What I can never understand about the theists I meet, is how they can even entertain the idea of free will. They (in my experience, all Christians) believe that their God is omniscient, while at the same time believing in free will. Okay, I say, so this God knows all things, right … including what I am about to do? And everything that everyone else will ever do?
No, they say, that’s not determined, that comes under free will.
But didn’t you just claim that your God knows everything?
Ummm… they say.
Logic is not their strong suit.
Matt Crampsays
The 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons has an interesting twist on this argument: evil gods make their creations evil, because those gods don’t care about the inner lives of their creations, but good gods know the powerful imposing one’s will on others, even if done with the best of intentions, is not a good act in that game’s moral universe. Thus, good gods made creatures that can be evil and set an example in other ways.
Of course, in Dungeons and Dragons, the existence of gods is easily confirmable by the fact that certain pious people can channel miracles on demand while everyone else has to be content with fireballs. Certainly it’s hard to argue that a god whose only input is the very occasional prophet and a set of stories with questionable morals is really having a go.
praesays
This omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent thing is the biggest plot hole in christian mythology. Whoever introduced this idea certainly didn’t think about it much. That’s why I prefer fictional mythologies over real ones: these make sense. And lol, I just noticed something: real religions/mythologies, which, in a sense, evolved, have flaws, which artifical (aka: intelligently designed) ones lack.
But, I also have a simpler explanation for the whole free will vs omnipotence thing. It was rather obvious last time I let myself drag into a church: the christians are obviously scared of their deity, they call it things like “allpowerful”, “allknowing” or “benevolent” just to appease it.
mastmakersays
Of course! This opens even more rabbit holes:
Argument: Evil God will cannot allow free will since it will not be acceptable to Evil God. Evil God will only be happy with absolute control.
Counter: So, you think ‘free will’ is benevolence from Good God? In that case, why do ALL Good Gods require absolute, unquestioning obedience from you, even at the threat of everlasting hell?
Actual case: Absolute unquestioning obedience is REQUIRED for priests to control masses.
consciousness razorsays
It’s fine as a response to a free will defense, but lots of bad shit happens that isn’t caused by anyone’s actions, intentionally or otherwise. Think of devastating earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc., which can cause an incredible amount of (totally pointless) suffering.
That sort of bad shit needs to be accounted for by theists too, since gods are supposed to be creators of the whole world and everything in it, not only creators of people who are thought to have free will. It’s just hanging on a little too long to the assumption that agents do good or evil stuff (whether they’re supposed to be gods or human beings), to the exclusion of other non-agencies which may also cause such stuff.
It seems like once you see that you shouldn’t necessarily associate an agent with good or bad stuff, then it’s clear that you have more work to do than you might have thought, justifying the claim that a particular agent (a god) is responsible for certain types of good stuff (or all good stuff). The follow-up claim, that only because of another supposed feature of agents (humans’ free will) is it the case that this god might be let off the hook for bad stuff (since we chose to make that happen), just isn’t right for several different reasons.
But playing along with the idea that it’s agents all the way down doesn’t seem like the right approach to take. At some point, you need to be able to introduce an idea that perhaps the earthquake didn’t destroy this town because God has a good plan and works in mysterious ways to make it happen (so it’s all ultimately okay somehow). The earthquake, while bad for the people hurt by it, might not be the result of anybody intending to do anything good or bad or anything else, not in fact for reasons that we know or for reasons that we don’t know — that’s a possibility too, that bad shit simply fucking happened, pointlessly.
If you don’t go there, of course theists can just slide away from talking about our free will, flip the record to the B side and start playing their greatest hits about how some special agent mysteriously intends everything we don’t, so we simply may not know what those intentions are. When it goes like that, they never quite approach the idea that they didn’t have a good reason to think there is a god doing anything at all. After all, one type of thing they might cite as a reason is the fact that there is some good in the world, but that is precisely the kind of assumption (good = morally significant = an agent must’ve done it) they should’ve been questioning from the beginning. In any case, it shouldn’t be about trying to find a plausible way to hide certain things behind our ignorance.* It’s about what’s true of the whole world, however ignorant we may or may not be.
*”But look here, theist, we can hide an evil demon behind the veil too. Ha ha, that’s so silly. People obviously don’t believe in evil spirits…. Hold on, what’s that? They do? Okay, back to the drawing board, I guess. Sorry for the interruption, move along.”
mambasays
Ask a Christian “what does God want from us?” and you will get an answer like “To worship him and love each other” or something, which is not giving us any actual consideration you might notice. But then reword it to say “What does God want humanity in general to accomplish? What do we DO?” and you will get nothing.
Why? because if the Bible story is true, God is a PET owner, and we’re the pets. It’s not good or evil, it’s having a pet to watch and play with. we’re not loved as we understand it, we’re patronizingly loved like “Ooo, I LOVE that rabbit!”. doesn’t mean we’d die for it if push came to shove, unlike love for OUR children which most parents would do.
Think of it…Genesis makes it clear we’re not supposed to be intelligent…the moment we were we were kicked out. We weren’t supposed to invent anything because all needs and desires (limited without intelligence) were taken care of in “paradise”. No goals, no dreams, no point. But Adam was alone and bored, unhealthy so eve was “made” (after testing out the other animals…use your imagination on bestiality WITHOUT lust of any form, no sin yet remember?). So now Adam has Eve, so go ahead and breed if you want, more purebreds make a nice collection.
Now think of your average hamster owner. Isn’t the desires basically the same? Just saying to the hamster figuratively “Be comfortable and good, love me back, and I’ll care for you. Don’t get too smart though or you’ll be a threat and I’ll throw you into the wild woods! I don’t really care if you try to do anything else because nothing you do is meaningful to me. Just be cute and I’ll play with you occasionally. Sometimes my little sister might shake the cage, sorry.”
There is a parallel you have to admit.
scottdesays
All hail Sithrak! Even now he oils the spit.
davidnanglesays
The Christian god always seemed like the 5-year-old’s final argument of “infinity.” Yes, you have many gods, your thunder god, and sea god, and war god… but my god is infinity good and infinity strong and infinity smart! So there!
