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To: jonno

I asked the question because I don’t see man existing like Adam and Eve, as innocent childlike beings. It would mean a fundamental change of human nature. So long as we are beings of volitional consciousness some will choose evil. Adam and Eve had no knowledge of good and evil before they ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge which means they could not have been reasoning beings since the purpose of man’s faculty of cognition is to identify that which is right and that which is wrong.


47 posted on 07/22/2012 10:01:32 PM PDT by albionin (A gawn fit's aye gettin.)
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To: albionin

Conscious beings, by definition, have free will. If they don’t, they are merely automatons. And God created beings with free will because he wanted friends, not robots.

The first exercise of free will in the Bible was not Adam’s, it was Satan’s. He exercised his free will to rebel against God.

My theory is that Satan’s challenge to God was that creatures of free will would not choose to serve Him. Christ answered that claim definitively to the contrary.

So after the various events foretold in the Bible, such as the Last Judgment, men and angels will still have free will and therefore the ability to do evil. But IMO God will not have any reason to tolerate it any longer and will rdeal with it accordingly whenever it pops up.

YMMV, and probably does.


54 posted on 07/22/2012 11:20:07 PM PDT by Sherman Logan
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