Interesting points, I see. I will take up a few:

1] M, 40: God was able to do what he has done because God spent a lot of time and made alot of effort. What you guys are saying is that God didn’t have to make any effort.

You are thinking in terms of time; we are thinking in terms of an eternal, necessary order that undergirds that contingent domain we call space-time, in which matter-energy undertakes interesting configurations that often reflect information impressed on it.

2] logically there was a time when God created all things.

yes, a the initial singularity: Hen harche hen ho Logos . . . “ etc, Jn 1:1 cf Gen 1:1 etc: NB what LOGOS means, reason himself inter alia.

There is no properly logical reference to time before the singularity at which the space-time order was created; only to an underlying necessary eternal order in God, “in whom we live and move and have our being.” Cf. here my remarks and link on the related Euthryphro dilemma and why it fails.

The issue is not in logic but the concepts, axioms and claimed facts that feed into the logic, in short, cf. my north pole and shamrock principle example.

3] God, Islamic views and design

I am noting here that design does not necessarily entail a temporal process once we address the sort of being the God of classic Western theism, is. [And, Islamic theology is (as the current pope pointed out, only to be drowned out by the rage) principally volitional rather than rational in its conception of God – one of the key differences between the God of the Bible and the Quran. So the attempted comparison breaks down into a distraction.]

4] God was able to have knowledge about everything without a competent cause of that knowledge.

God is the FIRST cause, a necessary being. His knowledge is original not derivative or caused. Above I simply pointed that having created agents and a cosmos he is, in the Judaeo-Christian outlook, immediately aware of the full gamut of its events in an eternally present reality of infinite awareness. Though that is strange to us, it is neither illogical nor more broadly unreasonable.

5] JS, 39:Perhaps the expressed opinion of Dawkins, Hitchens, et. al., ad nauseam, makes sense: that if a theist is willing to be irrational about what’s most important to her — namely her faith in God — there is a clear-and-present danger of her becoming irrational about much else besides (especially things that are really important, like politics for instance).

You raise an important caution here. But in fact some theists ARE irrational, just as some materialists are, for that matter. To be human is to –- at our best — struggle to be reasonable, wise and just . . .

6] BA, 41: Though God always knew how to “build” a universe under the constraints in which we live, it still took time, as we are aware of it, to build a universe under these constraints. You may well ask why didn’t He do it instantaneously, But in God’s eyes time is a completely different thing altogether, than it is to us

This holds on whatever view we have of origins, including YEC – 6 days is a span of time. So, if for his own good reasons he chose to act in and even enter into time once he has brought time into being, that is not unreasonable.

But, there lurks many a mystery here!

GEM of TKI

I suggest BA is right: you are constraining your view of God by thinking in human terms overmuch.

I disagree. I am thinking in logical terms.

We learn physics etc, God created them

That is exactly my point. Physics hasn’t been around forever. God had to create physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, etc. Therefore there was a time before those things existed because there was a time when God designed them and created them. Also there was a time before God designed them. Before those things were created by God they did not exist. Since most theistic philosophy proposes that God is the creator of all things then logically there was a time when God created all things. What I am saying is that God was able to do what he has done because God spent a lot of time and made alot of effort. What you guys are saying is that God didn’t have to make any effort.

This conversation reminds me of an Islamic anti-evolution author I have read. He has written many books and he has a bunch of websites all of which are pretty good at exposing the countless holes and nonsense in evolutionary theory. But guess what? He is passionately anti intelligent design! The reason he gives is that he believes God didn’t have to design anything. In his belief system God simply wills things into existence and then things magically become manifest without effort. He claims that intelligent design makes God out to be the same thing which you guys claim I am doing i.e. making God out to be not omniscient. Essentially you and he have the same ideology. You believe God created everything but you don’t believe God needed to make much or any effort. He may take it a bit furthur then you guys but the ideology is the same i.e. God is a magical entity. By magical I mean the use of magic like a genie uses magic. Magic in this sense is an effect without competent cause.

“Evolution can be thought of as sort of a magical religion. Magic is simply an effect without a cause, or at least a competent cause. ‘Chance,’ ‘time,’ and ‘nature,’ are the small gods enshrined at evolutionary temples. Yet these gods cannot explain the origin of life. These gods are impotent. Thus, evolution is left without competent cause and is, therefore, only a magical explanation for the existence of life…”
Dr. Randy L. Wysong, instructor of human anatomy and physiology, The Creation-
Evolution Controversy, pg. 418.

