Fair enough, if that's the way it is for you. I would argue however that God's role in most religions is not explanatory. It sounds to me you are accusing a screwdriver of being a poor sledgehammer, if you get my drift.

Of course a creator god is explanatory. It is a major function of such an idea.

It implies that a person's action is only an event in a deterministic sequence going back to God's intended creation.

Certainly. If god set in motion a sequence of events, knowing full well how the events were to unfold, it is hard not to see intention being in the creation.

This further implies that God's foreknowledge of each thing comes as a consequence of knowledge of the sequence of causality itself.

It is not a matter of “foreknowledge." For a god that has created time, so past, present, future would have no meaning. It would simply know all that there is to know - past, present, future - now. It is only for us stuck in the flow of past, present, and future - a creation of the omniscient, omnipotent god - that “foreknowledge” is a concept.

implies that actions of individuals themselves are part of God's own intended design.

Of course. Individuals' actions aren’t part of the all-knowing, all-powerful god’s design? Whose design is it then? There is some other even more powerful creative force at play in god’s creation? It would have to be more powerful than the all-knowing, all-powerful god to keep the all-knowing, all-powerful god in the dark.

If the all-knowing, all-powerful god set in motion its creation, knowing full well how it would unfold (and being all-knowing it would have to know how it would unfold), and that it unfolded in a particular way, giving us Hitler, the Black Death, George W. Bush, scabies, and farts, is this not in fact what the all-knowing, all-powerful god intended? If the all-knowing, all-powerful god set in motion its creation not knowing how it would unfold, it is hardly all-knowing or all-powerful, having some rather severe limitations for a god the created a universe as vast and as minutely intricate as we find this one.

But that's clearly not intended by the doctrine of free will.

And that is the point; free will and an all-knowing, all-powerful god really do not fit together.

doctrine of free will asserts that man as a moral agent can choose to do something or abstain from it regardless of circumstances.

And an all-knowing, all-powerful god would know before that particular human being was even conceived - even before there were humans or even before there was a universe - what choices were going to be made by that person. How can we act other than how god already knows we are going to act by the very virtue of how god set its creation in motion, unless god is not all-knowing or all-powerful, which means the all-knowing god is not all-knowing and that there are other forces at play god has no control of and did not create?

You can't object to free will by redefining the nature of the moral act or limiting the nature of omniscience to that of a designer.

No redefinition. Just taking the notion of all-knowing and all-powerful seriously.

[God's omniscience is supposed to be supernatural and proceeds by definition from his internal perfection rather than solely from his having designed the objects of his knowledge, so our deterministic model of how knowledge comes about must be discarded in the case of a theoretical perfect being.

I have no problem with the idea of supernatural all-knowledge. It certainly does not change the fact that god would have to have known at the Big-bang that as a result of its creation Hitler and athlete’s foot would result. How can things be other that how god knows them to be? They cannot. This has nothing to do with our limited sense of things; rather, it is based upon a god-thingie that is supernatural, beyond the limitations of time.

So we can posit an omniscience of the sort that comes to know even those things that the knower didn't himself design; ie free moral acts or abstentions.

And you are limiting god’s all-knowingness to the constraints of past, present, and future.

There is an important distinction there, and a distinction that allows for the coexistence of free will and omniscience.

And it is not a meaningful distinction, but then god really is not a meaningful concept when pushed.

You still labor under some particular misconceptions regarding the free moral act as determined by the spark of creation and by the creator's knowledge of the act.

No laboring, no misconception. It is the logical consequence of an omniscient, omnipotent god notion that free will is meaningless.

Knowledge does not determine the known

Except where an all-knowing, all-powerful god comes into the picture. What exists exists because of god’s power, god’s knowledge, which is pretty basic Western theology. If it was not the way god wanted it to be, it would not be, it could not be, particularly given god’s all-knowingness and all-powerfullness, which would be complete knowledge of and power over how its creation would unfold.

But I'd rather not go around and around on the particulars any more, because they are beside the point.

Depends upon which point.

The question is does a belief in God preclude one from being considered a Buddhist?

That an individual might hold idiosyncratic and contradictory views is not unknown.

Speaking of failure to explain, cosmological explanations are hardly the Buddha's strong suit. But obviously Buddhism offers something other than explanation on cosmogeny. In Buddhism it is argued that such explanations are beside the point.

And this last sentence may be why “cosmological explanations are hardly the Buddha's strong suit.” Duh.

And I would argue that this is the case for religion in general, whose point is salvation and not intellectual satisfaction.

Certainly the idea of god is not intellectually satisfying, but it used by theists to explain and justify existence and why we must act and believe this way or that.