Utterly childish.
unclefrogysays
the middle eastern god is nonsensical and contradictory and as has been mentioned childish in the extreme. If it wasn’t for the fact that people are raised in it’s ignorance no person with any education into the nature of the realty would have anything to do with it other than appreciate the most benevolent aspects of the believers practices.
uncle frogy
jaybeesays
Logic doesn’t matter. Christians can reconcile that Jesus was fully human and fully divine. Does not compute. Catholics recognize that the eucharist doesn’t physically change in any molecular or chemican fashion when it is consecrated, yet it is literally. not metaphorically, the body of Jesus afterwards. Does not compute.
They can be quite specific about God’s requirements, but when bringing up why he allows spina bifida, then you get the “It would be arrogant to claim to know God’s mind but I can tell you whatever it is it is for the best.”
A variation on the thinking in the video is this one: what if God populated the bible with a mix of good suggestions and bad ones in order to determine which bits of advice each individual chose to follow? A theological ink blot test.
Ed Seedhousesays
I don’t know how Christians reconcile the conception of a purely good God with Isaiah 45:7 which more or less lets the cat out of the bag. Yet they believe that this too is the infallible word of their God.
Personally I don’t see the problem. The concept of “good” is only knowable in contrast to the complimentary concept of “evil”. “God” could not create a world with good and without evil anymore than such a God could create inside without simultaneously creating inside. Of course there’s no need for an imaginary “god” to create any of these things in the first place since they are conceptual categories of the human mind, not features of the physical universe. You may know that your baseball is inside your house, but neither the baseball nor the house know anything at all so far as we know. And they also don’t know that they are “yours” for that matter.
Ed Seedhousesays
“inside without outside” is what I meant to write, honest.
tbp1says
“What I can never understand about the theists I meet, is how they can even entertain the idea of free will.”
I can go you one better. I have relatives who are Calvinist missionaries.
If ever there was an oxymoronic job description, that’s it.
I honestly don’t know how they rationalize it. We have a tacit, but very strong, understanding that we don’t talk religion or politics when we get together (usually only once every 2-3 years anyway), so I’ve never asked them.
I would argue that if there is a truly omniscient deity, then he doesn’t have free will, either (idea not original to me, of course).
Ed Seedhousesays
consciousness razor@5″It seems like once you see that you shouldn’t necessarily associate an agent with good or bad stuff,”
I think that should be “external agent” since good and bad are always associated with agents, it’s just that the agents involved are – us. Storms and earthquakes are neither “bad” nor “good”, so far as the universe as a whole is concerned, they just are. “Bad” and “good” are concepts in minds, not realities of the “external” world.
Wait, it’s a mistake for me to have said “they just are” as far as the universe is a whole is concerned. So far as we know “is” and “is not” are also concepts in minds, and the universe as a whole does not appear to either “know” or “not know” anything at all exists. This philosophy stuff can be tricky.
Silver Foxsays
If there is a god why not call it The Indifferent One? Or, better yet, call him Meh. Yeah, says the almighty Meh, I made the universe, but what a tedious thing it is to keep track of 2 trillion galaxies. Maybe I’ll come back later and check in and see how things are going. Or maybe not. Meh.
quarky2says
So do christians believe there is free will in heaven? If so, there is an infinite amount of time to screw up. If it is not possible to fail in heaven, why is it possible to fail with free will on earth? Or is there no free will in heaven? Or is it all make-believe?!
jacksprocketsays
It’s all a bit like the legendary builder, who did jobs that were good, quick, and cheap. Choose any two.
So you need the Trinity to get a god who is good, knowing, and powerful. None of the bits have all three. So there’s the god-part who is good and powerful, but he doesn’t know what the one who is knowing and powerful is up to, and he isn’t good. The one who is good and knowing hasn’t got the power to do anything about the other two.
There. I’ve just reconciled Christianity and Catharism, just in time to prevent the crusade and thousands of deaths… it is 1209 isn’t it? No, that’s the time….
unclefrogysays
@16
last question answer = yes
uncle frogy
Holmssays
Another defense I have heard from an apologist to the same question (why god is good yet permits evil), is that god only permits bad things so as to inspire ‘contingent good’ in people that observe and want to counter said bad thing. Some typical examples that I have heard are that god permits deprivation and poverty to inspire others to give generously, he permits illness and injury to inspire selfless work by groups such as Doctors Without Borders or the Fred Hollows Foundation he permits war to inspire a love of peace; the list goes on.
But the obvious rebuttal to this is that this logic is also perfectly applicable to the possibility to god being evil. The response to the suggestion of an evil god is going to be same but in reverse: how can he be evil if he permits good in the world? Checkmate, atheists!
The rebuttal to this is of course a simple reversal of the logic employed in the first paragraph. Evil god permits good in the world as a way of inspiring ‘contingent evil’ in people. Wealth and lavish lifestyles inspire jealosy and miserliness in the haves and envy and theft in the have-nots, peace and prosperity in one nation may inspire wars of conquest in their neighbours, good health in some inspires bitterness in the chronically ill… and so on. The underlying logic is equally applicable to opposing claims and so cannot be considered a compelling argument for either.
No, it does not work.
The problem with this kind of argumentation is that it is treating the concepts of “good” and “evil” in a rather manichean fashion as to opposed, but yet equal forces, some kind of inner drive, set either on positive or negative. It implies the picture of a cartoonish world of evildoers only enjoying evil things, waking up in the morning from evil sleep to make bad breakfast (’cause that would be evil).
They are of course much more complicated – even the theistic apologists know thhis. One simple aspect wohld be, that a “good” (in a simplistic fashion) person would be interested in spreading its philosophy, converting other people to the cause of doing good and minimizing suffering. Whereas an “evil” person would not care, perhaps looking for naive, easy-to-rip-off – suckers.
Of course the qouestion of theodizee still stands All concepts of good that we have incorporate in some way the impetus to spread it. A moral person wo could, but wouldn’t do it … isn’t.
KGsays
The concept of “good” is only knowable in contrast to the complimentary concept of “evil”. “God” could not create a world with good and without evil – Ed Seedhouse@11
No, that does not follow at all. Something does not have to be knowable in order to exist.
consciousness razorsays
Ed Seedhouse:
I think that should be “external agent” since good and bad are always associated with agents, it’s just that the agents involved are – us.
This is too simplistic and confusing a few different things.
We think things are good or bad for us, as moral agents. They can be beneficial or harmful, impede or promote progress, increase or decrease the chances of being successful — to us or for us, since there are certain things in life that we want or need. There are no moral goods or evils for something like a rock, which isn’t an agent and is unable to stand in relations like those with other stuff.
