Showing posts with label open theism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label open theism. Show all posts

Thursday, June 28, 2018

Cold Case Christianity: Yes, God’s Sovereignty Robs Us of Our Freedom

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled



Christianity describes a God who sovereignly calls believers to repentance.
And apparently, the original Jewish church didn't realize, until Acts 11:18, that God had called the Gentiles to repentance, despite how often Jesus had previously preached repentance to the Gentiles (Matthew 4:12-17) and many gospel texts saying Jesus' popularity at a prior time was out of control and caused entire towns to trample each other just to go see him (e.g., Mark 1:45).  Only desperate inerrantists would dare speculate that those texts were only talking about towns where no Gentiles existed.
Does this mean humans are mere puppets under the direction of an all-powerful Being who controls all decisions and dictates the final outcome?
Yes.  Otherwise, you need to explain why god wanted the reader to visualize him putting a hook in a person's jaw and pulling them around, when he talks about the reason a future army "gog and Magog" decide to attack Israel.  See Ezekiel 38:4.  If those sinners had already freely decided for themselves to commit this sin, it is error to use the metaphor of "hook in your jaws" to explain.  Hooks in jaws don't exactly bring to mind images of God respecting human freewill.

You also need to explain what God was doing to Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4:33, if it wasn't completely overriding his freewill.  So if God can violate human freewill once, then you lose, and the "God respects our freewill" can no longer be the ultimate show-stopper you think it is when answering questions about evil.  If God has no problems violating Nebuchanezzar's freewill, God cannot have any problems violating the freewill of a rapist just before they commit their crime.  That's right, Wallace:  Daniel 4:33 is the monkey-wrench in your "true love must be free to choose" bullshit. 

And worse, sometimes true love will use force to prevent a loved one from the deadly consequences of their own rebellious stupidity, such as the father who has his 19 year old daughter involuntarily committed because she is so out of control and likely to hurt herself or others.  If true love makes plenty of room to justify use of force, then presto, you can no longer argue that God's true love for the rapist require that He just sit by and let the rapist do whatever he wants.  If God struck the rapist dead just before the act, nothing about "love" would be any more violated in this than in what God himself does many times throughout the bible, using force to overthrow and kill enemies.
Does the Christian God allow humans any freedom to choose for themselves?
Sure, some parts of the bible teach that. But those parts cannot be reconciled with the above-cited passages.  It doesn't matter if God "usually" respects human freewill...his willingness to violate it takes away any intellectual justification you have to hide behind the "god respects human freewill" excuse, as if this was some monolithic unchanging truth.
The relationship between God’s sovereignty and man’s free will has been a topic of hot debate for two millennia; I doubt that I’ll be able to solve it in a blog post.
Good call.
But I do think the definition of free will lies at the root of the confusion and apparent dilemma.
It does.  If God infallibly foreknows what you will choose to do tomorrow, well, HE doesn't think you could possibly deviate from that forecast, because HE doesn't think his predictions can be proven wrong, so if YOU believe you have freewill, it is only an illusion you entertain because you are ignorant of what's in God's mindIf you could know your own future as certainly as God does, you would not claim you have freedom to choose.  You would instead claim that you cannot do anything other than make the precise choices God infallibly predicts you'll make.
Most of us would like to think that we are free to make any choice possible in any given situation, but if you think about it, that’s really not the case. Even the choices you thought you were free to make were limited by your pre-existing nature (your inclinations, desires, likes and dislikes).
Good call.
Have you ever cleaned out your closet and discarded an ugly shirt, tie or dress that was given to you as a gift? Why did you throw it away? You discarded it because it was taking up space. Every day, as you decided what to wear, you were free to choose that article of clothing, but you never did. Your nature (in this case, your taste in clothing) restrained your choice. In order to understand what the Bible teaches about “free will”, we need to distinguish between two concepts of freedom:

“Libertarian” Free Will:
This view of free will maintains that humans have the ability to choose anything, even when this choice might be contrary to our nature (our inclinations, desires, likes and dislikes). We might call this “Unfettered Free Will”.

