“Pastors and preachers” makes it pretty clear to me, but that’s just my take on it. My comments were based on that construct. Feel free to offer another. 
Yes, that’s what I meant by the vaguely implying, but it might just be limitation of the English language. It would be interesting to see how many people would say “yes” to a familiar god, but utterly reject the same proposal from a less familiar god. “I want world peace, but not if it means I have to be a Hindu!”
Just out of curiosity, how many people posting to this thread currently live in a war zone? If missiles are raining down on my house and militias are conscripting my sons and soldiers are raping my daughters, I’ll let God take whatever the hell he wants to make it stop.
This question is meaningless within my philosophical framework. I am a panentheist, which means that I not only believe in God, I don’t believe in anything other than God. Everything which exists is simply God manifesting in a particular time and space. You are nothing but God, though obviously the inverse isn’t true, since God is much more than just you.
Materialist atheists believe that free will is an illusion, and I agree up to a point. From one valid point of view, all our actions are predetermined by the laws of physics, or, if you prefer, by the will of God. But God obviously has free will, so there is another equally valid point of view from which all our actions are determined by God’s free will, and the “illusion” involved is the illusion that our individual wills are separate from God’s will.
On a less philosophical plane, the problem I have with the OP is that it doesn’t clearly identify what I would be giving up. Everyone agrees that it SEEMS as though we live in a universe where we have free will; how could we tell if we suddenly didn’t have it? Despite my philosophical problems with the concept of free will, I feel as though it would be terrifying to not have the subjective sensation of having free will, although I find it difficult to even imagine not having that sensation! I imagine feeling depersonalized, passively watching my body go about all its just and righteous business, with no input from me needed or desired. At that point, is the body doing all these good deeds even “me” anymore?
If we specify that the bargain is just that we still get to feel like we have free will, but just always make the right decision, it seems like there’s no good argument at all for refusing to take the deal.
Interesting! I’m on board with your first paragraph, but that means that the identity that I actually have has no external causal forces to take into consideration. And, as God, everything (including myself) is as it is because I chose for it to be. (The challenge is all in the interaction and communication).
What would it mean to be God without free will?
Oh, gawd, it was just a freaking joke to compliment eschereals post and their point about how would one know what sex “God” is.
I erred by not including “with apologies to Gallagher”.
See, you have the omnis wrong. The deity is not “all-good” (or “omnibenevolent”, as some say), the three are omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. All of which are somewhat nonsensical from a practical point of view, but omnibenevolent is outright ridiculous.
In fact, “good” is typically defined in terms of the deity’s pronouncements, so it gets to select what is good and bad, but from the perspective of the mortal subject, the deity itself is morally neutral, inasmuch as it would exist beyond good and evil (in some nightmarish Nietzschean realm).
The deity is said to be pursuing its own agenda which is incomprehensible to us, but it says that its agenda is good, so we have to accept that: the deity informs us of what is good and what is bad. Perhaps it will shake the walls of R’lyeh to awaken Cthulhu so that he can feast upon us to the end of days, and that might not seem so good to us, but the deity says it is, so wehave to accept that.
Or, maybe we could switch to another superbeing, in hopes that that one is more fond of us and will unseat the one who wants to bring about world peace in the mouths of the old ones, if we will only comply with it.
That’s a fascinating question. I think if God doesn’t have free will, then God is nothing but the sum total of the laws of physics, and at that point the question of God’s “existence” becomes a meaningless semantic issue. Subjectively, I feel that such a God would still be awesome and worthy of worship.
Faith is the belief that God doesn’t play dice with the universe; that we aren’t just the sum total of a bunch of quasi-random mechanistic processes (even though that, in and of itself, would also be really awesome), that our lives actually have meaning, and not just in the existentialist sense of “whatever meaning we arbitrarily decide to assign to them”.
I feel that the dice are loaded, that (from a sufficiently long point of view) we are constantly evolving in the direction of love and sanity. But ultimately, we can’t confidently distinguish a universe in which this is true from one in which it isn’t; hence the term “faith”.
So you don’t know what those are, yet still you don’t believe in them? How do you know what it is you believe doesn’t exist?
Here’s a simple mechanism: take a device capable of traversing infinitely many states in finite time, like Thomson’s lamp. Then, use it as the basis of a recursive computation of your future actions: in order to decide whether you do x or y, you need to first decide whether you want to do x or y. Then iterate infinitely (this is to overcome Schopenhauer’s regress, the only real problem for free will)… The result is clearly not deterministic: just as with Thomson’s lamp, the initial conditions don’t imply the outcome. It’s also clearly not random: there’s a simple mechanism by which it comes about. Furthermore, it’s also not determined by anything but that mechanism. This makes free will a kind of supertask, but so is super-Turing computation generally thought to be, and there plausibly are examples of that in the real world (in fact, true randomness generation is one, so if your ontology admits that, then it seems to also have the resources for free will of the above type—which of course doesn’t mean it actually exists).
