Monday, August 18, 2008

Randolph is mentally incompetent

Lee Randolph, resident genius over at DC, has done a post on the Fall:

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2008/08/gen-216-324-adam-and-eve-were-mentally.html

“This an article to show that Adam and eve did not know the difference between good and evil before they ate the fruit of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil therefore could not understand the consequences of what they were doing.”

Here he’s arguing on the basis of what the tree is called. On that interpretation, the tree would be the source of their moral discernment.

However, he then makes the following admission:

“Another interprtation of "Fall of Man" story is that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is really the tree of all knowledge where the terms Good and Evil are used as a merism ("bookends" or "upper and lower limits") to express a range, in the same manner as the term "young and old". This is considered a common usage in Biblical Poetry. I don't use this interpretation for this document but it wouldn't change the conclusion anyway.”

But it would change the conclusion since he could no longer infer the innocence of Adam and Eve from the name of the tree. The fact that Adam and Eve don't know everything doesn't mean they know nothing. Lee will have to argue for their innocence on some other ground.

BTW, that's not the only way to interpret the phrase. Hamilton takes it to denote moral autonomy.

“Here is where people become accountable for knowing about the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. At this point they still do not know the difference between good and evil.”

That’s an inference from the name of the tree. But if the name of the tree is an idiomatic merism, then the inference is invalid.

“God was being ambiguous and therefore deceptive by saying "you will surely die".”

Lee doesn’t explain how God was deceptive. He simply makes a bare assertion.

Perhaps Lee is alluding to the timeframe: “on the day.” But that’s a Hebrew idiom for "when." And, in fact, Adam and Eve did die. They lost the hope of immortality.

“Eve is now introduced to her first experience with someone whose intent may be to decieve her and possibly manipulate her, and she doesn't know the difference between Good and Evil.”

Why doesn’t she know the difference between good and evil? Is this an inference from the name of the tree? If so, the inference is invalid.

“There was evidently no warning about the snake. There are several default reasoning schemes that people commonly use and seem to present naturally. It takes education and experience to be able to overcome these. Presumably, since Eve and Adam were human, uneducated and with no life experience to speak of, they were susceptible to most if not all of these.”

i) Adam and Eve weren’t ordinary human beings. They were human prototypes of ordinary human beings.

They didn’t grow up. They were created as adults, with a certain amount of innate knowledge which would ordinarily be the result of the maturation process, but was, in their case, a natural endowment. For example, they could use language from the moment they were made. They didn’t acquire that knowledge although that knowledge is ordinarily acquired.

ii) Moreover, even if you’re an ordinary human being, you can’t acquire a knowledge of good and evil from experience. Experience doesn’t distinguish between a good experience and an evil experience. At most, experience gives you a knowledge of certain consequences. But experience doesn’t tell you if those consequences are good or evil. So the knowledge of good and evil must either be innate, revealed, or both (to one degree or another).

“People like stories and are willing to give the teller of the story the benefit of the doubt about the truth of it.”

i) The Serpent didn’t tell Eve a “story.” He wasn’t a storyteller. He wasn’t some Homeric bard.

ii) I like lots of fictitious stories. The fact that I like the story doesn’t incline me to believe it.

But Lee may be an exception. That would explain why he’s an atheist. He likes the just-so stories of Richard Dawkins.

“People are more likely to believe a story if it comes from someone they like.”

Gen 3 doesn’t say that Eve had a liking for the Serpent. Rather, she had a liking for the fruit, and what the fruit would confer.

“People are more likely to believe a story if it fits with what they already believe or want to believe.

i) It didn’t fit with what she already believed. It contradicted what she already believed. It contradicted the divine prohibition.

ii) It may have fit what she wanted to believe. A temptation naturally appeals to what a person wants. So what?

“People look for confirmation of what they already believe and disregard things that contradict.”

Yes, we can see that in the willful gullibility of Lee and other credulous unbelievers like John Loftus.

“People are more likely to believe a story if it comes from an authority.”

i) The prohibition came from an authority-figure—God.

ii) There’s no evidence that Eve regarded the Serpent as an authority-figure.