“Compatibilist” Free Will:
This view of free will maintains that humans have the ability to choose something, but this ability is restrained by our pre-existing nature (our inclinations, desires, likes and dislikes). We might call this “Self-Fettered Free Will”.
But if God knows the future infallibly, then this would restrict your freedom too. Here's the syllogism:

Premise One:  Infallible means "incapable of failing" 
Premise Two:  God infallibly foreknows that you'll steal a candy bar tomorrow.

Conclusion: Therefore, if God infallibly foreknows that you'll steal a candy bar tomorrow, your future stealing of a candy bar, is incapable of failing.

Here's the scary part:  Suppose a man rapes a child.  Did your god infallibly foreknow that this man would do this?  If so, then because the man's action was incapable of failing, the man was incapable of doing otherwise.  Sure, society as we know it would fall apart at the seams if we allowed criminals to go free since nobody can avoid making the choices they do, but then again, we've chosen to create a society that runs more on perceptions than reality.  We hold people accountable because we need to in order to have the society we wish, not because ability to choose otherwise is some proven scientific fact.

Believing a person is capable of doing otherwise might be what we need to believe to keep America's justice system running the way it does, but expediency doesn't dictate actual truth.  The wife can solve a lot of potential problems in her marriage by turning away from the evidence that her husband committed adultery, but her desire to retain consistency hardly determines actual reality.  She can have her happy marriage if she wants, but she needs to be honest and admit its only happy because she prefers perceptions rather than actual reality.
Our practical experience tells us that we don’t make choices that are completely unfettered (unrestrained) by our nature. There is a local Volkswagen dealership in our area that specializes in manufacturing pink Beetle convertibles. That’s right: Pink. They make them one at a time and sell dozens each year, all to young women, according to the sales manager. I can honestly say that I would never purchase that car, and if I was given one, I would sell it. While I clearly have the freedom to purchase it, my nature (my inclinations, desires, likes and dislikes) prevents me from doing so. While I consistently choose what I want freely, I would never freely chose the pink Beetle. My will is “self-fettered”. I bet you’re just like me. Many of us would never choose to order an anchovy pizza. Many of us would never choose to cut our hair in a “mullet” hairstyle. Our natures (our inclinations, desires, likes and dislikes) restrain us.
But I can imagine you doing a publicity stunt and eating an anchovy pizza while you get your hair cut into a mullet while driving down the road in a pink Beetle...if you thought doing so would increase sales of your book.  Now go have a private talk with your marketing director, and ask them whether the time has come to start taking bigger risks in order to keep the attention of today's attention-deficit "Christians".
The Bible recognizes God’s sovereignty and man’s “fallen” nature (our inclination toward rebellion and the denial of God’s existence).
But it doesn't recognize any sympathy for the fact that our fallen natures aren't our fault.  God's constant bitching about sin leaves the distinct impression that he doesn't think the fallen nature can be blamed for sinful choices.   It also leaves the distinct impression that God is less like an educated dictator and more like an irrational person who can solve a problem facing them, but who prefers to just back and bitch out it.  If you ask me, God is a dumbass, who needs to shut the fuck up and start taking action.

And don't be deceived.  The fallen nature of man is not the inevitable by-product of Adam and Eve's choice to rebel.  You forget that the God answered the Fall with a "curse".  It was God who decided that the earth should become a fucked up place requiring lots of human strain and effort to enable survival:


