Is Jehovah a self-inconsistent creator for both making Adam and Eve free and forbidding them to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil ?
Eating Forbidden Fruit
- Thread starter hishignicityesq
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No.
Just "No" without an explanation is an incomplete answer. Explain.
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God is never self-inconsistent in any way.
I am genuinely seeking feedback to my question, from Christians steeped in scripture. Do you possibly have, for the sake of my inquiry into the most common and fundamental of all questions set forth by men, regarding man's free will and Jehovah's injunction against eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, any scriptural wisdom which will support your explanation of the plain "No" response ?
ok doser
lifeguard at the cement pond
let me turn it back on you
why do you think this illustrates inconsistency?
what would a "consistent" God do differently, in your opinion?
You have a good question, so long as you are not rebelling against God, because we need to know what it means to be free, and because God said to them that something should not be done. Do you mean free to do whatever you want to do? Or are you asking about Christian free will? It certainly makes sense that we should obey God.
At this point my thinking has only thought an interrogative formulation, i.e.,a question; which I ask by the OP. I am asking my question in order to see what I might properly think, after receiving Christian input.
ok doser
lifeguard at the cement pond
it occurs to me that God expected Adam and Eve to know that disobeying Him was wrong
not sure why, gotta chew on that
but He did, it seems to me, otherwise why hold them responsible for their actions contrary to His directions?
and so i'm left with a scenario where Adam and Eve act contrary to God's will, whether it is in disobedience to His direction, or whether it is in disobedience to their knowledge of good and evil
not sure why, gotta chew on that
but He did, it seems to me, otherwise why hold them responsible for their actions contrary to His directions?
and so i'm left with a scenario where Adam and Eve act contrary to God's will, whether it is in disobedience to His direction, or whether it is in disobedience to their knowledge of good and evil
I have never heard of Christian free will. I would like to know what is meant by Christian free will.
Yes, by free I mean free to do what I choose to do, purely only by my own choice. Eve, by picking and biting the apple, did what she wanted to do, in an whatever fashion, and, she got herself banned from the garden of Eden.
I am wondering why Jehovah made Adam and Eve free, and, then, forbad them the particular free act of gaining knowledge of good and evil. Was the preservation of innocence the reason Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat of the tree's fruit ? Did Jehovah plan to keep humans innocent and therefore non-harmful ? That would have been nice; but it did not remain the case; all because of gaining knowledge; knowledge like their realization of their nakedness; wow, nakedness became something to be ashamed of, whereas before they innocently did not experience shame because of their undress. It is such a beautiful tragedy. If Jehovah is never inconsistent, why does he make himself to appear inconsistent by making freedom and forbidding the free act of eating the forbidden fruit ?
I could just say free will, but I am a Christian and this is a Christian website, and I have said before that I am Jewish. Do you have any concept of free will or freewill?
If it was an apple, yes.
I don't see the word forbidden, but I understand the point that God would not and did not allow them to pick the fruit and eat it. He commanded against their eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Are you familiar with the passage? Do you remember what God said, what Adam and Eve said, and what the serpent said?
No,I don't remember exactly. Did Jehovah say "Thou shalt not eat of..." ?
I can find it for you, what Yahveh said.
| Genesis 2:16-17 NASB - The LORD God commanded the man, saying, "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die." |
What ilk of death was the Lord referring to ? Death to innocence ?
I have a friend who thinks it possible that God knew beforehand that man would fail to abide by His "...you shall not..." imperative, and that human failure to heed His prohibition is the means whereby He led man to freedom, an interesting view which I cannot help but qualify by wondering whether of not to deem such a mode of leading man to freedom to be a self-inconsistency lived by God. Eve knew she was free to disobey, so she had freedom, thus it must have been the idea, the knowing she knew what her freedom was, that she realized and gained just by thinking about eating the forbidden fruit; thus it is by prohibition that we realize our freedom. Wow, I just sorted that out by engaging with you guys about it !
Maybe. I have heard spiritual death.
Thus it is in merely thinking about rebelling against His prohibitive imperative that we gain awareness of ourselves as being free, as being the freedom that we already are, prior to encountering prohibition. Prohibition is the road to knowing one's freedom.
Eve knew she was free to disobey the “...you shall not eat...” prohibitive imperative, she already had freedom; and, she realized and saw her freedom precisely in the face of the prohibition attached to eating the fruit, so, it was not eating the fruit per se that woke her up to her freedom, it was the mere thought of eating what was forbidden, it was by imagining the future possibility of eating the prohibited fruit, whereby she reflectively awoke to her freedom.
When He both created Adam and Eve with personal freedom and then set a prohibition against the exercise of that freedom, He enacted an apparent contradictory and inconsistent stance. So when you so stringently assert that He is never self-inconsistent you are clearly blindly predicating your assertion upon a long established Christian supposition that God is infallible; however, it is apodictically certain that in the instance wherein He created man, and, then, commanded man not to do a specific free act, does indeed constitute a self-inconsistent contradictory action.
If, indeed, prohibition was established in order to bring man to consciousness of the freedom God gave man, then that would somewhat qualify an ascription of contradictory conduct to the Lord, for, perhaps He did it in order to bring man to an awareness of his personal freedom by proscribing a particular act, i.e., eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; nonetheless it was via self-inconsistent actions that God brought man to the recognition that man is free.
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The is nothing "apparently contradictory" about that. Your theory is bogus from the start.