You seem to imply (and correct me if I’m wrong) that God cares if we’re happy, sad, healthy, sick, hopeful, or depressed. Now, I’m not suggesting He doesn’t care, I just don’t see why he should. We’re free to roam our little planet and conduct our little lives as we like.
Agree 100%, but I’m going a little further. I’m saying, that because the concept of free will is incoherent, that at best it’s a misleading statement to say “Free will doesn’t exist [in our universe]”.
There’s no such thing as free will in any logically-coherent universe, because the concept is internally inconsistent.
Then, when I start talking about redefining free will to be compatible with determinism…I guess all I mean is that I think choice is compatible with determinism. Too many people jump from “Free will doesn’t exist” to Fatalism.
It’s worse than that really. Even if you accept the notion of humans having a will independent of God, you pretty much have to believe that God at least knows what God is doing.
Which makes the question of original sin difficult to reconcile. At the very moment God was passing judgement on Adam and Eve he was also aware that he would later regret this decision and manifest as Jesus to overturn it. So why did he go through with it? Shouldn’t an omniscient God never have to change his mind? He already knows everything he’s ever going to know. How can he second guess himself?
You’re both just begging the question for reasons Tom Tildrum and **Mijin **are discussing.
I know you think a child has free will, and so does the child, but in the universe postulated by (certain strands of) monotheistic thought, in what sense does a child have free will if the child (and its environment) has been designed completely by an omnipotent and omniscient being? The being if it is truly omnipotent and omniscient arguably can’t help but have designed the child such that (whatever the child thinks) the child will definitely react in a certain way to a certain thing.
Don’t get me wrong: the whole idea that there *is *an omnipotent omniscient deity is obvious horseshit, no more believable than any other fairytale. But it’s fun watching the philosophical contortions of certain religious people who have tied themselves in knots by believing in a deity that can both lift everything and make something so heavy it is unliftable.
Measure the electrical activity in that bell-ringing child’s brain, and you’ll find that his brain makes the decision to ring the bell way before his conscious “will” kicks in.
If it never occurs to the child that he has the choice to throw the bell out of the window, then he doesn’t have free will. That was a choice just like any other, but it doesn’t exist if the mind doesn’t think of it. He’s no more of a master of his destiny than the kid who refused to ring the bell because he’s deathly afraid to. Both of them are responding to past experiences they have no control over.
While I don’t buy into free will (as others have said, it’s an incoherent concept), that doesn’t mean the kid isn’t making a choice. It just means you are looking at how he makes choices in close enough detail to see some of the individual components of the choice-making process. And that some of those components aren’t consciously accessible.
But the idea that the ability to make choices wouldn’t involve multiple components of the brain is in itself an artifact of the mystical view of choices being the result of some magically free will, instead of a mechanistic function of the brain. As long as one assumes there’s no magic involved it’s inevitable that if you look at the mind close enough you’ll eventually see it breaking down into simpler components that don’t look like a mind; when you divide the choice making process up into small enough time segments, you end up with a series of brain activities that individually don’t look like choice at all because “choice” is a mental function that is itself composed of smaller, simpler mental functions.
I do understand this, but where does that leave you? If you are consumed by anger your actions will be dictated by it, and that may get you into trouble. If you had no free will is it your fault? But if you could have chosen a different reaction but chose anger is it your fault?
I believe that choosing how we react to situation is something we can learn to do and it is within our ability to do so, it also ties in to some eastern meditative beliefs about letting go, gaining control over negative emotions and achieving peace.
I believe that learning is the only way to influence the thing we call “will”. You can both learn and unlearn all kinds of things, thereby influencing the thoughts and feelings we have.
However, do we decide how easy is it for us to learn? No. Do we decide how hard-working and deligent we are? No. Do we decide how motivated we are, or how we feel in response to failure? No. Do we decide to wake up one morning with the thought, “I’m going to fix my anger issues once and for all!” No. Chlorophyll was on my mind when I woke up this morning. Why, I have no idea. It certainly wasn’t something I decided ahead of time.