The putative ‘God’ of the hypothetical can then be just seen as the ‘celestial programmer’ type, that has initially created the simulation with super-Turing free-will capacities in all entities, but has now seen that this leads to bad consequences, and is offering to remove this, to set the world on a perfectly deterministic path optimizing some objective we can stipulate tracks ‘goodness’. As we don’t have any insight into our free-will module (we can’t, because our modeling capacities seem to be bounded by the computable), this won’t necessarily impact our own experience in the world.
As for the question of whether such a life would be worthwhile, we enjoy lots of things where we’re not free, in the end. Like rollercoaster rides: the tracks perfectly determine our future course (I mean, hopefully!), yet they’re still exciting. Or novels: before you crack open the first page, the fate of every character is long since determined. None of that seems to impact our enjoyment of such things, so why should a lack of free will impact our lives all that much?
That’s not how the question of theodicy is usually laid out:
In the philosophy of religion, a theodicy , (/θiːˈɒdɪsi/) meaning ‘vindication of God’ in Greek, is an argument that attempts to resolve the problem of evil that arises when omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and omniscience are all simultaneously ascribed to God.
I would need to have some guarantees about whose Will was going to be substituted and how it was going to be used. Given some of the things that have happened in my life, that religious folk shrugged their shoulders and said “It’s just God’s Will” - no. I am in no way sure that God’s Will for me is happiness or even contentment.
The one caveat: If it were ONLY me who had to give up their Will, not the entire world of humans, but just me? Then yes. I would take one for the team.
How would it even be possible to argue the existence of an “omnibenevolent” God?
Clearly there is a great deal of unnecessary suffering in the world, caused by human immorality. But even if all humans started behaving in a morally impeccable manner, people would still die young of rare diseases, natural disasters would still occur, and we would all still die in the end, with many of our dreams unfulfilled. Wolves would still eat rabbits, and rabbits would still crush the dreams of innocent stalks of grass.
I mean, you can argue that, from the most expansive point of view, “it’s all good”. But all mortal creatures want to be immortal and happy all the time, so from the point of view of any mortal creature, God obviously isn’t entirely “benevolent”. From our point of view, Chicxulub was a good thing, for the dinosaurs not so much.
All you’re doing is restating the problem, here. Yes, the universe we see isn’t consistent with a benevolent God. That’s the problem, not the answer to the problem.
I guess you don’t, you assume it at the outset, then try to make the world fit—which is the challenging part (although to the best of my knowledge, Plantinga’s defense is about as widely accepted as seems feasible on such a subject).
As to why one would make such an assumption? I can only speculate, but the most widespread reason seems to be ‘because that old dude/book/tradition says so and is socially contextualized as a source of truth’.
Maybe one way to paraphrase the OP’s question is to ask which is worse: pain and suffering and strife, or meaninglessness?
That is, would you accept a life that doesn’t hurt if it meant a life that doesn’t matter?
Really this sounds like a deal with the devil, taking a short cut for what is a partial solution. Peace of God is fundamentally different than world peace. The method is also different, peace from the free will desire to do good things with errors covered by God because of the person’s intent to do good vs the removal of the ability to do harm.
On first thought I think that would place us in a state of perpetual spiritual infancy with the inability to grow and ultimately take our appointed place in the universe (Kingdom of God). Though in even that there would have to be a way for us to get there, perhaps that would need to be handled in the underworld after death then with mercy extended into it.
Moderating:
Yes, it was a joke. No, your error was not failing to attribute to Gallagher. It was a thread shitty joke that did not address the topic at hand, and got a mild note.
NOW your error is arguing moderation in thread.
Go to ATMB if you want to argue your note.
It occurs to me: is the theory behind this the assumption that the reason we don’t have world peace is because humans have free will?
If so, and granting that for the purposes of discussion, it wouldn’t be necessary to get rid of free will altogether (granting also for the purposes of discussion that we’ve got it in the first place.) It would only be necessary to remove our ability to choose to hurt each other for personal or national (etc.) advantage. Just like we don’t have free will to flap our arms and fly, or free will to choose to live forever, or free will to choose to survive without eating or drinking, or have free will to choose to do any of all sorts of things we’re just not made to be capable of. But we could still have free will (or the illusion of it if there’s actually no such thing) to choose what to eat for dinner among available options, or whether to live in the city or the suburbs or the country, or who to have sex with or not have sex with, and for all the sorts of things we’d still be capable of. We’d just be made incapable of deciding to slaughter each other.
(And I don’t see any logical reason why being made able to disobey God requires having been made able to slaughter each other. There are logical reasons in evolution why we can – but I don’t see how that gets theologians out of the problem of evil, since the God that most of them seem to believe in made lots of other rules in addition to ‘thou shalt not murder’.)
Would you give up free will for world peace?
Do I have a choice?
Just as thorny_locust ended up wondering if there was an unspoken subtext to the question,
… I find myself wondering if the notion that free will is an illusion has some tie to the personal experience of being unable to pick and choose and bring about the future we’d hoped for, or from feeling unable to affect the world around us in any meaningful way.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m aware that the arguments usually presented are intellectual and philosphical and don’t tend to start with “I feel this way”. But I’ve often wondered if that’s a relevant component.