How is free will possible?

Dave L · Nov 2, 2018

Nicholas Deka said:
If I choose to think my will is free, it's because God wants me to want to think that, because God controls all of my wants. So God deceived me into thinking my will is free.

He withholds truth from sinners and you were already deceived from birth.

Dave L · Nov 2, 2018

durangodawood said:
Wait... you were telling be all along that the wants I seem to have are actually provided by God.

So I'm still looking for just one thing that I have actual (not illusory) control over here.

You freely choose what you want. But you cannot determine what you will want. It's part of your God given nature.

durangodawood · Nov 2, 2018

Dave L said:
You freely choose what you want. But you cannot determine what you will want. It's part of your God given nature.

Thats a nonsense contradiction.

If the choice originated in me, then I determined the outcome. If not, then something else determined it. Cant have it both ways.

Uber Genius · Nov 2, 2018

durangodawood said:
Fundamental material forces may be random. But in us, it appears that evolution has shaped them into an emergent order thats suitable for arguing these topics.

Please read at least a summary of the EAAN I mentioned and then lets talk further. It seems that evolution is not aimed at truth. We need some explanation for why our cognitive faculties would be aimed at truth when that is not a requirement for outcompeting our neighbors and passing on our DNA. Once you have read that article we can proceed.

Also remember that you are trusting a random process to produce order and information and judge between true and false claims, so we are going from disorder to order which is problematic.

durangodawood · Nov 2, 2018

Uber Genius said:
Please read at least a summary of the EAAN I mentioned and then lets talk further.....

Ah. What post?

Ken-1122 · Nov 2, 2018

Dave L said:
Paul says you are without excuse because the universe reveals God, no matter how much you rationalize against this. And Spiritually, God's presence in people's hearts is a uniform experience where only their attempts to understand differ somewhat.

Have you forgotten who you are talking to?

Uber Genius · Nov 2, 2018

Ken-1122 said:
As I said before; if I believe in Santa Clause, and I describe Santa as the one who creates toys in the North Pole, the very existence of toys would be evidence of Santa for me, but not for you. If you believe in God; and you define God as the creator of the Universe and all that exists; the very existence of the Universe and all that exist will be evidence of God for you, but it will not be for me.

And of course everybody seems to experience God differently this way.

We are not trapped in some postmodern solipsism where we can't trust the existence of anything accept our own experience.

No one justifies their belief in God by saying I believe God created the universe, the universe exists therefore God exists. This is a strawman of your own creation and is obviously circular.

So the existence of the universe kicks off a reasoning process

Anything that begins to exist has a cause (1)

1.Something cannot come from nothing. To claim that something can come into being out of nothing is worse than magic. When a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat, at least you've got the magician, not to mention the hat! But if you deny premise (1) you've got to think that the whole universe just appeared at some point in the past for no reason whatsoever. But nobody sincerely believes that things, say, a horse or an Eskimo village, can just pop into being without a cause.

2. If something can come into being from nothing, then it becomes inexplicable why just anything or everything doesn't come into being from nothing. Think about it: why don't bicycles and Beethoven and root beer just pop into being from nothing? Why is it only universes that can pop into being from nothing? What makes nothingness so discriminatory? There can't be anything about nothingness that favors universes, for nothingness doesn't have any properties. Nor can anything constrain nothingness, since there isn't anything to be constrained!

3. Common experience and scientific evidence confirm the truth of premise (1). Premise (1) is constantly verified and never falsified. It is hard to understand how any atheist committed to modern science could deny that premise (1) is more plausibly true than false in light of the evidence.

for more see:

Uber Genius · Nov 2, 2018

durangodawood said:
Ah. What post?

bottom of How is free will possible?

Youtube has a video of him presenting it as well.

It takes some digestion but is held in high-regard by most in academia, that is just to say that it has passed the test of time. It is not a quick read. Good luck.

Dave L · Nov 2, 2018

Ken-1122 said:
Have you forgotten who you are talking to?

Are you someone special? A cut above the rest?

Dave L · Nov 2, 2018

durangodawood said:
Thats a nonsense contradiction.

If the choice originated in me, then I determined the outcome. If not, then something else determined it. Cant have it both ways.

God determines the very words you use.

durangodawood · Nov 2, 2018

Dave L said:
God determines the very words you use.

No he doesnt. I do.

But thats beside the point.

No one is responsible for things they cant determine. Thats basic ethics, as opposed to your upside-down ethics in which people should be considered responsible for things they have no actual control over.

Dave L · Nov 2, 2018

durangodawood said:
No he doesnt. I do.

But thats beside the point.

No one is responsible for things they dont determine. Thats basic ethics, as opposed to your upside-down ethics in which people should be considered responsible for things they have no actual control over.

“The preparations of the heart in man, And the answer of the tongue, is from the Lord.” (Proverbs 16:1)

durangodawood · Nov 2, 2018

Dave L said:
“The preparations of the heart in man, And the answer of the tongue, is from the Lord.” (Proverbs 16:1)

Well then the Lord instructs me to disagree with you.

