God can write straight with crooked lines.

[I Have Questions]

Yes, I as well. It is completely bewildering to say what he said. I can't shoot myself in the foot, I don't wield the gun of Sorites, MG does.

He won’t because he can’t. We’re at the point in every discussion with MG at which he reverts to unsupported assertions followed by playing the victim.

...before running away for a while hoping people will forget about it and so can avoid owning his mistakes. It's a recurring pattern.

[Limnor]

Putting religion aside, I’ve been thinking about the Federalist Papers, Hobbes, and Locke as other models. I’d say each of these examples consider crookedness as something that, while not going away, can be best managed

Brownian Motion

Controlled/useful randomness, that is, randonness within boundries, going on within every cell of everyone's body.

Crooked (randomness), straight (boundries).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2582900/

Food for thought

I’m not a scientist but I enjoyed reading through these. I think the examples align more with Huck’s way of looking at the issue than MG’s. The biology indicates straight intent arrives through fallible agents—if carefully translated, that means the crookedness shows up in execution rather than in the command itself. MG tends to locate crookedness at the level of commands, where Huck leaves the command straight and puts the crookedness in human execution.

[Gadianton]

What we're missing in either is account is how crooked and straight map to good and evil.

[Fence Sitter]

What we're missing in either is account is how crooked and straight map to good and evil.

But even granting that framing, omnipotence and omniscience create a deeper problem. If God is truly both, why isn’t the message, or its execution, at least better, if not perfect? How would we expect the message or its execution to be any different if there were no God behind it at all? Pointing to the way things are as proof of divine intervention is just drawing targets around existing bullet holes.

[Limnor]

What we're missing in either is account is how crooked and straight map to good and evil.

Maybe the difference is intent? A God that would trick people into doing good is not palatable, but through the “fallen nature” view, crookedness is a natural response that distinguishes human nature from divine design. Fallen nature might include intentional vice, but assigning intentional vice to every mistake seems a bit too far.

[Limnor]

What we're missing in either is account is how crooked and straight map to good and evil.

But even granting that framing, omnipotence and omniscience create a deeper problem. If God is truly both, why isn’t the message, or its execution, at least better, if not perfect? How would we expect the message or its execution to be any different if there were no God behind it at all? Pointing to the way things are as proof of divine intervention is just drawing targets around existing bullet holes.

Omniscience and omnipotence could guarantee perfect execution but you’d have to remove free willl/agency.

[malkie]

But even granting that framing, omnipotence and omniscience create a deeper problem. If God is truly both, why isn’t the message, or its execution, at least better, if not perfect? How would we expect the message or its execution to be any different if there were no God behind it at all? Pointing to the way things are as proof of divine intervention is just drawing targets around existing bullet holes.

Omniscience and omnipotence could guarantee perfect execution but you’d have to remove free willl/agency.

Back to Satan's plan.

[Limnor]

Omniscience and omnipotence could guarantee perfect execution but you’d have to remove free willl/agency.

Back to Satan's plan.

Yeah I wondered if I wasn’t accidentally supporting something I didn’t intend to support. But I think preserving agency explains why perfect execution isn’t guaranteed, even under omniscience.

It doesn’t necessarily follow that any given command deserves obedience. Agency can account for the risk of crookedness, but it doesn’t give license to trust any message as divine.

[malkie]

Brownian Motion

Controlled/useful randomness, that is, randonness within boundries, going on within every cell of everyone's body.

Crooked (randomness), straight (boundries).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2582900/

Food for thought

I’m not a scientist but I enjoyed reading through these. I think the examples align more with Huck’s way of looking at the issue than MG’s. The biology indicates straight intent arrives through fallible agents—if carefully translated, that means the crookedness shows up in execution rather than in the command itself. MG tends to locate crookedness at the level of commands, where Huck leaves the command straight and puts the crookedness in human execution.

[memory from 60+ years ago + a couple of google searches] Apparent mathematical randomness is also useful in fields like game theory, and simulation - anywhere that you would like to have a variable that takes unpredictable values within bounds for a series of "turns". War games, financial market simulations, bio research, etc.

Are we just an iteration of a Monte Carlo simulation that some god-like entity is running?

[Fence Sitter]

Omniscience and omnipotence could guarantee perfect execution but you’d have to remove free willl/agency.

Even allowing for the need for God not to interfere, does not mean agency/free will is being preserved, all that is doing is preserving the free agency for some while allowing that same agency to be taken away by others, as is the case in murder or rape.