That's not clear. It's ambiguous whether these events in Genesis 3:6 are being recounted in strict chronological order.
Hmmm. It seems to depend on the translation; some translations are ambiguous about the chronology, and some are not. I have no idea how clear the chronology in the original Hebrew was.
Though this translation suggests that the interval between the two acts implied in the original was very short - perhaps in the range of seconds.
This one's interesting for the footnotes
But even if we grant the premise that Eve ate first, by what standard do you classify Eve's tempting of Adam to be evil? The only way you can get there is by assuming God to be good, but are we really justified in making such an assumption?
The tree apparently granted "knowledge of good and evil". So, if it was evil, Eve would have known, as she had that knowledge.
And then, after eating, Adam and Eve hid. If they had thought God evil, I would expect them to have hidden from fear of Him - yet they hid from fear of their own nakedness, implying that they saw fault in their own actions and wanted to avoid the consequences thereof.
Under interrogation, they shifted the blame instead of grovelling for mercy - again, this seems more the act of a person who knows they have done wrong than that of someone fearing an external evil.
...admittedly, it's a thin thread.
(Genesis doesn't actually say explicitly that being naked is bad, but it's strongly implied)
Interestingly, it implies that it's not being naked that is bad, but knowingly being naked; thus, a sin committed in ignorance is less evil than a sin committed in full knowledge. For some sins, ignorance might even be completely defensible.
For starters, we have a counterexample: humans create lots of things, but none of the things we create have free will because we don't yet know how.
Because we don't know how, yes. If we did know how, what would the result be?
Creating an intelligent agent without free will is, by necessity, limited. A non-free-willed entity can either have every action it can take planned out to the last decimal point (think a calculator, or a computer) which means that it cannot do or calculate anything that its designer can't do or calculate (it might be able to do those things faster, and without getting bored, which is why computers are useful); or it can be deliberately unpredictable, which means it's almost certain to go wrong in some way which it can't correct for.
And if you want something to calculate faster for you, then a fourteen-billion-year input before it gets to the calculating seems a little counter-intuitive. (I suppose if you have enough calculations, it can still be worth it).
Finally, free will seems to me to be logically incompatible with an omnipotent, omniscient deity
My having free will is not entirely incompatible with someone knowing my choices. To take an extreme example; let us assume that, at the age of 90, I release a complete autobiography, detailing my choices at every major decision point in my life. A time traveller from the year 3000 gets hold of this book, and then comes back to the present day, careful to change nothing (perhaps arriving on one of the moons of Jupiter). This time traveller knows what I will decide, yet his presence does not in any way constrain my freedom to make those decisions.
This is an oversimplification of Dennet's position
It was taken from the wikipedia summary. I'm not surprised.
but you also (if you are like most people) perceive motion when you look at this image despite the fact that there is no motion.
...huh. Fascinating. You're right, I do perceive illusory motion. But motion is a thing that exists independent of my perception; if a tree falls in the forest, then the fact of its motion is entirely independent of my observation thereof. A quale is different, in that the perception of the redness is the quale; the optical illusion which you provided somehow gives the quale of motion without actually having motion (which means that qualia don't exactly have a 1:1 mapping to the underlying reality).
I become more and more certain as I continue that what I mean by "quale" differs from what you (and presumably Dennet) mean be "quale".
The bottom line is that just as you can look at an illusory image in a way that reveals the fact that it is in fact an illusion, so too you can learn to look at your qualia and consciousness and perception of free will in ways that likewise reveal them to be illusions. It's actually a useful skill to cultivate.
...I am mystified. This skill seems to me merely convincing yourself that your own consciousness and free will are illusory, that you have no control over your acts and that there is not, in fact, a 'you' to have this complete lack of control? Am I wrong and, if not, then how is this skill useful?
BTW, most of the time when people get into disputes over whether or not something exists it's because they are making a fundamental error by assuming that existence is a dichotomy. It isn't.
Oh, yes. There are degrees of existence, things that exist only in part, or in potentia, or even things that strongly affect the world despite not existing, sometimes despite not even being possible to exist. No problem with that.
I have no idea how clear the chronology in the original Hebrew was.
I grew up speaking Hebrew, so I can tell you that the original is ambiguous too. The GNT translation interpolates the word "Then". That word ("az") does not appear in the original. The KJV translation is pretty good, but here's an interesting bit o' trivia: the original of "a tree to be desired to make one wise" is "w'nech'mäd häëtz l'has'Kiyl" which literally means, "and the tree was cute for wisdom." (Actually, it's not quite "...