If God is free, then he could have chosen not to curse the world or humanity, in which case Adam and Eve's sinning wouldn't have had much more cosmic effect than what happens when a three year old steals a cookie before dinner.  Sin? Yes.  Inevitable degradation of the rest of humanity?  No.
16 To the woman He said, "I will greatly multiply Your pain in childbirth, In pain you will bring forth children; Yet your desire will be for your husband, And he will rule over you."
 17 Then to Adam He said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, 'You shall not eat from it'; Cursed is the ground because of you; In toil you will eat of it All the days of your life.
 18 "Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field;
 (Gen. 3:16-18 NAU)
Wallace continues:
We see descriptions of this reality in Jeremiah 13:23, Mark 7:21-22, Romans 3:9-12, and Romans 8:6-8. The Bible also teaches, however, that humans have the freedom and ability to choose the things of God, including the salvation offered through Jesus Christ.
A theory that cannot be reconciled with the puppet-notion that is absolutely necessitated by God's infallible foreknowledge.  If God infallibly foreknows that Billy will hear the gospel but will always reject it unto death, then Billy doesn't have the freedom to deviate from his infallibly foreknown conduct, which would otherwise mean Billy doesn't have sufficient freedom to prove God's predictions wrong.  Remember, whatever is infallibly foreknown is incapable of failing.  That's the dictionary definition for "infallible".  Google it.
This ability to choose is described in passages like Joshua 24:15, John 7:17, and John 7:37-39. So, how do we, as fallen humans inclined to deny God, have the ability to choose God?
That question is utterly irrelevant to people who reject the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.  The Bible teaches God's full sovereignty and man's freedom to choose, because it contradicts itself.  Only inerrantists find the least bit of sense in struggling to live fully in the shadow of obviously contradictory philosophy.  Everybody else says "fuck god, he knows that I wouldn't deny him if he simply interacted with me directly the way a caring friend would."  God's appeal to our 5 physical senses has no less possibility of getting us to change our minds, than the prosecutor's appeal to a juror's 5 senses:  jurors change their minds all the time when convinced the empirical facts justify doing do. If we can make sacrifices in the effort to please other human beings who interact with our 5 senses, there is no reason to think we'd do otherwise if Jesus physically appeared to us and interacted personally with us the way real friends do.  Only desperate apologists, knowing perfectly well that Jesus is no different than a fairy, blindly insist that no more effort on God's part could possibly be to our benefit.  But on the whole, people are far more prone to change their wrongful opinions so as to accord with obviously established facts, when they can tell that doing so will substantially increase the likelihood they will avert disaster.

If God had no problems parting the Red Sea to Pharaoh's notice, he should have no problems giving us infallible visions of whatever terrible fate awaits those who reject the gospel (in light of Ezra 1:1, you cannot deny that god has magically coercive telepathic ability to get people to believe whatever he wants them to believe).  Most people are sane and do not willfully defy common sense when they can tell that their intended course of action is proven to likely result in catastrophe.
Well it appears that God (in His sovereignty) works at the level of our nature rather than at the level of our choices. God changes our hearts first, so we have the freedom to choose something we would never have chosen before (because our nature prevented us from doing so). You and I then have the freedom to choose within our new nature, and we are, of course, responsible for those choices.
Only if you can prove that god has changed the nature of all sinners sufficiently so that they can freely choose a gospel call that they'd otherwise reject. You aren't going to do that, and it wouldn't matter if you did, you are never going to get around the problem of how God's infallible foreknowledge allofor our future choices to be any different than what God predicted they would be.

Thursday, September 28, 2017

Cold Case Christianity: Are There “Limits” to God’s Power? Yes, if the bible has anything to say about it

