Pascal's wager becomes ridiculous when your invert it though.
Say you look at it as if there were a devil rather than a god. If you believe in the devil you will likely be tortured to death for all eternity as the rules of sin are essentially inescapable. If you do not believe in him and choose to live your life as you would and he does exist, you likely are still going to be tortured for all eternity. Since there is no way to know the dogmatic rules we have in Christianity are, in fact, from a god rather than a devil, there is no way to know that the likelihood of Pascal's Wager is any different from Pascal's Damnation.
I actually think Pascal's Wager still holds under your Satanic inversion. You've essentially just added two additional options:
1. Satan exists, you believe in him
Outcome: Tortured in Hell
2. Satan does not exist, you do not believe in him
Outcome: Tortured in Hell
3. God exists, you believe in him
Outcome: Heaven!
4. God exists, you do not believe in him
Tortured in Hell
3 is still the best option!
It isn't, because this isn't the assumption here. In context, there are only two valid outcomes:
-death with no afterlife
-being tortured for all eternity
By believing in 3 you have to also rationally believe in 1. By believing in 1 your odds are far more likely to be tortured in hell for all eternity as there is no way to know god's will within context. The only (only) constant in the bible is that the devil is there and will tempt you. The odds of a good, all powerful, and benevolent Christian deity controlling all things are essentially 0% given the prevalence of and success of "evil" men, especially within the church that controls the word of god itself. Either the Christian god isn't a god at all or isn't benevolent given the amount of terrible things that happen to his followers on this earth.
This goes back to the Problem of Evil:
God exists.
God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.
An omnibenevolent being would want to prevent all evils.
An omniscient being knows every way in which evils can come into existence, and knows every way in which those evils could be prevented.
An omnipotent being has the power to prevent that evil from coming into existence.
A being who knows every way in which an evil can come into existence, who is able to prevent that evil from coming into existence, and who wants to do so, would prevent the existence of that evil.
If there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God, then no evil exists.
Evil exists (logical contradiction).
There are only two likely outcomes here. Either there is a god and it is malevolent, or there are not gods.
But what about free will? By the nature of existence and history over time, free will leads to far more negative outcomes than positive, including horrific wars, torture, persecution, rape, murder, essentially everything out there that can go wrong. Free will is not something a caring and benevolent god would use without counteracting as it creates more evil than good. An omnibenevolent god would intervene (if it existed) to guide those with free will into choices of actions to prevent atrocities, rather than letting atrocities occur. If anything, free will is an argument for the existence of a malevolent god as it is the dogmatic direct cause of evil actions on earth. A benevolent god could have made positive actions easier or more karmicly rewarding to the faithful, but this is not the case in reality without assumption of a reward after death. Given that we cannot see that reward, nor prove that reward, nor see any likelihood that such a reward exists in any way shape or form it becomes essentially an empty promise as there is no reason that there shouldn't be confirmation of an afterlife in an existence in which a benevolent god actually exists. By leaving uncertainty, that actually creates more evil in the world as people fight over the nature of heaven and how best to get there, actively creating more evil through ambiguity.
Pascal's Wager is entirely about confirmation bias, you believe in something you want to believe, not in something with actual mathematical or logical certitude. And that's fine! Faith has a lot of roles and isn't something people shouldn't have or act by, there are a lot of good things within Christian dogma and the community.
But it isn't a logical outcome and we shouldn't try and pretend it is.
What if you're Jewish?
I don't think they have a version of the Devil.
Monster Talk also did a really good episode on the Devil, and how his meaning and presence has changed.
I've always felt that whatever the source, free will clearly operates within limits. You can will which direction you go when you walk, but you can't will yourself to fly up into the air, or blast the moon out of the sky with sheer willpower. So whatever the case free will is constrained by the limits of reality, whether it's produced by God or by a structure of evolved biology. I'd argue that free within limits is still free - if you feel limited free will isn't really free will then free will doesn't exist.
Again, free will as the theological concept would be in the long form, "freedom to ignore the will of God." The story of Lucifer kind of highlights this, in that (to paraphrase) he is pissed off because no matter how awesome he is and how powerful he is he is fundamentally unable to go against the will of God while humans who are these insignificant specks of dust to him are able to do whatever they want. Also, if an angel goes against God they will be destroyed or cast down while a human can be sinful all their life and recant their sins before dying and be welcomed into Heaven. Essentially, Lucifer rebels because he sees God as not being all He's cracked up to be and thinks he's getting a bum deal compared to these human assholes.
Nowhere in the theological concept does it say that free will gives us super powers over reality. In many ways, the story of Lucifer is supposed to be a cautionary tale of why someone so powerful would need to be limited so greatly. What it is is the right given to us by the Creator to do as we wish in our lives within the limitations of our humanity.
The idea itself is actually pretty awesome depending on the source talking about it. We are free to choose to live however we want, not subject to the divine will if we choose not to be. There may be punishments--and those punishments ebb and flow in severity depending on the source telling you about them--but we are allowed to do as we wish in our lives. So if you do good it is your choice to go and make the world a better place, and if you choose to do evil then it is your choice to make it worse. Realistically, most of the reason it gets focused on is to justify the existence of evil in the world when there is an all-powerful all-knowing being supposedly watching over it.
1) Angels are fundamentally unable to go against the will of God
2) Lucifer rebels
These two statements seem at odds. It goes into paradox territory if you try to assert that "it was god's will that Lucifer went against god's will".
Not only that, but the act of creating that situation, and its subsequent punishment, supports an interpretation of god with questionable morals.
The god that buggers with poor Job just to make a point?
I've always felt that whatever the source, free will clearly operates within limits. You can will which direction you go when you walk, but you can't will yourself to fly up into the air, or blast the moon out of the sky with sheer willpower. So whatever the case free will is constrained by the limits of reality, whether it's produced by God or by a structure of evolved biology. I'd argue that free within limits is still free - if you feel limited free will isn't really free will then free will doesn't exist.
Again, free will as the theological concept would be in the long form, "freedom to ignore the will of God." The story of Lucifer kind of highlights this, in that (to paraphrase) he is pissed off because no matter how awesome he is and how powerful he is he is fundamentally unable to go against the will of God while humans who are these insignificant specks of dust to him are able to do whatever they want. Also, if an angel goes against God they will be destroyed or cast down while a human can be sinful all their life and recant their sins before dying and be welcomed into Heaven. Essentially, Lucifer rebels because he sees God as not being all He's cracked up to be and thinks he's getting a bum deal compared to these human assholes.
Nowhere in the theological concept does it say that free will gives us super powers over reality. In many ways, the story of Lucifer is supposed to be a cautionary tale of why someone so powerful would need to be limited so greatly. What it is is the right given to us by the Creator to do as we wish in our lives within the limitations of our humanity.
The idea itself is actually pretty awesome depending on the source talking about it. We are free to choose to live however we want, not subject to the divine will if we choose not to be. There may be punishments--and those punishments ebb and flow in severity depending on the source telling you about them--but we are allowed to do as we wish in our lives. So if you do good it is your choice to go and make the world a better place, and if you choose to do evil then it is your choice to make it worse. Realistically, most of the reason it gets focused on is to justify the existence of evil in the world when there is an all-powerful all-knowing being supposedly watching over it.
1) Angels are fundamentally unable to go against the will of God
2) Lucifer rebels
These two statements seem at odds. It goes into paradox territory if you try to assert that "it was god's will that Lucifer went against god's will".
Which is why the only interpretation of the Christian Satan that makes sense is the one in the Bible - he exists because God is an asshole, and everything he does is at God's behest. Satan can chill with God while they talk about Job, gets a free pass to try to tempt Jesus, and is generally allowed to do his own thing. Sure, Dante and Milton and others make Satan into the bad guy, but that's on them. The Biblical Satan's role in the Bible is no more dark than the role of the other angels - it wasn't Satan noted as killing the first born of Egypt or drowning the world.
Aside from Revelations of course, but that's it's own special coded message to the Christians about the Roman Empire case.
Muslims get around this by turning Satan into a djinn (a fire spirit with free will cf angels, made of light, who have no free will). It's quite a bit more consistent.
As a bit of theological theorycrafting from a bored atheist, what if angels are just aspects of God's mind, and Lucifer is the part that was jealous of his own creations' lack of omniscience? The rebellion wasn't servants fighting against their master, it was a mental debate over whether to allow non-omniscient beings to continue to exist. In order to protect his own creation, God would have had to have sealed away the parts of his own personality that could lead to him harming or destroying it.
Pascal's wager becomes ridiculous when your invert it though.
