Instigator / Pro
0
1500
rating
1
debates
0.0%
won
Topic
#4421
The concept of God being all knowing is flawed
Status
Finished
The debate is finished. The distribution of the voting points and the winner are presented below.
Winner & statistics
Winner
0
2
After 2 votes and with 2 points ahead, the winner is...
Mall
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Parameters
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- Last updated date
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- Standard
- Number of rounds
- 3
- Time for argument
- Two weeks
- Max argument characters
- 10,000
- Voting period
- One week
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- Voting system
- Open
Contender / Con
2
1476
rating
336
debates
40.77%
won
Description
God of the Christian faith is praised as he is known as the creator of life and all beings. He knows all about everyone, the past, the present, and the future. He knows what you’re going to do within the next second, minute, day, month, year, ten years, etc. With this knowledge, it is plausible to say that God plans your whole life even before you are born, he knows whether you will turn against or for him at the end of your life, in which he will make a judgement towards you for it. In my view, how is this considered fair and just? How can a God be deemed rational when he punishes the lives of those he planned to have turned against him? If you program something that you know with full knowledge will turn against you sooner or later, who is there to blame? The robot for turning against you, or the fact that you PROGRAMMED the robot to turn against you?
Besides that, if God is rational, holy, and perfect as the Bible claims, then the concept of him being all knowing simply cannot be possible.
Round 1
Pro
#1
I would first like to thank my opponent for being willing to discuss this subject with me. I hope we can have an engaging and civil conversation about this and can end up on the good side. One disclaimer, I have semi-broken English so some things I say may be confusing, for that I apologize.
Opening:
We should start off with the basic fundamental that God is presented as an all-powerful being. God being omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent is found everywhere in the Bible.
Omnipotent: The ability to do anything:
The Almighty is beyond our reach and exalted in power; in his justice and great righteousness, he does not oppress. [Job 37:23]
By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth. [Psalm 33:6]
These passages along with many other examples (Isaiah 44:24, Romans 4:17, Jeremiah 32:17) show God has the power to do anything, he created all and is the underlying factor of how we got here in the first place.
Omniscient: Knowing everything:
in whatever our heart condemns us; for God is greater than our heart and knows all things. [1 John 3:20]
Great is our Lord and abundant in strength;His understanding is infinite.[Psalm 147:5]
Same as the prior examples, these passages show God being an all-knowing powerful being, he knows about all species, all creations, all events etc.
Omnipresent: "Present everywhere at the same time" [1] :
The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; [Acts 17:24]
He is before all things, and in Him, all things hold together. [Colossians 1:17]
The eyes of the Lord are in every place,Watching the evil and the good. [Proverbs 15:3]
As said before, these passages show God does not have to correlate with the factor of time, combined with his being omniscient, it can be concluded that he knows the past, present, and future of all human beings. Especially in terms of their faith, whether they believe in Him or not at the end of their life is already determined before they are born. No matter what choices can be made, God knows whether they'll end up in hell or heaven. This is with the technicality that God manufactures all of life and all endings of life. With this knowledge, the fairness of God's judgment can be put into question, how exactly is it fair to send someone to eternal suffering and doom over a life he knew from the start they wouldn't follow his teachings?
Argument 1: God's Rationality
Rational Reasoning: Using reason or logic in thinking out a problem. [2]
No matter how much one tries to get the gift of "eternal life" [John 3:16], their fate is already decided in the hands of God. Is this rational?
As mentioned in the description, hypothetically if I were to fully create and form a robot that I know would turn against me, what gives me the right to judge and proclaim that it was bad and turned against me? I was the one who created it. I was the omniscient power of that robot, I designed for it to live for a certain amount of time, I designed all the decisions it would make and the contribution it would make, and I designed when it would turn against me. This fits with God's power of being omniscient but even the greater power of being omnipresent.
God knowing all simply cannot correlate with him having rational judgment, all that is considered a sin under his ruling is all created by him. Even the creation of sin, when Adam and Eve betrayed him, was manufactured by God. Going even further, Lucifer, the angel who turned against God, was created by God himself. With all these events in mind, would it be rational to punish others for bad deeds from events YOU created? Absolutely not.
Argument 2: Is the idea of "freedom", a right given by Christ under the name "free will" actually free?
The concept of "free will" is highly present within the Bible, as God is mentioned to not force or convince you to turn to his love and believe in him:
The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance [2 Peter 3:9]
"But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.” [Joshua 24:15]
However, if you were to compare this to the reasoning just given prior, there is found to be a discrepancy. If God is completely aware of your choices and knows how you will end up, is there actually free will? Is there really the choice to turn to him when you have already been destined to eternal suffering? How can God not want anyone to perish, but creates human beings who he knows full well will not believe in him by the time they die in which they receive eternal suffering?
