We don’t get the “Straight Dope” here in Los Angeles anymore…didn’t know
that it was still around…
Anyway, if mankind has free will…this precludes Divine intervention…and
therefore, religion is meaningless. What must have been intervention, would
probably have been UFO’s (God-LIKE people) but NOT the Creator Him/It-self.
Quote from the late Barry White [paraphrased]: On religion, I tend to leave the jury out. Who knows what part of it is fact—and what part is myth?
Right away, I think that your logic falls apart here. Free will does NOT, by any means, preclude divine intervention. It does not preclude the possibility of God influencing a person, for example, or causing a typhoon to change directions, or causing a vehicle to start for no apparent reason.
Heck, it doesn’t even preclude the possibliity of a divine origin for the universe.
Now, one might ask why God would intervene in some instances, but not others. However, there is absolutely no inherent incompatibility between free will and godly intervention. None whatsoever.
We dont’ get it in Los Angeles? Dammit all! I never got the memo! Harumph!
So, err, you can only make decisions if aliens control your mind?
Personally, I consider the will to be an illusion.
I believe the OP’s argument is more subtle than that. Or, if his isn’t, mine is. OK, so maybe this “God” dude can make waves change directions and hotwire cars, but if free will exists, he’s not omnipotent – because he can’t control the decisionmaking of free actors. And if he does control them, then they’re not “free.” So, while there may be some powerful guy out there who can influence things, and while he might even have created the Universe, he’s not “God” as traditionally defined in the West – as omnipotent, omniscient, onmibenevolent being. And therefore there’s no reason to worship him – maybe it makes sense to placate him so he doesn’t turn a typhoon in your direction, but that’s done out of fear, not worship.
–Cliffy
God isn’t just omnipotent, He’s also purely good. He has the power to control the decisionmaking of free actors, but He chooses not to. God has free will, after all. God makes His choices in order to enhance, not reduce the free will of others.
What if he only controls decision making at certain times, and the rest of the time the person acts according to her own free will?
Well, there’s your problem right there; these two things aren’t really compossible. Omnipotence means that nothing constrains his action. A creature is not omnipotent if there is any X for which the statement “He cannot do X” is true. But “perfect goodness” is a constraint. That is, God cannot do evil. Therfore, he is not omnipotent. If God really is omnipotent and can therefore do evil, he is not perfectly good. (And no, the handwave about goodness being whatever God says it is doesn’t solve this – he still can’t do evil.)
Free will is not compossible with perfect benevolence. (With perfect anything, really.) If God really were perfectly good, in any instance, he could only choose the best action in those circumstances. For instance, imagine that you are perfectly blue-seeking. That is, in every instance you do the thing that will lead to the most blue things existing in the universe. Now I tell you that you should pick a number between 1 and 1000. If the number is 64, I will paint my car blue. If it’s any other number, I’ll leave my car red. You cannot pick any number other than 64. (Also assume that you’re locked in my closet, so you can’t do anything to create any blue objects yourself.) In that situation, you have no free will. If you really do have a choice, you’re not perfectly blue-seeking, because there are situations that exist in which you will not choose the most powerful blue-creating option. The same applies to God. If he’s perfectly good, he can’t choose to do evil any more than he can do evil.
–Cliffy
Why assume that the only decision one can make is to deprive another of a decision? Some choices produce more choices.
That’s incorrect. Surely I don’t have to eat a hamburger tonight to be free to eat a hamburger. God isn’t purely good because He is constrained to be good, he’s purely good because He chooses to be good.
You are treating the claim that God is always good as a matter of knowledge, as if you could predict everything that God will do. The claim that God is good is a claim supported by faith – we could not possibly know what God will do because He is free to be evil tomorrow – we take it on faith that He will continue to be good. Not withstanding, it is quite presumptuous to assert that one could know what it is to be perfectly good, let alone the mind of God. It may be quite possible to be good in an unfathomable number of ways, particularly with the omnipotence of God. Why even assume that there is a single “most good” choice? Perhaps God innumerable perfectly good choices.
Indeed, my understanding of God is that is perfectly because he allows us the chance to choose on our own. He could have made a perfect universe of perfect people. In fact, that’s an awful lot like Heaven. However, because he loves each of us, and conceived us in perfect clarity distinct from all other beings, he allows us our mistakes. He wishes that we would choose to be better than we are, and has armed us with all kinds of tools to do so. In a heartbeat, we could make this earth a paradise close to heaven, if not exactly there. We could end all wars, and poverty would be no cause of jealousy or concern.
Yet, even though we have polluted his vision, he does not strip us of our uniqueness. He does not destroy us and will not, though one day he will reclaim the very fabric of space and time on which we stand. In short, our free will is predicated on Divine Intervention. It is only God who allows us choice and gives it meaning.