Say you look at it as if there were a devil rather than a god. If you believe in the devil you will likely be tortured to death for all eternity as the rules of sin are essentially inescapable. If you do not believe in him and choose to live your life as you would and he does exist, you likely are still going to be tortured for all eternity. Since there is no way to know the dogmatic rules we have in Christianity are, in fact, from a god rather than a devil, there is no way to know that the likelihood of Pascal's Wager is any different from Pascal's Damnation.
I actually think Pascal's Wager still holds under your Satanic inversion. You've essentially just added two additional options:
1. Satan exists, you believe in him
Outcome: Tortured in Hell
2. Satan does not exist, you do not believe in him
Outcome: Tortured in Hell
3. God exists, you believe in him
Outcome: Heaven!
4. God exists, you do not believe in him
Tortured in Hell
3 is still the best option!
It isn't, because this isn't the assumption here. In context, there are only two valid outcomes:
-death with no afterlife
-being tortured for all eternity
By believing in 3 you have to also rationally believe in 1. By believing in 1 your odds are far more likely to be tortured in hell for all eternity as there is no way to know god's will within context. The only (only) constant in the bible is that the devil is there and will tempt you. The odds of a good, all powerful, and benevolent Christian deity controlling all things are essentially 0% given the prevalence of and success of "evil" men, especially within the church that controls the word of god itself. Either the Christian god isn't a god at all or isn't benevolent given the amount of terrible things that happen to his followers on this earth.
This goes back to the Problem of Evil:
God exists.
God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.
An omnibenevolent being would want to prevent all evils.
An omniscient being knows every way in which evils can come into existence, and knows every way in which those evils could be prevented.
An omnipotent being has the power to prevent that evil from coming into existence.
A being who knows every way in which an evil can come into existence, who is able to prevent that evil from coming into existence, and who wants to do so, would prevent the existence of that evil.
If there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God, then no evil exists.
Evil exists (logical contradiction).
There are only two likely outcomes here. Either there is a god and it is malevolent, or there are not gods.
But what about free will? By the nature of existence and history over time, free will leads to far more negative outcomes than positive, including horrific wars, torture, persecution, rape, murder, essentially everything out there that can go wrong. Free will is not something a caring and benevolent god would use without counteracting as it creates more evil than good. An omnibenevolent god would intervene (if it existed) to guide those with free will into choices of actions to prevent atrocities, rather than letting atrocities occur. If anything, free will is an argument for the existence of a malevolent god as it is the dogmatic direct cause of evil actions on earth. A benevolent god could have made positive actions easier or more karmicly rewarding to the faithful, but this is not the case in reality without assumption of a reward after death. Given that we cannot see that reward, nor prove that reward, nor see any likelihood that such a reward exists in any way shape or form it becomes essentially an empty promise as there is no reason that there shouldn't be confirmation of an afterlife in an existence in which a benevolent god actually exists. By leaving uncertainty, that actually creates more evil in the world as people fight over the nature of heaven and how best to get there, actively creating more evil through ambiguity.
Pascal's Wager is entirely about confirmation bias, you believe in something you want to believe, not in something with actual mathematical or logical certitude. And that's fine! Faith has a lot of roles and isn't something people shouldn't have or act by, there are a lot of good things within Christian dogma and the community.
But it isn't a logical outcome and we shouldn't try and pretend it is.
What if you're Jewish?
I don't think they have a version of the Devil.
Monster Talk also did a really good episode on the Devil, and how his meaning and presence has changed.
And the Christian Devil is typically also the Christian Satan.
The Jewish afterlife doesn't really have a hell though so there sort of isn't someone who is in charge of rulings it and tempting people to end up there.
I've always felt that whatever the source, free will clearly operates within limits. You can will which direction you go when you walk, but you can't will yourself to fly up into the air, or blast the moon out of the sky with sheer willpower. So whatever the case free will is constrained by the limits of reality, whether it's produced by God or by a structure of evolved biology. I'd argue that free within limits is still free - if you feel limited free will isn't really free will then free will doesn't exist.
Well this is related to a question I've never seen a satisfactory answer to, either.
The basic gist of the free will argument is that, while God could just make beings that aren't capable of making decisions God doesn't like, it's somehow less meaningful than a situation where only some people choose that way.
However, there's always a balance of probabilities concerning what people are going to choose. If you give 100 people a choice between eating their favourite candy bar or eating a dog turd, I'm pretty confident that the number choosing the dog turd is going to be pretty low. Nonetheless, there's nothing about this scenario that negates the argument that these people all had a free choice between the two.
Now if there are a bunch of things God really, really doesn't want us to do, why aren't those things closer to the "eating a dog turd" level of desirability, rather the opposite? Couple this with the fact that, if we accept that humans are a specifies that evolved, many of the things that God doesn't like are actually advantageous behaviour from an evolutionary perspective, although they are less desirable in a relatively small, pastoral, human society.
The other problem is that the free will defense implicitly asserts that the free will of the evildoer is way more important than the free will of the victim. The dictator can torture and kill on a whim, their subjects can struggle with all their will and still suffer. Is that better than a world where the dictator has to struggle mightily to hurt people and fails because their victims can just decide not to be hurt? That doesn't seem like a less free world. Is it a violation of my free will that I have to spend a lot more effort than e.g. Pol Pot to hurt someone? If not, what if hurting people was just absurdly difficult? If you had to spend years of your life on an epic quest just to make someone feel bad, we probably wouldn't bother, yet it is hard to see how free will would be violated.
This isn't even getting into the theological problems where in defending a Christian God the free will argument denies the possibility of heaven. If evil is justified by our free will so that this is the best world that God can create, then heaven/the kingdom of God/the New Jerusalem/etc. can't exist. Either the righteous in that place have free will but are beset by exactly as much suffering as we are (which is incompatible with Christian theology), or they have perfect lives without free will (which means that it's immeasurably worse according to the FWD), or it's perfect and they have free will (which denies the FWD to begin with).
The extreme form of the objection to the free will defense is from Aussie philosopher J.L. Mackie. Since the free will defense posits that we can freely choose the right thing at any given moral choice, there's nothing contradictory about someone freely choosing to do the right thing every single time. If you're an omnipotent and omniscient god, you could create such beings, and if you're good, why wouldn't you? There's no violation of free will if everyone ever born just happens to lead a virtuous life. Freedom can't require that sometimes we freely choose to do evil, because then it's not a choice.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
Pascal's wager becomes ridiculous when your invert it though.
Say you look at it as if there were a devil rather than a god. If you believe in the devil you will likely be tortured to death for all eternity as the rules of sin are essentially inescapable. If you do not believe in him and choose to live your life as you would and he does exist, you likely are still going to be tortured for all eternity. Since there is no way to know the dogmatic rules we have in Christianity are, in fact, from a god rather than a devil, there is no way to know that the likelihood of Pascal's Wager is any different from Pascal's Damnation.
I actually think Pascal's Wager still holds under your Satanic inversion. You've essentially just added two additional options:
1. Satan exists, you believe in him
Outcome: Tortured in Hell
2. Satan does not exist, you do not believe in him
Outcome: Tortured in Hell
3. God exists, you believe in him
Outcome: Heaven!
4. God exists, you do not believe in him
Tortured in Hell
3 is still the best option!
It isn't, because this isn't the assumption here. In context, there are only two valid outcomes:
-death with no afterlife
-being tortured for all eternity
By believing in 3 you have to also rationally believe in 1. By believing in 1 your odds are far more likely to be tortured in hell for all eternity as there is no way to know god's will within context. The only (only) constant in the bible is that the devil is there and will tempt you. The odds of a good, all powerful, and benevolent Christian deity controlling all things are essentially 0% given the prevalence of and success of "evil" men, especially within the church that controls the word of god itself. Either the Christian god isn't a god at all or isn't benevolent given the amount of terrible things that happen to his followers on this earth.
This goes back to the Problem of Evil:
God exists.
God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.
An omnibenevolent being would want to prevent all evils.
An omniscient being knows every way in which evils can come into existence, and knows every way in which those evils could be prevented.
An omnipotent being has the power to prevent that evil from coming into existence.
A being who knows every way in which an evil can come into existence, who is able to prevent that evil from coming into existence, and who wants to do so, would prevent the existence of that evil.
If there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God, then no evil exists.
Evil exists (logical contradiction).
There are only two likely outcomes here. Either there is a god and it is malevolent, or there are not gods.
