Free Will and Religion - Page 24

On March 06 2012 00:53 Uncultured wrote:


Now you're just going in circles. That very same article proposes a theory for compatabilism to be true, from Stephen Hawking himself. And that's exactly what this all is, theory. You keep citing physics as if this is all pinned down as fact, but even Hawking and Schrodinger both assert that they could be wrong about their beliefs of free will. You have cherry picked that single idea out of a plethora of possibilities and dote on only it, as fact.

You keep trying to make it out like I'm arguing for Free Will, when I'm not. I'm arguing that free will is a possibility, along with determinism, along with both of them working together.

On March 06 2012 18:11 somatic wrote:



As with most people (most religious people included) your misunderstanding of the the bible's message is causing your hatred towards it/reproach upon it. I have recently been studying with a group of bible student's (which exact denomination i will try to keep unmentioned because i fear my own lack of understanding on the matter may cause reproach upon their organisation) and will try enlighten you on the situation. Not so much on the free will part of the discussion, i have not read any of the comments yet but will assume my view has been mentioned already. Something along the lines of - if a thought pops into my head it is my choice whether i act on it or not. That choice is me exercising free will.

"If God is good, then why did he let the genocide in Rwanda happen?"

As you mentioned it is tied in to the Adam and Eve scenario. What essentially happened there was Adam and Eve choosing not to follow God's law's and hence live by their own rules. The consequence is that God is now allowing humans and Satan to have their chance to prove they can rule themselves it is not until when all is lost that He will step in and save the righteous. So i guess technically you are right he is ALLOWING it to happen but it is Satan's influence and humans that are CAUSING it to happen. He gives all the opportunity to learn about Him and try to correct their ways and as reward eternal life. Unlike many religious organisations that will say it was God's will that those things happen the truth is that he is merely allowing it to happen so His purpose for further down the track can be fulfilled.If i were a better student/more experienced teacher I could site scriptures pertaining to these facts, i guess i can try dig them up for anyone if they are truly interested.

"Why does he not intervene in the the mass-murder being conducted by the Syrian government, as we speak? "

If he were to intervene any time something bad happened he would be prolonging the existence of Satan's reign over the Earth, by waiting he is settling the issue at the fastest pace possible once and for all, while giving every body the chance to redeem themselves by giving His word, the bible.

Most of the gaping flaws you mention are a product of the teachings of the popular churches whose teachings have been combined with pagan beliefs (beginning during the reign of the Roman emperor Constantine.) and NOT from what the bible actually teaches. From what I have seen over my three or so years studying the bible, the logic is flawless. Much more so than any other human construct I have witnessed in my 27yrs on the Earth (examples such as national/international policies, movies, video game balance etc). I can guarantee many of your conceptions of what the bible actually teaches will be incorrect, as mine were before I began to study. Some examples are the existence of a "Hell", the holy trinity, immortality of the soul and God ruling the world at the moment rather than Satan as i already mentioned.

If it adds anything to my credibility, not that it should in my own opinion, i have a degree in Engineering. Hopefully this will mitigate any derogatory comments about me being uneducated and having blind faith. On that note i do NOT have 100% faith in the bible, i have not decided to be baptised yet and am far from knowing enough to convince my self that it is correct. All i can say is that it deserves alot more credit than what is commonly given to it.


***edit***
After reading some of the comments and contemplating the topic a little more it has some interesting implications towards religion, in that if you are willing to accept that we do not have free will, or at least do not understand it, then you may be willing to concede that if a spirit being that was greater than us was to exist it could have influence over our behaviour, or, "will".

On March 06 2012 00:59 GGTeMpLaR wrote:


Determinism rejecting free will is semantics in the same exact way and expects an unrealistic definition of free will, hence why it doesn't exist. Not necessarily though because if you're a deterministic individual who doesn't believe in free will you're not a compatibilist, the definition of compatibilism is that the universe is deterministic but we still have free will.

Scientific holism is the assumption that all science is capable of being unified, eventually we will be able to explain all phenomena in chemistry through pure physics in how particles interact, then biology, and continue to build up until we will eventually be able to explain everything through physics up to the point where human behavior can be mapped out and predicted. It relates extremely well to your argument since it's based on the fact that human behavior can be explained by particle interactions. If they can't be, then your understanding of the laws of the universe which are based on scientific holism won't fit so well anymore (which is more of an assumption than an understanding anyways).

Even if science is holistic (which again, we don't know whether it is or not but it sure as hell isn't right now), it doesn't necessarily follow that the laws of the universe force one to reject free will.

On March 06 2012 00:57 hypercube wrote:


So the emotionally loaded language and the moral condemnation is just the laws of nature playing themselves out in one part of reality (you) affecting another (the mental state of your readers).
I'd still hold that this kind of behaviour is inconsistent with your proffessed beliefs about reality but it would be unfair of me to criticise you for something that you have no controll over.