What you guys believe is the same thing. God was able to have knowledge about everything without a competent cause of that knowledge.

Imagine if you spent a lot of time and effort educating yourself with the end result of you building some magnificent invention which cured all disease, but instead of people acknowledging your hard labor at becoming educated and the sacrifice you made in investing a huge amount of your time and energy in your work, instead everyone simply says it was really no big deal for you. There you are having spent countless years in college, medical school, grad school, research labs, and then after spending countless hours working day and night you create the most wonderful thing, but no one believes that you made much if any effort at all.

So there God is, he has made an incredible effort, it took him a very long time, longer then we can imagine, he had no help from anyone, what was the end result? Life, the universe, and everything!

Then here we are enjoying the fruits of God’s labor but denying that God really had to make much if any effort at all. He just snapped his fingers and voila! here we are.

Right. “The fallacy of the false dilemma” is a more descriptive name than “the fallacy of the excluded middle,” since what it excludes (as in the case of your “indestructibly complex” being) isn’t necessarily interposed. Good to know. Thank you.

My (self-taught) expertise is in linguistics and figures of speech, not in philosophy or even theology, so forgive me if I get in over my head here. But as a Bible-believing Christian (hide the sharp objects!), I am wont to point out — what I consider to be — the hubris that so often accompanies well-meaning Christian apologetics.

If you would indulge me the courtesy of utilizing one of your above statements as a for-instance:

I am happy to concede the validity of your point about the irrationality of what you call “selective hyper-skepticism”, when you argue that “one has a plain epistemic duty to consider fairly live option candidates for ‘best current explanation,’ whether or no some future explanation may change the verdict.” However, there is one major limitation of this line of thinking: A theist wishing to find a rational ground for her faith in God (and not all theists do) would want an argument purporting to show something stronger: that God is the best possible rational explanation of the world.

So you’re saying that there are a lot of theists out there who don’t mind being irrational? Perhaps the expressed opinion of Dawkins, Hitchens, et. al., ad nauseam, makes sense: that if a theist is willing to be irrational about what’s most important to her — namely her faith in God — there is a clear-and-present danger of her becoming irrational about much else besides (especially things that are really important, like politics for instance).

The rational grounds that I have for my faith in God (in Christ Jesus) consists of much more than merely being able to demonstrate that God is the best possible rational explanation for the existence of the world. (As much trouble as we’re having formulating it in bullet-proof terms logically, Romans 1:20 says that everybody already knows the truth anyway; hence cometh the acerbic quality of the denials.)

Indulge me again to point out something from your writings. In your dissertation you state:

…we should not interpret an organism’s behavior as a manifestation of underlying mental states unless doing so enables us to make better scientific predictions about its behavior and/or explain its behavior more fully.

Right. Since it is impossible to crawl into any other being’s mind (including God’s), the more predictive and comprehensive the scientific interpretations, the more likely they line up with reality. The principle that you’re applying is, of course, foundational not just to science but to rationality itself.

Regarding the rationality of faith: many years ago, I read Christ promise his apostles in Acts 1:4-5…

And being assembled together with them, commanded them that they should not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father, which, saith he, ye have heard of me. For John truly baptized with water; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days hence.

…and I read about the apostles receiving the promise in Acts 2:1-4…

And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

…and I read about Peter testifying that same day in Acts 2:38-39…

Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call.

And for no rationally-explicable reason (being spared any two-bit psychology), wanting to be counted among the called, I believed and was baptised.

What rational grounds do I have to claim that my repentance and remission of sins are real? On the predictive grounds laid out by Peter, “ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit,” proven when I spoke in tongues just like the apostles did on the day of Pentecost when they received. And on the grounds that to this day I can pray in tongues at will. And on the grounds I have since seen and helped scores of others likewise receive the Holy Spirit — most recently my four-year-old granddaughter.

The key difference between how rationality applies to science versus how it applies to faith is this: Science has to see before it can believe. Faith must believe first, then it sees (and there are hundreds of promises in the Bible that God through Christ Jesus stands ready to prove in addition to the one about which Peter testified). But this in no way excludes believers from all the rational grounds we need to live a life of faith.