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Posted: 27 Sep 2017 01:13 AM PDT 
285Christians claim God is “all-powerful”. Does this mean He can accomplish anything?
When Jesus answered that question the answer was "yes" and no exceptions were expressed or implied:
 26 And looking at them Jesus said to them, "With people this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." (Matt. 19:26 NAU)
Are unbelievers morally obligated to know enough about the bible to recognize that when God himself teaches people on earth  in the person of Jesus, he sometimes employs typical Semitic exaggeration?  If Jesus was exaggerating here when giving his exception-less statement that with God all things are possible, where else might he have been exaggerating?  Maybe in his statement that whoever doesn't support him, opposes him (Matthew 12:30)?
Skeptics often test this notion by offering the following challenge: “Can the all-powerful Christian God create a stone so heavy he cannot lift it?” The question highlights an apparent dilemma: If God cannot create such a stone (or cannot lift what He has created), He is not all-powerful. Does this apparent paradox prove an all-powerful Being cannot exist in the first place?
Yes.  We are capable of creating an object we cannot lift, so the challenge is not a deceptive sophistry or trifle.  So if God cannot create a rock so heavy that he can't lift it, then there is indeed at least one act that, while being a logical possibility, is an act God is nevertheless incapable of doing, at which point the cherished doctrine of God's full omnipotence is refuted.
It’s true the Bible describes God as an all-powerful Being and often uses language that suggests that “nothing” is impossible for Him (as in Luke 1:37).
And if Paul Copan and Matthew Flanagan are correct when they argue in their "Did God Really Command Genocide?" book that God himself sometimes employs exaggeration, then we have to wonder how many other times a biblical author is employing exaggeration-rhetoric when describing some attribute or act of God, and what degree of potential death-blow this poses for traditional biblical proofs for classical theism.
At the same time, there are many places in Scripture where certain behaviors or conditions are described as “impossible” for God to accomplish. This apparent contradiction is inexplicable until we examine the nature of the activities (or behaviors) described as “impossible” for God:
 Moral “Impossibilities”
The Bible clearly indicates there are many things that God cannot do. Most of these are “moral” in nature. For example, it is impossible for God to sin (James 1:13). According to the Bible, God always acts and behaves with certain moral considerations in mind and it is impossible for Him to do otherwise. Our moral laws are not simply the decrees of God (as if He could have chosen otherwise) but are, instead, a reflection of his unchanging moral nature. God cannot violate His nature. For this reason, it is impossible for God to sin.
Some would argue that God sins whenever he either a) makes good on his promise to cause women to be raped, or b) takes "delight" in causing women to be raped:
15 "But it shall come about, if you do not obey the LORD your God, to observe to do all His commandments and His statutes with which I charge you today, that all these curses will come upon you and overtake you:
 16 "Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the country.
 30 "You shall betroth a wife, but another man will violate her; you shall build a house, but you will not live in it; you shall plant a vineyard, but you will not use its fruit.
 63 "It shall come about that as the LORD delighted over you to prosper you, and multiply you, so the LORD will delight over you to make you perish and destroy you; and you will be torn from the land where you are entering to possess it. (Deut. 28:15-63 NAU)
If your basis for exempting God from sin despite his doing acts that are "sin" for human beings, is blind reliance on the biblical statements that god cannot sin, then your basis for saying God is all-good, is not reality or the merits of his character, but sheer word definitions.  Asking you to consider that God might sin is like asking the dictionary to consider that good might be the proper definition of evil.  You have DEFINED God as necessarily good, and you fallaciously view that conclusion as some untouchable icon.  Well guess what...you being a sinner means ANYTHING you believe could possibly be false.  And who doesn't know that Christians disagree with each other on almost every biblical subject.

Stop pretending your classical theist beliefs are foregone conclusions, unless you admit you are only interested in helping other classical theists feel better, in which case you are hardly doing "apologetics".

The person who would give two shits for any fundamentalist Christian attempt to classify God's causing rape to be a morally "good" thing, would be other fundamentalist Christians.  The rest of us keep our cell phones at the ready, waiting to call the police on you should you ever come within 500 feet of us.
Logical “Impossibilities”
The Bible also clearly indicates that there are a number of things that God cannot accomplish based on logical necessity. For example, it is impossible for God to change (Malachi 3:6, James 1:17) or to deny himself (2 Timothy 2:13).
God changes often enough.  He changes his mind in Genesis and in 1st Samuel 15, despite the claim in Numbers 23:19 that he doesn't change his mind:
 19 "God is not a man, that He should lie, Nor a son of man, that He should repent; Has He said, and will He not do it? Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good? (Num. 23:19 NAU)
 5 Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
 6 The LORD was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.
 7 The LORD said, "I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky; for I am sorry that I have made them."
 8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD. (Gen. 6:5-8 NAU) 
 9 The LORD said to Moses, "I have seen this people, and behold, they are an obstinate people.
 10 "Now then let Me alone, that My anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them; and I will make of you a great nation."
 11 Then Moses entreated the LORD his God, and said, "O LORD, why does Your anger burn against Your people whom You have brought out from the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand?
 12 "Why should the Egyptians speak, saying, 'With evil intent He brought them out to kill them in the mountains and to destroy them from the face of the earth '? Turn from Your burning anger and change Your mind about doing harm to Your people.
 13 "Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servants to whom You swore by Yourself, and said to them, 'I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heavens, and all this land of which I have spoken I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.'"
 14 So the LORD changed His mind about the harm which He said He would do to His people.   (Exod. 32:9-14 NAU) 
 28 So Samuel said to him, "The LORD has torn the kingdom of Israel from you today and has given it to your neighbor, who is better than you.
 29 "Also the Glory of Israel will not lie or change His mind; for He is not a man that He should change His mind."
 30 Then he said, "I have sinned; but please honor me now before the elders of my people and before Israel, and go back with me, that I may worship the LORD your God."
 31 So Samuel went back following Saul, and Saul worshiped the LORD.
 32 Then Samuel said, "Bring me Agag, the king of the Amalekites." And Agag came to him cheerfully. And Agag said, "Surely the bitterness of death is past."
 33 But Samuel said, "As your sword has made women childless, so shall your mother be childless among women." And Samuel hewed Agag to pieces before the LORD at Gilgal.
 34 Then Samuel went to Ramah, but Saul went up to his house at Gibeah of Saul.
 35 Samuel did not see Saul again until the day of his death; for Samuel grieved over Saul. And the LORD regretted that He had made Saul king over Israel. (1 Sam. 15:28-35 NAU)
You do not say these are anthropomorphisms due to any concern about the grammar, context, genre or other any objective criteria of hermeneutics, you say they are anthropomorphisms solely because that excuse is the only artifice you can employ to avoid the conclusion that the bible contradicts itself.  But you don't have the first clue whether the originally intended ancient Hebrew audience, having no "bible inerrancy" baggage to worry about defending, would have accepted God's regret in Genesis 6:6 as a literally true statement about their god.

