Why Christianity is so Persistant

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i just don't get it
it's all about me
it's all about you... it's personal
but i just don't get it. and i never have. i have tried.
i have gone and still don't get it.
i went to a catholic church but i had never been baptized
i was the protestant kid , who couldn't receive or confess
i sat in the pew alone and stared at the cross
and i wondered

Tim_p I have to agree with Bec that, in a strictly deterministic universe then the omnipotent god that created it and human beings must bear the ultimate responsibility for all decisions made by us. There would be no free will, since god set the initial conditions and created the mind that was to make the decision based on those circumstances. The result would be invitable, at least to god. I can see no room for free will there.

However, I believe that you are wrong to think that just because cause and effect is part of how the universe works, it is the only way that things work. There can be effects that are not caused in a strictly deterministic sense. We are talking about emergent properties.

For example, the mind, consciousness, our psychology is clearly caused by the functioning of our brain, but this does not mean that psychology is completely reducible to physiology, brain chemistry, the firing of certain neurons. Consciousness/psychology is a property which, once it has emerged, is semi autonomous, with its own rules, and can kick back, causing brain states/chemistry to alter. It is a feedback mechanism. One can indeed change ones mind, and this is not predictible or determined.

Even purely physical events can be probabalistic or chance events by their nature, not because we don't know enough about initial conditions or causes. Science has had to come to terms with that when dealing with complexity.

However, I agree with you that an omnipotent god can have it any which way it likes. Such a being could set up a universe which does not run along strictly deterministic lines, and still know exactly what will happen because it (god) stands outside that system. Omnipotence cannot be bound by logic, and we cannot know how or why it is able to do this, since it is the source of everything.

Just to make myself clear, I do not believe in an omnipotent god, or an god necessarily, but I agree that omnipotence must mean that it could allow free will and still be all knowing. I do think that you need to give up your idea of absolute determinism, however.

Thinking about Free Will and an all knowing God...I think it could be possible to have both. Here are a few examples I thought about concerning freewill and an All Knowing Force.

Example 1; A scientist and a laboratory mouse in a maze.


The scientist created the maze and knows which way the mouse needs to go to find the cheese. The mouse has the free will to choose the path to the cheese. Choosing the wrong path, the scientist realizes that the mouse has chose a path that will lead to a dead end, but continues the experiment. After a while the mouse either finds the correct path to the cheese or gives up trying.


Example 2; The ChessMaster and the apt pupil.

The ChessMaster is teaching the pupil the correct way to play chess. The pupil makes a move thinking that his path will take him eventually to a win. The ChessMaster, having played many many times knows exactly where this move will take the young pupil and the Master also knows that if the game is played one way, it can lead to the pupil's demise or another way can lead to a win. It is the pupil's choice & how he wishes to play the game.

Example 3; The Gamer and the Game Creator.

The Game Creator knows how he has designed the Video Game. The Gamer has many choices on how to play the game all of which the Master Designer has programmed into the game. It is the choice of the Gamer to decide how he/she will play the game and what points, tools, and levels they will go to. but the Game's Creator knows each level (as he/she designed it) knows what tools can be had and therefore also knows what the outcome will be for each path taken.

I don't think that really explains anything about the persistance of Christianity at all.

Fortunately feedback is predictable, with limitations on the complexity that can be handled by humans.



The only reason that (small scale) physical events are probabalistic is because the initial conditions cannot be known (even by the particles themselves) due to uncertainty. If one could obtain the initial conditions, as an omniscient god could, one could with inifinite computing ability predict future conditions with absolute certainty.

There are a number of reasons why I believe that Christianity/Messianic Judaism persists.

1. Christianity/Messianic Judaism persists because they both rest on true and objective historical events that occurred in the past--the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ/Yeshua Ha-Mashiach. These events had numerous proven witnesses, both inside and outside the Bible (Josephus, Suetonius, Tacitus). The Bible says at one point that about 500 people at one time saw the resurrected Christ/Messiah with the nail-pierced hands and feet. The question is--and it is up to you--did they all actually see the resurrected Christ/Messiah, or were they just hallucinating?

2. In the Gospel account when Peter confessed that Jesus/Yeshua was the Messiah, Jesus told Peter, "Upon this rock (meaning the confession of faith in Jesus as Messiah), I shall build my church (ekklesia in Greek), and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

3. Millions of people have given their lives both in the past and in the present for their belief in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. People are still suffering to this day for this belief. This indicates that people are willing to suffer and die for what they believe was something that took place in history.

