This always drives me nuts when people say this. It basically amounts to saying, “Yes, this would seem to constitute evidence against God’s existence, and I cannot reconcile it with a loving and all-powerful God, so I just won’t try, and won’t think about it.” Grrr.
??? Strange place you went to, that doesn’t think God has dominion over the universe.
Don’t forget the sodomy causes natural evil theodicy. Refute that, atheist bastard!
It doesn’t work well for free will either. Even ignoring the question of whether free will even exists or is a sensible concept, our instincts aren’t designed the way a being who wanted us to behave morally would design them. Yes, we do have moral inclinations built in to a degree, but we have plenty of outright predatory or sadistic ones as well.
Consider the desire to indiscriminately hurt or kill everyone loosely associated with someone who did us harm. Or pedophilia. Or jealous rage towards your romantic rival. Or the human tendency towards stereotyping. These and many other tendencies are built in, and are best immoral and stupid behavior. The stupid part is important; a rational self interested being with free will wouldn’t indulge in such pointless or outright self destructive behavior regardless of morality. Most of the time, evil is stupid as well as wrong.
Our instincts make sense as a mishmash from millions of years of evolution; they don’t make sense as something a being that wanted us to act moral would make. That’s why morality involves so much self control; we have to override our own nature. A creature designed with a set of instincts designed to a moral standard could have just as much free choice as we do, but they would behave far more morally because they wouldn’t be fighting themselves so much. They could choose evil still, but generally wouldn’t bother.
Now you’re sounding like me, cut it out. 
I agree completely, and I find an amoral universe comforting in a way. If you earn or deserve a good thing happening to you, then you must also earn or deserve a bad thing. It helps keep me humble. I’m not a better person because of the stuff I do well through random genetics than a person who can’t do them well.
My understanding is that it happened so fast there wouldn’t be any time for pain. My advisor died in his sleep, even better.
I think I understand duality. What I don’t understand is whether free will applies to the spirit only, or to the combination of spirit and body? I can accept that the spirit is not fundamentally harmed by anything, but if my consciousness is part of the spirit me, I’d say that it might feel harmed by evil done to me.
In addition, what is the effect of the inability of the spirit to cause action by the body on its free will? We’re all totally free within our imaginations and dreams, but is that a reasonable meaning of free will?
Damn, I agree with you again. Ethics evolve over time, and different people and cultures come up with different ethical conclusions.
Doesn’t this assume some sort of standard of goodness which the person matches with God? Would a person who thinks they are doing good go to God or away? Think of the inquisitor, someone convinced of duality, and that torturing the body is worth it to save a soul. Would the inquisitor see god as beautiful or ugly?
And I thought you were a Christian. Any God worthy of worship would certainly care far more about goodness than worship.
I would but my mouth is full. 
That’s what’s I’ve been saying above. However, going with the natural evil argument avoids free will rat holes. (And Clockwork Orange territory. With natural evil, either God deliberately caused the earthquake, or he created a world where earthquakes happen, or he doesn’t give a crap. All of them are not exactly supportive of the theist’s loving god. The real answer, there is no god and shit happens, has none of these problems.
We’ve got so many arguments on our side, why make it more complicated than it has to be?
Minor point - how is this a flaw in atheistic belief? Ateists don’t claim that there’s an overseeing moral agent exerting control over the universe. So amorality in the universe, while perhaps unfortunate, is not contradictory to the atheistic perspective.
If on the other hand, you’re just saying that the fact that atheists admit that the universe is not moral has a negative impact on atheism’s sales appeal as a belief, then I agree completely. (Other than being more probably correct, atheism falls short in the sales appeal department on a number of levels; that’s a problem it tends to have.)
The problem with this argument (as i’m sure you know, so this is more for other people), other than it making atheism look bad as begbert2 points out, is that it’s a result of people incorrectly comparing atheism to religion. The two aren’t equivalent. The true equivalent in level terms of atheism isn’t Christianity, Judaism et al, it’s theism. Theism makes no moral statement about the universe either. A religion isn’t just theism; it’s a moral code and a view of the universe and sometimes a set of rituals, etc. Unlike atheism, those things come bundled in with the religion; it’s all one package. And so the nutjobs (of being which I accuse no-one in this thread) declare that atheism doesn’t have all these things, and would lead to anarchy. Yes? And? It’s the equivalent of me saying, hey, theism doesn’t give any moral statement of the universe, therefore it’s worthless next to utilitarianism. I’m also right, but who’s just a theist? Likewise, the nutjobs are correct, but who’s just an atheist?
