Libertarian: “Because He, in His omnipotence, willingly and perfectlydisregards, in His omniscience, any and all knowledge about your moral choices. This was the only way that He could create you as a free moral agent. As such, you are utterly free from His coercion.”
Since our moral choices have consequences in the physical world, God (under your scheme) must keep that knowledge from himself, too. Since very few places on the earth have been free from human interaction, doesn’t that mean that God has hidden from himself knowledge of lots of the physical world? How can you call that omniscient? Also, how do you reconcile that with God’s ability to prophesize (assuming you believe that He can do that)? In Christian tradition, Jesus knew he was going to die on the cross. How could He have known that if he hid from himself the moral decisions of his executioners?
Okay. I see that you’re new. I’m sorry. I was presuming upon you knowledge that you could not have had.
I believe in my God with all my heart, mind, and soul. The other thread you’re talking about must have been the one where the author of the thread requested be nonreligious. I was assuming the role of naturalist in order to particiate in the thread. The views I expressed there were my best attempts at understanding them honestly as I could in a context that is very foreign to me, what you might call a nontheistic one.
Most of the regulars here already knew my view, expressed elsewhere several times, that, if I were a naturalist, I believe that I would have to be an existentialist. Of the Camus type.
I did? I didn’t think I did, but no problem, I’ll restate.
If I am understanding this correctly it effectively translates into limited omniscience. I.e. He purposefully doesn’t know the outcomes of, at least some, events. This was exactly what I postulated before.
Yes, I agree. He doesn’t know, you do therefore you have free will.
The only other way of looking at the first paragraph is He knows, but He ignores it.
Ignoring the knowledge, while still knowing it is irrelevent (in fact, it sounds kind of heartless… yes, I know you will steal in this case, but I’ll just ignore that and let you face the event anyway). If He makes the event knowing the outcome then we have a free will violation.
The answer is no, as an observer but your logic is flawed, Poly, because God is not just an observer. He made the universe, space-time, etc. As stated above, a purely omniscient being doesn’t violate free will (which is what you are saying) because they have no creation control. This does not apply to God.
Lib, forgive me if this post sounds a little harsh, but: as was stated in the other thread several times, you misunderstood the non-religious requirement of the thread. The point that Glitch was making was that religious metaphors don’t answer the question, they merely tend obfuscate the issue, and trick you into believing that you have answered the question when you really haven’t. I don’t care what you think a hypothetical atheist would believe. The question is about free will (and, in this thread, about omniscience as well). Your inclusion of spirits does not change the question. You responded to an analogy about complex (i.e. real + imaginary) numbers, and implied that purely real arithmetic was insufficient to analyze them, and the response I had was “who said you couldn’t use complex arithmetic?”. If {spirit+physical} is where decisions are made (or only moral decisions, since you seem to make that distinction), then the question is do we have free will when you consider both our spiritual and physical components. If {physical} is where decisions are made, then the question is do we have free will when when you consider the physical world. If {spiritual} is where decisions are made, then the question is do we have free will when you consider the spiritual world. Glitch’s thread did not ask you to assume that God did not exist (despite your persistent protestations to the contrary)! Glitch’s thread did ask you to realize that your religious metaphors weren’t addressing the issue.
If you don’t want to address that issue, that’s fine with me, but if you do want to address it I would ask you to explian clearly. If you have done this in another thread, please provide the name of it or a link to it. Given the responses to what you say from other posters, however, I have the suspicion that you have never explained clearly what you mean (even if you think you did), since there is still misunderstanding.
In any event, how do you address the issue that what you have said about God (that he has only limited omniscience) does not jibe with what it generally understood about God (that he is actually omniscient) and with what your religion (I believe you are Christian, and believe in the life of Jesus Christ as a divine entity) teaches about the nature of your God? (e.g. his foreknowledge of events which had a significant moral component – wouldn’t you agree that the decision to crucify Jesus had some significant moral components?).
Also, you make a distinction between moral and other (non-moral?) decisions. What is the basis for this distinction, and what decisions do you offer as examples of decisions which have no moral component?
God’s deliberate disregard of His own knowledge (which He can do because He is omnipotent), and His deportation of that knowledge to you (which He can do also because He is omnipotent) does not mean that God is not omniscient. Not when you talk about the Whole God. Him and us. It is the aggregate of all spirit that is God. It is that aggregate that is omniscient. Anything less than that aggregate is not God fully, but only a part of God.
What I don’t like about the Trinity concept as it is traditionally held is that it stops short. We are not merely God’s toys. We are imbued with His very Spirit.
That is why it is very important that God be taken as the Whole God. The Whole God includes us. It includes all free moral agents. Together, we all are God.
“The Father and I are one… I am in the Father, and the Father is in me, and you are in me.” — Jesus
That’s what you are, Glitch. You, me, Poly, Gaudere, David, Satan, all of us. We are all One. We are, forgive me for this, chips off the ol’ block.
Sorry, Lib, you’ll need to be a little less cryptic if you want me to understand.
If you are trying to say that you explained yourself adequately in Free Will (non-religious), then I must report that you have failed to communicate your position to me.
I am explaining myself as clearly as I can. And I am doing it in this thread (and in all the threads that deal with metaphysics, epistemology, or ethics). Please do not assume that if I address a post to, say, Glitch, that you are excluded a priori from reading it, or from taking an answer to your questions from it.
I have explained the distinction as I see it between moral and amoral decisions. The decision to steal, for example, is a moral decision. The decision whether to put the loot in your coat pocket or your pants pocket is an amoral one.
I have also explained (here, there, and nearly everywhere) that, in my opinion, there is no free will in the natural world because your must do whatever your brain tells you to do. If there is only the brain, then there is only the brain. If there is no ablative entitry, then the context is unary. But there is free will in the real world, i.e., the spiritual world, because God gave you omnipotence and omniscience over it.
