I pared to here. It cannot be. We ARE created. All the information in you and me is written by God.
What information are you talking about?
Perhaps we are not yet tracking on analogy (not intending Metaphor because I don't know a lot about how we are created). The point is that 'like' a computer program, there is nothing there that a programmer didn't place there.
How do you know this?
Is a spirit a "program"?
Like any creation, there is nothing in us that God didn't place there.
That doesn't mean we're anything like a computer program.
Granted sin has messed up the works, but that isn't an addition, it is a detraction. At any rate, thanks for entertaining, and at great length the idea and premise. It is an illustration and you've definitely picked up on points where it fails. In any way, 'can' it serve for some considerations of Creator/creature? If not, I'll have to move on to something else.
It seems to me that just about the only thing we have in common with any sort of computer is that our basic biology functions via a language based system. The problem for your analogy is that we haven't the foggiest idea of how that language actually works. It is so vastly more complex than any language we use for any purpose that it may not even be accurate to call it a language. We certainly are not programmed like a computer. It's closer to say that we are designed like a stupefyingly complex machine that makes the Large Hadron Collider at CERN look like it was designed by seven year olds with crayons and put together using Lincoln Logs and Legos without any adult supervision.
In short, to compare us with computers isn't like comparing apples to oranges, its like comparing apples to the light that reflects off the surface of a methane lake on Tatan as the fully lit Saturn breaks above its horizon just as the tiny Sun sets in the far distance below the opposite horizon. The point being that to compare the two is simply absurd.
God told Samuel that he would not suffice when He talked to him about the problems of a king that Israel was asking for. Prophetically, it all came true. I'm not following how this answers the proposition that we are programmed by a programmer by simile.
There was no prophesy about Saul's rebellion against God prior to him becoming king nor did Saul's rebellion parallel the general warnings Samuel gave Israel about what the effect a king would have. More importantly, your poor attempt at rationalizing completely ignores not only the other clear examples that proof we are not who we are because God has programmed us but it flatly ignores (it seems intentionally so) that God Himself told Saul that he and his descendants could have reigned over Israel forever!
God's own words prove your thesis false, Lon. That should be enough for you. Why isn't it?
LOL! Quit being silly, silly man. This is your exasperation point and I shouldn't have asked you to go further knowing you. We share a lot of similar doctrine because it is biblical. Where we differ? Think on it, if I get at least part of what you know from scripture right, then I'm no slouch. Don't be exasperated over difference because even that can shore up your own thoughts. If it doesn't seem so, then lets chalk it up to a failed conversation. This is a peripheral thread. Important? Yes, but nothing for a need to get to exasperation, we can move along.
You calling me silly made me laugh, Lon.
I wasn't being silly. Many of your doctrines are so disconnected from anything rationally related to what the bible actually says that it seems it must be made up out of thin air. You cannot even articulate why you believe this stuff.
Er more independent in our thinking. You'd not be saved without knowing your need of Savior (nor I). Silly? No, just knee-jerk my friend.
What does that have to do with anything either of us has said, Lon!
Don't answer that! I don't care. You're too far off into lala land and it's not a trip I care to take.
Thank you for this. I've looked at Open Theism for 25 years and have not found it the same as you. It isn't just that I've been taught omnis, it is that they come to mind as I continually read through scriptures. If it this is the only hang up? At one time yes. Today? Not much.
So, you are like the Calvinist and Arminians that I mentioned. You have pet doctrines and you more skillfully than most find ways to knot up your mind so as to preserve those pagan doctrines intact no matter what anyone says. You know their pagan origins and DO NOT CARE! They're your pets! You love them like my wife loves our sick cat that vomits on the floor every other day and you're far more desirous of a belief system with those doctrines intact than you are of the objective truth. That's your perogotive but it will not serve you well, Lon. It's the mental equivalent of carving a god from a piece of drift wood.
And then, as if you cannot remember "being there" as it were, your frustration rather than empathy...
I was never 10% as irrational as you are, Lon. That isn't me trying to insult you. I'm just saying that the things you say don't seem to connect to anything that makes any sense from within a Christian worldview. You're one step away from a pantheist, for crying out loud. I said that I was the guy who believed in practically every popular doctrine in Christiandom that you can name. Some of things you say fall well outside that parameter.
Al (omni). Mighty (potent). Show that to be false please.
Irrelevant. It is the doctine that I am concerned with, not the word.
As I've said recently (perhaps to someone other than you, I don't remember), I have no problem with someone using the term "omnipotent" so long as the meaning is made clear to the audience. Bob Enyart would use the term from time to time in his bible studies and everyone listening understood intutively what he meant and that he wasn't talking about the Classical doctrine but merely that God is the fountainhead of all power as I explained in my previous post.
You, however, are not doing what Bob was doing. You are trying to force the use of the word and then implying that the doctrine is therefore biblical. I here to tell you that I'm not impressed by such tactics.
I think and use the ideas as logic paradigms. For instance, I'm in agree on these on particulars: God HAS to make sin go away. He has to do this by His actions because He is right and the outcome right, good, holy. I do not agree with the philosophers, nor all theologians on what must logically follow and entail. Rather, God is the actuator of all that exists (not author of sin). I don't believe God can write a new song. Why? "His understanding is infinite." Infinite includes everything. Using the Master Chess player, there is no chess and even the opponent comes from His own mind.
The single point about God not being able to write a new song should be sufficient by itself to set off alarm bells in your own mind, Lon!
There a really abscure portion of the bible that maybe you've never heard of. It's a tiny little portion near the center of most any bible you might pick up. It's called the Psalms! It's nothing really! It's just a spattering of
150 songs that god wrote for us.
You're probably right though! I mean, we surely can't allow God having written scores of songs to persuade us that we've made a mistake with our doctine of omnisicience. NO!
Often enough, we argue over these same ideas such that it isn't just these theological and philosophical concerns: they affect what we take away from our thoughts of God. I'm finite. The best I can do is assert something that 'looks and logically must-or-appears-certain about God. "Without Him, nothing exists that exists" (from whence came some of my robot illustration in extrapolated thoughts). He is the Omni of many things by scripture assertion because He is the "all." IE No other God, nothing but Him in existence but what proceeds from Him, etc.
As far as thread, not to exasperate. Never my intention.
As I said, these pagan doctrines are your pets. You see them because you want to see them and can't imagine your spiritual life without them. The history of these doctrines, their totally clear and extremely well documented and totally undisputed history, should be enough by itself to make you question their validity but instead you
entrench your mind against any argument that threatens their stature as the foundations upon which you've built your theological paradigm.
Do yourself a favor and look up the simptoms of being psychologically entrenched and see how many of them describe you and the way you feel about these unbiblical omni-doctrines.
