> > (1) Given: God creates and controls physical laws.
> > (2) Given: God creates and controls the intrinsic nature of souls.
> > (3) Given: Souls have only physical factors (experiences and makeup of their bodies) and their intrinsic nature to control their decision making process.
> > (4) Therefore: God creates and controls the decision making processes of souls [from (1), (2) and (3)].
> >
> > Is this faulty reasoning?
> >
>
> This is faulty, I think, for one thing: God cannot commit an evil act. By stating that humans are automatons simply doing God's bidding (which seems to be what you might be trying to say), you are implying that, via control of the decision making process, God is committing evil acts, being evil.

This is precisely what I was implying. My problem with your rebuttal is that it hinges on an eventual assumption of actions of the souls; the argument I have above makes no claim about that.

Brief primer in formal logic. When evaluating arguments, we are chiefly concerned with two things: deductive validity and soundness. Deductive validity is a sort of odd concept, because "valid" in this sense doesn't mean "true." It simply means that, if all of our premises our true, then our conclusion must be true. The following is a deductively valid argument:

(1) All men are rich.
(2) I am a man.
(3) Therefore, I am rich [from (1) & (2)].

While I am not rich, this argument is still valid because if premises (1) and (2) are true, the conclusion *has* to be true. What the argument is is unsound. This occurs when a valid argument has faulty premises. If, however, we have a valid argument with true premises, the argument must be sound.

You did not dispute either my premises or my reasoning in the argument that is at the top of the post. It seems to me that if those three premises are true, the conclusion must be. You say the conclusion is false. If this is so, then either one or more of my premises is false or there is an error within the line of reasoning used. Bringing in external evidence that contradicts the conclusion does not invalidate the argument.

It may well be that the argument is unsound, but if so I'd like to know the problem in that particular argument.

> So I do think that we the fact that we can commit evil means that we do have free will to *some* extent. What that extent is, I'm not entirely sure of, and frankly, I doubt whether we can ever know.

Interesting. I can understand this, but I still want to know, which is why I spend all this time thinking about it... heh.

> Something I keep coming back to in my mind is the fact that you, I, everyone else, are trying to use the laws of logic/reasoning/whatever to explain how God works, when God exists outside of those laws. He created those laws, not vice versa. God can defy logic, because God *created* logic. Therefore, I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume that there *is no* reasonable explanation, comprehendable by the human mind, as to how our wills interact with God's. The capacity to know this, the tools necessary to figure this out, were not given to us.

I hear this a lot. It's a tangent, but one worth addressing because unless we settle it all further discussion is worthless.

What does it mean to say god exists outside of logical laws? I'm not sure. Logic is a set of principles that is concerned chiefly with internal consistency (as above, a logically valid argument need not have any relation to the outside universe). In other words:

"All zaks are blowmfor.
Some zaks are boldorg.
Therefore, some blowmfor are boldorg."

Is completely logically valid. It means NOTHING, has no bearing on reality, and yet is valid. How could god do something that was logically invalid? It would mean that he was capable of being inconsistent. The fundamental principle in logic is that of non-contradiction. "A is A and not non-A." In other words, something can't be something that it is not. This makes sense. How can god make A be non-A while still being A? He couldn't. The fact of the matter is that omnipotence does not include the ability to do the logically impossible; how could it?

This, however, is a different question from, "Can we determine the nature of god with logic?" I think the answer is yes. The problem we run into is a lack of observational evidence. Given enough data, it is comprehendable that we could understand god (though there may be aspects to him that our brains can't handle). In this way, though, it's our biology that's at fault, not logical principles.

Stephen