I used to believe in free will a long time ago. But in my early 20s, my adolescent quirks evolved into full-blown Tourette’s Syndrome. You have tics long enough, especially mental tics, and you realize that the conscious mind is only a passive bystander. Yeah, you might think, well, a person with a weird brain isn’t a good example of anything. But if there is a God–and I don’t believe there is–why would he give free will to only some people? If free will is limited and conditional, then it’s not really “free”. If Adam had bitten into the apple because of a complex tic or because he had heard voices urging him to do it, would he have been banished from the Garden of Eden along with the “willful” Eve? Justice in the bible doesn’t seem to allow for these nuances. Yet this is the reality that human beings must deal with.
If this was true there would no need for 10 commandments. If God knew evil would destroy some of his children then he is not the loving , caring, just being that people say he is. A human parent is limited to what they hope or believe is good for their child, but an all knowing being should know. Free will isn’t like telling your child you can go to the movies but if you don’t stay home as I wish, you will die.
Originally Posted by SirGalahad:
Clearly, since I don’t think bells think, make mistakes, have a mind (little or otherwise), believe anything, or have a will of any sort. Tell me, do these bells answer you when you talk to them? Do you think other inanimate objects have little minds?
Am not.
Arguably? There’s no real argument here. Omnipotent and omniscient beings don’t do things because you want them to. There is absolutely no reason such a being has to design children or anything else to do anything. If such a being designs children to have free will then they have free will. That doesn’t reduce the omnipotence of this being in the least, it could always make a child do anything if it wants to. It does not follow that omnipotence and omniscience requires a being to predetermine the future. That’s just you (or someone else) trying to place restrictions on omnipotence and omniscience, and of course that’s not possible. The limitations you have as a human do not apply to gods. It’s pretty much the way we tell the difference.
I am a theist and, for the purposes of simplifying this discussion, I more or less believe in an omnimax God and in free will, but I think a lot of the apparent paradoxes surrounding the concepts arise from a poor model of exactly how these things work out. I think that these concepts are fully compatible, but it requires an analogy to explain how.
Let’s liken the nature of God to the universe as a computer scientist who is running a complex simulation. Running this simulation, with no randomness inserted into the simulation, we know that any given state of the simulation is determined by the initial state and the conditions set on computing one state from the previous one. This is a fully deterministic universe and has no free will involved, and the nature of omniscience in this sense is that, the person running the simulation can see all the information describing the given state.
Obviously, from a frame of reference internal to the simulation, it may or may not be apparent what the external rules are, and if they’re sufficiently complex, it may even be impossible to know internally, so it might actually appear that they have free will where they do not. This, of course, presents a problem because it means that free will is just an illusion, but it does mean that God can be truly omniscient. On the other side, though we may or may not be able to know and understand sufficiently complex rules, this just doesn’t fit our observations about the universe because there appears to be randomness involved. So, really, this is only a paradox because we’re trying to fit something that is inconsistent with our observations.
So what happens when we start injecting randomness into the simulation. Really, not a whole lot really changes. Ultimately, randomness isn’t utterly random, but the random variables are still bound by the rules and we start getting emergent behavior. Even without having perfect knowledge, one of the important things that we do with simulations is we run LOTS of them and we start to see trends and probabilities. In fact, we can suss out interesting implications from emergence based on fairly simple rules. Thus, we have true free will, modeled effectively as random variables, and the outside observer still has true omnscience, in his perfect knowledge of the rules governing the simulation, the initial state, and all the information about any given state at will, and also has implied omnscience in being able to see the trends associated with the emergent rules when the randomness is injected in the simpler ones.
Hell, we hold this as observationally true in our daily lives. We know that the quantum world involves randomness, and yet everything on the scale that we observe appear to be deterministic. Yes, on the small scale things really are probablistic, but on a large enough scale, it all becomes predictable to extraordinary precision. Thus, to an outside observer, with all of that randomness, there is still a sense of true meaningful omniscience.
I always thought that “omniscient” includes knowing the future. If you’re using a definition that just means everything that is knowable now, then that means that prophecy of the future is not possible.