For committed Christians and Messianic Jews, the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ are true events that are rooted in history. This is why Christianity/Messianic Judaism persists.

Also I think the fact that Europe spread its thoughts and ideas thoughout the world over the last 5 centries also contibutes a lot too converting people was one of ther aims. Now America is in on it too spread the word they say sending missionaries all over the globe to "help" people but with strings attached.

Tim_p wrote:

Tim, I really think you are confusing your faith position with your science position here. If the inititial conditions of a quantum particles cannot be known, then it is unscientific to assume that they are not probabalistic by nature. You simply cannot know one way or the other.

You seem to be equating an omnipotent god with a super computer, yet in an earlier post you were aware that such a computer could not make absolute predictions from within the system, because it would have to predict its own future state before the fact.

Why should someone believe in Christianity over:
Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Taoism, Budhism...?

I think there is a possibility that they are all true.

This is true. Personally, I agree more with the basic beliefs of Judiasm, and that's the reason why I ended up accepting it. Some of there are as follows.

Afterlife:
Simply put, we don't know for sure. If there is Heaven or Hell, no one ever came back and described it. The Old Testament/Torah makes vague references to the Sheol, which is "a place where nothing happens". It is this Sheol that probably was reinterpreted by the church as Hell.

Fee will/Predestination:
Judiasm believes that people are responsible for their own actions. This is evident from the numerous rituals tha Jews follow. The religions states that it's more important to life sin-free as an end in itself, rather than for the rewards in the afterlife.

Missionaries:
Judaism never had any since the religion was founded. However, synagogues welcome new converts. This reason is that the only motivation to accept a religion should be becaue you truly want to, not because someone convinced you to, or only to avoid going to hell.

For the records, I do NOT mean in any way that Judaism is superior to any other religion. I just meant to point out the unique approach Judaism takes in these issues.

Yes, as stated my argument does require a truly omniscient God, such as God can only exist if it is outside the physical universe.

If you remove God from my argument it still works in a weaker form. One does what one wishes to do, even under coercion one is still acting by free will, just because one doesn't like one's options does not mean one's choices are not their own. Inside the limits of physics the question of predestination is irrelevant, what will happen will happen whether or not it can be predicted, the possibility of different futures is meaningless as only one will occur.

Hmm. So you're saying that if a person chooses to live a life of sin and refuses to ask for forgiveness and is therefore condemned to hell, then that's because God gave them the ability to make decisions but then constructed a set of circumstances in which they could make no other choices other than the ones they made. After all, if everyone follows his plans by their own free will, then God *plans* for those people to go to hell since they are simply following his plan.

Being offered a chance to make a decision when there is only one possible choice is not an example of free will.

I can't imagine why anyone would want to join a religion where a certain percentage of people are condemned to hell because of devine plans.



I'll tell you why *I* think Christianity has been around for such a long time:

We even had a Member of Parliament in Canada argue that religion is hereditary since kids get it from their parents (as opposed to sexual orientation, which the Member said was a matter of choice).

That is a gross misinterpretation of my argument, it is not that only one choice is available, it is that each person's unique mind will only decide on one course of action for each circumstance and an omniscient God, knowing each person's unique mind and each unique circumstance, could predict a person's actions perfectly.

Edited for a mild grammatical error caused by a typo.

Last edited by Tim_p on 28 Feb 2006, 2:26 am, edited 2 times in total.

Oh, let's see here. Remember the crusades, the witch trials, the Spanish inquisition, and Hernando Cortez? I think the reason Christianity is so popular today is that there was a time when anyone who opposed it got slaughtered.

Excuse me for taking things literally, but your clarification seems to support my point. If the omniscient God can predict the choices a person would make and designs a reality in which those choices will lead straight to hell, then how fair is it to the person who spends eternity in hell because they made the choices God expected them to make? If the choices are predictable and the situation is designed with those predictions in mind, then where is the "free will"? That's like the situation the accused witches found themselves in, where they were tossed in a lake and either drowned (in which case they were not witches) or they didn't drown, in which case they were witches and therefore burned at the stake. There can be no free will if there is only one outcome.

I Myself was born a Roman Catholic but I am not anymore. I though have had limited contact with other religions. Though I have chosen to believe in what I want to believe not because of some hereditary values in the end. I have done this from choice alone nothing else. To Me it is also not some Shared Psychotic Disorder either for every person I have talked to has their own personal beliefs of what they believe in and how the believe them. That is called being a Individual in the end.