Your fanatical devotion to bible inerrancy is greater than your willingness to interpret bible texts consistent with their immediate contexts.  If the bible had said in the originals that 2+2=5...

Wallace continues:
According to the Bible, God always acts and behaves with certain logical considerations in mind and it is impossible for Him to do otherwise. The laws of logic are, once again, a reflection of God’s unchanging nature.
 These “Divine Impossibilities” provide us with insight into God’s character and power. Objective moral truths and transcendent laws of logic are simply a reflection of God’s eternal being.
There are biblical exceptions to all moral laws of God in the bible.  Don't believe me?  Take your best shot.  Or decide that ignoring the challenge will likely help keep sales of your gimmicks going at a profitable rate.
They are not rules or laws God has created (and could therefore alter recklessly), but are instead immutable, dependable qualities of his nature reflected in our universe.
So because keeping holy the Sabbath day originally required killing anybody who dared to engage in work on the Sabbath day (Numbers 15:32 ff), God's eternal unchangeable objective morals require that this moral truth be observed today in the exact same way.  The more you talk about how Jesus showed us the liberal truth about working on the Sabbath day, the more reason you give us to believe the original death-sentence for Sabbath day work was improper and immoral.

Sorry, but most of God's "absolute" morals are contained in the Mosaic Law or first covenant, and the NT is clear that these things of God were becoming obsolete even in the 1st century, and were ready, even back then, to vanish away, which is the exact opposite of your lauding God's morals as eternal unchangeable objective truths.  And the NT specifies that it was God himself who made his first covenant obsolete, making him not much different from a sinner whose morals change throughout their life:
 13 When He said, "A new covenant," He has made the first obsolete. But whatever is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to disappear. (Heb. 8:13 NAU)
Wallace continues:
They exist because God exists (not because God created them).
Then the moral of God (i.e., that those who work on the Sabbath be killed (Numbers 15:35)) only exists because God exists, not because God created that law.  So unless you wish to argue God doesn't exist, this rather harsh objective moral of God still applies today in all the full stern way it did originally, that is, if you wish to accord the least bit of meaning to your belief that God's morals are eternal and unchangeable.

Some would argue that first requiring the death penalty for an act, then later refusing to enforce that death penalty in appropriate cases, constitutes a change in morals even if not a change in law.
In addition, the Bible describes God as omnipotent and capable of doing anything he sets out to do.
It also says God sometimes fails to achieve what he wished to achieve, such as his desire to give Judah battle victory, but could not in the case of particular enemies because they had chariots of iron:
 16 The descendants of the Kenite, Moses' father-in-law, went up from the city of palms with the sons of Judah, to the wilderness of Judah which is in the south of Arad; and they went and lived with the people.
 17 Then Judah went with Simeon his brother, and they struck the Canaanites living in Zephath, and utterly destroyed it. So the name of the city was called Hormah.
 18 And Judah took Gaza with its territory and Ashkelon with its territory and Ekron with its territory.
 19 Now the LORD was with Judah, and they took possession of the hill country; but they could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley because they had iron chariots.
 20 Then they gave Hebron to Caleb, as Moses had promised; and he drove out from there the three sons of Anak.
 21 But the sons of Benjamin did not drive out the Jebusites who lived in Jerusalem; so the Jebusites have lived with the sons of Benjamin in Jerusalem to this day.    (Jdg. 1:16-21 NAU)
Evangelical Christian scholars who accept biblical inerrancy are unable to explain how iron chariots could hold back the sovereign intent of God for Judah to win that battle, except to speculate that "presumably" Judah must have lost its nerve at that point in the battle...despite the fact that the biblical text provides the reason God's hand did not prevail...it was because the enemies he was fighting had iron chariots: 

