Not at all. What it means is that if you have that absolute certainty then your only free-will choice is whether or not to engage in direct rebellion. Any other choice is not a moral decision, but merely a cost-benefit calculation.
It is the absence of such dead-certainty that makes simple physical temptation a powerful force in our minds (and bodies). That absence makes us unaware of the genuine cost of vice as compared to the physical gratification derived therefrom, or the benefit of virtue as compared to the physical deprivation derived therefrom. And turns such decisions into genuine moral dilemmas.
So you are saying theists really are unsure whether God exists? And what of the OT figures that chatted up God, was Moses unable to make moral decisions since he knew God existed?
Wouldn’t a decision to rebel or not also be a cost/benefit analysis? If not stealing a car is simply a cost benefit anaylsis if you are certain of the punishment, I fail to see how rebellion/obedience is not equally so. You still decide whether the inevtiable punishment is worth what you gain.
If a God existed that truly wanted people to have free will, it would not dangle the carrot of heaven in front of you while whipping you with the threat of hell.
If someone truly believes in heaven and hell, I don’t believe they are using free will to worship their god. And since people do not choose what they believe or don’t believe, then I don’t really see how free will comes into the picture at all.
Choosing not to worship a god while under those beliefs is not a choice, it’s insanity.
i think this thread starts to address my main problem with theism. i’ve realized for some time now that my faith in all-things-secular is similar in many ways to faith in a creator. one thing that helped to push me over in the secular direction was the question:
why did god create things?
if god is omnipotent, certainly these things aren’t a means to an end. he wouldn’t need the means, since he could presumably cause the end without this means, if he was indeed omnipotent. i have trouble understanding why an omnipotent being would be motivated at all, let alone be driven to create something as fallible as humans.
so two questions i guess: whence does free will come if we really have it? and, why did god make people?
perhaps this is a bit of a hijack, and i apologize if that is so, but i really think that answering these questions can go a long way toward answering the main question.
I don’t think it is a hijack at all, and in fact gets to the core of the implied question: “If God, then why us?”.
It is a reasonable axiom that God is the moral absolute. It is also a reasonable axiom that His will, since it is boundless, is free. Therefore, it is a reasonable inference that God is a free moral agent.
Since He Himself is free to make moral decisions, the question presents itself as to why He chooses goodness over evil. We would have to redefine “free” if we wanted to assert that He must choose goodness over evil. Therefore, He makes His choice voluntarily and volitionally. (Free -> Voluntary — Will -> Volition).
When we are free to choose, we choose what we value, as in Gaudere’s choice between a pile of money and a pile of shit. Those who value money more than shit will choose money, while those who value shit more than money will choose shit.
Given a dichotomous morality, if God has chosen goodness, then we may reasonably draw the inference that God values goodness over evil. And just as a person who chooses riches is rich, so is a person who chooses goodness good. Thus, God is good.
But goodness in isolation is morally moot. It is like having money with no market. Two things are required to break God’s moral isolationism: (1) entities besides Himself that are free moral agents, and (2) a conduit that bridges the volition of the agents to serve as a moral economy.
If seems like a reasonable axiom that love is a suitable conduit for goodness, and that we, if we are free moral agents, are entities who are like God. Therefore, God loves us. And His love is a conduit for His goodness.
It is a reasonable inference, then, that closing the conduit of goodness by rejecting His love results in a state of evil, which is reasonably defined as the absence of His love (since the morality is dichotomous). Thus it is implied that the opposite of love is rejection.
Since God is good and loves us, and since His love serves as a conduit for His goodness, it is reasonable to infer that He created us for the purpose of expressing His love.
Thus, each of us is a kiss from God — a piece of God Himself. Our lives are journeys through the fabric of moral existence. Our moral choices always involve opening or closing the conduit between ourselves and our Creator.
It is only natural that if we close our hearts to God that we will envy Him, suspect Him, and even hate Him. Even though we make our choices freely, we blame Him that we made them. It is not surprising that by divorcing ourselves from Him, we divorce ourselves from reason and begin to rationalize the justification for our decisions.
We blame Him for condemning us to the abyss when it is we ourselves who spend our lives cutting the lifelines He gives us, over and over and over again.
When we protest that God condemns us to hell simply because we break the rules, we are raising a red herring. God is good, and He loves us. We are not breaking rules; rather, we are breaking His love. He is not rejecting us; rather, we are rejecting Him. He does not condemn us; rather, we condemn ourselves by severing the conduit of His goodness.
We are like people who choose shit over money, and then complain that it stinks.
I have never bought into that idea. If god is morally perfect, then he can only do the morally perfect thing. At given juncture A, there might be for a person several moral choices, A1, A2 and A3. However, only one of those would be “perfect”. So if god is morally perfect, then he must choose the perfect action. Thus he cannot choose another action. Thus he is not a moral free agent.
I don’t think that being without free will makes something “imperfect”, since we ourselves are without free will IMHO. So this isn’t an attack on the concept of god, just an attack on a common characterization of him. In fact, I think the entire idea of his having a “will” at all is a little silly. Honestly, *Lib, I still have no idea how you reason from the pantheistic god of your infamous modal logic “proof” to this personal god you trumpet. I’ve thought about asking you in GD, but I’m not sure I want to drag everyone through that again
If God is not a free moral agent, then He cannot be morally perfect because He is not free to make a moral choice. Rather than morally perfect, that would make Him morally impotent.