But what about free will? By the nature of existence and history over time, free will leads to far more negative outcomes than positive, including horrific wars, torture, persecution, rape, murder, essentially everything out there that can go wrong. Free will is not something a caring and benevolent god would use without counteracting as it creates more evil than good. An omnibenevolent god would intervene (if it existed) to guide those with free will into choices of actions to prevent atrocities, rather than letting atrocities occur. If anything, free will is an argument for the existence of a malevolent god as it is the dogmatic direct cause of evil actions on earth. A benevolent god could have made positive actions easier or more karmicly rewarding to the faithful, but this is not the case in reality without assumption of a reward after death. Given that we cannot see that reward, nor prove that reward, nor see any likelihood that such a reward exists in any way shape or form it becomes essentially an empty promise as there is no reason that there shouldn't be confirmation of an afterlife in an existence in which a benevolent god actually exists. By leaving uncertainty, that actually creates more evil in the world as people fight over the nature of heaven and how best to get there, actively creating more evil through ambiguity.
Pascal's Wager is entirely about confirmation bias, you believe in something you want to believe, not in something with actual mathematical or logical certitude. And that's fine! Faith has a lot of roles and isn't something people shouldn't have or act by, there are a lot of good things within Christian dogma and the community.
But it isn't a logical outcome and we shouldn't try and pretend it is.
What if you're Jewish?
I don't think they have a version of the Devil.
Monster Talk also did a really good episode on the Devil, and how his meaning and presence has changed.
And the Christian Devil is typically also the Christian Satan.
The Jewish afterlife doesn't really have a hell though so there sort of isn't someone who is in charge of rulings it and tempting people to end up there.
But there is a being that opposes God.
The Jewish Satan is The Adversary and is God's prosecutor/secret policeman.
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
Pascal's wager becomes ridiculous when your invert it though.
Say you look at it as if there were a devil rather than a god. If you believe in the devil you will likely be tortured to death for all eternity as the rules of sin are essentially inescapable. If you do not believe in him and choose to live your life as you would and he does exist, you likely are still going to be tortured for all eternity. Since there is no way to know the dogmatic rules we have in Christianity are, in fact, from a god rather than a devil, there is no way to know that the likelihood of Pascal's Wager is any different from Pascal's Damnation.
I actually think Pascal's Wager still holds under your Satanic inversion. You've essentially just added two additional options:
1. Satan exists, you believe in him
Outcome: Tortured in Hell
2. Satan does not exist, you do not believe in him
Outcome: Tortured in Hell
3. God exists, you believe in him
Outcome: Heaven!
4. God exists, you do not believe in him
Tortured in Hell
3 is still the best option!
It isn't, because this isn't the assumption here. In context, there are only two valid outcomes:
-death with no afterlife
-being tortured for all eternity
By believing in 3 you have to also rationally believe in 1. By believing in 1 your odds are far more likely to be tortured in hell for all eternity as there is no way to know god's will within context. The only (only) constant in the bible is that the devil is there and will tempt you. The odds of a good, all powerful, and benevolent Christian deity controlling all things are essentially 0% given the prevalence of and success of "evil" men, especially within the church that controls the word of god itself. Either the Christian god isn't a god at all or isn't benevolent given the amount of terrible things that happen to his followers on this earth.
This goes back to the Problem of Evil:
God exists.
God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.
An omnibenevolent being would want to prevent all evils.
An omniscient being knows every way in which evils can come into existence, and knows every way in which those evils could be prevented.
An omnipotent being has the power to prevent that evil from coming into existence.
A being who knows every way in which an evil can come into existence, who is able to prevent that evil from coming into existence, and who wants to do so, would prevent the existence of that evil.
If there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God, then no evil exists.
Evil exists (logical contradiction).
There are only two likely outcomes here. Either there is a god and it is malevolent, or there are not gods.
But what about free will? By the nature of existence and history over time, free will leads to far more negative outcomes than positive, including horrific wars, torture, persecution, rape, murder, essentially everything out there that can go wrong. Free will is not something a caring and benevolent god would use without counteracting as it creates more evil than good. An omnibenevolent god would intervene (if it existed) to guide those with free will into choices of actions to prevent atrocities, rather than letting atrocities occur. If anything, free will is an argument for the existence of a malevolent god as it is the dogmatic direct cause of evil actions on earth. A benevolent god could have made positive actions easier or more karmicly rewarding to the faithful, but this is not the case in reality without assumption of a reward after death. Given that we cannot see that reward, nor prove that reward, nor see any likelihood that such a reward exists in any way shape or form it becomes essentially an empty promise as there is no reason that there shouldn't be confirmation of an afterlife in an existence in which a benevolent god actually exists. By leaving uncertainty, that actually creates more evil in the world as people fight over the nature of heaven and how best to get there, actively creating more evil through ambiguity.
Pascal's Wager is entirely about confirmation bias, you believe in something you want to believe, not in something with actual mathematical or logical certitude. And that's fine! Faith has a lot of roles and isn't something people shouldn't have or act by, there are a lot of good things within Christian dogma and the community.
But it isn't a logical outcome and we shouldn't try and pretend it is.
What if you're Jewish?
I don't think they have a version of the Devil.
Monster Talk also did a really good episode on the Devil, and how his meaning and presence has changed.
I've always felt that whatever the source, free will clearly operates within limits. You can will which direction you go when you walk, but you can't will yourself to fly up into the air, or blast the moon out of the sky with sheer willpower. So whatever the case free will is constrained by the limits of reality, whether it's produced by God or by a structure of evolved biology. I'd argue that free within limits is still free - if you feel limited free will isn't really free will then free will doesn't exist.
Again, free will as the theological concept would be in the long form, "freedom to ignore the will of God."
Fair enough, but I don't think I've ever heard a discussion where that was the definition the theist was using. If God doesn't exist then I guess we wouldn't have that, since you can't deliberately defy a will that doesn't actually exist.
Almost always in debates about free will online I'll hear a theist argue that free will can't exist if we're 'just' material, chemicals, matter in motion, molecules 'fizzing', etc. because in that case every decision wasn't a concious decision but just 'molecules bumping around a certain way' (or words to that effect). Only being created by a God adds that certain extra undefineable 'je-ne-sais-quoi' that makes free will 'real'. An argument that always made me think of pixie dust bringing a puppet to life.
Being a material being is a fact of reality that may well constrain our free will in certain ways, but I don't think there's any fundamental difference between biology limiting free will and gravity limiting free will, as per my 'fly around through sheer force of will' comment. Our free will is certainly limited by reality whether God exists or not.
I've always felt that whatever the source, free will clearly operates within limits. You can will which direction you go when you walk, but you can't will yourself to fly up into the air, or blast the moon out of the sky with sheer willpower. So whatever the case free will is constrained by the limits of reality, whether it's produced by God or by a structure of evolved biology. I'd argue that free within limits is still free - if you feel limited free will isn't really free will then free will doesn't exist.
Again, free will as the theological concept would be in the long form, "freedom to ignore the will of God."
Fair enough, but I don't think I've ever heard a discussion where that was the definition the theist was using. If God doesn't exist then I guess we wouldn't have that, since you can't deliberately defy a will that doesn't actually exist.
Almost always in debates about free will online I'll hear a theist argue that free will can't exist if we're 'just' material, chemicals, matter in motion, molecules 'fizzing', etc. because in that case every decision wasn't a concious decision but just 'molecules bumping around a certain way' (or words to that effect). Only being created by a God adds that certain extra undefineable 'je-ne-sais-quoi' that makes free will 'real'. An argument that always made me think of pixie dust bringing a puppet to life.
Being a material being is a fact of reality that may well constrain our free will in certain ways, but I don't think there's any fundamental difference between biology limiting free will and gravity limiting free will, as per my 'fly around through sheer force of will' comment. Our free will is certainly limited by reality whether God exists or not.
To be clear, as an atheist, my intent wasn't to denigrate a physical worldview by asserting that it negates the possibility of free will. I subscribe to that physical worldivew and do not believe in free will for reasons similar to those that lead me to not believe in a deity.
I think Apothe0sis is right that the discussion of the existence of free will is overall irrelevant to the discussion of the existence of God, though. I was mainly arguing against the viewpoint that theism is less conducive to free will than atheism (or, more specifically, physicalism).
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
I've always felt that whatever the source, free will clearly operates within limits. You can will which direction you go when you walk, but you can't will yourself to fly up into the air, or blast the moon out of the sky with sheer willpower. So whatever the case free will is constrained by the limits of reality, whether it's produced by God or by a structure of evolved biology. I'd argue that free within limits is still free - if you feel limited free will isn't really free will then free will doesn't exist.
Again, free will as the theological concept would be in the long form, "freedom to ignore the will of God." The story of Lucifer kind of highlights this, in that (to paraphrase) he is pissed off because no matter how awesome he is and how powerful he is he is fundamentally unable to go against the will of God while humans who are these insignificant specks of dust to him are able to do whatever they want. Also, if an angel goes against God they will be destroyed or cast down while a human can be sinful all their life and recant their sins before dying and be welcomed into Heaven. Essentially, Lucifer rebels because he sees God as not being all He's cracked up to be and thinks he's getting a bum deal compared to these human assholes.
