Followed by scores of comments in which God’s nature is debated according to the ontological categories of post-Enlightenment philosophy: the price of a paperback copy of Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.

Irony so ironic that it’s like a snake swallowing its own tail: utterly priceless.

The only germane point is that whatever one’s theology is, it is dangerously unstable if it entails logical contradictions. It is not like one can pick any semantics that are convenient and expect some sort of rational theology to pop out. Would that were the case…

That means the issue is far more closed for Mormonism that it is for a world where (say) God may or may not exist, where eternal recurrence is unobjectionable, where repentance isn’t the primary focus, where God if he exists may not have a purpose or mission, where the conflict between good and evil may be purely subjective, where sin may be nothing more than a matter of genetics, and so on.

Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Why? Can determinism ever answer any why question? Why do why need to repent? God said so. Why did he say so? Because there was never any possibility for him to say otherwise. Why did Adam sin? Bad genetics. Why did Adam have bad genetics? Cosmic radiation. Why did God punish Adam for bad genetics? There was no other alternative. It was in God’s nature to punish Adam for bad genetics. What determined God’s nature? Fate. Anything Fate isn’t responsible for? No. Why?

I recognize not everyone finds Fischer persuasive. My point isn’t whether one agrees with Fischer just that many do and that this is very much an open problem in philosophy. The fact that it is such an open philosophical issue for the experts ought inform how we proceed in theological disagreements. That is things aren’t as obvious or resolved as some claim.

It’s fine to argue the issue. And clearly I’ve done that over the years. But when we move from that into portraying it as a resolved issue or judging those who disagree then I think we’ve crossed a significant line.

If God (generally speaking) has compatibilist free will, we can be sure that (for example) everything he has ever done is ultimately traceable to a metaphysical accident. It is nothing more than a substitution of the Calvinist doctrine of God’s Eternal Decree with the doctrine of Fate’s Eternal Decree, where Fate doesn’t even have the benefit of personality.

I don’t think Fischer’s arguments, by the way, are persuasive – does a circuit breaker demonstrate moral responsibility simply because it triggers when the electrical current flowing through it is too high, thereby preventing a house with small children inside from burning to the ground? What if it doesn’t trigger?

It’s actually a strong argument although I don’t think it’s sufficiently strong to render competing views unreasonable. For instance there are many very smart philosophers who believe one can be responsible yet not free in the sense Blake and Geoff use the terms. (I gave some links at NCT for those interested) Secondly there’s no reason to assume that the words used in the scriptures must be absolutely bound by the way we use the terms. Rather it is sufficient for them to be “close enough” to get God’s point across – which is rarely about the ontology of time. We also have passages such as D&C 19 where terms where a traditional sense, such as “endless punishment”, don’t mean what we thought.

So I’m very skeptical of pushing a semantic argument into a claim for a certain way of reading a word in scripture. As I said the argument to responsibility is stronger but I don’t think it ultimately works simply because I don’t think most people would be upset if we found out punishment or reward were more complex than it first appeared or if responsibility meant something quite similar but not exactly the same as our intuitions tend to portray.

None of this is to address the larger issue of humility and arrogance. As I’ve said I think it crucial to be humble in our reasoning but always look to understand the reasons we are reasoning with.

Mark, I’m trying to be fairly general so there can be lots of various ways to instantiate the other choices. One obvious example can be found amongst several multiverse postulates in physics. Each universe is an independent block of space/time. So “until” a new block is formed due to sufficiently flat spacetime in an other universe it doesn’t exist. So instead of moments you have blocks of universes. I’m not saying that’s right, mind you, just that it is one example that would fit that alternative. Obviously some block universe theories would be incompatible.

Bookslinger, what Einstein’s theories are more general than Newton’s one should note that for the range of phenomena examined until just a few decades prior to Einstein Newton’s theories fit. And still fit. So one has to be very careful how one views this progression of science. One can’t say that because Einstein partially supplanted Newton that we can simply discount science. (Not that you are saying that, but it is a very common approach among say Evangelical fundamentalists)

Once again no scientist is saying we know everything nor that we know all phenomena. What scientists will say is that there are some things we know very well and that if you are going to overturn them you ought have a lot of evidence. When someone pits a naive reading with little investigation against established knowledge with considerable evidence it is simply deceptive to raise the mystery cry and say reasons don’t matter. My point is simply that one ought investigate how one reads and look at the evidence for a particular reading. What I see all too often is a willingness to simply discount what has reasons without recognizing that how we read is based upon readings. I’m certainly not portraying science as infallible. Just that most critiques of science are based on very poor reasoning.

Doug, the King Follet Discourse in most readings postulates an endless regress of Fathers. There never was a person without a father. That logically demands that there be an actual infinity of gods going into an infinite past. There was no absolute beginnings. Just beginnings to various stages of existence. This was a pretty prominent part of Joseph Smith’s Nauvoo theology and was held very prominent through the 19th century and through most of the 20th.

Of course to say something is infinite is not to say it is boundless. An obvious example is the set of odd integers versus the set of even integers. There are clear bounds on each but both are infinite.

Regarding foreknowledge, that debate is primarily a semantic one. That is what is the meaning of the word “free.” The condition for foreknowledge is simply that if I know at t1 what is true at t2 in the future then the very meaning of truth entails that the event at t2 is fixed at t1. One problem though is that most lay people who look at that confuse the truth conditions with additional metaphysical implications like fatalism (what I do doesn’t matter) and that’s simply false. I put some links on this over at NCT which I think pose problems for those appealing to human intuitions on the matter. More importantly I tried to emphasize that the matter is ultimately a semantic issue of the words “free” and “responsibility.” Those, like Geoff over there, who demand an absolute incompatibility between foreknowledge and freedom or responsibility are really making a claim about what freedom and responsibility mean as words.

Sadly the fact that this is all a semantic debate is all too often missed in these debates.