Ep. 304 An Interdisciplinary Commentary on the Gospel Accounts of Jesus Christ: Installment 1, Introduction
Bob launches a new miniseries, and starts by summarizing his chapter for a Festschrift in honor of Walter Block.
Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest:
- [As of release, no information was available on the actual collection in honor of Walter. RPM will update when available.]
- Callahan and Murphy’s critique of Hans Hoppe’s argumentation ethics.
- Help support the Bob Murphy Show.
About the author, Robert
Christian and economist, Chief Economist at infineo, and Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute.
Hey Bob, your friendly atheist listener here again. I think you are making a very serious category error with your comic strip and Star Wars analogies. The issue is not a matter of “did somebody else create the universe in which we find ourselves?” While such a being would certainly seem godlike to us, it is fundamentally not the god that Christians insist on. You don’t merely say God is omnipotent with respect to our universe. You say God is omnipotent. When we consider a comic book writer god, or a computer programmer god, such a being still suffers from Mises’ need to act, just in his own separate timeline. These beings are all still quite imperfect.
The Star Wars analogy is also not very satisfying. Sure, George Lucas loves Anakin and puts him through suffering only to save him, but what about Palpatine? Palpatine has no salvation. What about random storm troopers blown to bits with the Death Star? Lucas doesn’t even bother to give these guys names, let alone salvation.
You make some valid points.
A better analogy would be a flight from SFO to JFK. As an individual, you have the choice to get on the plane. Yet the plane is going to leave with or without you. The plane is predestined to make that trip.
Likewise, the destination of sinners is predetermined. What we individually choose to do with the lifeline we’ve been given, God coming and dying for our sins, is our own prerogative.
Additionally, Israel is predestined to inherit certain things, and the New Testament church is predestined to inherit certain things, as part of God’s divine plan. How believers choose to be a part of those covenants (or not) is also our individual prerogative.
When dealing with Biblical verses, oftentimes readers do not take the time to delineate what the context is regarding(i.e. salvation, covenants, political events) and just lump them all together.
God’s knowledge of how individuals will choose is no more a conflict of free will than you watching a movie again and knowing how the plot unfolds. It was Jesus (God in the flesh) who stood outside of Jerusalem and said he would have protected them, but they didn’t want it, foretelling the fall of Jerusalem and the temple after his crucifixion.
I’m not sure how you think any of this supports you. You are simply asserting the truth of your own beliefs, not providing evidence for them or reasons to believe them.
“The Bible says…” is not a persuasive argument for anything.
Upon my initial hearing, I’m going to have to listen to this at least one more time to ensure that I understand it in the way you meant. In my current state of understanding, you (Bob) are showing how there is an equivocal way to look upon these situations, depending upon your perspective. To some people, that may not be “satisfying” in the way we want it to be; it may not resolve the quest for a “single” answer that explains it. Yet if the kind of quantum uncertainty that Bob describes is indeed fundamental to this universe, perhaps we need to accept that equivocal understanding/perception instead of demanding that a “single” answer should apply at all times and in all circumstances. I currently think that that’s the upshot that Bob is trying to convey. Or else I’m totally wrong here!
Certainly, I’ll focus solely on correcting the grammar in your original message:
Hey Bob, Happy New Year.
Is it me, or is Mises not trying to refute God, but just merely saying we cannot conceive an omnipotent being with praxeology as “Action is a display of potency and control that are limited. It is a manifestation of man who is restrained by the circumscribed powers of his mind”? You gave the author analogy once before; it’s like Harry Potter (I comment here because that was a very old episode), but we clearly know authors have means and it’s their way to satisfy the means.
If we want to be uniform, we can say God has means like Rowling having something in mind; that’s why the universe was created at a certain time. But we, as characters of the books, do not know it. Or think of Avicenna, who wanted proof of God and imagined the universe is eternal, because he said for God to create the universe at a certain time, something must have changed, but God is perfect and unchanging, so the universe always existed.
what I want to somethings are kind of understandable but not real like infinity others likes Quantum Level are real but not understandable, i am not knowledgeable at its physics so it might be theory,
Ps: also i struggled with the concept why God created universe when he does not benefit anything from it is something i am trying to understand from my teens
yes i use chatgpt for proofread
Great warm up episode. I look forward to the rest of them. I love mini-series’ like these to get deep into a topic.
Thanks Max.
Your comic analogy reminds me of Lewis’ Miracles, ch. 2, starting at paragraph 12