Well… If we do have intervention from UFO’s, what’s to stop us from basing a religion on them? In fact, a quick google search reveals plenty of odd-ball UFO religions. Who cares if they’re the creator (assuming there is only one) or not?
Assuming you have free will (which I don’t believe, but that’s not germane to this discussion), you’re correct, because you could eat a hamburger. If God is omnibenevolent, he cannot choose to do evil. If he can choose to do evil, he’s not omnibenevolent. Now, you define the problem away by saying that omnibenevolence isn’t really omnibenevolence, it’s just a trend – he could change his mind tomorrow and start doing evil. First, OK, but I don’t think that’s consonant with the traditional Western view of God. (I could be wrong, I suppose – I’ve never beleved in God, so I can’t claim full knowledge about how belivers think.) More importantly, why worship such a creature? Fear him, sure. But worship? When you’re hanging by a thread; when tomorrow he might roll over and light your uncle on fire or make mold infect your baseball card collection? There’s nothing there that deserves worhsip, just placation.
Distinction without a difference. Imagine you’re omniscient. If so, you will know what the “perfectly good” action is in every possible situation. If that happens, you will be able to predict God’s actions with 100% certainty until the end of time. How can his actions be called a choice, then, when there is no possibility of him doing anything different? No, he’s a machine same as the rest of us. Or, if he’s really a flibbertigibbet as you suggest, he’s not worth the worship as I discussed in the previous paragraph.
It’s not presumptuous to imagine the thoughts of a fictional creation. Stephen King does it all the time. (Hmm, actually, if you read that column he has in Entertainment Weekly, he actually is quite presumptuous, but I’m sure there’s some humble author out there. P.D. Wodehouse maybe.)
If you know everything about all causes and consequences, can there really be two actions without any value distinction? I doubt it, but it doesn’t matter. Even if God can choose one of several options, there are still plenty of options that an omnibenevolent God cannot choose. Return to my example about you being perfectly blue-seeking. OK, after the thing with the car, I then offer to open all the sandwich bags in my house (changing the strips from the green locked color to the blue – and incidentally yellow – opened color), if you pick any integer that is a perfect square, a perfect cube, even, a prime, or 77. (You’re still locked in the closet.) Well you’ve got a lot of choices on this one, unlike the car example - an infinite number of choices, in fact. But there are also a lot of things you can’t choose. You can never be omnipotent. Same with God – he may have an infinite number of value-equivalent options to choose among, but that doesn’t make him omnipotent, because there are still things he cannot do. (Again see above re: defining away omnibenevolence problem with deservedness of worship.)
–Cliffy
This is where we differ Cliffy, the rest of your post is mostly a restatement of what you said before. You misunderstand the basic nature of freedom in my opinion.
Let me give you an example of the distinction between being constrained to do good, and choosing to always do good. Suppose I have the freedom to send you a dollar in the mail every Saturday. Furthermore, let us suppose that today, I promise that I will send you a dollar in the mail every Saturday until I die. To me, every time I send you a dollar in the mail, for the rest of my life, I have the choice to break my promise (do evil), or keep my promise (do good). Making my promise in no way diminishes my freedom to do good or evil. One step further, keeping my promise in no way diminishes my freedom to do good or evil.
There are many situations in the Bible where God makes promises to us, and I think that is wholy analagous (I’m not an expert on this by the way, I just remember reading this, like the Covenant of the Arc for example).
Now, contrast that with a situation where I am constrained to do good. Suppose the court makes a judgement against me, in favor of you, and my wages are to be garnished in the amount of one dollar a week to be paid to you on Saturdays. They take the money directly from my pay check, and I am so wedded to my job that I can’t quit. In this situation, I am constrained to send you a dollar, and I have no choice. There is no choice at all, no freedom, and no good or evil, despite the fact that the same transaction is being performed as the previous example.
A similar distinction exists between being constrained to be perfectly good, and choosing to be perfectly good. Being constrained to be perfectly good is not good at all, and not omnipotent, where as choosing to be perfectly good is consistent with omnipotence.
There is another difference between constraint to do good, and choice to do good. When one is constrained to do a good thing, the thing is good only by virtue of an external judgement. You think that receiving the dollar every week is good, so you say I am constrained to do good. This is a different meaning of good because it has absolutely nothing to do with my internal framework; really it is a good/bad distinction, not a good/evil distinction. Indeed, if I don’t have a choice in the matter, for me there is no distinction between good/evil or good/bad to me. Constrast this with the situation where I am making a choice every week about whether to send you the dollar. In this situation, I can have the internal distinction between my alternatives, considering one good and the other evil – in fact, your judgement doesn’t come into the matter unless it is known to me. If I have no idea whether you want to receive a dollar every week, I can only make assumptions, but that doesn’t remove my freedom to choose, and perhaps I can still make an evil choice, even if you regard it as good (or merely bad).