Anyway, there's still the problem of your upside down ethics.

holo · Nov 2, 2018

durangodawood said:
Well then the Lord instructs me to disagree with you.

Anyway, there's still the problem of your upside down ethics.

Well, apparently God instructed Pharaoh to disagree with Moses, for example. The bible even quotes God as saying that he "raised him up" for a specific purpose. While you can say that the bible implies free will, there are certainly a lot of verses that say quite explicitly that it's God who controls stuff, even the evil things. It sounds horrible, but the upside is that it has a purpose, even if we don't understand what that purpose may be. And I personally thinks that's infinitely better than what most Christians seem to think, which is that God made everything good, but was somehow forced to give us free will, which resulted in everything quite literally going to hell, and then he had to come up with Jesus as plan B.

holo · Nov 2, 2018

Uber Genius said:
So yes it is possible for humans to delude themselves no doubt, but that is true of every knowledge category. So I don't think that gets us anywhere.

I understood you to mean that if we don't have free will, Paul's admonitions would be pointless. And in a way you'd be right, but on the other hand his admonitions would just be another one of the billion things that determine what people do. We could make a similar point by asking why God would use Paul to admonish people when he could just as easily have convinced them of the truth, just like he did with Paul (who arguably didn't freely choose to believe - God quite dramatically made him a believer on the road to Damascus).

Uber Genius said:
So my point would be that is very difficult to read any scripture in any book OT or NT, without hundreds of implicit clues that require the reader to have libertarian free will. Every comment on this thread required people to use their intent to recall memories, choose freely to study philosophical notions of free will, using rationality freely decide which position, libertarian, compatibilism, or determinism, best explains their experience of the world and in some cases their understanding of the scriptures. So none of these appear to me to be determined.

I'm with you on the choosing, but not on the freely. I can't "freely" choose which world view to agree with. Sure, I may be more inclined to believe whatever feels best, but then again, the tendency to do that isn't something I've chosen "freely". Wind back time to when I started this thread, and it would've evolved in the exact same way a billion times, wouldn't it?

holo · Nov 2, 2018

As far as I know, the only person the bible explicitly says to have free will, is God.

holo · Nov 2, 2018

Ken-1122 said:
Why do you say that?

You seemed to be saying that very thing: "And now all of that is a part of “ME” My genes are me, the culture is me, and everything else you mentioned is now a part of “ME”.

But maybe I misunderstood what you meant.

Ken-1122 said:
At birth.

But the person you were born as is hardly the same person that you are now. The only time you are you, is right now. In a second, quite literally and physically, you'll be a different person. There's no part of us that I know of that isn't constantly changing, I don't see some sort of essence in us that's somehow independent of anything else (people who believe in a soul will probably see it differently).

holo · Nov 2, 2018

Uber Genius said:
We need some explanation for why our cognitive faculties would be aimed at truth when that is not a requirement for outcompeting our neighbors and passing on our DNA.

Who says they are aimed for truth? Our everyday experience of the world hardly tells us anything about the ultimate nature of reality. If we are inclined to seek truth, it is very likely because that type of behaviour was an advantage in our early development as humans. That's also a reasonable explanation for why we tend to lie, exaggerate, believe in supernatural things and so forth.

holo · Nov 2, 2018

durangodawood said:
No he doesnt. I do.

But thats beside the point.

No one is responsible for things they cant determine. Thats basic ethics, as opposed to your upside-down ethics in which people should be considered responsible for things they have no actual control over.

But ethics don't have to be only about holding people morally responsible. I think a good example is the difference between the judicial systems in the US and Scandinavia. The Scandinavian countries are, very broadly speaking, more concerned with protecting the innocent and rehabilitating the criminal, while in the US the focus seems to be more on protecting the innocent and punishing the guilty. You'll probably never see the death penalty in Scandinavia, much less the families of the victim being allowed to witness the execution.

Point being, you can say that actions or consequences are good or bad without necessarily saying that the perpetrator is evil.

JesusYeshuaisLord · Nov 2, 2018

holo said:
I guess this belongs in the philosophy forum, but that's closed. But it's relevant to ethics because the idea of free will is a prerequisite for even talking about ethical and moral issues.

Anyway, I'm wondering how a truly free will can even be possible? The reason I doubt it is because absolutely everything, even the tiniest signal between two synapses in your brain, happens for a reason. The only way to alter the outcome of something is to alter the conditions. In other words, if you rewind time for, say, 10 minutes, without changing anything, the exact same thing would happen a million times in a row, whether it's a coin toss or a thought. At what point, and how, does this proposed free will enter the equation?

Note: don't confuse making choices with having free will. We obviously make choices all the time. The question is if the choice could in fact really have been different, given all the things that lead up to that choice. As far as I can tell, the only way for your brain to have made a different choice, is if your brain was different to begin with.

I think you make a good point.
Personally I don't think we have true free will in the absolute sense that we want to have it. Like I think we cannot be without bias and without absolute objectivity, and this even if we believe in God or not. Without God, the thoughts patterns of our brains are too complex and require too many different information to have the above. With God thats clear that there are powers at work within us.

How is free will possible?

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