It just annoys me when people suggest atheism would be a poor replacement for religion - well, of course it would! Atheism is just a statement about lack of belief in gods. Atheism and a philosophical and moral statement of the world; now, that’s the equivalent of a religion, and that’s what should be used to compare.
I know it’s hard to keep in the forefront when you’re not used to thinking in this way, but God’s interest is your aesthetical choices, not your mechanical choices. Therefore, He gave you a universe that is neutral so that you can make it do your bidding. And this is where actions come in. The spirit makes a moral decision and commands the brain. The brain then commands the body, and the decision is carried out by an action (or inaction, as in leaving someone to die of thirst in a desert, for example). So God isn’t leaving poisons out for you to drink. He is leaving building blocks that you then form into either poisons or delicacies, and hand them out or consume them as you see fit.
You’re not tying this theory to an afterlife punishment/reward scenario, are you? (Honest question.) I can see making people inclined to be sociopathic to create opportunities for the aesthetically pleasing human drama of those who face the killer, but only if you don’t punish the killer for it afterwards. (That would demonstrate a contradiction in the ‘value’ of the serial killing: it’s not really bad so it’s okay to allow it for the sake of esthetics, but it’s really bad so we have to burn the dude in hell.)
You know, I honestly don’t know whether free will applies to the physical. I mean, there might be a corollary or analogous thing going on in which there is freedom of motor movement or brain decisions or whatever. And I would guess it would have something to do with quantum mechanics, but honestly I don’t know. There should be, though, it seems to me, some sort of thing that is at least pseudo-free, since I pretty much view the universe as a mathematical expression — specifically a probability distribution, just with a lot of variables. In either case, though, you can understand why I don’t fuss over it much.
I think it is often the case that the brain or the body or both don’t necessarily cooperate when the spirit commands, for whatever reason. There might be physical damage, or physical distress — like panic or something. A person might courageously run to the aid of someone being mugged, for example, until he sees a gun, whereupon he steps back. There is often conflict between the spirit and the animal. As Jesus put it, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” But when we meet with God face to face, we will not be corporeal. It will be our essential selves deciding whether He is beautiful and His goodness valuable. There will be nothing to interfere.
As you know, my theology is deduced from simple axioms about goodness and love. And one of the things I discovered is that the opposite of love is not hate, but sin. Consider that love is defined as the facilitation of goodness; then the opposite of love is the obstruction of goodness. And that’s what sin is. Therefore, if two men are in love and edify one another, there is no sin because they are facilitating love. But the man who condemns them is sinning because he seeks to be an obstacle to their love.
With the caveat understood that my judgment in this matter is worthless, but for the sake of answering your question in the spirit it is asked, I will say that, absent any other information, the inquisitor will find God to be decidedly unattractive. There will be an insidious mercy that he will despise.
I realize that he isn’t very popular here, but CS Lewis once said that God so values goodness that were there a creature more good than He, He would worship it.
Point taken. And it’s a fair complaint, in my opinion.
Honest answer: no. There is no punishment. Only reward. Every man is given exactly what he values most. If he values hate and conflict, then that is his eternity, and while it may be hell to me, it is heaven to him. Likewise, he would have no interest in my eternal orgy of edification. That would be hell to him. Our whole lives are spent in the pursuit of what we treasure most, and that’s what this earthly journey is all about. It is a moral (aesthetical) pursuit in which we seek what we consider to be treasure. Our essence is always aimed at our goal. Or as Jesus put it, “Where your treasure is, there your heart is also.”
I agree with your last paragraph there; that’s pretty much all they’re left with that I find intellectually honest and valid and they’re pretty unhappy results theologically.
As for your earlier points about free will and our genetic and subconscious stuff, it seems to me it’s definitely a mixture of the two. It’s seems absurd to suggest that we’re not at least driven towards certain inclinations, perhaps inexorably, based on those elements. On the other hand, it would seem equally facile to suggest that we have NO free will whatsoever WITHIN those constraints.
