I have been watching a lot of videos of people asking pastors, preachers and such why there is evil in the world. The answer they usually give is God wants us to have free will. My question is this. Say God revealed himself to all humans’ beings on the planet and gave us a choice. Say that God told us he had a plan, but his plan would take decades or centuries more. However, we could have peace on the planet now. However, everyone giving up their free will would be the only way to do it.
Let’s say God took a vote of all human beings on the planet. What would your vote be. Would peace on earth be worth giving up your free will and ability to harm, abuse and mistreat others?
I reject the premise. There is no such thing as free will in the sense you imagine it, it is a religious fantasy. The harm in the world is not attributable to free will, it is attributable to selfishness, cruelty, psychopathy, etc.
I think a better way to express what you’re asking might be: would you be willing to accept modifications to your brain to change your personality so that you would be less selfish, have more empathy, never be inclined to harm others?
A less philosophical and arguably more practical take on this would be the movie Equilibrium and others of the same sort. That much of the violence and conflict in the world are a result of our emotional fixations - in this vehicle, drugs are used to dull/remove such things, although genetic engineering, brain surgery, or implants (to various degrees of sci-fi) could arguably do the same.
Either way, you get into the situation that if there is no ‘free will’ as the OP seems to be intending to use the term, there isn’t much point in doing much of anything, and, as set up in the OP, there wasn’t ever a POINT to anything either. God set up some weird thought experiment writ large, didn’t like it, and gave the participants a chance to opt out for a total reset. Game over.
For instance, is it that anyone that has a choice between doing good vs. evil considers their choice to be totally free and without external influence… but then they always happen to make the good choice?
Or, is it more that a demon appears on your shoulder before any choice, promising to inflict indescribable torture on you if you choose evil?
Except that the angelic critter appears on your other shoulder exhorting you to accept the soul-cleansing (which, of course, you can take after doing the evil thing and be just fine).
The premise is flawed, but for a different reason. Free will is brought up in relation to the question of theodicy—why, if God is all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing, things still seem a bit shit, on the whole—because of Plantinga’s ‘free-will defense’. If there was free will, then the combination of tri-omni God and the existence of evil would not be inconsistent. But then, that combination isn’t inconsistent, even absent free will (we’ve shown an example where tri-omni God and evil coherently coexist, but then, that obviously means it’s possible for them to coexist). So there’s no dichotomy between ‘having free will’ and ‘evil existing’, even in the presence of a tri-omni God.
Free will is the gap between my level of introspection and the actual functioning of my brain.
No brain is powerful enough to have complete insight into its own workings–it would have to simulate itself to do so, which is impossible. So for any decision, there will be an element which appears to come out of nowhere–even if you recognize that it must come from either a deterministic or random process, you can’t pin it down any more than that. You made a decision, but you don’t know why. And you don’t have enough information or insight to say if it could have been otherwise, or what might have made you change your mind. Thus it feels like you truly did have a choice in the matter.
I think the same idea must apply to any intelligence, since an arbitrarily powerful brain still can’t simulate itself. Every decision will have an uncertain origin to it, which might as well be called free will.
Sure. I agree with all that. But the key point is “feels like”. The strong intuition that you could have done otherwise in identical circumstances is an illusion.
Yet it is fundamental to Christianity that it is not an illusion. And our criminal justice system assumes that it is not an illusion. Both are based on a fictitious foundation that we could have done otherwise in precisely identical circumstances.
Wasn’t there some line like ‘Those who would sacrifice liberty for peace deserve neither’? I go with that. Free will (however you understand the term).