That ability would be more than theoretically possible – it would be God’s actual omniscience and his sovereignty over space and time. It dovetails with discussions about his providence…
If he can do this and this, or if you have read or read about George Müller or Rich Stearns, it may have been a “billiard shot” or it may have been him actually intervening in time and space. I lean towards the idea that he is atemporal or omnitemporal (I lean away from Molinism) and am more prone to favor a variation of the B-theory of time, one that is beyond our ability to grasp, since we live exclusively in linear (although we know that it can be warped), tensed and sequential time, and he outside of it, and that his relationship to our material reality is personal and dynamic and not static.
There’s a problem with the scenario even if he knows how all QM events will turn out. Tweaking the initial conditions will not result in the choice of all possible worlds, just the worlds that are going to result from a particular set of QM events. Even if he can tweak the initial conditions to anything he likes, some present worlds are unreachable because he can’t force particular QM events to happen by tweaking initial conditions.
One could of course argue that this is not the world he would have wanted given complete free choice, only the best approximation given any set of initial conditions. And one could argue that he also intervened at various times after the initial setup, but that’s not the billiard shot any more, if so.
I have no idea what most of your second paragraph means.
That is not unexpected, since only Christians (and not necessarily all of them) will be familiar with God’s providence experientially. As I said elsewhere,
Regarding your first paragraph, that too is not too unexpected, since you cannot allow for God’s absolute sovereignty, omniscience and omnipotence.
Actually, it’s the other way around – you seal yourself off from the whole of reality by not allowing for the existence of the immaterial. That makes your world way smaller.
This isn’t correct. I’m willing to allow for the existence of “the immaterial”, given sufficient evidence. But apparently you are unable to argue for such a thing in a way that someone who doesn’t already believe it can understand, and it’s my fault.
How can a cognitively normal person fail to find the INSTANTLY OBVIOUS flaw in this claim?
I love my parents and my siblings, and I am simultaneously compelled to believe in their existence because it is so undeniably obvious to me. Nobody has to force me to believe they exist, it’s obvious all by itself, and I still love them. But the first condition for love is to be convinced there’s actually something there to be loved. Then we can take it from there.
Also, just what the fork is it with this “you need to guarantee they’ll love me otherwise I dont’ want them to see me” nonsense? Sounds like the kind of crap a spoiled Hollywood actor, or child, or super-narcissist would say.
These demands are fatuous in the extreme.
No, that is simply not credible. Most people are actually believers, and have NOT been exposed to radical and dramatic biblical-style miracles like watching the parting of the Red Sea, or Jesus walking on water.
Most people believe on little more than their parent’s say-so when they were raised to believe as young children and continue to believe sincerely for the rest of their lives. Many believers are convinced they have experienced the divine by what turns out to be nothing more than having been overcome with strong feelings of love, awe, and wonder.
There is a lot more here than you think. Although some people undoubtably have faith built on very little substance guys like @swamidass or @dga471 have built their faith with the support of evidence. You left the Christian faith based on being convinced it is a fairy tale. Why not take a fresh look with all the resources you have to your disposal?
I have taken a fresh look at Christianity over the last 2 years based on the advise of @swamidass and have been stunned by what I have found.
God purportedly came down to Earth and took the form of a human man, then went around and performed various grandiose and miraculous acts. It wouldn’t be difficult for me to believe that a man with such extraordinary powers really was God, even if the miracles performed would not deductively prove he was in fact God incarnate.
Heck, even if he could not persuade me that he really was the Christian God, that doesn’t mean that would constitute an obstacle to me loving this person and believing the person exists. After all, none of the people I actually believe exist and whom I really do love, are Gods. They’re just mere mortal fleshy humans, they’re not infinitely powerful, or intelligent, or immortal, yet I believe they exist and I love them.
If God wants me to love him and know he exists, he can just show up as a human and, well, be the kind of person I would come to love. I don’t even have to believe he’s literally the divine creator of the universe as depicted in the Christian bible for that, at all. A mere human could persuade me that they are wise, powerful, a good person worthy of loving, and that they exist, all at the same time.
Why doesn’t the bloke just show up? None of your excuses make any logical or even emotional sense.
He did. He also left evidence of this. The web has a huge amount of resources to examine the evidence. Look at both sides of the arguments leaving your priors at the door.
@colewd I agree with you that there is evidence that Jesus rose from the dead. Of course @dga471 agrees too.
The challenge, I imagine, is that the way you handle evidence is suspect to them when you press the same circular design argument. The case for the Resurrection is far stronger than ID, so why not try focusing on that? Whether ID is true or false just doesn’t matter any ways. Why not try a different way forward?
No, that’s not how I stopped believing at all. I realized that all the reasons I believed in the first place were bad reasons. I was raised to, and I rationalized away contradictory evidence without having a good reason to, that’s basically why I believed. Once I realized this, I went through a period of assessing arguments for belief I’d heard during my life, found them all completely unpersuasive, and gradually stopped believing.