That’s all very different from claiming such agents must themselves be causes of (or perhaps morally responsible for) all the good or bad things, or in other words that no non-agents can have effects which are good or bad for agents. That’s simply false: if a rock falls on your head and kills you, that’s probably bad for you. Nobody (not a god or a rock-moving spirit or anyone else) needs to have caused that rock to fall on your head. Someone might do that if they’re capable, but it isn’t necessary — it could have genuinely good/bad consequences for you, regardless of the type of thing or which series of events caused it.
I would say all of this is much clearer and more plausible than whatever it is you’re rambling about.
“Bad” and “good” are concepts in minds, not realities of the “external” world.
What could this even mean? You’re apparently not claiming they aren’t “real” (e.g., pain, pleasure, racism, democracy, however good or bad any such things are), but that they are not “external”…. Who cares? What difference does it make to any of this, whether those are internal or external (or both, neither?) to a mind or to a bunch of minds?
It makes no difference, but let me ask…. If an idea that you have is internal to your mind, doesn’t that imply it’s external to mine? So when and where did you have reason to say truthfully and in all generality that such things are “not realities in the external world”? Am I not a part of the external world, from your perspective, just like you are from mine? Am I a figment of your imagination? Do both of our minds exist, not in the physical world but in some other (apparently non-spatial) realm? Why are we taking any bullshit like this seriously?
Wait, it’s a mistake for me to have said “they just are” as far as the universe is a whole is concerned. So far as we know “is” and “is not” are also concepts in minds, and the universe as a whole does not appear to either “know” or “not know” anything at all exists. This philosophy stuff can be tricky.
Where is this going? You’re making mistakes, but claiming that there are things isn’t one of them, for fuck’s sake.
Existence may be something you think about — it could be a concept you have in your mind — but that does not imply anything about what there is (or isn’t). Nobody has any reason to give a fuck about whether the universe (the part that isn’t you) knows anything. If you drop all of the deepities and esoteric nonsense, we can try to have a coherent discussion about actual stuff. Because there is actual stuff.
andyosays
I don’t think the free will excuse is the same for the evil god though. If he made everyone and everything evil it wouldn’t be a sustainable universe, so that’s a reason to make it just reasonably evil and a bit good without having to invoke free will. I think for the free will argument the standard counterpoint works best: there’s a whole bunch of really, super, uber shitty stuff that happens without anyone’s will, free or otherwise.
Brian Englishsays
@consciousness razor.
It’s fine as a response to a free will defense, but lots of bad shit happens that isn’t caused by anyone’s actions, intentionally or otherwise. Think of devastating earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc., which can cause an incredible amount of (totally pointless) suffering.
If God created the universe, then god is responsible for everything that happens in it. A creator can’t blame the creation for its flaws. If s/he didn’t intend bad things, god is shoddy, if s/he did, evil.
My answer to the free will defense is that even if god has ineffable, supposedly good (how do they know?) reasons for allowing free will, god has still created persons for god’s own ends and using persons to ones own ends is immoral.
F.O.says
We live in a world where *every* single creature, to survive, needs to horribly kill plenty of others.
It is inherently built into the system, it’s inescapable.
How fucked up must be the mind that conceived this?
God exists and He is a sadistic psychopath.
Brian Englishsays
I don’t think the free will excuse is the same for the evil god though. If he made everyone and everything evil it wouldn’t be a sustainable universe,
How so? God can do what god wants, you’re assuming an evil universe is ceteris paribus the same as this universe.
Holmssays
No, it does not work.
The problem with this kind of argumentation is that it is treating the concepts of “good” and “evil” in a rather manichean fashion as to opposed, but yet equal forces, some kind of inner drive, set either on positive or negative. It implies the picture of a cartoonish world of evildoers only enjoying evil things, waking up in the morning from evil sleep to make bad breakfast (’cause that would be evil).
They are of course much more complicated – even the theistic apologists know thhis.
Yes of course things are more complicated than the simplistic binary of innately good people vs. innately bad people, and yes most people recognise this; and yet that fact does not stop a) critics of religion posing the ‘problem of evil’ to an apologist, nor b) the apologist responding with the ‘necessary free will’ argument outlined in the OP (or the ‘contingent good’ alternative argument outlined by myself at #19). When it is presented in that manichean manner by the apologist, it can be responded to in that manner by the critic. It works as a rebuttal because it addresses the argument as presented.
consciousness razorsays
If God created the universe, then god is responsible for everything that happens in it.
Well, I’m not so sure about that. I mean, consider that the USA’s “founders” (the whole generation, not a handful of dudes) created this country — they gained independence, formed alliances, made the constitution, got the whole ball rolling basically. It doesn’t follow that because they created it, they’re responsible for everything that has happened since. You probably wouldn’t blame Donald Trump on, let’s say, Jefferson or his whole generation — not unless you could show some fairly strong connection to that effect. But of course, like I said, they are (at least partly) responsible for a whole lot of it, even if not absolutely everything. Maybe you’d say a creator god isn’t analogous, but I don’t really know.
Anyway, my point is that there isn’t a god who created the universe (or did anything else). If that’s true, then there isn’t one to hold responsible when a tornado kills your dog or whatever. And I know I didn’t cause the tornado. Jefferson didn’t. Trump didn’t. The gay agenda didn’t. The big evil conspiracy of conspirators didn’t. It’s just the sort of shitty thing that happens sometimes.
An omnipotent god would be responsible for anything bad in their universe, since their powers would allow them to either build a perfect universe, or fix a broken one. The Old Testament God, or the gods of people like the Greeks and Romans, not so much, since they’re portrayed as superpowered versions of the local rulers.
I should have added those gods are shown as having the same vices as humans, such as jealousy and anger.
Ed Seedhousesays
consciousness razor@22: “Where is this going? You’re making mistakes, but claiming that there are things isn’t one of them”
I don’t understand you here and think you misunderstand me, but I could of course be wrong about both thoughts. I don’t think I claimed that there are “things” although I do think that minds are real (and physical) and concepts that minds have are real phenomena in the world as whole. But “things” are another construction of language in human minds, not actual physical phenomena. The map is not the territory and the word is not the thing.