 In our text (v. 18a) the narrator explicitly attributes Judah’s successes in the hill country not to equivalent military power but to the presence of Yahweh. Then why could they not take the lowland? Why is Yahweh’s presence canceled by superior military technology? The narrator does not say, but presumably the Judahites experienced a failure of nerve at this point, or they were satisfied with their past achievements.
Block, D. I. (2001, c1999). Vol. 6: Judges, Ruth (electronic ed.).
Logos Library System; The New American Commentary (Page 100).
Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.


Keil & Delitzsch, ultra-conservative in their Christanity and theology, comment on this verse but carefully avoid discussing why the iron chariot held back the sovereign hand of god.

Wallace continues:
God’s choices, however, are always consistent with His moral and logical nature; He never sets out to do something contrary to who He is as God.
Which can only mean that when God causes rape and parental cannibalism (Deut. 28:30, 53), takes "delight" to inflict such ravages (v. 63), causes unbelievers to brutally slaughter Hebrew children and forces women to endure abortion-by-sword (Hosea 13:15-16), this is consistent with the notion that God is always "good".

!?

Do ya think there might be the slightest chance that J. Warner Wallace's interest in biblical inerrancy ultimately rests on something other than sincere genuine persuasion that this doctrine is true?

One has to wonder: if God is good despite causing such atrocities, what worse type of evil would God have to cause before conservative Christian inerrantists would change their mind and start saying the god of the bible isn't as good as the bible says?.

What could possibly be worse than hacking children and babies to death as the mother's arms are amputated by sword and she shrieks hysterically in her fruitless efforts to protect them?

Maybe refusing to purchase your forensic faith gimmicks would be a worse sin?   If you can justify slaughter of women and children as described above, there's every chance you'd seriously believe a person's refusal to purchase your materials is a sin.
When someone asks, “Can the all-powerful Christian God create a stone so heavy he cannot lift it?” they are asking a logically incoherent question. It is the equivalent of asking, “Can God create a ‘square circle’?”
No, as explained above, because human beings can create an object so heavy they cannot lift it (for example, creating a steel beam that weighs 4 tons), then the question is no more illogical than

"Can a human create an object so heavy that she can't lift it?"

Since the question is legitimate and can be legitimately and correctly answered "yes", the question will remain perfectly logical and legitimate regardless of whoever happens to the actual person named in the challenge:

"Can Bill create an object so heavy that she can't lift it?"  YES
"Can Susan create an object so heavy that she can't lift it?"  YES
"Can William Lane Craig create an object so heavy that she can't lift it?"  YES
"Can J. Warner Wallace create an object so heavy that she can't lift it?"  YES
"Can God create an object so heavy that she can't lift it?"  YES

So then, there is one logically legitimate action that God cannot do, therefore, he is not all-powerful.

There is nothing illogical about sinning, otherwise you'd have to say humans cannot sin, so if God cannot sin, there's another act within the realm of the logically possible, that he cannot do: sin.

However, the notion that God cannot sin constitutes nothing but willful salivating blindness on the part of biblical authors and the modern Christians who swallow such garbage hook, line and sinker, as has been demonstrated from Deut. 28:63 (supra) and as will be demonstrated from Ezekiel 38-39 (infra).
Circles and squares are mutually exclusive by their very definition. As a result, the question nonsensically queries the creation of something similarly nonsensical.
Then human beings must be more powerful than God, because under your logic, the examples I just gave must then indicate human beings can achieve the logically impossible.
God cannot create square circles for the same reason He cannot sin; He acts dependably in a manner consistent with His moral and logical nature, and our universe is the beneficiary of God’s dependable nature.
And nothing about this changes when he forces people to sin and then punishes them for acting the way he forced them to act, such as is taught explicitly in Ezekiel 38:4 through ch. 39.