Nowhere in the theological concept does it say that free will gives us super powers over reality. In many ways, the story of Lucifer is supposed to be a cautionary tale of why someone so powerful would need to be limited so greatly. What it is is the right given to us by the Creator to do as we wish in our lives within the limitations of our humanity.
The idea itself is actually pretty awesome depending on the source talking about it. We are free to choose to live however we want, not subject to the divine will if we choose not to be. There may be punishments--and those punishments ebb and flow in severity depending on the source telling you about them--but we are allowed to do as we wish in our lives. So if you do good it is your choice to go and make the world a better place, and if you choose to do evil then it is your choice to make it worse. Realistically, most of the reason it gets focused on is to justify the existence of evil in the world when there is an all-powerful all-knowing being supposedly watching over it.
But, as I showed, that's not even a coherent concept - what would it look like if we didn't have freedom from the will of god? Whether we a vice choosing or virtue choosing is a function of what we are and the properties of those things that make us up. God choose one configuration or another, it doesn't make a difference in terms of changing the deterministic chain of our behavior - whether it is grounded in soul-stuff or quantum wriggling. Our fundamental capabilities do not change, we just have different parameters, our behaviour is no more uncertain, no more unbound from either the universe or the preferences of our creator.
Of course, this only serves to be further exploded by the idea that God is outside the universe and the fact that time is a property of our universe so any creation is of a 4D object - that conatains the beginning, end and everything in between.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
Basically, if you are going to use free will in a sense other than my sense then you have to define what it is - and it doesn't matter whether you use the long form "free from the will of the creator" or not. Any vague use is inherently unhelpful, it needs to be defined and we need to ensure that it is a coherent concept - because usually it isn't. And not having something that "doesn't mean anything" cannot have consequences.
The best way to really detail what it is as a concept is to define what it would mean to have it and what it would mean for it to be absent.
I've always felt that whatever the source, free will clearly operates within limits. You can will which direction you go when you walk, but you can't will yourself to fly up into the air, or blast the moon out of the sky with sheer willpower. So whatever the case free will is constrained by the limits of reality, whether it's produced by God or by a structure of evolved biology. I'd argue that free within limits is still free - if you feel limited free will isn't really free will then free will doesn't exist.
Again, free will as the theological concept would be in the long form, "freedom to ignore the will of God." The story of Lucifer kind of highlights this, in that (to paraphrase) he is pissed off because no matter how awesome he is and how powerful he is he is fundamentally unable to go against the will of God while humans who are these insignificant specks of dust to him are able to do whatever they want. Also, if an angel goes against God they will be destroyed or cast down while a human can be sinful all their life and recant their sins before dying and be welcomed into Heaven. Essentially, Lucifer rebels because he sees God as not being all He's cracked up to be and thinks he's getting a bum deal compared to these human assholes.
Nowhere in the theological concept does it say that free will gives us super powers over reality. In many ways, the story of Lucifer is supposed to be a cautionary tale of why someone so powerful would need to be limited so greatly. What it is is the right given to us by the Creator to do as we wish in our lives within the limitations of our humanity.
The idea itself is actually pretty awesome depending on the source talking about it. We are free to choose to live however we want, not subject to the divine will if we choose not to be. There may be punishments--and those punishments ebb and flow in severity depending on the source telling you about them--but we are allowed to do as we wish in our lives. So if you do good it is your choice to go and make the world a better place, and if you choose to do evil then it is your choice to make it worse. Realistically, most of the reason it gets focused on is to justify the existence of evil in the world when there is an all-powerful all-knowing being supposedly watching over it.
But, as I showed, that's not even a coherent concept - what would it look like if we didn't have freedom from the will of god? Whether we a vice choosing or virtue choosing is a function of what we are and the properties of those things that make us up. God choose one configuration or another, it doesn't make a difference in terms of changing the deterministic chain of our behavior - whether it is grounded in soul-stuff or quantum wriggling. Our fundamental capabilities do not change, we just have different parameters, our behaviour is no more uncertain, no more unbound from either the universe or the preferences of our creator.
Of course, this only serves to be further exploded by the idea that God is outside the universe and the fact that time is a property of our universe so any creation is of a 4D object - that conatains the beginning, end and everything in between.
That could be explained by there being three primary states: God, NotGod, and a third state created by God in which the universe exists. Free will is only a thing that even makes sense in the third state. Once a soul dies, it either becomes God or NotGod, at which point there's simply no concept of deciding to do anything.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
I've always felt that whatever the source, free will clearly operates within limits. You can will which direction you go when you walk, but you can't will yourself to fly up into the air, or blast the moon out of the sky with sheer willpower. So whatever the case free will is constrained by the limits of reality, whether it's produced by God or by a structure of evolved biology. I'd argue that free within limits is still free - if you feel limited free will isn't really free will then free will doesn't exist.
Again, free will as the theological concept would be in the long form, "freedom to ignore the will of God." The story of Lucifer kind of highlights this, in that (to paraphrase) he is pissed off because no matter how awesome he is and how powerful he is he is fundamentally unable to go against the will of God while humans who are these insignificant specks of dust to him are able to do whatever they want. Also, if an angel goes against God they will be destroyed or cast down while a human can be sinful all their life and recant their sins before dying and be welcomed into Heaven. Essentially, Lucifer rebels because he sees God as not being all He's cracked up to be and thinks he's getting a bum deal compared to these human assholes.
Nowhere in the theological concept does it say that free will gives us super powers over reality. In many ways, the story of Lucifer is supposed to be a cautionary tale of why someone so powerful would need to be limited so greatly. What it is is the right given to us by the Creator to do as we wish in our lives within the limitations of our humanity.
The idea itself is actually pretty awesome depending on the source talking about it. We are free to choose to live however we want, not subject to the divine will if we choose not to be. There may be punishments--and those punishments ebb and flow in severity depending on the source telling you about them--but we are allowed to do as we wish in our lives. So if you do good it is your choice to go and make the world a better place, and if you choose to do evil then it is your choice to make it worse. Realistically, most of the reason it gets focused on is to justify the existence of evil in the world when there is an all-powerful all-knowing being supposedly watching over it.
But, as I showed, that's not even a coherent concept - what would it look like if we didn't have freedom from the will of god? Whether we a vice choosing or virtue choosing is a function of what we are and the properties of those things that make us up. God choose one configuration or another, it doesn't make a difference in terms of changing the deterministic chain of our behavior - whether it is grounded in soul-stuff or quantum wriggling. Our fundamental capabilities do not change, we just have different parameters, our behaviour is no more uncertain, no more unbound from either the universe or the preferences of our creator.
Of course, this only serves to be further exploded by the idea that God is outside the universe and the fact that time is a property of our universe so any creation is of a 4D object - that conatains the beginning, end and everything in between.
That could be explained by there being three primary states: God, NotGod, and a third state created by God in which the universe exists. Free will is only a thing that even makes sense in the third state. Once a soul dies, it either becomes God or NotGod, at which point there's simply no concept of deciding to do anything.
I don't know what you mean by free will in this context. Which is my point. Either Free Will is undefined or it is a compatibilist definition and it is entirely irrelevant.
Pascal's wager becomes ridiculous when your invert it though.
Say you look at it as if there were a devil rather than a god. If you believe in the devil you will likely be tortured to death for all eternity as the rules of sin are essentially inescapable. If you do not believe in him and choose to live your life as you would and he does exist, you likely are still going to be tortured for all eternity. Since there is no way to know the dogmatic rules we have in Christianity are, in fact, from a god rather than a devil, there is no way to know that the likelihood of Pascal's Wager is any different from Pascal's Damnation.
I actually think Pascal's Wager still holds under your Satanic inversion. You've essentially just added two additional options:
1. Satan exists, you believe in him
Outcome: Tortured in Hell
2. Satan does not exist, you do not believe in him
Outcome: Tortured in Hell
3. God exists, you believe in him
Outcome: Heaven!
4. God exists, you do not believe in him
Tortured in Hell
3 is still the best option!
It isn't, because this isn't the assumption here. In context, there are only two valid outcomes:
-death with no afterlife
-being tortured for all eternity
By believing in 3 you have to also rationally believe in 1. By believing in 1 your odds are far more likely to be tortured in hell for all eternity as there is no way to know god's will within context. The only (only) constant in the bible is that the devil is there and will tempt you. The odds of a good, all powerful, and benevolent Christian deity controlling all things are essentially 0% given the prevalence of and success of "evil" men, especially within the church that controls the word of god itself. Either the Christian god isn't a god at all or isn't benevolent given the amount of terrible things that happen to his followers on this earth.
This goes back to the Problem of Evil:
God exists.
