[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
[quote]Cortes wrote:<<< This still doesn’t do it for me, Tirib. I can’t see how you can say that certain things occur, “by holy, righteous, just, merciful gracious and loving divine mechanisms understood by Himself alone,” while you refuse to allow the equally comprehensible notion that God could just as easily decree that humans alone are given the opportunity to choose good or evil. Either notion is either paradoxical or, if not, ludicrous. >>>[/quote]Because the former maintains an uncontingent God and hence the integrity of the comprehensive system of thought I see spawned from the scriptures and extrapolated from their being wielded upon human logic and the latter does not. It breaks the system. This is KingKai’s cue for what he will see as an inadvertent fatal concession here, but it’s getting late and I need sleep. (Yes, I see it too, but it ain’t really there, go ahead please =] ) Where was that last post I promised you a response to Cortes. I cannot find it.
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I understand the dilemma. I’ll attempt what may be a fairly clumsy analogy:
Say you were an android designer and android design were advanced enough to allow my hypothetical. (We are actually NOT that far off! - YouTube )
And let’s say I attempted to inbue her with something simple, like “likes” and “dislikes,” as well as a system for developing these and perhaps even changing them. No matter how good I was, no matter how adept I was at putting her and her “brain” system together, there is no way that I could remove myself or my hand in her creation from the process, so that she might independently come to hate country music and like math rock like I do, for instance. Or to “acquire” a taste for beer, or wasabi, photography, raw liver (not a typo, yum!). No matter what I did, the will is the missing element. The only “will” I could give her would be one that I designed her to have. Good or bad. There is neither, and I can’t even imagine there ever finally could be, technology advanced enough or skill fine enough to instill a will truly independent from the creator.
And here we reach the paradox. How can our wills be independent, well…ever, really?
He came first. He created everything, from nothing. He imbued us with a will (dare I say, created us in his image?) that allows us the freedom to choose this or that, on our own. It’s not even a matter of a greater will and a lesser one, though his and ours are, respectively. It is a matter of Almighty God’s creation of a new will independent of his own. I think it is beautiful and humbling and, yes, absolutely illogical. Just like his incarnation as Christ on Earth.
If there is going to be a paradox either way, then, taking the Bible as a whole and Christianity as a way of life, it makes a lot more sense to me to go with the notion that the paradox is, indeed, this one.
So. What am I missing, Tirib? 
N.B. When we sort of reached this point before, I remember you commenting about systems and also about God-centered and man-centered (??paraphrase??) passages.