God forces the future armies of "gog and magog" to attack Israel, describing the force with the metaphor of "hook in your jaws", which is clearly the wrong mental image for the person who thinks God always respects human freewill:
 1 And the word of the LORD came to me saying,
 2 "Son of man, set your face toward Gog of the land of Magog, the prince of Rosh, Meshech and Tubal, and prophesy against him
 3 and say, 'Thus says the Lord GOD, "Behold, I am against you, O Gog, prince of Rosh, Meshech and Tubal.
 4 "I will turn you about and put hooks into your jaws, and I will bring you out, and all your army, horses and horsemen, all of them splendidly attired, a great company with buckler and shield, all of them wielding swords;
 5 Persia, Ethiopia and Put with them, all of them with shield and helmet;
 6 Gomer with all its troops; Beth-togarmah from the remote parts of the north with all its troops-- many peoples with you.
 7 "Be prepared, and prepare yourself, you and all your companies that are assembled about you, and be a guard for them.
 8 "After many days you will be summoned; in the latter years you will come into the land that is restored from the sword, whose inhabitants have been gathered from many nations to the mountains of Israel which had been a continual waste; but its people were brought out from the nations, and they are living securely, all of them.
 9 "You will go up, you will come like a storm; you will be like a cloud covering the land, you and all your troops, and many peoples with you." (Ezek. 38:1-9 NAU)
 16 and you will come up against My people Israel like a cloud to cover the land. It shall come about in the last days that I will bring you against My land, so that the nations may know Me when I am sanctified through you before their eyes, O Gog."
 17 'Thus says the Lord GOD, "Are you the one of whom I spoke in former days through My servants the prophets of Israel, who prophesied in those days for many years that I would bring you against them? 18 "It will come about on that day, when Gog comes against the land of Israel," declares the Lord GOD, "that My fury will mount up in My anger.
 19 "In My zeal and in My blazing wrath I declare that on that day there will surely be a great earthquake in the land of Israel.
 20 "The fish of the sea, the birds of the heavens, the beasts of the field, all the creeping things that creep on the earth, and all the men who are on the face of the earth will shake at My presence; the mountains also will be thrown down, the steep pathways will collapse and every wall will fall to the ground.
 21 "I will call for a sword against him on all My mountains," declares the Lord GOD. "Every man's sword will be against his brother.
 22 "With pestilence and with blood I will enter into judgment with him; and I will rain on him and on his troops, and on the many peoples who are with him, a torrential rain, with hailstones, fire and brimstone.
 23 "I will magnify Myself, sanctify Myself, and make Myself known in the sight of many nations; and they will know that I am the LORD."' (Ezek. 38:16-23 NAU)
Ezekiel 39:1 "And you, son of man, prophesy against Gog and say, 'Thus says the Lord GOD, "Behold, I am against you, O Gog, prince of Rosh, Meshech and Tubal;
 2 and I will turn you around, drive you on, take you up from the remotest parts of the north and bring you against the mountains of Israel. (Ezek. 39:1-2 NAU)
After these future armies are forced by God to be the means by which God punishes Israel, supra, then God will punish these future armies for the attacks on Israel which God had forced them to engage in:
 3 "I will strike your bow from your left hand and dash down your arrows from your right hand.
 4 "You will fall on the mountains of Israel, you and all your troops and the peoples who are with you; I will give you as food to every kind of predatory bird and beast of the field.
 5 "You will fall on the open field; for it is I who have spoken," declares the Lord GOD.
 6 "And I will send fire upon Magog and those who inhabit the coastlands in safety; and they will know that I am the LORD. (Ezek. 39:3-6 NAU)
Sorry Wallace, but you need to learn some basic English.  "preaching to the choir" does not constitute "apologetics", and certainly doesn't equip your audience to do anything more than get slaughtered, should they dare choose to take your stuff and use it to confront an atheist knowledgeable of the bible, as I am.

Jason Engwer doesn't appreciate the strong justification for skepticism found in John 7:5

Bart Ehrman, like thousands of other skeptics, uses Mark 3:21 and John 7:5 to argue that Jesus' virgin birth (VB) is fiction.  Jason Eng...