Conclusion:
I apologize for being sort of blunt or lacking in the arguments I presented, and if clarification is needed I am well able to cooperate to make some of my words clearer. But wrapping it up, if God were to be the all-powerful and all-knowing deity the Bible claims him to be, then it is impossible for him to be rational. Adding on, it is impossible for the concept of "free will" in humans to exist. Both due to the fact that God created, formed, and set straight the choices you will make in life, the way you die, and the way you end up in terms of faith, a believer or non-believer.
Con
#2
"With this knowledge, the fairness of God's judgment can be put into question, how exactly is it fair to send someone to eternal suffering and doom over a life he knew from the start they wouldn't follow his teachings? "
There are several questions I can add on top of this. But will any of the answers suffice?
Being that it's been established.....God knows all things... how would anyone know enough to have an answer?
Who knows more than God?
We have what we know in our limited knowledge in what makes sense to us. What looks rational to us is probably not even a fraction compared to the Almighty being.
Matter of fact, our thinking and reasoning, we refer to as rationalizing.
But who's to say God's knowledge can be accurately referred to as something that is based on rationality like us?
You stated "God's rationality".
However, rationality is something we apply to minds that don't know all things. Our minds calculate within a limited amount of facts.
But a being that knows the end from the beginning,how are we to measure the knowledge of that being claiming it is constructed based on a rationality system?
Would it be something greater than rationalization, outside of logic?
See the questions can just keep going and going because our limited minds have not reached a conclusive answer on something beyond our understanding.
It has to fit within our understanding. If it is outside that, the questions just continue.
"No matter how much one tries to get the gift of "eternal life" [John 3:16], their fate is already decided in the hands of God. Is this rational?"
I'll start this way. The bible is not a science book. It's not something to use to create rationality. To get scripture and question is it rational is inappropriate.
It's a book of writings reported to be of inspired writings from a divine source.
So the rational thing we can do is get what the scripture actually reports.
The book does not say "No matter how much one tries to get the gift of "eternal life".
First off, no one tries to get the gift. Nobody seeks after God.
Romans 3:11
"There is none who understands;
There is none who seeks after God."
So you're attempting to just rationalize from an incorrect basis and faulty foundation.
"As mentioned in the description, hypothetically if I were to fully create and form a robot that I know would turn against me, what gives me the right to judge and proclaim that it was bad and turned against me? I was the one who created it. I was the omniscient power of that robot, I designed for it to live for a certain amount of time, I designed all the decisions it would make and the contribution it would make, and I designed when it would turn against me. This fits with God's power of being omniscient but even the greater power of being omnipresent.
God knowing all simply cannot correlate with him having rational judgment, all that is considered a sin under his ruling is all created by him. Even the creation of sin, when Adam and Eve betrayed him, was manufactured by God. Going even further, Lucifer, the angel who turned against God, was created by God himself. With all these events in mind, would it be rational to punish others for bad deeds from events YOU created? Absolutely not."
All of this is your rationalization, is that correct?
I'm quoting all of this because whether you have 2-3 paragraphs or 2-300 books of trying to rationalize these things out, all of it is faulty because why would it be something you can understand in your limited mind categorized/labeled under rationality and reasoning?
This means God only knows that much infinitely more which you're lacking that could be used for you to understand.
We can reason together and compare rationalizations because we both can understand and make it possible to reach an equivalent level of information in our knowledge.
But trying to put God on the same level is fallacious as He does things with a total or infinite knowledge. You make your decisions based off a knowledge with limited experience.
That much is very rational about this subject as a whole.
In reference to the "freewill" there's a lot more to the scriptures that have to be rightly divided.
As we just understood in Romans 3, nobody is choosing God but God gives them up to choose what they want to do (freewill) in Romans 1.
They choose to do what they want in those activities listed. Not one of them is serving and following God.
In summary so we both know and others know where we are going here, I'll state your position as I gets it as well as mine.
You're communicating God knowing all things is flawed based on you knowing very little things. That's flawed and doesn't make sense in and of itself.
That's like a child telling a parent their decisions, the choices they make, the things they do as parents are faulty.
The child doesn't know more than the parent and the child barely understands why the parent does certain things.
Just like the child, you likewise have no position to make a judgment of what's flawed and what's not. You have no more knowledge than what Malachi 2 refers to God as the Father.
My position is you don't have a solid flawless foundation to determine a mind greater than yours to be flawed.
I'm going to circle back to what the scripture says.
Romans 3 and 11
"There is none who understands"
We are flawed in our thinking because we DON'T KNOW ALL THINGS.
How would this Almighty being be flawed in knowing all things?
Now because we're missing information, flaws and mistakes occur.
If we knew all things, the end from the beginning, it would eliminate the cause of flaws because we'd know exactly what would create them.
In the titular Matrix character Neo's voice ..,"Whoa" .
.
Round 2
Apart from what was presented by con, another problem that seems to occur in the description is mixing "knowing" and "planning". He can know what one will do but it is ultimately the individual who chooses what they do/did/will do. It doesn't mean He orchestrated for the individual to make that choice, but just that He knows the choice that would be made.
In fact, the Bible states that The Lord wants for all to come to repentance. 2 Pet 3:9
God bless.