And in the fairly rare case where some natural phenomena is explained in the suttas, it seems we can be fairly certain the explanation is faulty and useless by the kind of evaluation you give here (there are rain-cloud gods that make it rain?).

Not that you have shown, simply because I have made no comment about the nature of what finds in the suttas.

So clearly, the ability to explain is not what you are after. And as I said, nor should it be.

Not what I am after? The fact that god is put forth as an explanation is simply a fact of the matter and has nothing to do with what "I am [supposedly] after."

Western theology elaborates well beyond these limited notions of yours and has been fully aware of the "problem" of free will since inception.

And it never has been able to offer a solution to that problem. It either tries to some way or other limit god’s knowledge, or it simply dissolves into it-is-a-deep-mystery sort of thing.

The idea has been fairly hammered out as far as humanly possible.\

Which nicely nails the problem on the head. The idea of god is a human construct and one could reasonably argue that it is driven by a need derived from the idea that we have this self sort of thingie:

"The assumption that a God is the cause (of the world, etc.) is based on the false belief in the eternal self (atman, i.e. permanent spiritual substance, essence or personality); but that belief has to be abandoned, if one has clearly understood that everthing is impermanent and subject to suffering." Abhidharmakosha  5, 8 vol IV, p 19

You ignore a number of important theological points

Not at all.

and persist in making logical errors.

Not that you have shown.

The principle and original one being that there is no reason why an omnipotent and omniscient God cannot permit free will in his creatures, and still no proven connection between God's knowledge of a particular moral act and controlling that act

So you say.

a] Since god is an absolute, god is beyond the created, temporal conceptions and relative considerations of time. The notions of past, present, and future would have no limiting bearing on god; otherwise god could not be omniscient.

b] Since god is an absolute with absolute knowledge and is not limited by the concept of time, there is nothing past, present and future that is not fully known by god as an "eternal nowness" -- omniscience cannot mean anything less.

c] Since god is an absolute with absolute power, there is no action beyond god's purview, except that limitation of being all-good. God cannot do evil.

d] Since there can be "no creature without a Creator," all that is, is because god allows it to be, setting in motion its existence. Being absolute, with no limitation except being unable to do evil, god could also not allow something to be.

e] The physical world is god's creation. Its handiwork is not only the blue sky and the majestic mountain, but also the TB bacillus, AIDS virus, the earthquake, and any other natural phenomenon one cares to point to.

f] Since god is omniscient there can be no question that not only does god know the results of a process that god has absolute atemporal knowledge of and absolute control over, but what is, is because god wanted it to be as it is, and what is, is what is in what we call past, present and future, is fully known to god.

g] We can grant that god may have not created the TB bacillus or AIDS virus directly, but given omniscience and omnipotence, it is a necessary argument that god, setting into motion the processes of nature that would give rise to the TB bacillus and the AIDS virus, that god had full atemporal knowledge of AND control of the results of god's creation ("Whatever happens is His will”) --- the AIDS virus, the TB bacillus.

h] Being omnipotent there is no question that god could have done otherwise, since god is without limit.

i] If I were to build a dam, knowing even before it was being built that it would fail due to its design, then I would be held legally and morally responsible for the damage, suffering, and death caused by the dam's failure, and my failure to get the downstream inhabitants to safety.

j] Occurrences of natural disasters, disease and other natural phenomena that cause suffering can be seen as following from god's design. God is, therefore, liable for the suffering caused by god's design. This is particularly the case since god has absolute control over god's creation and god knows absolutely that a natural disaster, part of the process god set in motion, is going to happen -- killing and causing suffering. Since god is omniscient there can be no question that not only does god know the results of a process that god has absolute atemporal knowledge of and absolute control over, but what is, is because god wanted it to be as it is, and what is, is what is in what we call past, present and future, is fully known to god. So much for natural phenomenon.

k] Since god is all-good what god wills is all-good.

l] Human freedom of will to be meaningful must mean freedom to act contrary to god's will; otherwise, we would be just automata following the programming set for us -- god's will.

m] Since god's will is the Good, action contrary to god's will is absence of the Good, that which can be called evil.

n] The ability to make choice -- the will not to choose the Good -- is god's creation.

o] As a creation, will is something that god would have absolute knowledge of and control of, for there is no question that an atemporal god who is capable of absolute knowledge will have absolute knowledge of what choices humans will make. Even before the rise of life (creation?) god knew with absolute certainty that Hitler would arise and do his great absence of Good -- omniscience demands no less.

p] It is possible to conceive that Hitler could have acted differently, but the fact is he didn't, and given the absolute atemporal knowledge of god, there is no question that god could not have known that the human nature god set into motion could not but given arise to Hitler and the Holocaust.