“The snake told the truth.”

No, he told a half-truth. That's more deceptive than a lie because it's more plausible. But Adam and Eve did suffer the death penalty for their sin.

“And Eve did not have any experience with "Bad people" or know the difference between "good and evil" people.”

Actually, if a person contradicts what God told you, that makes him a bad person.

“Eve gave the snake the benefit of the the doubt, she evidently did not dislike him”

i) To like someone and not to dislike someone are not the same thing.

ii) Moreover, you don’t have to like someone to succumb to temptation. The relevant consideration is not whether you like the person, but whether you like what he offers you.

“What he said fit what she wanted to believe.”

True, that’s how temptation works. And it works on people with a lot of experience. Indeed, the experience of evil can predispose someone to give into temptation.

When dealing with a truly innocent person, there is no predisposition to evil. No preexisting hook.

“And she undoubtedly took it to be authoritative about the Tree.”

How does that follow? Temptations can work with possibilities or probabilities rather than certainties. That’s why people gamble. They will take a big risk for a big potential payoff.

They don’t know their bet will pay off. Indeed, the risk factor is, itself, part of what may make a temptation appealing.

“Neither Eve or Adam had any wisdom or knowledge of good and evil at this point.”

Notice that Lee only has one argument, which he repeats ad nauseum.

“She trusted the snake because she did not have any reason not to.”

She had a perfect reason to distrust him: he contradicted God.

“There is no indication that they had any idea about lying.”

i) They had a lot of innate knowledge.

ii) And even if they had no prior idea about lying, if God says one thing, and the Serpent says the opposite, that, of itself, would acquaint them with the idea of lying.

“Adam and Eve both had built in cognitive biases that come into play here, such as trusting what others say.”

The account doesn’t say that Adam and Eve had a built-in bias to believe whatever someone told them. And temptation doesn’t depend on trust. For example, a criminal syndicate doesn’t depend on trust. It relies on greed and fear.

“Desire was apparently built into Eve as described in Gen. 3:6.”

Desire is a necessary condition for temptation, but hardly a sufficient condition.

“They were following the natural cognitive processes that they were born with (untempered by education).”

Adam and Eve weren’t “born.”

“The snake could not have known the difference between good and evil unless it had acquired it from somewhere.”

It says something about Lee that he thinks you must acquire a knowledge of good and evil through personal experience. That’s a rather revealing and damning admission, don’t you think?

According to Lee, I don’t know that murdering someone is evil until I have that experience. If that is Lee’s philosophy of life, then the police might consider him a person of interest.

Speaking for myself, I wouldn’t be eager to go under the knife of a surgeon with who shared Lee’s philosophy—especially under general anesthetic. I might wake up in his basement with various parts of me floating in vials of formaldehyde.

“In any case It was smarter than Eve because it knew that she would not literally die.”

She did literally die. Does Lee think that Eve is still alive? Where is she hanging out these days? Stockholm? Madrid? Barcelona?

“Eve…didn't know that dying was bad.”

How does that follow? Most of us only die once. Our personal experience of death is uniquely limited. Yet most of us try to avoid premature death.

You see, God endowed man with a faculty for abstract reasoning. You can understand many things without having to experience them.

Lee began his post by talking about stories. You don’t have to experience a fictitious story to understand it. That’s the whole point of using your imagination. You can conceive of possibilities that fall outside your personal experience. Indeed, you can conceive of possibilities that fall outside human experience.

“Or that disobeying god was bad.”

Once again, how does that follow? Does Lee mean you can’t know something is bad unless you experience the consequences?

i) Even this wouldn’t tell you that something is morally wrong, but merely unpleasant—sooner or later.

ii) Once again, this raises disturbing questions about the scope of Lee’s experience. He doesn’t know that molesting a child is wrong unless he engages in child molestation.

“The desire was built into her and Humans have or acquire cognitive biases that must be unlearned.”

Why would a Darwinian say that we must unlearn our cognitive biases? What is Lee’s frame of comparison?

