to protect us from being pulled into sin by the 'less-than-God' in us. We need to choose to have this protective cover reinstated before it is restored, because it's very important to God that we freely choose to have it (for the sake of preserving freedom).

[Added] What about angels?

Come to think of it, there are actually beings who never choose to 'Fall' in a sense and reject God. What about the angels who never sin?

I think that angels possibly have a different kind of free will to humans. It's long thought that when an angel makes a choice, somehow the choice is 'forever'. So whereas humans constantly make choices that make them better or worse people, angels possibly only make one choice - to never sin or to sin - and then they stick with it forever. So angels somehow have the ability to 'stick' to a choice never to sin forever that humans can't do. It's because the choice to follow God comes up again and again that ensures we would all have fallen in the Garden of Eden (in my interpretation).

So why don't we all have 'angel style' free will where we make choices forever?

I think possibly for two reasons. a) The same proportion of angels disobey God as all humans reject God, so it doesn't save more people, and, b) It increases God's glory to have people constantly choose to be good over being evil, rather than only evaluate the decision once and in only one decision choose to be good over evil.

What do I mean by 'objective' morality? The Euthyphro dilemma

This picture illustrates the difference between the brain and the soul that I talk about in this article:



[Click to enlarge]

"Does 2 + 2 = 4 because God says so, or does God say that 2 + 2 = 4 because it does?"

"Is the right thing the right thing because God says so, or does God say that the right thing is the right thing because it is right?"

The answer I believe is that 2 + 2 = 4 because it's in the nature of the finite world that 2 + 2 always equals 4. Everything in the finite world expresses this truth; i.e. one rock and another rock will always make two rocks, and so on. In the same way the right thing is the right thing because that's what God's nature expresses in the infinite world. We should look at the second question as being exactly like the first question, with the same answer, following the same 'unconscious grammar'/structure of thought, applying to an infinite domain instead of a finite one.

But one might say, obviously it isn't a logical truth that you should always choose to do the right thing. But we only feel that because our intellect dwells in a realm that is infinitely less than the realm of God and the soul: the finite realm. Our intellect comes from a finite, physical brain. Because of this, our intellect can never grasp the 2 + 2 = 4s of the infinite world. 'You should be good' is such a 2 + 2 = 4. Such infinite knowledge belongs to the soul, God, and God's intellect, but *not* to the finite world.

So why did God make us with an intellect that doesn't tell us to choose The Good all the time? Because only God can be fully infinite, infinite in every respect, as He 'encompasses all possible infinities in His being', and that means our intellect has to be made finite. Our soul is in the infinite world with God, and our soul tells us The Good. But our reason, infinitely divided, monumentally cut-down compared to what God has, can't tell us practical facts like 'just do the right thing' (and will always end up leading us astray - the disconnect that I'm describing relates to original sin).

Morality is objective in theism, I think, because it can find a way to make 'good and evil' into a rather mysterious '2 + 2 = 4'. Any worldview can believe that '2 + 2 = 4' but not every worldview can find a way to look at morality in the same way. This is what I think 'objective' morality must mean.

What's Wrong with Human Reason?

This illustration helps explain the ideas in this article (click to enlarge).



A lot of Christian thinkers attack human reason as not being very good. In Romans 3 Paul criticises a common philosophical argument against God as mere 'human reason'. So what's wrong with human reason?

Well, the only thing wrong with human reason is that it's finite - it's limited. Because only God can be fully infinite (as there can be only one infinity), creatures had to 'lose' (in a manner of speaking) God's way of reasoning to be created, and the result is finite reasoning, which is infinitely less than the reasoning of God. The problem is that finite reasoning just can't understand everything about God.

I'll illustrate how this might work in practice using some examples from mathematics.

Let's say that you wanted to solve an incredibly hard mathematics problem. Let's say that you wanted to test whether all numbers follow a certain prediction. A mathematician wouldn't look at every number to find out the answer; that's impossible (for us). They'd find some technique that would allow them to figure out the answer after looking at a large but not infinite selection of numbers. Whereas God, with infinite reasoning, could look at *every* number to figure out the answer. God could solve e.g. the Riemann hypothesis by looking at every number there is, an actually infinite series of numbers. God could do the same for every mathematical problem.

Now, if God were finite, then we could eventually come to understand God using our reason. If God were finite, then understanding God would be like understanding a very difficult but ultimately graspable concept. But because God is an actual infinity (see what I mean by this here) then understanding all the mysteries of God would be like looking at every number (as in the above example). We can use 'shortcuts' to talk about God - e.g. say that God is loving - but we cannot actually understand God through limited reasoning. As Paul says in Romans 11:33 "O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgements, and his ways past finding out!"

The difficulty that every creature faces in understanding God is bigger than not being able to 'search out' His ways. There's a different kind of 'logic' applying in the infinite world compared to the finite world, that we just can't grasp very well.