I have just had to do a blog post on Dean at the Door (of Jamaica), so pardon my being a bit brief on points that deserve elaboration:

1] God, fruitflies and consciousness:

Fruit flies show signs of responsiveness, there is no sign that such have the sort of intellectual capacity that “consciousness” in the context of inrelligent — as opposed to instinctual — agents is about.

And God, if he is the necessary being behind the cosmos, would have to be very very intelligent and powerful. Well beyond human capacity. As timeless and present everywhere, every-when, such a being would be aware and able to integrate that awareness timelessly.

In short, the root issue is a difference in conceptions of a cosmogenetic intelligent agent, and I suggest your framework needs some adjustment in light of the reasonable requisites of such an agent.

2] when it comes to God there had to be a stage where the knowledge on how to communicate and how to use his potential was acquired. He would have needed to become self taught in language, geometry, physics, mathematics etc. None of these disciplines can be understood at an intellectual level without a stage of acquistion of that knowledge

I suggest BA is right: you are constraining your view of God by thinking in human terms overmuch. We learn physics etc, God created them, if he is the cosmogenetic agent. Big difference.

(Cf here the classic Christian answer to Euthryphro’s dilemma on goodness and God; which is still trotted out as of all things a disproof that the God of the Bible and derivative Orthodox theology exists! IMHCO, on long reflection on many similar matters, the contradictions and problems we perceive lie in our conceptions and the difficulties they throw up, not in the classic vision of God. Cf, e.g., my discussion on Patrick’s Shamrock principle. I find that by way of analogy we usually don’t spot how one can stand at one point on the Earth’s surface and be due N of London, Jerusalem and Los Angeles, say. But the issue here is to see that “North” in the context of the Earth is a three-dimensional issue, not a 2-dimensional one, so once we see that we stand at the N pole and the apparent contradiction vanishes.)

GEM of TKI

I will just have to disagree that God’s omniscience is changed by God needing to have gained knowledge about himself and his potential at some point in order for him to develop knowledge on how to build universes. For me God is omniscient because he exists and is fully conscious of everything everywhere and that everything is understood by him either because he created it or he has come to understand it, but that doesn’t automatically force us to conclude that God has always been in full knowledge of everything.

Whatever God has created he didn’t have full knowledge of those things until he conceived of them, planned them, and figured out how to build them, because they didn’t exist before then even in a conceptual mode. In the same sense just because God is omniscient doesn’t mean he knows everything that can be known, if he hasn’t conceived of something yet, then he won’t know about it until he does conceive of it. Before God designed human forms there had to be a designing phase. Before the designing phase there had to be a conceptual stage. Before the conceptual stage God didn’t know about human forms because they hadn’t been conceived of by God. Does that take away from God’s omniscience? No. It just means that whatever Good knows he had to learn.

You ask where is the reasoning circular? To this I answer,
You presuppose an absence of knowledge on God’s part and seek to justify this absence by human experience. Maybe circular reasoning is not the right term, but I know it is faulty reasoning for you cannot justify your assertion of God’s character from a limited human perspective of gaining knowledge. For all we know, from our present limited perspective, knowledge is not a thing that has to be learned, as is commonly presupposed by us, but is actually “alive” “living” “infinite” which is actually a integral part of who God really is. So the character you would seek to limit in classical Theism, to validate your assertion, would be His omniscience,,,, You would seek to limit His character of being infinite and perfect in knowledge by your assertion .

Your assertion that God did not know about chemistry is a circular reasoning.

I don’t see the circular reasoning, can you explain your thinking on this?

You also wrote:

To fit your interpretation of God into the scheme of classical Theism you would have to limit one of God’s attributes. Classical Theism list the attributes of God as 1. Omniscience 2. Omnipresence 3. Omnipotent 4. Eternal.

Which of the attributes have I denied? I agree with all 4. What I add is that God had to develop his intellect and knowledge.

You also wrote:

I would like to point out that many after-life experiencers say that they knew all the answers to all the knowledge they ever wondered about when they were in the presence of the “Being of Light”.

Whatever they thought they knew doesn’t change God’s history. Any real knowledge or real illumination they feel they received had to be given to them by God. But God had no one to give him knowledge, he had to acquire that without aid from any other intelligence because he was the first intelligence.