You are not me and I am not you, but on the other hand we are physically connected to each other and the world we are a part of, nothing in the least mystical about that. Statistically it is virtually certain that atoms that once “inhabited” your body are now in mine, and vice versa.
I don’t believe in a magical nonphysical separate “I” that lives somewhere in my head apart from my brain. I might say that my “self” is my brain, or perhaps an idea in my brain, but my brain does not exist apart from my body and my body doesn’t exist apart from the world it inhabits. Difference and separation are different words for different concepts. I would agree that we are different people, but not that we are separate.
If this is seen as irrelevant or sealioning then I apologize in advance. I believe I am just trying to make myself clear but may be failing utterly.
Ed Seedhousesays
consciousness razor@22 “If you drop all of the deepities and esoteric nonsense, we can try to have a coherent discussion about actual stuff. Because there is actual stuff.”
We agree there is actual stuff at least in the sense that our words are useful in pointing out that “stuff” to each other. If you say “here is a cup of tea” I will know what you mean perfectly well, although the cup of tea doesn’t know what it is. I wasn’t trying to be “deep” but apparently I failed. Not for the first or last time I suspect.
Holmssays
#28
Well, I’m not so sure about that. I mean, consider that the USA’s “founders” (the whole generation, not a handful of dudes) created this country — they gained independence, formed alliances, made the constitution, got the whole ball rolling basically. It doesn’t follow that because they created it, they’re responsible for everything that has happened since.
True, but that’s because ‘humans founding and writing the new constitution of a nation’ is not at all analogous to ‘supernatural agent creating a universe and all physical laws.’ Theists are the ones making the extreme claim of everything being within the purview of their deity, not just at the moment of creation but also for all time. If that is they (ludicrous) claim they want to make, then it follows that all things good and bad created by that deity are his responsibility.
The explanation works unless you are a Zoroastrian or read al-Ghazali’s “Incoherence of the Philosophers”.
consciousness razorsays
If you say “here is a cup of tea” I will know what you mean perfectly well, although the cup of tea doesn’t know what it is.
I guess this is pretty much where I get off the train. It doesn’t matter (for these purposes) whether the cup of tea knows anything. It doesn’t matter whether anybody knows anything, or even if there is anyone who could potentially have any sort of knowledge, beliefs, concepts, etc. Maybe there’s a universe with only a cup of tea in it and nothing else — try to picture that. If in fact there’s a cup of tea in that universe, it is simply a fact: the cup of tea exists. Things we do or don’t know, or the ideas in our heads or the words we might use to try to understand each other (whether they’re about the tea or ourselves or anything else) have no bearing whatsoever on that.
If there is a good or bad experience which a person has, for example, that is also simply a fact. We know empirically that it’s a thing which sometimes happens to the sort of thing I was describing as a “moral agent.” And we also know it isn’t something that happens to rocks, for instance. We can use that information. It isn’t germane to questions of whether they’re real or how they relate to agency, when you claim goods/evils are “not external,” that the universe (other than perhaps that agent who is affected) doesn’t know or isn’t concerned, and so forth.
The distinction I was drawing was between the sorts of things can be affected positively or negatively (in a moral sense) on the one hand, and those things which can cause such effects. You were right to say that good/bad are “associated” with agents, in the former sense. But that fails to say the “association” doesn’t need to run the other way, since agents don’t need to be causes of morally significant events. That seems to address the point fairly adequately. It doesn’t look like there are any other critical points to bring up about it.
taraskansays
@25 F.O.
We live in a world where *every* single creature, to survive, needs to horribly kill plenty of others.
It is inherently built into the system, it’s inescapable.
How fucked up must be the mind that conceived this?
Which, I think, feeds Christian/Buddhist conceptions of self-loathing (or selflessness, or pity, it’s a sliding scale really), as well as ideas like Supremacy of Man, or institutional racism. For God to be true, clearly not all lives are equally sacred. I think there’s something of the ball-fondling of the free market inherent in there, too.
I’ve always seen Christian and Buddhist philosophy as two sides of the same coin, and this is that coin in a nutshell.
woozysays
I was underwhelmed by this video.
It spends the first 25% of the video setting up the dualism vs. materialism veil as though that would be the gyst of the argument. And then the actual argument has nothing to do with it. Then he introduces the concept of evil god as though that would be utterly inconceivable and absurd and a clincher when people have believed in evil god(s) for ever. There’s utterly no reason evil god is unbelievable… unless you take that most apologists believe in good god. But if we are countering the argument “must be true if a lot of people believe it” we should counter it not that something no-one believes is equally logical, but that it’s *more* logical that beliefs are sociological by products rather than underlying realism. But that’s clearly not the argument if we are talking of good and evil gods.
Then he thinks the (admittedly preposterously weak) free will => evil argument that under evil god free will => good would be equally valid which doesn’t make any sense, as good god would have a reason for wanting to cut the strings but evil god would not. Good good cuts the string because it makes people responsible for the good they do and that’s good. Meh, if you say so. Evil god cuts the string because it makes people responsible for the evil they do … and that’s evil?
Vaalsays
@1 – quotetheunquote wrote:
“What I can never understand about the theists I meet, is how they can even entertain the idea of free will. They (in my experience, all Christians) believe that their God is omniscient, while at the same time believing in free will.
Depend on your theory of free will. On a compatibilist view, free will is compatible with determinism, hence every determined event could in principle be known before-hand by a Being with sufficient knowledge – e.g. God. And yet
it would still make sense to speak of instances in which we are free to do as we wish, and other times when we are constrained.
A majority of philosophers hold the compatibilist view of free will (and some rather bright fellas like Sean Carroll also
are compatibilists). So if we are going to claim the Christian is being illogical, we better hit the target.
@11 – Ed Seedhouse, wrote: “The concept of “good” is only knowable in contrast to the complimentary concept of “evil”. “God” could not create a world with good and without evil anymore than such a God could create inside without simultaneously creating inside.”
That’s a fallacy bandied about by Christians.
You are conflating descriptions with ontology (labels mixed up with “what exists”). It’s often accompanied by the analogy to light and darkness “light and darkness require one another to exist.” No they don’t. Light exists. Physically. If we were never in darkness, we would still always be seeing via the electromagnetic radiation that stimulates our eyes. We’d still be explaining how we “see” via light, since it existed. The fact we may not have a label or concept of “darkness” (if for some reason we never did) doesn’t entail light, and our apprehension of it, would be a fact.