God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.
An omnibenevolent being would want to prevent all evils.
An omniscient being knows every way in which evils can come into existence, and knows every way in which those evils could be prevented.
An omnipotent being has the power to prevent that evil from coming into existence.
A being who knows every way in which an evil can come into existence, who is able to prevent that evil from coming into existence, and who wants to do so, would prevent the existence of that evil.
If there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God, then no evil exists.
Evil exists (logical contradiction).
There are only two likely outcomes here. Either there is a god and it is malevolent, or there are not gods.
But what about free will? By the nature of existence and history over time, free will leads to far more negative outcomes than positive, including horrific wars, torture, persecution, rape, murder, essentially everything out there that can go wrong. Free will is not something a caring and benevolent god would use without counteracting as it creates more evil than good. An omnibenevolent god would intervene (if it existed) to guide those with free will into choices of actions to prevent atrocities, rather than letting atrocities occur. If anything, free will is an argument for the existence of a malevolent god as it is the dogmatic direct cause of evil actions on earth. A benevolent god could have made positive actions easier or more karmicly rewarding to the faithful, but this is not the case in reality without assumption of a reward after death. Given that we cannot see that reward, nor prove that reward, nor see any likelihood that such a reward exists in any way shape or form it becomes essentially an empty promise as there is no reason that there shouldn't be confirmation of an afterlife in an existence in which a benevolent god actually exists. By leaving uncertainty, that actually creates more evil in the world as people fight over the nature of heaven and how best to get there, actively creating more evil through ambiguity.
Pascal's Wager is entirely about confirmation bias, you believe in something you want to believe, not in something with actual mathematical or logical certitude. And that's fine! Faith has a lot of roles and isn't something people shouldn't have or act by, there are a lot of good things within Christian dogma and the community.
But it isn't a logical outcome and we shouldn't try and pretend it is.
What if you're Jewish?
I don't think they have a version of the Devil.
Monster Talk also did a really good episode on the Devil, and how his meaning and presence has changed.
And the Christian Devil is typically also the Christian Satan.
The Jewish afterlife doesn't really have a hell though so there sort of isn't someone who is in charge of rulings it and tempting people to end up there.
But there is a being that opposes God.
The Jewish Satan is The Adversary and is God's prosecutor/secret policeman.
Yeah, I was going to say, Satan as an evil counter to God is concept of zoroastrian origin. It's why the Christian Satan makes no sense theologically. Like how can an angel rebel against God? How can anything rebel against God? If Satan is inferior and wholly evil, why does God allow him to exist. Those questions don't have satisfactory answers because that's not what Satan was in the beginning. Before that, Satan was the guy who investigated/persecuted/tempted people to make sure they were really cool with God. He worked for God and was in no way in opposition to him.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
Ahriman is the evil counter to god in Zoroastrian which was probably imported by Persian immigrants and mixed in with the theology.
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Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
I've always felt that whatever the source, free will clearly operates within limits. You can will which direction you go when you walk, but you can't will yourself to fly up into the air, or blast the moon out of the sky with sheer willpower. So whatever the case free will is constrained by the limits of reality, whether it's produced by God or by a structure of evolved biology. I'd argue that free within limits is still free - if you feel limited free will isn't really free will then free will doesn't exist.
Again, free will as the theological concept would be in the long form, "freedom to ignore the will of God." The story of Lucifer kind of highlights this, in that (to paraphrase) he is pissed off because no matter how awesome he is and how powerful he is he is fundamentally unable to go against the will of God while humans who are these insignificant specks of dust to him are able to do whatever they want. Also, if an angel goes against God they will be destroyed or cast down while a human can be sinful all their life and recant their sins before dying and be welcomed into Heaven. Essentially, Lucifer rebels because he sees God as not being all He's cracked up to be and thinks he's getting a bum deal compared to these human assholes.
Nowhere in the theological concept does it say that free will gives us super powers over reality. In many ways, the story of Lucifer is supposed to be a cautionary tale of why someone so powerful would need to be limited so greatly. What it is is the right given to us by the Creator to do as we wish in our lives within the limitations of our humanity.
The idea itself is actually pretty awesome depending on the source talking about it. We are free to choose to live however we want, not subject to the divine will if we choose not to be. There may be punishments--and those punishments ebb and flow in severity depending on the source telling you about them--but we are allowed to do as we wish in our lives. So if you do good it is your choice to go and make the world a better place, and if you choose to do evil then it is your choice to make it worse. Realistically, most of the reason it gets focused on is to justify the existence of evil in the world when there is an all-powerful all-knowing being supposedly watching over it.
But, as I showed, that's not even a coherent concept - what would it look like if we didn't have freedom from the will of god? Whether we a vice choosing or virtue choosing is a function of what we are and the properties of those things that make us up. God choose one configuration or another, it doesn't make a difference in terms of changing the deterministic chain of our behavior - whether it is grounded in soul-stuff or quantum wriggling. Our fundamental capabilities do not change, we just have different parameters, our behaviour is no more uncertain, no more unbound from either the universe or the preferences of our creator.
Of course, this only serves to be further exploded by the idea that God is outside the universe and the fact that time is a property of our universe so any creation is of a 4D object - that conatains the beginning, end and everything in between.
The way its often framed often seems like it assumes humans are in some sort of neutral state, where free will allows us to choose between two or more options without anything affecting our judgement when this is clearly not the case. Everything from culture to biology affects how we make choices, humans are not perfectly rational actors. So, as you say, why this particular set of physical instincts and chemical signals? If god so discourages premarital sex, he could have made the choice easier for people especially young people by not making hormones and chemicals so strongly influence behavior, if he wanted us to be more charitable he could have changed how strongly we feel attachment and the amount of people we can feel an emotional attachment to at any given time, and it would not necessarily have removed free will. Why is the way our bodies and minds are, why is the way we have evolved/born/created to be right now the way we are now somehow more conducive to truly "free" will than any number of other ways we could have been made to be.
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
I think the difficulty here is that culture, biology etc... do not affect our choices they are us.
As I noted, our choices are made in our mind, and it doesn't matter what our mind is grounded in - chemical fizzing, quantum quantuming, soul stuff, idealist stuff - we can't ask "what would it be like if it were not for X" because we are those things.
The question fundamentally reduces to: can we make decisions unbounded by what makes up our mind? And the answer, no matter what the model of a mind you use is going always to be no.
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ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
I think the difficulty here is that culture, biology etc... do not affect our choices they are us.
As I noted, our choices are made in our mind, and it doesn't matter what our mind is grounded in - chemical fizzing, quantum quantuming, soul stuff, idealist stuff - we can't ask "what would it be like if it were not for X" because we are those things.
The question fundamentally reduces to: can we make decisions unbounded by what makes up our mind? And the answer, no matter what the model of a mind you use is going always to be no.
I was about to confidently say it was chemical fizzing, but then realized there might be quantal shit going on at a lower level, and googled "synaptotagmin quantum." Pretty hilariously, the first results are for a paper on Arxiv about quantum consciousness that touches on free will.
I don't disagree, but found it interesting and perhaps telling that typing neuroscience words and "quantum" into google comes up with non-peer reviewed articles on consciousness and free will.
Of course, consciousness and decision making are somewhat separate. From what I've read, it sounds like decisions are made entirely unconsciously. Consciousness is more of a sanity check, taking ideas or decisions that have already been made and trying to scrape together justifications for why they are reasonable. The consciousness does get veto power if it can't figure out a working justification, though, which I suppose could in theory then be used to help train the unconscious network. If the unconsciouness is well trained enough, though, then the conscious parts of decision making can just be dumped entirely unless something noteworthy comes up.
Of course, how the heck the conscious network gets trained I have no idea. I assume that's probably what dreams are for, shuffling around conscious ideas and seeing how they can be aligned.
As a bit of theological theorycrafting from a bored atheist, what if angels are just aspects of God's mind, and Lucifer is the part that was jealous of his own creations' lack of omniscience? The rebellion wasn't servants fighting against their master, it was a mental debate over whether to allow non-omniscient beings to continue to exist. In order to protect his own creation, God would have had to have sealed away the parts of his own personality that could lead to him harming or destroying it.
should have also sealed away the part that allowed him to flood the world or requires that his son die to forgive us
As a bit of theological theorycrafting from a bored atheist, what if angels are just aspects of God's mind, and Lucifer is the part that was jealous of his own creations' lack of omniscience? The rebellion wasn't servants fighting against their master, it was a mental debate over whether to allow non-omniscient beings to continue to exist. In order to protect his own creation, God would have had to have sealed away the parts of his own personality that could lead to him harming or destroying it.
should have also sealed away the part that allowed him to flood the world or requires that his son die to forgive us
I'm willing to count the second one as putting some aspect of himself through a bunch of shit so he could figure out what the heck all of those humans kept on whining about. And the first one as him really, really needing to have gone through the second one.