[Originally published at Intentional Insights in response to Religious and Rational]
Spirituality and rationality seem completely opposed. But are they really?
To get at this question, let's start with a little thought experiment. Consider the following two questions:
1. If you were given a choice between reading a physical book (or an e-book) or listening to an audiobook, which would you prefer?
2. If you were given a choice between listening to music, or looking at the grooves of a phonograph record through a microscope, which would you prefer?
But I am more interested in the answer to a third question:
3. For which of the first two questions do you have a stronger preference between the two options?
Most people will have a stronger preference in the second case than the first. But why? Both situations are in some sense the same: there is information being fed into your brain, in one case through your ears and in the other through your eyes. So why should people's preference for ears be so much stronger in the case of music than books?
There is something in the essence of music that is lost in the translation between an audio and a visual rendering. The same loss happens for words too, but to a much lesser extent. Subtle shades of emphasis and tone of voice can convey essential information in spoken language. This is one of the reasons that email is so notorious for amplifying misunderstandings. But the loss in much greater in the case of music.
The same is true for other senses. Color is one example. A blind person can abstractly understand what light is, and that color is a byproduct of the wavelength of light, and that light is a form of electromagnetic radiation... yet there is no way for a blind person to experience subjectively the difference between red and blue and green. But just because some people can't see colors doesn't mean that colors aren't real.
The same is true for spiritual experiences.
Now, before I expand that thought, I want to give you my bona fides. I am a committed rationalist, and an atheist (though I don't like to self-identify as an atheist because I'd rather focus on what I *do* believe in rather than what I don't). So I am not trying to convince you that God exists. What I want to say is rather that certain kinds of spiritual experiences *might* be more than mere fantasies made up out of whole cloth. If we ignore this possibility we risk shutting ourselves off from a vital part of the human experience.
I grew up in the deep south (Kentucky and Tennessee) in a secular Jewish family. When I was 12 my parents sent me to a Christian summer camp (there were no other kinds in Kentucky back in those days). After a week of being relentlessly proselytized (read: teased and ostracized), I decided I was tired of being the camp punching bag and so I relented and gave my heart to Jesus. I prayed, confessed my sins, and just like that I was a member of the club.
I experienced a euphoria that I cannot render into words, in exactly the same way that one cannot render into words the subjective experience of listening to music or seeing colors or eating chocolate or having sex. If you have not experienced these things for yourself, no amount of description can fill the gap. Of course, you can come to an *intellectual* understanding that "feeling the presence of the holy spirit" has nothing to do with any holy spirit. You can intellectually grasp that it is an internal mental process resulting from (probably) some kind of neurotransmitter released in response to social and internal mental stimulus. But that won't allow you to understand *what it is like* any more than understanding physics will let you understand what colors look like or what music sounds like.
Happily, there are ways to stimulate the subjective experience that I'm describing other than accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Meditation, for example, can produce similar results. It can be a very powerful experience. It can even become addictive, almost like a drug.
I am not necessarily advocating that you go try to get yourself a hit of religious euphoria (though I wouldn’t discourage you either -- the experience can give you some interesting and useful perspective on life). Instead, I simply want to convince you to entertain the possibility that people might profess to believe in God for reasons other than indoctrination or stupidity. Religious texts and rituals might be attempts to share real subjective experiences that, in the absence of a detailed modern understanding of neuroscience, can appear to originate from mysterious, subtle external sources.
The reason I want to convince you to entertain this notion is that an awful lot of energy gets wasted by arguing against religious beliefs on logical grounds, pointing out contradictions in the Bible and whatnot. Such arguments tend to be ineffective, which can be very frustrating for those who advance them. The antidote for this frustration is to realize that spirituality is not about logic. It's about subjective experiences that not everyone is privy to. Logic is about looking at the grooves. Spirituality is about hearing the music.
The good news is that adopting science and reason doesn’t mean you have to give up on spirituality any more than you have to give up on music. There are myriad paths to spiritual experience, to a sense of awe and wonder at the grand tapestry of creation, to the essential existential mysteries of life and consciousness, to what religious people call “God.” Walking in the woods. Seeing the moons of Jupiter through a telescope. Gathering with friends to listen to music, or to sing, or simply to share the experience of being alive. Meditation. Any of these can be spiritual experiences if you allow them to be. In this sense, God is everywhere.