Same with good and evil. There could always exist “reasons for doing the things we currently call ‘good’ ” whether reasons for doing bad exist or not. (And, in fact, if many moral theories are correct- there AREN’T reasons to do evil). Just like light would be a physical fact without darkness, our doing good actions would be a physical fact without anyone doing evil. It’s especially acute for Christians, since an All Powerful God could have made us with a more noble nature, to always choose The Good.
(And there are compatibiist reasons why that does not invalidate free will….)
Vaalsays
^^^^ typo correction:
“The fact we may not have a label or concept of “darkness” (if for some reason we never did) doesn’t entail light…..wouldn’t be a fact.”
John Moralessays
Vaal, you’re confused. Compatibilism doesn’t rescue the idea that God created everything knowing precisely every outcome before said creation (kinda pointless, no? Might as well have created the final state and not bothered with the in-between).
So if we are going to claim the Christian is being illogical, we better hit the target.
Exactly as quotetheunquote did.
—
Your second point to Ed Seedhouse is also flawed; your analogy is inapt because darkness is a privative definition in relation to light, whereas evil is not a privative (the absence of good is not itself evil).
… but hey, Ed Seedhouse did write ‘complimentary’ rather than ‘complementary’. So that was erroneous.
Trickster Goddesssays
God is a trickster: neither good nor evil — she just likes to yank your chain.
unclefrogysays
the whole idea of god seems to not answer anything really. at least I can.t make it work for me neither can I even follow the discussion after that.
like this there is a god he creates the universe stop right there forget about good and bad for the moment. were does this universe come from or what does the god make it out of and where does that stuff come from?
where is this universe in relation to this god who exists.
it sure looks to me that the middle eastern god which is the one that is the primary focus here is still to a large part a god like the Greeks or Romans had only even bigger and more powerful personality the biggest and most powerful personality of all apparently, and still a limited thing for all that. If it is some other type of god one that is not separated from anything that is the sum total of everything I fail to see the need to discus the god as if it is some kind of being only from a higher realm but still like everything else intrinsically god in the same way as everything else is.
the former god would be the determining factor in good or evil as described by the interpreters of the god of which there are many and disagree on much that is fundamental about this god of theirs.
if it is the later type of god then it is some what different since it could be said that everything is a kind of illusion with its own complications for deciding what is good and bad. namely it is all a play of gods and part of the illusion.
Both add a level of speculation and complication that I find not particularly helpful.
It also does not help that we humans have been talking about this thing for a very long time and much of the discussion is influenced by ancient languages taken out of cultural context and using concepts that are not quite accurate in describing what we find the universe to be.
I suspect that the idea of free will that is being used does not hold up to scrutiny as closely as it has been thought of in the past. We are far more constrained by conditioning, experience and learning and the inborn nature of our physical bodies, our psychological state and the influences of everything around us then we like to admit
tying believers in logical knots can be fun at times the little video is it can be a lot of work.
uncle frogy
anymsays
The gnostics had a convenient way out of this (the world was created by a god-like being, but he was deranged, incompetent and abusive and demanded worship, in contrast the true god will totes free you from this awful world if you jump through these hoops) but the mainstream christians had some fairly strong negative opinions of that sort of thing put them all to the fire and sword and destroyed all their texts. This is apparently how the catholics thought they should prove they weren’t a religion of evil, suffering and oppression. Good show, folks.
Vaalsays
@40 John Morales,
I’m not confused. Go look at what quotetheunquote wrote again. quotetheunquote made a specific statement about the logical consequence of one of God’s attributes: God’s omniscience – that it follows from the fact that God knows everything that will happen to “therefore we would have no free will.” If you understand compatibilist free will, you will know it is compatible with everything in principle being predictable by an omniscient Being. (That is, free will is compatibil with all our actions being determined by the state of the universe from one moment to the next, hence if you knew all the facts about the state of affairs you would know what will happen next – as an Omniscient Being, or “knowledgeable enough Being” would).
And I’ve seen a lot of people criticize the idea of Christians having free will on that ground: “If God KNOWS you are going to choose to go to France for your vacation, then it means you can not choose to do otherwise, therefore this is inconsistant with having free will.” But it’s not inconsistent with compatibilist free will. (And even among Christianity, where free will has been debated within the context of God’s omniscience, one of the schools of thought is that we must have some form of compatibilist free will with God’s foreknowledge).
Now, if one wants to actually make the argument by adducing other traits of God – God’s from God’s Omnipotence and role as Creator, then the argument can become more interesting (and certainly that will mean God bears additional responsibility for every action we take, but whether this still puts the lid on having compatibilist free will is an argument to be had…).
Cheers,
Vaalsays
Whoops forgot:
@40 John Morales,
Your second point to Ed Seedhouse is also flawed; your analogy is inapt because darkness is a privative definition in relation to light, whereas evil is not a privative (the absence of good is not itself evil).
A large portion of Christianity (e.g. Catholics) hold that evil is indeed privative.
That aside, I don’t see how you’ve made a point against what I wrote, which was to say in either the case of Light or Good Actions (or good reasons for actions), both describe “things that exist” and therefore do not depend on the absence of their opposite. No more than the opposite of “snakes” would have to exist, or the opposite of “playing hockey” for either of those two occur. If all we did was play hockey, then the usefulness of the *label* ‘not playing hockey’ may be dubious, but the facts of what we are doing still occur. This is why I said not to mix ontology with labels.
quotetheunquotesays
Vaal:
No, I am not a student of Christianity and its various arguments. I had never heard of “compatabilist free will” before today.
But what it sounds like to me, is a patent absurdity – and a construct that was built with the express purpose of doing an “end run” around the problem of God’s omniscience. As in, “we’re going to create this new thing, call it “compatibilist free will” and what it means is, your fate is both pre-determined and not pre-determined at the same time.”
Hmmm. No. This make about as much sense as the host being both god’s flesh and bread at the same time. (Although I have only Jaybee’s word that any Catholics believe this, I had not hear of this before.)
alkisvonidassays
@quotetheunquote
But what it sounds like to me, is a patent absurdity – and a construct that was built with the express purpose of doing an “end run” around the problem of God’s omniscience
Compatibilism is not argued exclusively by theists — far from it:
Compatibilism was championed by the ancient stoics and medieval scholastics (such as Thomas Aquinas), and by Enlightenment philosophers (like David Hume and Thomas Hobbes). […] Contemporary compatibilists range from the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, particularly in his works Elbow Room (1984) and Freedom Evolves (2003), to the existentialist philosopher Frithjof Bergmann.