You also wrote:

You presuppose that if God had known about chemistry He would have certainly expressed this universe before now. Yet this universe is a entropy limited universe that is not eternal in its nature. This type of universe could have been expressed an infinity of times before now that we are not aware of.

I disagree with the infinity part. I agree that it is possible that God has created many universes many manytimes, but I have to disagree with the idea that there was no beginning where God had to figure out how to create a universe for the first time.

You also wrote:

Most of all it seems to me that you are trying to project human limitations onto God who is eternal in nature.

I agree that God is essentially eternal in nature. But being eternal doesn’t mean that God can do what is impossible to be done. It is not a human limitation alone that knowledge needs to be acquired, it is simply the nature of knowledge. For example; if we agree that God created human life forms, then in order for God to be able to do that he would need to know how to do that. The idea that God is like a magical genie who can snap his fingers and things get done without effort, is without merit. In order for God to build human bodies or any life forms, first he would have needed to figure out how to do that. That would have required a period of time where the designs were thought up, designed, and then built. There had to be a knowledge acquisition phase where God figured out how to build life forms because life forms are extremely complex designs. It is not taking away from God to say that God cannot do what is impossible to do e.g. design and build life forms without figuring out how to do that first.

You also wrote:

I’ll admit it is very hard to understand God but I would be very careful before seeking to limit His attributes as given by classical Theism.

I don’t limit his attributes, rather I think I clarify them. There is an old metaphorical example given about how people progress in their understanding of God:

If you are at sea on a boat and you are approaching a mountainous island from a great distance at first the island will seem barely distinguishable from a cloud.

From a great distance our understanding of God is very hazy and not well formed.

As the boat gets closer to the island you can see that the mountain on the island has a shape which makes it quite distinguished from the clouds. Although it is still very hard to see.

As one gets closer to God his conception about God becomes less hazy.

As the boat gets closer you can clearly see the island and mountain, but no details about what is on the island can be seen.

As you progress in your understanding of God a clearer vision of what God is occurs.

Eventually the boat gets so close that you can see trees and houses.

As you get closer to God your understanding of God progresses until you can see many details which were not seen previously.

Then the boat docks and you can get out and meet the people on the island and see everything and experience everything first hand.

Eventually as we get closer to God we will actually meet God and get to know god first hand.

So when someone first learns about God his conception is usually very hazy. He may see God as some mysterious force or person who magically runs the universe. As the person gets closer and closer while progressing in his understanding of God his conception of God becomes less and less fuzzy and more and more realistic. God becomes seen as a conscious person who is intimately involved with the design and plan of the running of the universe. As you get closer still an even more clear picture begins to emerge. God is seen as also being responsible for the design and creation of all life and that he is present everywhere and intimately involved with the direction of everyone’s life. As one progresses and gets even closer to God he sees that God is not only present everywhere and directing the universe and everyone’s life, but that God is actually a part of and within his own consciousness. He learns that by looking within his own consciousness that there he can actually meet God directly, one to one.

So as we progress in our understanding of God our conception of God will become less and less hazy, our conception will become more clear and distinct until we can actually relate directly to God due to having acquired full knowledge on who and what God is and how he is relevant in our lives and our world.

5] Mentok: no entity can be educated without first being educated.

kairosfocus: But this rather begs the question when dealing with a necessary being who may well be all-knowing through inter alia being consciously aware at each time and place in the cosmos in a vasrt eternal present. We are temporally bound, God, may well not be.

There is a big difference between being consciously aware and having the knowledge of and an advanced intellectual understanding of what you are aware of. A fly is consciously aware of you trying to swat him away, but the fly knows nothing about what you are nor his place in the universe nor geometry, physics, mathematics, etc. Similarly when it comes to God there had to be a stage where the knowledge on how to communicate and how to use his potential was acquired. He would have needed to become self taught in language, geometry, physics, mathematics etc. None of these disciplines can be understood at an intellectual level without a stage of acquistion of that knowledge. While I agree that God is inherently conscious of everything because of his essential nature, still there had to be a stage in God’s existence where it was all incomprehensible to his mind. Gradually over a long period of time God’s mind developed more and more through various stages of knowledge acquistion beginning with the ability to communicate with himself through a language of some type. Even though God’s consciousness was/is aware of everything due to it’s nature and presence everywhere, still God had to figure out what he was and what he could do.