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Re: The Universe as a Program: An Omniscient God and Free Will
Posted By: Stephen, on host 68.7.169.109
Date: Sunday, January 19, 2003, at 11:55:19
In Reply To: Re: The Universe as a Program: An Omniscient God and Free Will posted by Mia on Sunday, January 19, 2003, at 11:44:36:

> I know this doesn't really answer your question of free will, but I think it illustrates the point that we CAN'T see everything. I don't know why bad things happen to people, but God does.

The problem with that analogy is, within the context of my original post, it doesn't address the question: why is there any reason for evil to exist at all?

In other words, why would god allow the pirates or the evil Arab to come into existence in the first place? The implication is that their existence has some purpose that we can't see.

Mia's parable essentially says that humans can't understand god's plan. I'm willing to grant this premise, but it becomes problematic if we assume that there are things that happen that god does not want to happen. It's my understanding of Christian theology that these sorts of things do happen, which appears to me to be a contradiction given my computer program analogy. More importantly, why would god have, say, eternal punishment for those who did bad things? Within the context of my simulation analogy, such action doesn't make sense, since god is directly responsible for the actions anyway (he controls the starting state of the universe as well as the rules of interaction for the things inside the universe).

Stephen

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