q] Human nature being god's creation is god's responsibility, since god knew even before he set any creation in motion how human nature would unfold -- that is, it would do evil, Hitler would arise.

r] Therefore: "God, as the Creator of all things ['Whatever happens
is His will'], is the creator of evil through man as His Instrument, as creator of man's will to do evil."

s] If I were to make a robot that was capable of making free choices and one of those choices was to kill, it would be hard not to hold me responsible for a death committed by that robot. If I knew without question that it would kill and I set it loose anyway, it would be no different from my killing directly, and there would be no way I could absolve myself from responsibility.

t] Whatever is evil that is to be done by humans, it IS known by god -- omnipotent, omniscient -- and it IS the result the nature of the creation god set in motion. God, therefore, is responsible for the evil done by god's creations. Since god is omniscient there can be no question that not only does god know the results of a process that god has absolute atemporal knowledge of and absolute control over, but what is, is because god wanted it to be as it is, and what is, is what is in what we call past, present and future, is fully known to god.

u] If humans' have free will, then god is not all-good, or god lacks omnipotence or omniscience. Or if god is omniscient and omnipotent, humans lack free will.

v] God, being omniscient, knows as an eternal truth each choice, each action, that each human will decide; how then can we say that we have a choice to act contrary to how god knows we are going to act? That would imply god is ignorant, not omniscient. How can we say we have free will when we cannot act other than how god knows we are going to act, which is to say act according to how god created us?

w] If god has chosen to limit the absoluteness of god's being in someway, there is still no absolution from responsibility.

x] Through the creation of natural phenomena and through the creation of human nature, god, who has absolute atemporal knowledge and power, IS responsible for the pain and evil that arise from these creations.

y] As r] states god is the creator of evil, which is in direct contradiction to the notion that god is all good. We have then a major incoherence: the evil creating nature of god and god being all good. God is a self-contradictory notion. And as we see in v] the notion of free will falls prey equally to the problematics of omniscience and omnipotence.

Beyond pointing that out, I think the topic has departed significantly from Buddhism

Not necessarily.

and so I've got to cut myself short.

There is a good in that here, but I’ll pass.

Maybe you can debate your view with theists in one of their debate boards. I'm sure there are plenty who have intelligently studied the matter.

Been there done that. It always ends up that god is a mystery that we can never hope to understand.

As intellectually tempting and frankly popular as your position is, the same mistakes that were merely latent in your argument before show up all the more glaringly when you spell it out point by point. The reasons you can't see them are beyond scope.

Now there is an eye-roller. “Gee, you have made all these mistakes, and I don’t understand why you cannot see them, but I am not going show what they are or refute them.” As if that is really a valid comment on your part.

But at this late stage, it is no longer my place to point the errors out.

It is to laugh. Now, I always stand to be corrected on anything I say; however, you have yet to show that anything I have said here is in error, and at best you are offering this rather cheesy posturing as a response.

I already have in essence, but all you say in reply is flatly that I didn't and go on to elaborate the same argument only in more detail.

Nice try at dodging the issue.

You've clearly laid out your thinking on the matter

Which is far more than you have done.

[QUOTE=brburl;504313]As intellectually tempting and frankly popular as your position is, the same mistakes that were merely latent in your argument before show up all the more glaringly when you spell it out point by point. The reasons you can't see them are beyond scope.

Now there is an eye-roller. “Gee, you have made all these mistakes, and I don’t understand why you cannot see them, but I am not going show what they are or refute them.” As if that is really a valid comment on your part.

But at this late stage, it is no longer my place to point the errors out.

It is to laugh. Now, I always stand to be corrected on anything I say; however, you have yet to show that anything I have said here is in error, and at best you are offering this rather cheesy posturing as a response.

I already have in essence, but all you say in reply is flatly that I didn't and go on to elaborate the same argument only in more detail.

Nice try at dodging the issue.

You've clearly laid out your thinking on the matter

Which is far more than you have done.[/QUOTE]

I explicitly pointed out the fundamental gap already, but most of the errors occur in the area of not understanding the premises which go together in theodicy with God's omnipotence, with how it is precisely defined (for example you utterly ignore the concept of divine decree, which the allowance of free will is considered a divine decree).    You can figure them out, but will never admit your mistakes anyway, so I will not play this game with you.  Like I said the theodicies have been done, and by those more learned in theology than I.  And not being a theist, I haven't much reason to continue going in these circles of denial and belittlement with you.  So go ahead and declare victory and smugly diminish what I have to say if you will, and be happy at Ron's congratulations.   

in friendliness,
V.