The problem is that logic and science are not the same. Scientifically, you may say that a bear made some tracks if you observe a bear making some tracks. But if you did not observe a bear, then the effects (the tracks) might have been made by a clever person or an invisible pink unicorn. A “God’s effect” is not a “God”. That’s why temporal lobe studies are dead ends — you cannot know whether God is attempting a communication with man, or whether man is making up a God. Science cannot study the supernatural. Period.
You are still limited to valuing or pursuing what it is available, and that affects a choice. For example, it is much harder to value the life of a racist scumbag, than the life of a kind saint. Lets say we have Bob. Bobs a decent enough person, but since he has been surrounded by racist scumbags his entire life he knows nothing but hate, and will choose that path. On the other hand, if Bob were exposed to nothing but kind saints he would choose love. So, who made the choice in this situation to turn to hate? Does God make the decision for Bob by surrounding him with angels or scumbags, or is it still completely Bob’s choice?
I don’t think its an insoluble problem for either, although it does present a good deal of difficulties for a large portion of theists. Just becuase something is not self-generating, does not mean something else must have caused it. Its definately possible that our conception of cause simply does not apply to the first event. The first event typically being God for theists and some sort of Big Bang type theory for atheists. That is, it might just be that God or the Big Bang is without a cause in the way we understand it. There is nothing before either of those events to cause them, God being eternal, and time starting with the Big Bang. To put it succiently, what caused God/The Big Bang? Nothing, they simply exist, without cause.
Clearly, no free will presents an extremely difficult problem for those that wish to claim divine retribution or reward, along with a benevolent God. Since without free will those two are contradictory. However, that is a problem for those that wish to claim that, not me. But, if someone wants to pick up that banner there are a couple things, in my opinion, they would have to show to prove free will. The first is that there is something that makes up “me” that is independent of God’s hand in creation. Otherwise, I am simply a program executing the commands God placed inside of me. The second would be that I am not constrained by any rules in my choosing. That is, I need to be able to choose anything, and everything that I want.
That simply isn’t true. I may value something that doesn’t even exist, like Santa Claus for example.
Well, in this case, it’s *your * choice, because you’ve made Bob into a two-dimensional dichotomy. 
You have decided that the choice that matters is between racism and tolerance. Why your judgment ought to have any bearing on the evaluation of Bob’s morality is unclear.
Goodness caused God’s existence. At least, that’s the conclusion that I’m compelled to reach given the axioms that you know well from previous discussions. But I believe you are mistaken in your premise that a thing may not create itself, if by creation you mean come into existence. Existence is merely one aspect of essence, and a trivial one at that.
Your freewill IS the part of you that is separate from God’s creation. You’re like the puddle trying to make sense out of the shape of its hole.
I never said anything about existence, I said choices available to you. Valuing Santa Claus is a choice available to you, but say valuing Shinte is not. Why? Becuase God, or whatever, did not make Shinte, whomever or whatever that is, available to you as a choice.
I made Bob into a two-dimesnional dichtomy becuase, for one, I have no desire to write pages upon pages describing the entirity of a person. Second, that example is just a useful illustration for the point I was trying to make, and that you seemingly missed. Furthermore, I made no value judgement, albeit I admit scumbag and saint do imply somesort of judgement becuase of our ingrained values. It may be that the scumbag racist has more value than the kind saint, but that is not something I spoke to.
Regardless, the point, and the issue at hand, is did Bob really exercise free will in that case or was it God’s choice, or both of theirs?
Trivial as it may be, it is the focus of this thread, or at least it is for me. It seems pointless to argue about something when none of our logic or facts necessarily apply. As for Goodness causing God’s exisetence, that just moves the question back to what caused Goodness.
Where did this part of me seperate from God come from? It also seems as though you are saying we are all schizophrenic, is that the case?
First off, I made no mention of logic. Second, it is possible to study the effects of something independent of the underlying cause. Ignorance of the underlying cause of gravity did not prevent Newton from formulating his laws of gravitational motion. Lastly, I made no mention of studying the supernatural. I said we could study the effect of God on the world, and how a person experiences God. Both of those are phenomena that occur in the natural world.
Sorry, but that dog won’t hunt. If you can conceive it, I can value it. Whatever you might mention, I am free to adore. Or despise.
I really didn’t miss your point. But mine is that those would not be Bob’s only two choices but for the fact that you offered him nothing else, due to various constraints. May we not assume that the unconstrained God offers limitless choices? He has lots of time. Perhaps He has waited through trillions of universes for Bob to make a choice: from His reference frame, it’s the same blink of time as a nanosecond.
I’m really the wrong one to present that analogy to, since I was a hippie who rebelled against his parents. Even so, if you want to offer hypotheticals and deal in analogics, then the onus is upon you to construct them properly. If it is too much effort, or you don’t have the time, then argue by some other method.
Goodness is an aesthetic. It needs no cause for existence because it doesn’t exist. It’s like beauty. Or value.