Here you’re redefining “free will” to mean “unpredictable due to randomness.” I don’t think that’s what most people mean when they say they believe they have free will.
Oops; I was unclear. For, yes, that falls out of another set of “omni” characteristics often attributed to God – omnibenevolence, perfect wisdom, perfect Good, etc.
But it wasn’t actually a part of what I was arguing at the time; I was only addressing causation. My point was that an all-powerful and all-knowing creator could not have created the universe from nothing without also creating/causing every event that occurs there.
(Ultimately, it’s a reductio ad absurdum, trying to reject the ideas of omni-anything.)
If God were “perfectly moral,” he would have to care. If God sees every sparrow fall – and doesn’t care – then he would have less moral sympathy than even an average human.
But again it all comes down to attributes which others have said God has. A God that isn’t perfectly moral is entirely possible (and not a little scary!)
Much of the moral question comes down to: “Should we fear God?” The concept of Free Will, and of omnibenevolence, point in the direction of fearing ourselves, not God. But, alas, they lead to other paradoxes, most notably the Problem of Pain. Why would an all-loving God permit the world’s pain? There really can be no answer to this: the attributes are contradictory.
The answer must be that if God exists he must be a really narcissistic, delusional asshole with a really messed up definition of “love”.
Since you have shared. and I I do accept what you have shared and thank you for it.
It is not for the select few, but for everyone but…
God gives free will because God wants us to freely come to the conclusion that Love is the only way. That requires us being free to find our own path, and also that God puts faith in us (or God) that Love is the only way.
In that some may have to go through several lives but eventually they will realize that the only way that the most tri-omni God has found is Love, but this God is willing to let the children try otherwise, yet always be able to decide that the Tri-Omni God was right all along.
If almighty Og is omnipresent, meaning extra-temporal, it cannot itself have free will, as it already knows the outcome of anything it might do. Genesis 1 says that man and woman were created in Yowee’s image, which would tend to exclude free will – except, we are supposedly descended from Adam and Eve, who were not created until chapter 2 and were created from the dust of the earth, not in Yowee’s image.
It is all very confusing. I have yet to conceive a way by which omnipotence is somehow different from absolute impotence.
I don’t agree that knowledge of what choice you will make, and choice, are incompatible.
If I know for a fact I will be offered a choice of coffee or tea tomorrow, and I know I’ll pick coffee because I prefer it, that doesn’t change the fact that tomorrow when I’m given the choice I will pick coffee because I prefer it.
(That’s not to defend either the god “hypothesis”, free will, or the compatibility of these two concepts. They have many problems and we’ve enumerated some in this thread).
I suppose it’s possible that God exists in a higher dimensional space, with his own “time-like” dimension, unobservable to him. A kind of “Big Time.”
(Imagine, if you will, playing a time-travel board game, where you can move counters around from 1975 to 1935, etc. But the “Big Time” are the turns of the game.)
Grin! True enough. (Hmph. Coffeeist! Your evil spawn shall die at the hands of the true Teaites!) Free will, or even ordinary volition, don’t count for a lot when it comes to the easy decisions. “You can either read Tom Sawyer…or have scorpions applied to your mucous membranes! Which do you choose?”
It’s a little like talking about free speech: if it isn’t controversial, there isn’t a whole lot of point to defending it. But when it’s neo-Nazis marching in a parade – or having to choose between outcomes that are nearly equal in preference and of some serious consequence to you – it gets messy.
I’ve always thought that God sees the future the same way we see the past.
Just because I know today that yesterday I chose to have lasagna for lunch, doesn’t mean I didn’t have the free will to choose something different yesterday.
As far as I know, God can’t go back and change what happens. Kind of like how we can watch a video- we can skip to any part of the video and watch it as many times as we want, but what plays never changes. This doesn’t mean that free will decisions weren’t made by the director, producer, writer, actors etc. that led up to the video i’m watching.
Or it’s possible that God can go back, and does all the time. We wouldn’t know, would we?