So yes, I’d say that we don’t necessarily have truly pure free will if you take into account predispositions, etc.; or at least not in any meaningful way but we have it within those constraints (though I’m not sure I’d necessarily say constraints; that seems a bit absolute maybe they’re just roadblocks that we could navigate around in theory but cost us more than if someone else didn’t have those roadblocks). As far as being tone deaf, I know where you’re coming from as an analogy but of course I’m not sure I’d technically include that as an issue of free will, per se; but I know what you’re getting at. Beyond any possible constraints, there’s of course the issue of what arena free will is expected/understood to operate within and I’d of course distinguish talents, for example, from moral or ethical choices.
I guess it’s a question for me as to how definitively I’d define the available choices as absolutely ‘limited’ rather than just harder or easier to act on. The use of mental retardation would be easier for me to allow for certain limitations as being utterly absolute perhaps but I don’t know.
Personally, I’m seduced by a Matrix-like idea that we’re playing something out again that already happened; like living through a VHS tape being played back on a VCR where you’d subjectively think you have free will and perhaps you did at the time that it happened/was recorded the first time but now we’re just playing it through again so technically now we don’t even though we think we do. Deja vu sometimes makes me wonder about that along with serendipity.
Yeah, I think it was their way of trying to not fall into the camp of the first type of folks that would answer it that way. Of course, when you press on why god wouldn’t have dominion over the universe in that sense, they fell back to well we don’t know but it will all be explained in the hereafter. Grrr, indeed!
It’s actually at those points that I feel I’m not talking to a serious person anymore and now just a partisan apologist and I ask for the check. Which is just as well since they’re sure that the holy spirit will work on me later, etc. so whatever. (!)
Maybe because people are raised that way and they prefer the devil they know, so to speak. It would surely be consistent with various religions all sure they’re right.
Interesting theory - I don’t buy it, but it seems reasonably self-consistent at least.
I feel compelled (heh) to also comment on the question of free will -what do you mean by the term? You can’t mean “free of the influence of our thoughts, emotions, memories, and preferences”, because nobody could make a case for anyone having that kind of free will. (Or wanting it, for that matter.) Once you start throwing thoughts and emotions and preferences and memories back in, though, when to you stop? Where do you draw the line?
(Based on analysis like the above, I’ve come to the personal opinion that ‘free will’ is an incoherent concept, useful only as an antonym to ‘fully predictable’ or ‘predetermined’. To me, the mechanism of the will, whether it is influenced/caused by thoughts or emotions or quantum mechanics or genetics or the human inability to hover in midair - those are just details of implementation and don’t really matter at a philosophical-discussion level.)
Oh, and if the “spirit” has free will, I would think that even with an antirely mechanical body the spirit+body would also have free will, to the precise extent that the body is under the control of the spirit, rather than ignoring the will of the spirit. As in, ‘a guy driving a car’ has free will if the guy does, about the things he can make the car do; whereas ‘a guy sealed in concrete’ has somewhat less free will, I’d say. (I don’t think that quantum randomity adds anything to the equation at all on account of I don’t consider raw randomity to be ‘will’.)
No one could ask for anything more than that. Thank you.
I draw the line between the spirit and the animal. When I use the term free will, I mean specifically free moral will — the freedom of the spirit to make moral choices. The body merely carries out (or fails to carry out) what the spirit demands.
And before you ask, I will say that the mechanism for this is unknown to me. But I suspect that it has something to do with the brain’s limbic system. As Ramachandran has pointed out, we cannot really know whether the brain is manufacturing God or God is calling out to the brain whenever we detect religious experiences coming from the temporal lobes. And science cannot tell us because science cannot investigate God. It has been shown that the limbic system can be sort of short-circuited by things like epilepsy, drugs, or even manual stimulation. But this proves nothing theologically.
Why is the revealed truth of such transcendent experiences in any way “inferior” to the more mundane truths that we scientists dabble in? Indeed, if you are 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, Phantoms in the Brain, “God and the Limbic System”, pp 184-185
Is it still free will if God changes your mind abruptly about his existence?
The mind is just an extension of the brain, and as I explained in quite some detail, I’m not really that interested in whether there is physical free will. I suppose it would be the same as if God moved my toes, or caused me to trip on a rock. It really doesn’t matter whether a person is a theist or an atheist in terms of free moral will. So when my epiphany happened, all that changed was a part of an animal. I had always valued goodness, just as I’m sure you do. The only difference is that now it all makes sense to me. And for you, I’m sure you have your own life experience that makes sense of the world for you. We don’t have to be enemies.