In his post, Lee has done a wonderful job of proving that Lee is mentally incompetent. Was he mentally incompetent before he became an apostate? That would explain his apostasy. Or does apostasy induce mental incompetence? There’s empirical evidence to support both explanations. One aggravates the other.

15 comments:

  1. Steve, after a True Christian dies and goes to Heaven, is it theoretically possible for him to decide to defy God and sin and fall from Heaven?

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  2. AARON KINNEY SAID:

    "Steve, after a True Christian dies and goes to Heaven, is it theoretically possible for him to decide to defy God and sin and fall from Heaven?"

    No.

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  3. Then how did Lucifer defy God and fall from heaven?

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  4. The blog article lists Lee Randolph as the author.

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  5. "Then how did Lucifer defy God and fall from heaven?"

    It's not the place that makes sin impossible but the nature of the will. The will was free to sin before sin but will be made immutable in regards to moral choices after the restoration of all things.

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  6. "Then how did Lucifer defy God and fall from heaven?"

    Lucifer was not a "true Christian", first off, secondly, he never "died and went to heaven," and third, he never was in "heaveb" in any where near the sense used of the reward the saints have, the new heavens and earth.

    If the disanalogies weren't enough, Lucifer was never definitively sanctified. He was never, to use the latin categories, non posse peccare. He was posse peccare, posse non peccare before he fell. Since Christians will be non posse peccare in heaven, they will not be able to fall. Lucifer never was (and the entire prelapsarian analogy you're using has virtually nothing in common with the eschaotlogical state of man) unable to sin.

    Does that answer it for you?

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  7. Paul,

    Lucifer was not a "true Christian", first off,

    Then how was he ever in heaven in the first place? Are angels simply not Christians?

    secondly, he never "died and went to heaven,"

    I dont see how dying and going to heaven, or being created in heaven from the start has anything to do with it?

    and third, he never was in "heaveb" in any where near the sense used of the reward the saints have, the new heavens and earth.

    Oh theres multiple heavens now? I thought Lucifer used to be very close to God, so wouldnt he be in the same heaven that God was in? Is God in the "new" heaven or the "oldschool" heaven?

    If the disanalogies weren't enough, Lucifer was never definitively sanctified. He was never, to use the latin categories, non posse peccare. He was posse peccare, posse non peccare before he fell. Since Christians will be non posse peccare in heaven, they will not be able to fall. Lucifer never was (and the entire prelapsarian analogy you're using has virtually nothing in common with the eschaotlogical state of man) unable to sin.

    Does that answer it for you?


    Why, yes, this makes much more sense now. If only we could get this information out to all the atheists and Muslims and Buddhists etc, Im quite sure that we would be able to finally reverse the faith-drain that has been bleeding Christianity dry for the last 40 years. :)

    Seriously though lets recap. If you are created as an angel in heaven, then you are in an old style heaven, which isnt as good as the new heaven, and you are able to sin. But if you are born a human being, you can sin only on Earth, but once you make it to heaven, you can no longer sin, an you are in a new heaven or a different heaven than the heaven that the angels are in.

    So theres one hell and at least two heavens, but humans and angels are like, seperated between the two heavens and cannot interact. Maybe Im wrong about my assumption about the number of hells there are. Is there a hell for every heaven? Is Satan now in the old school hell while human atheists would end up in the new hell?

    This stuff is needlessley complex, and the increased complexity only makes it appear more absurd. Regardless of the truth or falsity of Christianty, it is more and more obvious that the more questions the potential customer (unconverted) asks, the harder the sale is for you salesmen (evangelicals).

    It reminds me of those medicine commercials where, out of a 1:00 minute ad, 45 seconds of it is disclaimers and warnings and other baloney.

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  8. Re: Saint and Sinner,

    It's not the place that makes sin impossible but the nature of the will. The will was free to sin before sin but will be made immutable in regards to moral choices after the restoration of all things.

    Baloney. I've heard from numerous reliable Christians that it is literally impossible to sin in heaven and as soon as you try you automatically get cast into hell. Ive also been told from numerous reliable Christians that humans, when they go to heaven, become angels, much like Lucifer was an "angel" and that you still have free will.