(my emphasis)
Stephen Hawking has also argued in one of his lectures that determinism is often confused with the lack of free will. And, in fact, “free will” makes little to no sense if interpreted as “anything can happen”. If offered ice-cream, would you require to be equally probable for me to eat it, reject it or shove it in my eye socket in order to accept that I have free will in the matter? What does it matter if you know I’ll accept it? What does it even matter if I belong to a race of beings that you designed, and I happen to find ice-cream irresistible? I’ll still eat it because I want to, not because you forced me to. Whether or not I can choose what I want is another matter, and it’s best not to call that free will.
alkisvonidassays
#47, cont.
All in all, I find Raymond Smullyan’s line of arguing in “Is God a Taoist?” far more logical than either Stephen Law’s or any apologist’s. A sentient being without free will is as absurd as square triangles or round cubes. Wherever there’s an agent capable of pondering the possible consequences of their actions, as well as of external events, there is automatically free will, which can then be thwarted. When theists speak of “free will”, they really have in mind something entirely different — say, “God’s Prime Directive”, or “non-interference clause”. God could indeed have created automata without free will, but these would have been non-sentient, and in fact incapable of either good or evil. We have done so ourselves, and we understand the implications: we neither fine cars nor incarcerate firearms.
consciousness razorsays
quotetheunquote:
But what it sounds like to me, is a patent absurdity
So you’re an incompatibilist. Do you think determinism is true or not?
alkisvonidas:
Stephen Hawking has also argued in one of his lectures that determinism is often confused with the lack of free will.
I’m not sure what he’s said about it, but it’s not too hard to see how these ideas start to unravel.
Suppose you have an indeterministic world: some undetermined thing happens in it … an electron moves over there, a photon walks in and orders a beer, whatever you like. I do not will such things to happen. If my willing stuff is constituted by some things (lots of them, if we’re talking about the scale of the atoms in my brain) which physically happen in the world, then it does not follow that because those things are undetermined, my will is therefore any more “free” than it would be if those things were determined. I don’t get how I’d be willing things freely in any coherent sense, when an electron does stuff randomly or isn’t caused deterministically by physical laws or its environmental conditions….
Anyway you slice it up, however the physics actually works, it doesn’t look like I have control over that kind of stuff. The fact that something random caused my behavior (if that is a fact) does not entail that I got to choose my behavior. So compatibilism, of a certain type of “free will” which isn’t claiming violations of physics, seems less absurd than the idea that making my choices indeterministic is making them “free.” So maybe incompatibilism is the wackier idea that you shouldn’t be taking so seriously.
Vaalsays
quotetheunquote,
Before dismissing an entire school of philosophy off-hand, you might want to do a bit of research into the philosophical subject of free will – it’s not simply theistic – secular philosophers tend to think it’s the only coherent version of free will.
I see some initial links have been provided. Google is friend :-)
John Moralessays
Vaal:
Now, if one wants to actually make the argument by adducing other traits of God – God’s from God’s Omnipotence and role as Creator, then the argument can become more interesting (and certainly that will mean God bears additional responsibility for every action we take, but whether this still puts the lid on having compatibilist free will is an argument to be had…).
Yeah, it does. Again: under that conceit, whatever anyone ever does (and all the choices they face and all the decisions they take) is exactly as God wanted them to be before Creation. No version of free will survives that — only the illusion thereof.
A large portion of Christianity (e.g. Catholics) hold that evil is indeed privative.
I was brought up Catholic, and that’s quite contrary to the teachings.
But….do you understand the Omniscience angle and compatibilist free will? How my reply to quotetheunquote was in fact correct, given how he phrased the problem as a problem Omniscience specifically poses to free will?
As I said, I agree the argument for maintaining compatibilist free will becomes more interesting when you add in God as our creator. But your simple declaration that no free will survives it is not an argument. For that, you’d have to have a good understanding of compatibilism. Are you familiar with that philosophical position? One way of putting it is that to say I am “free to choose” between two breakfast cereals (or more important choices) is simply a standard empirical claim of my nature and powers in similar situations. Why do I think I can choose Shreddies instead of Cheerios? Because I understand from my general experience I have that capability, and so long as I’m “free to choose” – that is not constrained physically or coerced by threat – then I could choose what I wish. Whether a God designed such a state of affairs or not, they would still exist and require the same description between scenarios in which I was constrained to do as I desired, or not. And, again, since this is all compatible with everything being completely determined at the outset…the Creator God is not an obvious problem to this form of free will. You may argue that you don’t think compatibilist free will is *real* free will (as I said, the majority of Philosophers who specialize in it will disagree).
But that’s another question vs whether it’s compatible with the Creator God.
As for your Catholic education, did you never learn of the centrality of Aquinas’ influence on the Catholic church’s metaphysics? It’s quite possible I suppose, given that members who sit in the pews don’t get deeply into the philosophy
of their own faith.
“Thomas’ philosophical thought has exerted enormous influence on subsequent Christian theology, especially that of the Catholic Church,”
Read the first paragraph on the wiki page to see the influence of Aquinas on The Church. The Catechism that you quote is *not* a philosophical discussion about the ontological nature of sin and evil, but more an expression of “what sin looks like” in practice. More what the effects of sin have in practice.
But to understand the metaphysics, you have to look to the philosophical underpinnings set forth by Aquinas, especially his famous arguments for God, in which he identifies the nature of God as the only being of “pure act” and of having “no deprivation.” On Aquanis’ view, evil has no ontological existence, it is the absence, the deprivation, of an entity reaching it’s final cause or “end.” This is why Catholics famously argue the “problem of evil” doesn’t really apply to God, since evil is not a “thing” that God could cause.
Evil is defined by St. Thomas (De malo, 2:2) as a privation of form or order or due measure.
