Monday, January 31, 2011

Heat-Rays!



James Anderson recently did a nifty sequel to his nifty post on Newcomb's paradox:

http://proginosko.wordpress.com/2011/01/27/yours-sincerely/

But it doesn't look like his new post has garnered the attention it merits. Evidently, critics of the previous post fled in abject terror at the sight of his towering sequel–like hapless humans fleeing the Tripods in Spielberg's War of the Worlds!

3 comments:

  1. Heh, well, it's not entirely untrue that James elicits abject terror, but that isn't the reason I haven't responded. I try to avoid public displays of cravenness. I've had the post open in my browser for about a week, but haven't yet had time to read it...

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  2. In that event the Tripods may need to upgrade their armor. I'll find a hill where I can watch the combat from a safe distance.

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  3. I suspect nobody has responded because the analogy doesn't correspond to Limited Atonement.

    LA has nothing to do with predicting who will accept, because "accepting" is totally dependent on whether the atonement was originally intended to benefit the individual or not.

    The analogies fail to take into account that in LA, an 'actual' rather than 'potential' redemption took place. This also ties into the problem of "eternal justification", where *logically* if Christ already took the punishment for your sins, you never can be under God's wrath from the moment of conception.

    A better and more faithful analogy is that 10 people are on death row, and without their knowledge, Jesus takes the death penalty for 7 of them. At that moment, there is no legal basis to have those 7 on death row - irregardless of their 'accepting' of the offer since the punishment is already inflicted. With this, there is no 'offer' to the other 3, since nothing happened for them that can be offered.

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