I could, hoping that this criticism, however unjustified, would cause the behaviour to change, but I have a suspicion it wouldn't.

On March 06 2012 19:58 Imbaman wrote:
There is no reason to believe that our brains do not use the laws of physics to operate.. Neuroscience has shown that emotions and actions can be induced by electrical signals artificially induced. Chemicals in the form of hormones affect our decisions everyday, and chemicals can be used to bring us out of consciousness among other things. Studies have also shown that when when certain parts of the brains are separated from the rest of the brain strange things happen. These people have been shown to be aware of what they are doing, but have no control over what they are doing. People who have their left brains separated from their right brains have been shown to be unable to say what they are looking at with their right eyes, because the right side of the brain control speech, but the information from the right eye only goes into the left brain. They are able to say it by writing it down with their right hands, and using their left eye to see what their right hand wrote. These examples show how awareness/consciousness/free will is all an illusion derived from our highly complex brain being able to take into account immense amounts of input including things from far in the past in order to come to a decision in a situation.

On March 06 2012 08:14 HailPlays wrote:


The laws of physics do no such thing. They are just descriptions of causal relationships that repeat themselves. At no point can science claim that these laws actually govern anything. They're just the best explanations we can come up with right now. You have made the error of equating scientific theories with objective, certain truth, when they have no stronger a claim to that than a priest.

Feel free to take your philosophical escapade to the next level by reading up on Hume's problem of induction. If you would rather I explain the problem to you, do let me know. Not to mention the whole slew of sceptical arguments of which those who use science in this way seem blissfully oblivious.

On March 06 2012 21:09 paralleluniverse wrote:

If we extend this argument to it's logical extreme: why should I go to work tomorrow or do anything at all, if everything is predetermined?

The nonexistence of free will doesn't change the fact that I can't afford to feed myself without working.

If you want a more philosophical answer, I'm a compatiblist, i.e. I believe one does not have free will, but has weak free will, defined as the ability to do according to ones motivations (even if these motivations are not free). My motivations are to convince you I'm right, and obtain sustenance.

On March 06 2012 08:54 Njbrownie wrote:


If what you say is true, then people would not have any control over a single thing they did in life ever. Except people do have choices in life. They are faced with millions of choices and these choices are subject to reason.
Reasonably, your "decision to move" is your will, you have it right at the front of this chain of command. How do you describe a contradictory post and all together moot your own point?
The mind is a complex feature that noone knows enough about to adiquitely describe a scenerio such as ones life being pre-determined. People have been debating this forever and both sides agree that there are some form of indeterminism is true!
According to logic, then if experts in the area all agree that indeterminism exists how in the hell can you turn around and say it doesn't? Whereas, determinism has little to no factual backing and tons of theories floating with open ends left unproven.

In the early morning of July 23, 2007, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, two career criminals, arrived at the home of Dr. William and Jennifer Petit in Cheshire, a quiet town in central Connecticut. They found Dr. Petit asleep on a sofa in the sunroom. According to his taped confession, Komisarjevsky stood over the sleeping man for some minutes, hesitating, before striking him in the head with a baseball bat. He claimed that his victim’s screams then triggered something within him, and he bludgeoned Petit with all his strength until he fell silent.

The two then bound Petit’s hands and feet and went upstairs to search the rest of the house. They discovered Jennifer Petit and her daughters—Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11—still asleep. They woke all three and immediately tied them to their beds.

At 7:00 a.m., Hayes went to a gas station and bought four gallons of gasoline. At 9:30, he drove Jennifer Petit to her bank to withdraw $15,000 in cash. The conversation between Jennifer and the bank teller suggests that she was unaware of her husband’s injuries and believed that her captors would release her family unharmed.

While Hayes and the girls’ mother were away, Komisarjevsky amused himself by taking naked photos of Michaela with his cell phone and masturbating on her. When Hayes returned with Jennifer, the two men divided up the money and briefly considered what they should do. They decided that Hayes should take Jennifer into the living room and rape her—which he did. He then strangled her, to the apparent surprise of his partner.

At this point, the two men noticed that William Petit had slipped his bonds and escaped. They began to panic. They quickly doused the house with gasoline and set it on fire. When asked by the police why he hadn’t untied the two girls from their beds before lighting the blaze, Komisarjevsky said, “It just didn’t cross my mind.” The girls died of smoke inhalation. William Petit was the only survivor of the attack.

Upon hearing about crimes of this kind, most of us naturally feel that men like Hayes and Komisarjevsky should be held morally responsible for their actions. Had we been close to the Petit family, many of us would feel entirely justified in killing these monsters with our own hands. Do we care that Hayes has since shown signs of remorse and has attempted suicide? Not really. What about the fact that Komisarjevsky was repeatedly raped as a child? According to his journals, for as long as he can remember, he has known that he was “different” from other people, psychologically damaged, and capable of great coldness. He also claims to have been stunned by his own behavior in the Petit home: He was a career burglar, not a murderer, and he had not consciously intended to kill anyone. Such details might begin to give us pause.