And this has been the Catholic Church’s official metaphysical understanding of evil ever since. So it should be no surprise that an examination of the teaching of the Pope, here for instance Pope John Paul II, you will see these metaphysics of evil:
“As for evil, it is a deprivation; it has no positive value in itself and therefore cannot be a positive cause or principle, for its origin is a mere privation. “
“Evil is certainly real, yet it is not itself a thing; it simply we can say affects a reality which, in all that it has of being, is positive and good[1]. Evil is then a privation of a due good which belongs to a thing according to its nature.”
“Evil is thus a lack of due being. It is a deficiency, a corruption, a privation, a lack of something that should be there.”
I certainly can’t speak to what you were taught personally. But…yes…it’s true!….the official Catholic Church’s position on evil has for a long time been that it is a privation, not an “ontological thing unto itself.”
(Not that I’m defending that view of evil: I disagree with it).
Cheerio,
Vaal
John Moralessays
Vaal:
But….do you understand the Omniscience angle and compatibilist free will? How my reply to quotetheunquote was in fact correct, given how he phrased the problem as a problem Omniscience specifically poses to free will?
Yup. And quotetheunquote was quite explicit he referred to theists’ (Christians in particular) notion of free will. For the third and last time: that conceit is embedded in teleology, so that whatever choices one makes were predetermined by God before creation, by virtue of its purported omniscience and omnipotence. Everything anyone thinks and does is precisely what God chose for that someone to do, and if you think that allows for any meaningful concept of free will, well… we will never come to an agreement.
But your simple declaration that no free will survives it is not an argument. For that, you’d have to have a good understanding of compatibilism. Are you familiar with that philosophical position?
Yes. And it’s been argued here ad nauseam over the years.
Why do I think I can choose Shreddies instead of Cheerios? Because I understand from my general experience I have that capability, and so long as I’m “free to choose” – that is not constrained physically or coerced by threat – then I could choose what I wish.
Duh.
Because God decided to make a Creation where you would think you could choose.
You’re “choosing” what God chose for you to choose.
(Calvinists at least acknowledge that entailment)
—
As for your Catholic education, did you never learn of the centrality of Aquinas’ influence on the Catholic church’s metaphysics?
Not via the Church, other than through the Catechism. But I’m pretty familiar with his writings.
Read the first paragraph on the wiki page to see the influence of Aquinas on The Church. The Catechism that you quote is *not* a philosophical discussion about the ontological nature of sin and evil, but more an expression of “what sin looks like” in practice. More what the effects of sin have in practice.
Precisely. And your initial claim was “A large portion of Christianity (e.g. Catholics) hold that evil is indeed privative.”.
The more theological the claim, the more etiolated from adherents’ actual beliefs and practices. Now, if you’re using Catholics as a metonym for the Church’s professed theology, you have a point — but do note that its usage of “privation” is jargon; it refers to the deliberate withholding or rejection of due goodness, not merely to its absence*. In short, evil is disobedience to God.
If not, I can assure you that in practice, almost all of the Catholic adherents I know believe evil to be an external something (whether a agency, a force, an influence, an idea or whatever) that can affect people.
(And the Devil is evil incarnate)
—
* In that theology, only humans are capable of good and evil — the result of the Original Sin.
alkisvonidassays
@ John Morales
Because God decided to make a Creation where you would think you could choose.
You’re “choosing” what God chose for you to choose.
That… doesn’t even make sense. I honestly can’t imagine anyone seriously believing that notion.
Are you saying that God intended, in every minute detail, every tiny decision and turn of my life? That it was part of a divine plan that I put 2 spoonfuls of sugar in my coffee this morning, instead of 1?
Even if I DID believe in an all-powerful God that originated everything, I’d still acknowledge that huge arrays of events that He knows would inevitably happen would be just irrelevant to His plan. Things just had to be one way or another, but there’s no reason to think that everything has a purpose. And if God is indeed all-powerful and not a sham, then events would unfold as natural consequences of previous conditions. My actions and everybody else’s would be the natural result of my character, my upbringing, the surrounding conditions and current whims. Why, then, say that I think I choose, instead of actually choosing? What on Earth is the difference between these two? I remain baffled.
John Moralessays
alkisvonidas:
Are you saying that God intended, in every minute detail, every tiny decision and turn of my life? That it was part of a divine plan that I put 2 spoonfuls of sugar in my coffee this morning, instead of 1?
Yes, that’s precisely to what omniscience and omnipotence refer. And let’s not forget omnipresence and omnibenevolence and so forth.
My actions and everybody else’s would be the natural result of my character, my upbringing, the surrounding conditions and current whims. Why, then, say that I think I choose, instead of actually choosing? What on Earth is the difference between these two? I remain baffled.
Heh. That’s because it’s not natural, it’s Divine. Your character was known to the nth degree before Creation (if not, whence this purported omniscience?) and God had the power to make it so (else, whence this purported omnipotence?)
—
Of course it is nonsensical, but there you have it. You need faith to fathom the omnigrandeur and omni-ineffability of God.
John Moralessays
PS another corollary is that everything everywhere everywhen is precisely as God wants it to be (were God to want it otherwise, it would be otherwise — unless God is perverse and chooses to have things be other than what it wants, despite its omni-attributes).
consciousness razorsays
John Morales:
Everything anyone thinks and does is precisely what God chose for that someone to do, and if you think that allows for any meaningful concept of free will, well… we will never come to an agreement.
It’s not clear if you’re claiming that compatibilist, non-libertarian free will is not meaningful. Would you say that? Or is this meant to be more specific to theological arguments which presuppose a god with omni- features? There does at least seem to be a few ways out of the inconsistency for theists, who may not believe god is omnipotent and/or omniscient. They could also try to have a timeless version of an infallible agent, but that looks incoherent to me since agency seems to rule out things like that.
One issue that hasn’t come up very explicitly is the notion that the past (times when, inter alia, you describe conditions like “God chose X”) is supposed to be necessary in some sense, while that’s not supposed to be true of the present or future (not if “free” or contingent choices can happen now/later). It does seem like that kind of view is at least highly problematic. What exactly makes the past different?
It seems wrong to assume that a determinist is committed to a claim like that. You don’t need a proposition like “past states cause present/future ones.” That might be a simple, casual, shorthand way to talk, but it’s very misleading. Physical dynamical laws are understood to describe things symmetrically in time, so it’s just as meaningful (that is, not very) to say “present/future states cause past ones.” Why pick one in favor of the other?