Ah, the good old atheism thread, where people annoyed at atheists telling them what they are, tell atheists what atheists believe.
In my experience, most people calling themselves agnostic, are actually atheists who either do not understand the term, or wish to distance them from it (for number of reasons, some good, others less so), though there does exist a smaller set of people who are theists, but still use the word for whatever reason.
And, for that matter, most reasonable atheists will admit to some level of agnosticism, even if only because certainty of, well, anything, as all but impossible.
Atheist is just a label, a minor label, and in a perfect world, it would be an irrelevant label, but unfortunately we don't live in that world.
Ah, the good old atheism thread, where people annoyed at atheists telling them what they are, tell atheists what atheists believe.
In my experience, most people calling themselves agnostic, are actually atheists who either do not understand the term, or wish to distance them from it (for number of reasons, some good, others less so), though there does exist a smaller set of people who are theists, but still use the word for whatever reason.
And, for that matter, most reasonable atheists will admit to some level of agnosticism, even if only because certainty of, well, anything, as all but impossible.
Atheist is just a label, a minor label, and in a perfect world, it would be an irrelevant label, but unfortunately we don't live in that world.
Basically, if you are going to use free will in a sense other than my sense then you have to define what it is - and it doesn't matter whether you use the long form "free from the will of the creator" or not. Any vague use is inherently unhelpful, it needs to be defined and we need to ensure that it is a coherent concept - because usually it isn't. And not having something that "doesn't mean anything" cannot have consequences.
The best way to really detail what it is as a concept is to define what it would mean to have it and what it would mean for it to be absent.
I think I made the mistake of trying to explain the philosophical concept of free will in the context of its use from religious folks and it was taken as an attempt at debate. Let me take this time to apologize as the explanation was obviously not sought out, and I am not looking to debate a concept I have no belief in.
User name Alazull on Steam, PSN, Nintenders, Epic, etc.
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Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
I think the difficulty here is that culture, biology etc... do not affect our choices they are us.
As I noted, our choices are made in our mind, and it doesn't matter what our mind is grounded in - chemical fizzing, quantum quantuming, soul stuff, idealist stuff - we can't ask "what would it be like if it were not for X" because we are those things.
The question fundamentally reduces to: can we make decisions unbounded by what makes up our mind? And the answer, no matter what the model of a mind you use is going always to be no.
Right but the idea is that a creator god could, either through natural evolutionary processes or simply by willing it so, make humans naturally inclined more towards what the Bible (or any particular religious text) says is morally righteous behavior. You say that those things don't affect our choices but... they do. In defining what kind of people we are, they define what kind of decisions we will make, what we will decide is acceptable or not, whether or not we will do things we feel are wrong or not. A god could have made us less likely to engage in premarital sex by altering how we get aroused or by making people who do not get aroused until after they're married. If perfect free will and choice were so important, a creator god could have made it so humans would be coming at all these important righteous decisions from a truly neutral position, not unduly weighted towards what the god wanted us to do or not, and so making our choices truly meaningful.
And it seems like god has done none of these things. If there is a creator god, the way they made humans is nonsensical if they truly wanted people to be able to freely decide between good and evil in a meaningful way.
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
I like to describe myself as an "indifferent agnostic". I'm assuming I can't be the first person to come up with that description, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone else ever use it. Basically, I don't really know if a god exists or not, but I also couldn't care less about the true answer. Whether or not there is a god isn't going to effect me in any way. I doubt there is such a being, but I'm open to the possibility that I'm wrong.
The way I see it, the answer to whether or not a god exists can be answered in one of three different ways: (in order from most to least likely in my opinion)
1) There is no god - I'll continue to strive to be the best person I can be regardless. There's no afterlife and I'm perfectly fine with that.
2) There is a god - I'll continue to strive to be the best person I can be regardless. If there's an afterlife that should be sufficient.
3) There is a god and he demands my worship - I'll continue to strive to be the best person I can be regardless. God is a narcissistic asshole. Fuck that guy.
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
I believe in a sort of animist "everything has a soul and personality" after studying a good bit of Saussure and semiotics when I realized that essentially my brain is making whatever reality I want to perceive to a certain extent so if I want to talk to my computer and plead with it as a rational and sentient entity to get it to actually raster the file I am working on that is fine and sane by my frame of reference and to hell with anyone who disagrees with me.
This could mean I am insane, or (once I reach about 55) delightfully eccentric.
If consciousness and free will don't exist or have no special causal power, then why does the ILLUSION of consciousness and free will exist?
The most rudimentary building blocks of conscious experience are probably the sensations of pleasure and pain. Why do we feel pleasure and pain? On the face of it the answer is obvious. Pain is a negative feeling usually associated with actions that do our bodies immediate harm; it deters us from doing things that inhibit our ability to survive. Pleasure is a positive feeling usually associated with actions that keep us alive or lead to reproduction; it encourages us to do things that help our species survive. It has a positive fitness value. If we did not have those feelings, or if the positivity of the feeling were not at all correlated with the utility of the action, we would be likely to make a lot of stupid choices that reduce our fitness. Natural selection would favor an organism that was encouraged to make better choices. Natural selection would also favor an organism that was capable of overriding those impulses in specific scenarios where it may be necessary, if one arose.
That argument works fine from the perspective of evolutionary biology, but it assumes as a premise that free will exists and flows from consciousness. If you reject that, and assume that all behavior is just a deterministic chain of chemical reactions, then why do conscious sensations exist? If the system is wired to shy away from such-and-such an action outside of extreme duress and that's all there is to say about the matter, then it wouldn't matter how that action actually felt. So why does it hurt? You can argue that the feeling of pain doesn't exist, at which point your argument immediately fails because it does. You can argue that conscious experience is just some weird side effect of the physical system with no special causal power of its own, but if that's the case, why does everything line up so well? Why does the phenomenal experience of pain just so happen to align so consistently with actions that hurt our odds of survival if our behavior would have been the same regardless? Why does the phenomenal experience of pleasure just so happen to align so consistently with actions that help us survive and reproduce? Why does a giant clusterfuck of barely-distinguishable electrical impulses just so happen to result in an extremely consistent narrative describing a conscious self that doesn't exist and doesn't do anything? It looks an awful lot like conscious experience--the actual experience, from more than just a simple behaviorist perspective--plays some sort of significant role in learning or decision-making that would not be possible (or would be much harder to achieve) in a system devoid of conscious experience.
Yeah, sure, you can create a model where conscious experience doesn't exist and everything else still works fine without it. But that model does not describe the universe we actually occupy.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
What do you mean by free will?
Why we have conscious/subjective experience is one of the deep problems of philosophy of mind and neuroscience in general.
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Golden YakBurnished BovineThe sunny beaches of CanadaRegistered Userregular
In my experience, most people calling themselves agnostic, are actually atheists who either do not understand the term, or wish to distance them from it (for number of reasons, some good, others less so), though there does exist a smaller set of people who are theists, but still use the word for whatever reason.
And, for that matter, most reasonable atheists will admit to some level of agnosticism, even if only because certainty of, well, anything, as all but impossible.
I'm one of those 'the terms aren't mutually exclusive' agnostic atheists. I don't know if there's a God or not, and I don't believe there is one either.
Why we have conscious/subjective experience is one of the deep problems of philosophy of mind and neuroscience in general.
I don't have a perfect definition that slots in flawlessly with our current empirical model of the universe. I don't have a model that perfectly reconciles everything. That's the point.
If intelligent design as a model has zero validity, evolutionary biology as a model has perfect validity, and a purely materialistic, deterministic model of the universe has perfect validity, then conscious experience utterly defies explanation. But conscious experience exists. It exists with greater certainty than anything else we think we know about. The only reasonable way to deal with this discrepancy is to accept that our various models of the universe are limited tools which do not fully describe the universe as it exists. To accept that there is room for our models to grow and change significantly, or that there is room for new models to emerge.
There is a common tendency among reductive atheists (and I've been getting a strong sense of this from your posts) to hold as a premise that the current scope of our deterministic, materialistic model of the universe is perfect and beyond reproach. If an idea emerges which is not perfectly consistent with the current model, it must be twisted into something unrecognizable which would fit the model, or it must be rejected out of hand no matter how much validity it looks like it has. I don't see this as hugely different from a theist that holds as a premise that God must exist in a certain form, and any controversial ideas must either be tortuously contorted into something that fits their conception of God or must be denied even if it's obviously true.