    Of course, the truth is that I hear it both ways in completely contradictory explanations from various Christians. Its like when you call the IRS for tax advice: 32 different IRS representatives will give you 32 different answers.

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  9. It's obvious Aaron woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. It's also evident he has no desire to actually listen to any responses.

    Typical.

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  10. Aaron,

    For starters, a beginner's knowledge of Christianity and its categories would be helpful for future discussions. If this exchange does one thing, it at least demonstrates wour rather minimal knowledge of Christianity despite your claims about being an "on fire" Christian (a claim needed to "sell" your atheism).

    Now, on to your responses:

    AK: "Then how was he ever in heaven in the first place? Are angels simply not Christians?"

    Christians, as is inherent in the name are followers of Jesus Christ. People who have placed their faith in Jesus and trust in him for salvation. Angels who never fell do not need to do this, and fallen angels will not and cannot do this. Lucifer never was a "Christian."

    Secondly, I don't know what you mean by the term "heaven." In regard to where Christians will be after the final judgment, it doesn't even exist yet. So, no, Lucifer was not "there." (You can't "be" at a place that doesn't exist, in other words.)

    AK: "I dont see how dying and going to heaven, or being created in heaven from the start has anything to do with it?"

    It's a disanalogy. You used the terms, if they "didn’t have anything to do with it," then why did you include "dies and goes to heaven?"

    AK: "Oh theres multiple heavens now? I thought Lucifer used to be very close to God, so wouldnt he be in the same heaven that God was in? Is God in the "new" heaven or the "oldschool" heaven?"

    Yes, Aaron, as virtually any systematic theology will tell you. Many times people use the term "heaven" for "where believers will reside after the consummation."

    Now, if you just mean "being close to God" (though we'd have to admit the spatial categories are metaphorical), then I fail to see how Lucifer and the departed saint are analogous. Believers will be the adopted sons of God the Father, Lucifer never was. Believers will have new natures, natures unable to sin, Lucifer never did. Believers will be much "closer" to God than any angel ever were or was.

    Again, to repeat myself:

    If the disanalogies weren't enough, Lucifer was never definitively sanctified. He was never, to use the Latin categories, non posse peccare. He was posse peccare, posse non peccare before he fell. Since Christians will be non posse peccare in heaven, they will not be able to fall. Lucifer never was (and the entire prelapsarian analogy you're using has virtually nothing in common with the eschatological state of man) unable to sin.

    What could be your response to that?

    As far as I saw, your only response was to trade on the ambiguity on the term "heaven" and then make some snide and sarcastic remarks which failed to rebut anything I (or S&S) said. Is that normally how you go about "killing" the afterlife, Aaron? Irrelevant objections and mockery?

    Now, you said in response to S&S's answer:

    "Baloney. I've heard from numerous reliable Christians that it is literally impossible to sin in heaven and as soon as you try you automatically get cast into hell."

    S&S didn't mean it was "impossible" for Christians to sin in heaven because of where you are at, it is because of who you are, a perfected human, made unable to sin.

    And no Christians would "try" to sin. It may be true as an (heretical) hypothetical that if you sinned in heaven you would go to hell, but that sounds like asking what would happen in 2+2=5. It is impossible for a perfected saint, especially on a Reformed, compatibalistic view of God's decree and man's freedom, to sin in heaven. They will necessarily fail to sin (which includes "trying").

    But since, as I pointed out, none of this is true of Lucifer, then your question has been answered. Lucifer was never (a) non posse peccare, he was (b) posse peccare, posse non peccare (before the fall). It is because Christians are (a) that they will not be able to fall once they "go to heaven." Satan was never (a), he was at best (b), and so you're using the wrong categories.

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  11. AK: "Ive also been told from numerous reliable Christians that humans, when they go to heaven, become angels, much like Lucifer was an "angel" and that you still have free will. "

    And who are these "reliable" Christians? Respected scholars in the field, I assume, or teenage Arminians Aaron bullies on message boards?

    Do you mean "become" like angels in an ontological way or in a few economical ones? Vagueness isn't conducive to dialog, Aaron.