Whether criminals like Hayes and Komisarjevsky can be trusted to honestly report their feelings and intentions is not the point: Whatever their conscious motives, these men cannot know why they are as they are. Nor can we account for why we are not like them. As sickening as I find their behavior, I have to admit that if I were to trade places with one of these men, atom for atom, I would be him: There is no extra part of me that could decide to see the world differently or to resist the impulse to victimize other people. Even if you believe that every human being harbors an immortal soul, the problem of responsibility remains: I cannot take credit for the fact that I do not have the soul of a psychopath. If I had truly been in Komisarjevsky’s shoes on July 23, 2007—that is, if I had his genes and life experience and an identical brain (or soul) in an identical state—I would have acted exactly as he did. There is simply no intellectually respectable position from which to deny this. The role of luck, therefore, appears decisive.

On March 06 2012 21:53 BillClinton wrote:
What is a law of nature?

A law is always system-bound (the consequence[s] of the law is/are related to a definite space), if we talk about laws of nature it is always an approximation and therefore a reduction of reality. 'Even' the laws of math are 'only' provable until the basic axioms within the system 'math'.

If you say we obey to the laws of nature you imply the existence of an ultimate law (respectively god). Or you have to accept that the numbers we get from our artificial tools are probabilitistic abstractions [ex ante] and our conclusions thereof are only true as long as a more comprising theory is developing.

What is debunked is that even if quantum fluctuations are fundamentally stochastic, i.e., completely random and unpredictable, it still does not imply that free will exists.

On March 06 2012 21:49 paralleluniverse wrote:

But do you really have a choice to move or not? If you did have a choice, that would imply that you can, independent of the world, choose either to receive electrical impulse in the synapses of your brain that constitutes the intention to move or to receive a different electrical impulse which constitutes the intention to not move. Therefore, you imply that the motion of the elementary particles that makes up your thought are chosen by a human brain, as opposed to being dictated by the laws of physics acting on this system of particles from a prior state. This is absurd and contradicts our current understanding of physics.

Sam Harris has another point of view on the issue of humans feeling like they make choices, in the article I linked in the OP. Perhaps his exposition is more relatable:

On March 06 2012 12:25 kidcrash wrote:


The problem with the bolded statement is that it's taking an all or none stance, when in fact there is much grey area to cover. Let's take a look at the probabilty within the randomness of quantum mechanics. Let's make a simplistic example to make it as clear is possible. Let's say that within 3 events or "actions", 2 of them are within the realm of free will, while the 3rd falls into the random nature of quantum mechanics. The key here is that the 3 actions can be independent of each other.

As much as people would like to beleive that every single action is interconnected with each other, they don't have to be.

On March 06 2012 20:24 sigma_x wrote:


The answers to the response you give have been pretty well established since 1955 (see J.L Mackie's, Evil and Omnipotence). First, for us, it makes sense to draw a difference between a positive act against a failure to act. For example, when a man is drowning off the coast, many people would say there is a difference between failing to act and allowing that man to die, and physically holding that man's head under the water. It makes sense in this circumstance to draw distinctions between the two. God, however, does not have this luxury. He is all powerful. To god therefore, it makes no sense to draw that sort of distinction. That it is Satan's influence, or humans or whatever is irrelevant. Allowing Satan to do something, and God doing it himself is really no difference at all.

Second, it makes no sense to say that God should be concerned that the consequence of his actions prevent him from acting. This is a pointless argument. Humans, and other mortal beings who are not all powerful, have this problem. God, being omnipotent, doesn't need to allow anything to happen so that "His purpose" can be fulfilled. He can just make it happen.

Which brings us to this thread. As far as the logical problem of evil is concerned, the only tenable response is a free will defence. In fact, most Christian apologists not only agree but think the matter has already been settled by reason of Platinga's free will defence. For my part, I am content defending J. L Mackie's logical problem of evil simply by asserting the truth of compatibilism.

On March 06 2012 21:59 Oshuy wrote:


I do not see why anyone would try to demonstrate that free will exists, that in itself would be absurd. The use of the quantum fluctuations is to point out that based on the same initial state, alternatives to the final outcome exist. A single experiment that is not determined is enough to leave room for choice.

That gap is all that is required to allow for any decision making process we can imagine, including free will. The main point here being that we have no scientific way to collect enough data to prove/disprove it.
(would appear as a bias in the randomness of quantum events linked to specific decisions, which we cannot measure yet)

I agree it is absurd, I agree it is a bypass of the laws of the universe by something undefined which would have that "will". Point is, there is no scientific way to rule it out other than Ockham's razor.