We don't have a Unified Theory of Everything. We KNOW that we don't. So we have to accept that our knowledge is limited and that we shouldn't constrain the possibilities for every unknown based on the limited boundaries of our current models. It's better to accept the universe as a vast and loosely-understood thing than to reject the universe wholesale and replace it with a false edifice which is small enough for us to pretend that we hold it fully within our grasp.
I say I'm agnostic because I waffle about weather there is a God or not. I would like to believe in one, I'd like to believe in a heaven. But my mind can't bring myself to without something more than what I've seen so far. Aside from me not being able to imagine an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent God caring what goes on down here.
What's the term for people who know that gods don't exist but believe that gods exist?
There isn't one. Knowledge is basically just belief at a very high level of confidence. The terms are relative to one another and don't work in that configuration.
Ah, the good old atheism thread, where people annoyed at atheists telling them what they are, tell atheists what atheists believe.
In my experience, most people calling themselves agnostic, are actually atheists who either do not understand the term, or wish to distance them from it (for number of reasons, some good, others less so), though there does exist a smaller set of people who are theists, but still use the word for whatever reason.
And, for that matter, most reasonable atheists will admit to some level of agnosticism, even if only because certainty of, well, anything, as all but impossible.
Atheist is just a label, a minor label, and in a perfect world, it would be an irrelevant label, but unfortunately we don't live in that world.
Says a post telling agnostics what they believe.
Ummm, where?
At no point at my post, did i say that "agnostics believe this"
I merely pointed out that, in my subjective experience, most people calling themselves agnostics, are atheists by some definitions of the word.
Most agnostic theists tend to not adobt the label on its own, but some do, and i am not sure why.
Anyway, i'm agnostic atheist, thought in my case the "believes there is no god" also fits, but that's not the definition of atheist or atheism (it is one (narrow) definition of atheist, but not the only one).
What's the term for people who know that gods don't exist but believe that gods exist?
There isn't one. Knowledge is basically just belief at a very high level of confidence. The terms are relative to one another and don't work in that configuration.
If I got one thing out of a college course on epistemology, it's that knowledge isn't tied into any sort of system like that. If any system that produces results that disagree with what makes sense to us can be considered to be falsified, then one definition of knowledge that is impossible to falsify is "something is known if upon looking at the situation I would consider it to be known". Any other formal system will just end up having to be a full simulation of a brain, which is just a more formalized version of the same thing.
The same thing holds for belief. Therefore, to know something but not believe it, all you have to do is decide that you know it but don't believe it. Or have me, personally, decide that you know it but don't believe it, depending on how you interpret the theory.
I think there's a term for this, and I've been frantically trying to look it up with no luck so far.
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Ah, the good old atheism thread, where people annoyed at atheists telling them what they are, tell atheists what atheists believe.
In my experience, most people calling themselves agnostic, are actually atheists who either do not understand the term, or wish to distance them from it (for number of reasons, some good, others less so), though there does exist a smaller set of people who are theists, but still use the word for whatever reason.
And, for that matter, most reasonable atheists will admit to some level of agnosticism, even if only because certainty of, well, anything, as all but impossible.
Atheist is just a label, a minor label, and in a perfect world, it would be an irrelevant label, but unfortunately we don't live in that world.
Says a post telling agnostics what they believe.
Ummm, where?
At no point at my post, did i say that "agnostics believe this" I merely pointed out that, in my subjective experience, most people calling themselves agnostics, are atheists by some definitions of the word.
Most agnostic theists tend to not adobt the label on its own, but some do, and i am not sure why.
Anyway, i'm agnostic atheist, thought in my case the "believes there is no god" also fits, but that's not the definition of atheist or atheism (it is one (narrow) definition of atheist, but not the only one).
The first bold sentence is incredibly smug, and the second bold and italicized sentence would be where you actually tell agnostics what they believe. The third sentence also bold and italicized is you doubling down on it.
Your subjective experience is called an opinion, so stating it as a fact could be seen as telling someone what they believe.
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What if you're Jewish?
I don't think they have a version of the Devil.
Monster Talk also did a really good episode on the Devil, and how his meaning and presence has changed.
http://www.skeptic.com/podcasts/monstertalk/episodes/2013/
November 13th: Speak of the Devil
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
The god that buggers with poor Job just to make a point?
Muslims get around this by turning Satan into a djinn (a fire spirit with free will cf angels, made of light, who have no free will). It's quite a bit more consistent.
They have Satan.
And the Christian Devil is typically also the Christian Satan.
The Jewish afterlife doesn't really have a hell though so there sort of isn't someone who is in charge of rulings it and tempting people to end up there.
But there is a being that opposes God.
This isn't even getting into the theological problems where in defending a Christian God the free will argument denies the possibility of heaven. If evil is justified by our free will so that this is the best world that God can create, then heaven/the kingdom of God/the New Jerusalem/etc. can't exist. Either the righteous in that place have free will but are beset by exactly as much suffering as we are (which is incompatible with Christian theology), or they have perfect lives without free will (which means that it's immeasurably worse according to the FWD), or it's perfect and they have free will (which denies the FWD to begin with).
The extreme form of the objection to the free will defense is from Aussie philosopher J.L. Mackie. Since the free will defense posits that we can freely choose the right thing at any given moral choice, there's nothing contradictory about someone freely choosing to do the right thing every single time. If you're an omnipotent and omniscient god, you could create such beings, and if you're good, why wouldn't you? There's no violation of free will if everyone ever born just happens to lead a virtuous life. Freedom can't require that sometimes we freely choose to do evil, because then it's not a choice.
The Jewish Satan is The Adversary and is God's prosecutor/secret policeman.
Pascal's Wager dismisses all non-christian faiths, including Judaism, as false and incorrect for following because reasons. It's totally bonkers.
Your point actually is one of the main ones used to tear apart Pascal's Wager.
Fair enough, but I don't think I've ever heard a discussion where that was the definition the theist was using. If God doesn't exist then I guess we wouldn't have that, since you can't deliberately defy a will that doesn't actually exist.
Almost always in debates about free will online I'll hear a theist argue that free will can't exist if we're 'just' material, chemicals, matter in motion, molecules 'fizzing', etc. because in that case every decision wasn't a concious decision but just 'molecules bumping around a certain way' (or words to that effect). Only being created by a God adds that certain extra undefineable 'je-ne-sais-quoi' that makes free will 'real'. An argument that always made me think of pixie dust bringing a puppet to life.
Being a material being is a fact of reality that may well constrain our free will in certain ways, but I don't think there's any fundamental difference between biology limiting free will and gravity limiting free will, as per my 'fly around through sheer force of will' comment. Our free will is certainly limited by reality whether God exists or not.
I think Apothe0sis is right that the discussion of the existence of free will is overall irrelevant to the discussion of the existence of God, though. I was mainly arguing against the viewpoint that theism is less conducive to free will than atheism (or, more specifically, physicalism).
But, as I showed, that's not even a coherent concept - what would it look like if we didn't have freedom from the will of god? Whether we a vice choosing or virtue choosing is a function of what we are and the properties of those things that make us up. God choose one configuration or another, it doesn't make a difference in terms of changing the deterministic chain of our behavior - whether it is grounded in soul-stuff or quantum wriggling. Our fundamental capabilities do not change, we just have different parameters, our behaviour is no more uncertain, no more unbound from either the universe or the preferences of our creator.
Of course, this only serves to be further exploded by the idea that God is outside the universe and the fact that time is a property of our universe so any creation is of a 4D object - that conatains the beginning, end and everything in between.
The best way to really detail what it is as a concept is to define what it would mean to have it and what it would mean for it to be absent.
That could be explained by there being three primary states: God, NotGod, and a third state created by God in which the universe exists. Free will is only a thing that even makes sense in the third state. Once a soul dies, it either becomes God or NotGod, at which point there's simply no concept of deciding to do anything.
I don't know what you mean by free will in this context. Which is my point. Either Free Will is undefined or it is a compatibilist definition and it is entirely irrelevant.
Yeah, I was going to say, Satan as an evil counter to God is concept of zoroastrian origin. It's why the Christian Satan makes no sense theologically. Like how can an angel rebel against God? How can anything rebel against God? If Satan is inferior and wholly evil, why does God allow him to exist. Those questions don't have satisfactory answers because that's not what Satan was in the beginning. Before that, Satan was the guy who investigated/persecuted/tempted people to make sure they were really cool with God. He worked for God and was in no way in opposition to him.
The way its often framed often seems like it assumes humans are in some sort of neutral state, where free will allows us to choose between two or more options without anything affecting our judgement when this is clearly not the case. Everything from culture to biology affects how we make choices, humans are not perfectly rational actors. So, as you say, why this particular set of physical instincts and chemical signals? If god so discourages premarital sex, he could have made the choice easier for people especially young people by not making hormones and chemicals so strongly influence behavior, if he wanted us to be more charitable he could have changed how strongly we feel attachment and the amount of people we can feel an emotional attachment to at any given time, and it would not necessarily have removed free will. Why is the way our bodies and minds are, why is the way we have evolved/born/created to be right now the way we are now somehow more conducive to truly "free" will than any number of other ways we could have been made to be.
