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 "wisdom", the meaning of "l'has'Kiyl" is broader than that. A better translation would be something like "smartness" or "brainpower".)
if it was evil, Eve would have known
Sure, but 1) I don't grant your premise and 2) the order of events is ambiguous, so even if I grant the premise the possibility remains that Eve didn't know it was evil except in retrospect.
a sin committed in ignorance is less evil than a sin committed in full knowledge
That's the Ethan Couch defense, and it's not entirely indefensible. We don't generally prosecute children as adults. However, it is problematic if you use it as an excuse to game to system by remaining willfully ignorant. A parent who denied their child an education on the grounds that if the child remained profoundly ignorant then it would be incapable of sinning would probably be convicted of child abuse, and rightly so IMHO.
which means that it cannot do or calculate anything that its designer can't do or calculate
You have to be careful to distinguish what is computable in theory vs what is computable in practice. Even now, computers can do many things that their creators cannot.
My having free will is not entirely incompatible with someone knowing my choices.
You are mistaken.
time traveller
Time travel, like omniscience, is logically incompatible with free will for exactly the reason you describe. But it's actually deeper than that. Time travel is impossible because your physical existence is an illusion, just like your free will is an illusion. (See also this and this.
I become more and more certain as I continue that what I mean by "quale" differs from what you
Maybe. But if, as you have already conceded, the quale of motion can exist without motion, why cannot the quale of free will exist without free will?
Am I wrong and, if not, then how is this skill useful?
Yes, you are wrong. Coming to the realization that free will (and even classical reality itself) are illusions doesn't make those illusions any less compelling. You can still live your life as if you were a classical being with free will while being aware of the fact that this is not actually true in the deepest metaphysical sense. As for why it's useful, well, for starters it lets you stop wasting time worrying about whether or not you really have free will :-) But it's much more useful than just that. By becoming aware of how your brain fools you into thinking you have free will you can actually take more control of your life. Yes, I know that sounds like a contradiction, but it's not. You can use your knowledge that free will is an illusion to improve the illusion. It's kind of like having a lucid dream.
But why don't you go read the book before we go further.
There are degrees of existence
Not just degrees. Existence is not just a continuum, it's a vector space.
...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 "wisdom", the meaning of "l'has'Kiyl" is broader than that.
[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.