Oh. And with respect to the leap from a panentheistic (not pantheistic) god to the Christian God, I believe that I’ve explained before that it happened quite the other way around. I came to know the Christian God by subjective experience. Over time, my brain caught up with my heart.
Well that’s fine reasoning there Lib, but it doesn’t do much to counter my point that he cannot, by the definition of moral perfection, have free will. If he simultaneously must have it, but also cannot have it, then he’s a self-contradiction, and doesn’t exist.
Either something is “good”, and god does that, or what god does defines what “good” is. Under the first definition, a contradiction manifests. Under the second, god still isn’t free, because he’d have to be consistent over time, other wise good couldn’t be called an absolute. God would be like a court of appeals that never diverged from stare decisis, that always had to follow precedent.
But your definition of moral perfection is itself a contradiction. You say that He must make the perfect choice. That is no choice at all. No one is obliged to use your definition.
If something is “perfect”, then it must be a certain way. The perfect way, in fact. For any given thing, there would be one perfect way it could be, and a whole list of imperfect ways it could be. Are you defining perfect such that at least two different ways could both be perfect? I’m afraid I just don’t follow.
I’m sorry if you think I’m “arguing against my own imagination” here, but you’re not putting forth any definitions for me to argue against, so I’m using the ones that appear to be most common. Is it possible that when a choice presents itself, two different options are both perfect? If so, explain how. If not, then god has to do the perfect one.
Perhaps morality doesn’t require the notion of “choice” at all. Apparently, sorry to put words in your mouth, your definition of moral “good” seems to require that there be a choice to do “evil.” Why is it necessary, to your mind, that god have that choice? Suppose he always acts in a certain way, and we’re supposed to act that way coz he wants us to, and we use the shorthand description “good” to describe that. We must be miscommunicating on something here, because I’m not seeing how your definition of morality and perfection is operating.
The perfect thing must be perfect in the way it is defined, but outside of that, it may manifest in any number of infinite ways. A circle, to be a circle, must be constructed such that every point on its circumference is equidistant from its center. It may be a circle of any size. It may be drawn on any surface of any shape. And depending on the surface, the ratio of its circumference to its diameter need not even be pi. But in every case, it is a perfect circle.
Our moral choices are made within the context of a reality illusion — the universe. Two choices, one to feed someone starving and the other to heal someone sick, are morally equivalent.
What makes God morally perfect is that He always makes decisions that are morally good. What makes Him morally absolute is that He makes decisions in a context of true reality — eternity.
Morality is defined as a relation to a standard. (American Heritage or Merriam-Webster.) God’s standard is perfection. And in fact, the moral imperative that Jesus gave us is to “Be perfect”. (Matthew 5:48.)
Morality is dichotomous because there is God and Not God (good and evil, perfect and all else). God’s moral decision is to love us. His decision manifests as goodness through the conduit of His love such that, upon our consent, we are imbued with His moral perfection.
It is that perfection that entitles us to be One with Him for eternity.
Even as an athiest I have no particular problem with the basic concepts behind many religious rules (don’t steal, don’t hurt people, etc, etc) If God made an appearance on earth I don’t think rebellion would be much of an issue since most athiests would go DOH, guess I was wrong…there you are!
I think that makes a lot of sense, Drachillix. But the problem is in what constitutes “an appearance”. There have even been debates here about exactly that.
It is difficult to conceive of any event that cannot be rationalized by some appeal to a materialist dogma. The sole exception being a subjective experience that results as a change in perspective, point of view, or reference frame.
If I bowl a perfect game, that’s because I didn’t make any mistakes according the rules of the game. I can check the rules and verify that there were no mistakes. You can call God “perfect”, but not in the same way that a game of bowling is “perfect”. Whose “book of rules” are we to check God’s behavior against? Who would have written such a book?
I make jokes about God sometimes, just so I can say that God understands, because he has a “perfect sense of humor”. Of course, there is no such thing as a perfect sense of humor, because different people find different things funny. Different people find different things to be moral/immoral. God is not required to use anyone’s definition of morality.
I think that when you talk about “God” and “perfect” together, it’s in the sense that he could size me up and tell me and my sister the perfect joke to crack us up, and then tell me and my mom a different joke that would totally have us rolling. It’s that he could bowl a perfect game if he wanted to, or only knock down the 1-pin in the first frame, the 2-pin in the second frame, and so on.
If God is the standard that defines Good and Evil (gotta capitalize the words there, make 'em look impressive), whatever God chooses is Good, and whatever God rejects is Evil. So? You cannot say what God will or will not choose (is and is not choosing, had and had not chosen). The predictive power of your statements is nil.
What makes you think the world can be conceived of as separate from eternity?
You define God’s choice as perfection. Okay, fine. So? Why should we be concerned about this standard?
Lastly, if God accepts some things and rejects others (in other words, there is God and Not God), then there’s something greater than God: the totality of the God and Not God combined.
Well, there you go…God could rearrange the stars in the sky every night to spell out the 10c, broadcast a Q&A TV show 24 hours a day, call the lottery numbers for every lottery and every game outcome from now until the end of time, and all those silly materialists would still be able to disbelieve, therefore never risking infringing on free will even if you accept that knowing with a reasonable degree of certainty that God exists can infringe on free will!