    Do you mean "free" in a libertarian or a compatibilist sense? Your claims are so vague that all Christians could agree with it. If they mean libertarian freedom, they we never had it and never will. Again, vageness is not conducive to dialog,

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  12. Hi guys,
    the name is Randolph,
    and you boys sure are full of piss and vinegar to be so christiany.

    Where's that peace that passes understanding?

    can't you make a rebuttal without name calling?

    when I was growing up I learned that the first one that runs out of ideas is the first one to strike a blow.

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  13. oh yea,
    I forgot to mention,
    that any comments I have about this I'll make on my article.

    wow, do you really think I'm a genius?
    People have said that about me every now and then,
    but I don't know for sure because the real test is like $500.00 and I'm afraid I'll find out I'm not!

    take care.

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  14. Hi guys,
    me again,
    I can't resist, I'm a slave to my passions,

    two things.

    did God overlook the stern rebuke?

    wouldn't adam and eve have to be crazy to disobey god?

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  15. Paul challenges a response to the following:

    If the disanalogies weren't enough, Lucifer was never definitively sanctified. He was never, to use the Latin categories, non posse peccare. He was posse peccare, posse non peccare before he fell. Since Christians will be non posse peccare in heaven, they will not be able to fall. Lucifer never was (and the entire prelapsarian analogy you're using has virtually nothing in common with the eschatological state of man) unable to sin.

    Yet the "disanalogy" is in fact a valid analogy. Per Paul (Manata), Lucifer's situation was indeed analogous to Adam and Eve's -- they were all posse peccare et posse non peccare prior to their respective "falls".

    Nevermind the fact that the assertion that humanity will be restored (which is not the right word -- corrected would be more appropriate) to non posse peccare is unfounded. Augustine said it, and many since have argued it, but nowhere is it found in scripture.

    Indeed, we must draw from inference the fact that humanity is posse peccare (self-evident if they in fact sinned), but it is not so easy to argue that they were posse non peccare -- able to not-sin. From the text, it seems instead that sinning was inevitable -- that is, non posse non peccare.

    None of this, however, detracts from the fact that either Adam, Eve, or god was incompetent, based on the Genesis 2-3 account.

    Eve was not present when the decree (not to eat of the TKGE) was given, so she was told directly or indirectly afterward. Who was available to tell her?

    1. She may have been told by god, either directly (as with Adam), or indirectly (as with imbued knowledge of the decree).

    2. She may have been told by Adam directly.

    3. She may have been told by the serpent.

    Since Genesis 3:1 details the serpent asking of Eve what the decree was, we can rule him out. Since god is unlikely to have provided Eve an inaccurate rendering of the decree, we can rule him out for being incompetent (based on this subject, anyway).

    Which leaves Adam or Eve. If Adam mis-stated the decree, then he is either incompetent or a liar. Since we are led to believe that no human sin took place prior to Eve's bit, however, we must conclude that he has not lied, per se. If Adam correctly stated the decree, then Eve is incompetent for having mis-stated it to the serpent.

    Either way, one of them, at the least, is incompetent.


    Incidentally, Lucifer is also incompetent, if we are to believe that he continues to wage a war he cannot win. Hell, most humans find George W. Bush to be incompetent, and even he recognizes that his personal vendetta is a losing effort.

    Lucifer, we are told, is the highest of the heavenly host, yet so stupid as to defy his creator, who he has observed creating (a feat of which he himself is incapable). Likewise, after his initial sin, we are led to believe that he continues to sin, and worse, to convince others to sin.

    What motive could he possibly have?

    To shamelessly steal from C.S. Lewis, he is either an idiot, insane, or an idealist.

    Even if he does not qualify for redemption (a curious extension of doctrine in and of itself), wouldn't he recognize that his best shot at such would be to stop being a dick? If he were simply to 'quit his job', wouldn't that be a tremendous improvement? What if he chose to actively encourage others to follow god?

    No, he still may not be redeemable, but he would show himself to be capable of repentance.

    I digress.

    Per the Genesis 2-3 account, Adam and/or Eve is incompetent. Period.

    --
    Stan

    ReplyDelete