Now, you might not like my opinion, and that’s fine. I hold you in no less esteem.
In the purely natural world, there is no free will.
There is a Holy Spirit (i.e. God), which we are all a part of. In this spiritual context, “free will” can be measured as a deviation from the will of this Spirit. However, since the will of the Spirit cannot diverge from the will of the Spirit (since they are the same thing, by definition), I do not see how you get your definition of “free will” in this spiritual context.
However, when you put these two things together, you say “tada! Free Will!”. How do you combine two things which have no free will to get free will? You seem to deny the possibility that free will comes from the physical world, since that is “just” the brain. I do not understand how you can think the Will of the Spirit is free will, since in another thread you wanted to define free will as deviation from the Will of the Spirit. If free will doesn’t come from the physical world, and it doesn’t come from the spirit, where is it coming from? Where is the actual “choice” occuring, and what factors govern what “options” are open, and which “option” is actually selected?
I also don’t understand where the “options” in your moral choices come from. If I am not free to decide what to eat for lunch (since it is a choice which has no moral consequence), why am I free to decide if I want to eat people for lunch (since cannibalism would be, generally speaking, a moral choice)? What is the difference between them? Also, do you believe that the Spirit is constantly interacting with the physical world, producing effects that would not have resulted without God’s interactions?
Thanks for explaining your confusion. I’ll see if I can zero in and relieve it.
Yes, that is my opinion. You’ve already heard my explanation that the brain qua the brain is a unary, self-referential entity. If, for example, you were a neurologist, you would be simply a brain studying a brain. But what you might not have heard from me yet is that, not only do I believe that there is no free will in the natural world, I believe that there is no effective will at all.
Not for you as a person, but only for you as a brain. If you think of yourself as your brain — and as a naturalist, I believe I would — then you do not exist as any entity apart from it. You have no soul, only your brain. You have no ego; your brain is your ego. You have no heart, except for your blood pumping muscle.
Because your brain is an electrically powered biochemical organ, you have no personal choices. Remember, you aren’t a person. You’re just a brain.
Your arms will move however this organ dictates, just as blood will flow when the heart muscle contracts. It’s just an organ. It makes its decisions either by a predetermined and complex sequence of synaptic discharges that began in the womb, or else it makes it decisions based on some genetic code that lends propensities that allow for random misfires and other mistakes.
As I see it, if there is free will (or will of any kind) among humans in a natural world, then there is also free will for other creatures with brains. And even that implication might be arbitrary because I see no reason you could not say there is free will also for bacteria, plants, and heck even viruses. These things are also just discharging their genetic compulsions — like the human brain.
I am reminded of a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. (I won’t blame you if you go, “huh?”.)
The guys were playing poker. Each cigarette was worth a dime. The little short guy with the permafrost smile wanted to bet a nickle. So he broke a cigarette in half and tossed it into the kitty.
“Dime’s the limit,” McMurphy told him.
So, he tossed the other half in and said, “Okay. I bet a dime.”
McMurphy held up the two cigarette pieces and, leering at the hapless man, said, “This ain’t a dime. This is shit.”
Though your spirit is made of the same stuff that God’s spirit is made of, though He broke off a part of himself and put it inside your consciousness, you and He do not share identities. It isn’t that He slid, say, a finger of His spirit into you, which you are borrowing for some duration. It is that he broke his finger off and gave it to you. To have. To own. To be.
You can dispoil it, if you like, and many people do. You can also nurture it with His Word, and many people do that as well.
Over and over again (but since you’re new, you may not have seen it) I have described your oneness with God as an ablative relation as opposed to a genetive one. You are in one another but apart from one another.
You have a relationship.
Spirit, unlike cigarettes, can seemlessly rejoin, entertwine, and commune. And all pure spirit is already joined with Him in a sort of supernatural marriage. Why the hell did He go through all this? Simply because He determined that love among free moral agents is the highest goodness there is.
Evil, as I see it, is nothing more than goodness we have spoiled. When God discharged a portion of His spirit to inhabit your consciousness, He released it entirely from His control. His will is your will only if yours coincides with His.
In fact, He explained His will clearly and simple terms. His will is that we believe in Him. That belief opens our hearts to the treasure that is God, which was the treasure that we sought. But other men seek other treasure, and so open their hearts to other things. There is not only a priori evidence that our will need not coincide with His, based on our separate identity, but there is ample empirical evidence as well.
Few believe in Him.
That statement might surprise you since there are billions of people who profess a belief. But just as a tree is know by its fruit, so their true beliefs are known by their works. “Many will call upon me saying, ‘Lord, did we not do mighty works in your name?’ And I will say, ‘Get away from me, you evildoers. I never knew you.’” — Jesus
The aggregate of God’s spirit is all the spirit that is not despoiled. He cannot allow a rotten spirit into His kingdom any more than you can allow a rotten apple into your barrel.
Well, I would say that if you eat people against their will, then that would be a moral choice. You are free to decide to discharge your will, in a spiritual context, because that is what a free moral agent does. He makes free moral choices. I presume you will allow that God Himself is a free moral agent. Therefore, if you are a part of Him — a “little” God named Erratum — then you, too, are a free moral agent.
And decisions with respect to morality are made by the real you, the spiritual you.
Well, that’s a loaded question.
I believe that the natural world serves merely as a context for our spiritual odyssey. It is nothing more than a framework within which we make our moral choices. It is amoral.
God might interfere in the amoral fabric, just as we ourselves do every day, but He never interferes in the real universe, the spiritual realm where our moral decisions are made. If He did, then we would not be free moral agents.