As I noted, our choices are made in our mind, and it doesn't matter what our mind is grounded in - chemical fizzing, quantum quantuming, soul stuff, idealist stuff - we can't ask "what would it be like if it were not for X" because we are those things.
The question fundamentally reduces to: can we make decisions unbounded by what makes up our mind? And the answer, no matter what the model of a mind you use is going always to be no.
I was about to confidently say it was chemical fizzing, but then realized there might be quantal shit going on at a lower level, and googled "synaptotagmin quantum." Pretty hilariously, the first results are for a paper on Arxiv about quantum consciousness that touches on free will.
I don't disagree, but found it interesting and perhaps telling that typing neuroscience words and "quantum" into google comes up with non-peer reviewed articles on consciousness and free will.
Of course, how the heck the conscious network gets trained I have no idea. I assume that's probably what dreams are for, shuffling around conscious ideas and seeing how they can be aligned.
should have also sealed away the part that allowed him to flood the world or requires that his son die to forgive us
I'm willing to count the second one as putting some aspect of himself through a bunch of shit so he could figure out what the heck all of those humans kept on whining about. And the first one as him really, really needing to have gone through the second one.
In my experience, most people calling themselves agnostic, are actually atheists who either do not understand the term, or wish to distance them from it (for number of reasons, some good, others less so), though there does exist a smaller set of people who are theists, but still use the word for whatever reason.
And, for that matter, most reasonable atheists will admit to some level of agnosticism, even if only because certainty of, well, anything, as all but impossible.
Atheist is just a label, a minor label, and in a perfect world, it would be an irrelevant label, but unfortunately we don't live in that world.
Says a post telling agnostics what they believe.
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I think I made the mistake of trying to explain the philosophical concept of free will in the context of its use from religious folks and it was taken as an attempt at debate. Let me take this time to apologize as the explanation was obviously not sought out, and I am not looking to debate a concept I have no belief in.
Right but the idea is that a creator god could, either through natural evolutionary processes or simply by willing it so, make humans naturally inclined more towards what the Bible (or any particular religious text) says is morally righteous behavior. You say that those things don't affect our choices but... they do. In defining what kind of people we are, they define what kind of decisions we will make, what we will decide is acceptable or not, whether or not we will do things we feel are wrong or not. A god could have made us less likely to engage in premarital sex by altering how we get aroused or by making people who do not get aroused until after they're married. If perfect free will and choice were so important, a creator god could have made it so humans would be coming at all these important righteous decisions from a truly neutral position, not unduly weighted towards what the god wanted us to do or not, and so making our choices truly meaningful.
And it seems like god has done none of these things. If there is a creator god, the way they made humans is nonsensical if they truly wanted people to be able to freely decide between good and evil in a meaningful way.
The way I see it, the answer to whether or not a god exists can be answered in one of three different ways: (in order from most to least likely in my opinion)
1) There is no god - I'll continue to strive to be the best person I can be regardless. There's no afterlife and I'm perfectly fine with that.
2) There is a god - I'll continue to strive to be the best person I can be regardless. If there's an afterlife that should be sufficient.
3) There is a god and he demands my worship - I'll continue to strive to be the best person I can be regardless. God is a narcissistic asshole. Fuck that guy.
This could mean I am insane, or (once I reach about 55) delightfully eccentric.
The most rudimentary building blocks of conscious experience are probably the sensations of pleasure and pain. Why do we feel pleasure and pain? On the face of it the answer is obvious. Pain is a negative feeling usually associated with actions that do our bodies immediate harm; it deters us from doing things that inhibit our ability to survive. Pleasure is a positive feeling usually associated with actions that keep us alive or lead to reproduction; it encourages us to do things that help our species survive. It has a positive fitness value. If we did not have those feelings, or if the positivity of the feeling were not at all correlated with the utility of the action, we would be likely to make a lot of stupid choices that reduce our fitness. Natural selection would favor an organism that was encouraged to make better choices. Natural selection would also favor an organism that was capable of overriding those impulses in specific scenarios where it may be necessary, if one arose.
That argument works fine from the perspective of evolutionary biology, but it assumes as a premise that free will exists and flows from consciousness. If you reject that, and assume that all behavior is just a deterministic chain of chemical reactions, then why do conscious sensations exist? If the system is wired to shy away from such-and-such an action outside of extreme duress and that's all there is to say about the matter, then it wouldn't matter how that action actually felt. So why does it hurt? You can argue that the feeling of pain doesn't exist, at which point your argument immediately fails because it does. You can argue that conscious experience is just some weird side effect of the physical system with no special causal power of its own, but if that's the case, why does everything line up so well? Why does the phenomenal experience of pain just so happen to align so consistently with actions that hurt our odds of survival if our behavior would have been the same regardless? Why does the phenomenal experience of pleasure just so happen to align so consistently with actions that help us survive and reproduce? Why does a giant clusterfuck of barely-distinguishable electrical impulses just so happen to result in an extremely consistent narrative describing a conscious self that doesn't exist and doesn't do anything? It looks an awful lot like conscious experience--the actual experience, from more than just a simple behaviorist perspective--plays some sort of significant role in learning or decision-making that would not be possible (or would be much harder to achieve) in a system devoid of conscious experience.
Yeah, sure, you can create a model where conscious experience doesn't exist and everything else still works fine without it. But that model does not describe the universe we actually occupy.
Why we have conscious/subjective experience is one of the deep problems of philosophy of mind and neuroscience in general.
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I'm one of those 'the terms aren't mutually exclusive' agnostic atheists. I don't know if there's a God or not, and I don't believe there is one either.
I don't have a perfect definition that slots in flawlessly with our current empirical model of the universe. I don't have a model that perfectly reconciles everything. That's the point.
If intelligent design as a model has zero validity, evolutionary biology as a model has perfect validity, and a purely materialistic, deterministic model of the universe has perfect validity, then conscious experience utterly defies explanation. But conscious experience exists. It exists with greater certainty than anything else we think we know about. The only reasonable way to deal with this discrepancy is to accept that our various models of the universe are limited tools which do not fully describe the universe as it exists. To accept that there is room for our models to grow and change significantly, or that there is room for new models to emerge.
There is a common tendency among reductive atheists (and I've been getting a strong sense of this from your posts) to hold as a premise that the current scope of our deterministic, materialistic model of the universe is perfect and beyond reproach. If an idea emerges which is not perfectly consistent with the current model, it must be twisted into something unrecognizable which would fit the model, or it must be rejected out of hand no matter how much validity it looks like it has. I don't see this as hugely different from a theist that holds as a premise that God must exist in a certain form, and any controversial ideas must either be tortuously contorted into something that fits their conception of God or must be denied even if it's obviously true.
We don't have a Unified Theory of Everything. We KNOW that we don't. So we have to accept that our knowledge is limited and that we shouldn't constrain the possibilities for every unknown based on the limited boundaries of our current models. It's better to accept the universe as a vast and loosely-understood thing than to reject the universe wholesale and replace it with a false edifice which is small enough for us to pretend that we hold it fully within our grasp.
Ummm, where?
At no point at my post, did i say that "agnostics believe this"
I merely pointed out that, in my subjective experience, most people calling themselves agnostics, are atheists by some definitions of the word.
Most agnostic theists tend to not adobt the label on its own, but some do, and i am not sure why.
Anyway, i'm agnostic atheist, thought in my case the "believes there is no god" also fits, but that's not the definition of atheist or atheism (it is one (narrow) definition of atheist, but not the only one).
If I got one thing out of a college course on epistemology, it's that knowledge isn't tied into any sort of system like that. If any system that produces results that disagree with what makes sense to us can be considered to be falsified, then one definition of knowledge that is impossible to falsify is "something is known if upon looking at the situation I would consider it to be known". Any other formal system will just end up having to be a full simulation of a brain, which is just a more formalized version of the same thing.
The same thing holds for belief. Therefore, to know something but not believe it, all you have to do is decide that you know it but don't believe it. Or have me, personally, decide that you know it but don't believe it, depending on how you interpret the theory.
I think there's a term for this, and I've been frantically trying to look it up with no luck so far.
The first bold sentence is incredibly smug, and the second bold and italicized sentence would be where you actually tell agnostics what they believe. The third sentence also bold and italicized is you doubling down on it.
Your subjective experience is called an opinion, so stating it as a fact could be seen as telling someone what they believe.