I think you have me confused with someone else. I do hear the voice of God, but not in that manner. The part of you separate from God came from the same thing that God Himself came from — goodness. Goodness compels existence because goodness edifies. That is its essence. You seem to think that there is some big deal about existing, but I am not burdened by that problem because I am not an existentialist.
I know you made no mention of logic, but you should have. That’s why I took the liberty of mentioning it myself. You proposed that science investigate something which it is ill-equiped to investigate. Something analytical. Something metaphysical. Something essential. As I explained already, you may study an effect, but the effect is not the thing that caused the effect. You are incapable — with science, at least — of determining whether a temporal lobe spike is a fit of epilepsy or a command from God.
I agree, but you haven’t concieved of everything that the human race will concieve of. Thus, you may be able to value Santa Claus but a person in the stone age wouldn’t.
The limited choice is not due to an inherent flaw in God, rather its due to an inherent flaw in humanity. We only get one shot at this life, and we can only experience each moment once. Your experiences, and your choices are limited by many factors. If you were born in 200 B.C. you would not have experienced Jesus or his message, if you were born in 200 A.D. you would not have experienced Mohammad or his message. Could our stone age friend have chosen to become a disciple of Christ, or a follower of Mohammad. Can you choose to become a disciple of the next prophet, whomever he may be? Of course not, you are limited to at best a centuries worth of experience.
Would you have become a hippie if you were born in 1850?
Aesthetic, beauty or value presupposes someone, or something to set the criteria, or make that judgement. Beauty has no meaning without someone or something to define what is beautiful.
Whatever, I don’t know what defintion of exist you are using, but I am using the one that means “To actually be.” If there is a Goodness that edifies then Goodness exists. If there is not a Goodness that edifies then Goodness does not exist. By the way, schizophrenic in the manner I am using it does not mean hearing voices, it means the coexistance of two opposing, or disparate things. In this case, that part of one which is caused by God, and that which isn’t.
Why should I have?
I do no such thing. I said “God’s effect on the world, or the manner in which a person experiences God.” Those two things are in the natural world, neither are metaphysical or essential, and both can be observed. As such, they both fall within the reach of science. Saying that we are incapable of determining whether a brain spike is epilepsy or God begs the question.
Liberal, I had no idea our beliefs are so closely aligned.
Aside from all the other things you described:
<snip>
I’m sure you are familiar with Dr. Persinger’s work on this and the ability to produce “the God effect” by stimulation of part of the brain. (I assume that it is the temporal lobe.) Although many other scientists and lay people misunderstand his studies, Dr. Persinger himself makes no judgment about the meaning of the ability to stimulate these experiences. It is as you said – he says he is incapable of determining the cause.
Nonsense. You can hypothesize that a bear made the tracks, and then predict that you’ll find bear fur on branches. If you find it, you don’t prove anything, but you do increase your confidence. You can also predict that it will shit in the woods.
I for one would be much more willing to accept the god hypothesis if we found the “tracks.” Of course this only makes sense if the hypothesized god interacts with us in a physical way.
I’d just like to throw my questions into the mix. If god knows everything that is going to happen why is he always getting pissed and smighting folks and kicking them out of perfectly nice gardens for eating an apple that he put there and knew they would eat. And splitting up people with different languages for building a tower he knew they would build, and drowning everything. Oh and why the drama of crucifying a guy to forgive our sins, could he just do it without the drama. And if we are how he made us why do we need to be forgiven anyway.
If he had punished before we did those things, what would we have learned? From our perspective, we haven’t done anything wrong - and likely we’d still think to ourselves “Eat the apple? Ha! I wouldn’t do that, ever!”, because we’re often wrong.
One of the major pro-God arguments in the “Problem of Evil” debate is that there is evil in the world because God is trying to teach us a lesson - as a parent must allow their children to make their own mistakes sometimes in order to let them learn themselves. As humans, our minds are ingrained with the idea that cause -> effect; a God who reversed that, and punished before the evil we commit, would confuse us considerably.
And that’s even assuming he tells us he’s punishing us. If there’s someone upstairs, the closest he’s come to telling people things directly was via his son (assuming a christian God) 2000-odd years ago. Chances are with punishment before the sin he wouldn’t tell us why he was doing it - so we’d be left with what would seem to be an angry God randomly punishing us (from our perspective).
I’m not familiar with his work in particular, but I am familiar with the work of neurosurgeon and researcher, Dr. VS Ramachandran who actually pioneered that sort of experiment. I read his book, Phantoms in the Brain, at the recommendation of an atheist.
*Which one of these categories does mystical experience fall into? Why is the revealed truth of such transcendent experience in any way “inferior” to the more mundane truth that we scientists dabble in? Indeed, if you are ever tempted to jump to this conclusion, just bear in mind that *one could use exactly the same evidence — the involvement of the temporal lobes in religion — to argue for, rather than against, the existence of God.