Here's an example of finite logic versus infinite logic. In finite terms, 1 + 1 = 2, and one orange plus another orange makes two oranges. That's the logic of the finite world. Now, let's try to put infinity into the finite world. We don't know the value of infinity, so let's just say that infinity = 'X' and leave 'X' undefined. If infinity = X, then according to human reason X + X = 2X, so infinity + infinity = two infinities. But we know that infinity always remains infinity. You cannot take anything away, or add anything to infinity to change it. So infinity + infinity = infinity. So X + X equals 2X... but X + X in this case also equals X! That implies that 1 = 2.

But, you might say, human reason actually can understand infinity because at least we know that these puzzles exist...

But is that really the case? What kind of reasoning do humans use to understand the infinite? Finite reasoning. What kind of reasoning fits best with the infinite? Infinite reasoning. So shouldn't we be drawing mainly on infinite reasoning to understand the infinite, i.e. to draw conclusions about it, and make judgements as to its nature?

Christians believe (in the philosophical interpretation of this essay) that if we looked on the infinite with infinite reasoning then we would understand all mysteries of God. The problem is that to create us God had to give us a form of reasoning that is monumentally 'cut down' compared to what He has. A side-effect of this severely cut down form of reasoning is that we need to use the 'tool' of faith to understand the infinite (God) in the way that He really is (Hebrews 11:6).

OK, why is it such a big problem that we can't understand all the mysteries of God, or the logic of the infinite very well? What's so significant about this?

Well, just like we can't understand God fully, the fact that we have finite reasoning means that we can't understand other people fully!

Let me explain... it's the fact that we have finite reasoning that makes humans unable to fully understand themselves, other people, and God, and this allows us to be tempted by sin.

How so? Well, there's something about infinity that is incredibly perfect and wonderful, such that when people see infinity as it really is they give unconditional love and understanding to whoever they see. Because God encompasses all of infinity, the first and greatest commandment is to love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind (Luke 10:27). God's infinite nature is why God deserves the most love, honour, and respect above anyone else when He is perceived by a mind that desires to follow infinite reasoning (Rev 4:9-11).

We know that God is infinite, but what is less well-known is that when God made us in His image He used His power to put "eternity (i.e. infinity) in our hearts" - Ecc 3:11. In other words, the good news for humans is that there's a divine spark in all of us as well. Because we have infinity inside us (i.e. our soul), the same love, honour and respect that applies to God also applies to humans to a lesser (but still great) degree. So if anyone saw you or me as we really are - if they saw our soul - then they would love us unconditionally forever. In such a way do we receive the next greatest commandment from the Bible "You shall love your neighbour as yourself".

Why is it that everyone who looks on infinity as it really is (i.e. who follows infinite reasoning) will love God and other people with all their heart, mind, soul and strength? How does that come about? I don't actually know with finite reasoning. It comes somehow from infinity, in a way that finite reasoning just can't understand.

If we only had infinite reasoning, then we would never struggle to love others and God with all our strength, any more than we currently struggle to figure out whether one plus one equals two. That's why it is impossible for God to be tempted by evil. God cannot be tempted by evil (James 1:13) because He knows these infinite truths through His reasoning. On the other hand, humans can never know these infinite world truths through our reason (infinite reasoning always being inaccessible to humans) but only through our moral sense that comes from our soul. Because our finite reasoning knows nothing about infinite reasoning the way God knows, humans are continuously tempted to act against infinite reasoning, which is sin (i.e. not being perfect).

Of course, finite reasoning can be used to honour the truths of the infinite world - for example, using reason a scientist can cure a terrible disease and help many. But it can also lead us astray very easily. As David Hume famously said "It is not contrary to [finite] reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger". Hume here illustrates how disconnected finite reason is from morality.

It's humanly impossible to do justice to infinite reasoning because we would only see why we should be perfectly good if we understood infinite truths. But we can't understand any infinite truths through our reason, so we simply can't know why we should always be perfect in a way that would actually be effective (although we can understand infinite truths on an emotional level). Because we can never know these things, human beings, consequently, can never be perfect without a miracle from God.

When the apostle Paul says that 'All have sinned and come short of the glory of God' I believe he refers to three things: a) We have no hope of avoiding the temptation to sin because we have finite reasoning, b) We know whenever we sin that we shouldn't sin through the witness to infinite truth given by our soul, and c) We are fully responsible for our sin because we have free will through our soul (which is a gift from the infinite world).

In my interpretation of hell, these three things together force God to push the infinity that He's loaned to us really far away from Himself, in order to separate the part of Himself being used to sin from Himself, and this results in earthly suffering, and in the same way later on, hell (Gen 2:15-17; Romans 1:18-19).