— VS Ramachandran, MD, PhD, Phantoms in the Brain, p. 185
(Emphasis mine)
Huh? Just because he didn’t speak English? You’ve confused a label for the thing it represents just as you had confused an effect with the thing that caused it. In order for something to qualify as freewill as you’re describing it, there would have to be knowledge of all things, including things unknown — a contradiction. That’s why freewill is not an epistemic phenomenon. What is known is entirely irrelevant. Freewill isn’t about a choice of what to know; it is about a choice of what to value given whatever it is that you know.
I agree. But that’s exactly the sort of equivocation I cautioned against. What moral difference does it make whether you choose to do jumping jacks or push-ups just because they are the only exercises you know? The only choice that matters is which you value more: the facilitation of goodness or the obstruction of goodness. That moral choice can be accomplished no matter how many trivial physical choices you have.
No, but I still would have been a rebel. It is a part of my essence.
Exactly! And that is what our moral journey is all about — deciding for ourselves what it is we find beautiful and valuable. We all pursue that which we treasure. “Where your treasure is, there your heart is also.” — Jesus
Then you might have meant MPD.
For the third time, it is because logic, and not science, is the applicable tool for examining analytical questions.
But you’re studying an effect, and not the thing that caused the effect. As a last attempt to get this point across to you, let me propose a thought experiment. Suppose you are a Flatlander, and you see a point appear. You see it widen into a circle until its widest diameter, and then you see it shrink back to a point again. Based on what you can study with the tools that you have, how can you possibly know that what just happened was a three dimensional sphere falling through your world? You did not witness a sphere, and in fact cannot even extrapolate one.
Are you suggesting that a clever person cannot put bear fur on branches? Confidence is a fine thing, and if it is what you value, then you will have your reward. But it will have no effect on reality.
Billions of people have found the tracks. Have you considered the possibility that you’re wearing a blindfold?
Well, you aren’t being forgiven for having eleven toes or anything; you’re being forgiven for obstructing goodness — something that was your own choice, made independently of His will. That’s why it’s called freewill. If you’ve written a computer program, you’ve no one to blame but yourself if it crashes. But if you allow it to generate its own code and it crashes just because it doesn’t value your wishes, then you have a legitimate gripe.
But if the punishments are so final, permanent eviction from the garden of eden, everlasting damnation, then do we really learn. I mean if once we fuck up we a punished forever then whats the point of teaching. Besides where does a god who sends us to hell for eternity get off saying he loves us. Thats kind of like giving a parent who kills their kid for sneaking an extra desert a pass because he was trying to teach him and he says he loves him.
And I don’t buy all this freewill BS. I mean I can choose to eat broccolli but I can’t choose to like broccolli. What about child molesters do they choose to do what they do? I don’t think any of us make as many choices as we think we do. The brain is a complex organ. I have many thoughts and desires that if I really had freewill I would not have. Seems to me this belief in freewill is just the ultimate opiate for the masses. It comforts us to think we are in control, to think we are special and not just a complex biological organism. That somehow we are different/more special than plankton.
Absolutely not, you still wrote the code that determines what the new code will be, and thus wrote the new code. Whether or not the program generates new code that is acceptable to you is solely dependent on the portion of the program you write to create new code. If it generates code unacceptable to you, that is becuase you programmed it to do so.
You still don’t get it. It has nothing to do with choosing from among options available to it. The choice is merely whether it does or does not value the code I’ve written, and whether it will faciliate or obstruct my code. I’ve made it so that it can do either one.
No, you are speaking to an entirely different point that I am. My point is that the choice, any choice, is dependent on the code you have written. Saying that “it” chose not to value your code is absurd, becuase “it” is doing nothing but execute the code you have written. Anything that “it” chooses is entirely dependent on the code you write. Anything “it” chooses to do, value, or whatever is becuase you wrote it to do so. “It” is nothing more than an extension of you, and your will.
No clue, because I don’t believe in God. I agree that there a considerable contradictions between the concept of a benevolent God and the actions he is supposed to have taken and ideals he holds us to.
I agree with all that - essentially we are all just the sum of our expiriences, our environment, and our physical body, but we are different/more special than plankton - we have emotions, for one. Regardless as to whether those emotions are a factor of our “soul”, or merely electrical impulses in the brain, the fact remains that if something bad happens we’re going to be sad, and that’s unpleasant. My own philosophy is that the primary “good” thing is to reduce suffering, and increase happiness, on the grounds that we feel better and enjoy it (an indisputible fact, if nothing else) and I think it’s better on practical grounds, too - sort of hedonism writ large. Hedonism’s got a lot of bad press, really. 
Nah. You’re assuming vacuum tubes and silicon chips. My program is more advanced than that, and makes its own aesthetic choices.
Look, I understand your argument. If God gives you nothing but an axe and a knife, then your only choice is what to cut with. But that’s where you’re mistaken and are confusing theology with teleology. It makes no difference whether you have only two items to cut with or a whole arsenal of cutting tools. What matters is whether the cut you make edifies or destroys — that is, does it facilitate God’s will or obstruct it? Jesus teaches that two disparate acts are morally equivalent so long as both are done to the glory of God.