But even “cause” is the wrong term. For one thing, first of all, causation (whenever you are going to use the term) simply doesn’t mean “makes necessary” or anything of the sort. Secondly, it’s a bit of a mouthful to say this: things time-evolve such that a unique state at one time determines a unique state at any other time. But that’s apparently the sort of thing you should be saying. None of the states may be “necessary,” you’re not picking out ones in the past as special or privileged in any way, and they’re not “causing” each other. All sorts of ideas like that confuse people about these issues, and those are only compounded by confusions about freedom, will, choosing, agency, and so forth.
Rob Grigjanissays
cr @57:
Physical dynamical laws are understood to describe things symmetrically in time
Rob Grigjanis:
Fair enough, but that’s presumably not one of the asymmetric distinctions between the past and future that anyone is talking about. So if my statement is amended to account for that, I’m pretty sure all of the same points still hold.
Vaalsays
“Yup. And quotetheunquote was quite explicit he referred to theists’ (Christians in particular) notion of free will.”
And he was explicit in focusing on the single attribute that he found to be incompatible with free will: God’s Omniscience.
Many people have an intuition that if someone knows in advance exactly what you are going to do, that this is incompatible with “real” free will. No other attribute needs to be invoked because the possibility Omniscient Foreknowledge in of itself seems to violate free will. This is a very common , specific argument often presented by
atheists – and usually by atheists with an incompatibilist intuition of free will.
That is exactly the form of the argument quotetheunquote presented. He spoke strictly of God’s foreknowledge of our actions, drawing the common direct line between God’s Omniscience and free will. His second reply re-enforced this by saying compatibilism s an “end run” around the problem of God’s Omniscience. (And the specific consequences of foreknowledge to free will is why so many theists tackle the problem by proscribing what God knows, or could or not know, about human free willed choices).
So, he was clear and I was clear in addressing exactly what he wrote. If you wish to make an argument quotetheunquote did not in fact make, and invoke God’s other attributes and predestination for your own specific argument….more power to you.
Sor far you just keep asserting the incompatibiism of any free will with a Creator God, but have provided no argument demonstrating how compatibilism is, in fact, incompatible. But your replies suggest you are weary of the subject, that your mind is made up on the matter and as you say agreement is unlikely. Ok, I’ve been forewarned. No problem.
“Now, if you’re using Catholics as a metonym for the Church’s professed theology, you have a point “
Yes, that was my point. In a massive sect with over a billion adherents, I can’t be responsible for accounting for every
variation among the adherents, so it was a short form for referencing Official Church understanding. That’s why I also disagreed with your follow up claim that evil as privation is not the teaching of The Church. I don’t think one can reasonably claim “the church doesn’t teach X” by pointing to one set of teaching and ignoring the well known tradition where the church does appeal to the metaphysics I referenced. Also, I’ve interacted with many Catholics who have promulgated the Church’s view of evil as privation. And as the links suggest, those who bother to learn the Churches official view promulgate that understanding.
“but do note that its usage of “privation” is jargon;”
I disagree. The concept of evil as privation comes from Aquinas’ arguments, which sets out to understand the very ontology of God and the nature of sin/evil. He arrives at the ontological understanding of “good” where “good” is synonymous with “being” and evil, not “being anything/existing” can not cause anything. This is an important foundation for the whole metaphysics, upon which official Church understanding of sin is derived. Yes it looks *on the surfacet to us* like evil is a thing because it seems like evil causes things to happen. But Aquinas untangles exactly those types of misunderstandings (or seeks to) in his Summa Theologiae.
If it amounts to just jargon to you, ok, but I’ll leave you to take it up with Aquinas..
consciousness razorsays
Vaal:
If it amounts to just jargon to you, ok, but I’ll leave you to take it up with Aquinas..
Now come on. You said you disagreed that it’s jargon. I guess we’d have to take it up with the dead guy if this were going anywhere, since you didn’t offer a satisfactory reason to disagree with Morales’ assessment. But what good would that do?
Aquinas may claim that “good is synonymous with “being,” but that’s a claim which need not be accepted. (All of what follows also applies to evil and its supposed counterpart nonexistence.) Accepted or not, that is not the understanding the vast majority of people have of either of those terms, which is how I’ll characterize common usage as opposed to jargon. They’re not synonyms. By “the vast majority of people,” I mean something like non-Thomists, and probably even all Thomists when they aren’t specifically making arguments directly related to these concepts. Taking it up with Aquinas would not settle that, since his authority on his own doctrines, whatever that may be worth, isn’t worth shit when we’re talking about what a term does or doesn’t mean to anybody else.
John Moralessays
Vaal, not so much weary as bored. And yes, my mind is made up until something new comes up.
Many people have an intuition that if someone knows in advance exactly what you are going to do, that this is incompatible with “real” free will.
Obviously, it depends what one calls free will (aka volition).
If it’s the possibility for one to do other than what one will actually do, then foreknowledge of one’s actions indeed precludes that version. As does determinism.
If it’s the ability to make choices according to one’s nature (as alkisvonidas holds), then such foreknowledge doesn’t, but it’s a triviality at best (and begs the question).
Issues relating to coercion are a distraction; obviously, one can only choose from the choices which are available to them, and nobody has unlimited choices*.
—
* Well, except God. It’s a special being.
consciousness razorsays
John Morales:
If it’s the possibility for one to do other than what one will actually do, then foreknowledge of one’s actions indeed precludes that version. As does determinism.
I’m not sure if that’s how you want to put it — the word “possibility” seems a little misplaced. It isn’t that you must necessarily do whatever you actually do, because all other options are impossible, or in other words that this is the only way the world could be. Alternative actions may be “possible” in a lot of senses (logically possible, etc.), but the claim is that you are unable to affect certain things that would result in you making a different choice. Does that seem like an improvement to you?
Like I said above, this looks like it hinges on certain specific assumptions (at least partly) about what you’re able to do. A simple reason (maybe not the only one) that you can’t affect those things that would result in a different choice is that those things are all in your past. You apparently aren’t the sort of thing which can affect (in the present) what the past was like, or you may say even more generally that “causation” doesn’t work that way. But it’s not very clear how determinism is supposed to enter the picture. What does that have to do with it?
I already talked about how indeterminism doesn’t offer any obvious support for free will (libertarian or otherwise). If both determinism and its negation seem to create the same difficulties, it’s pretty silly to point at determinism as if it were obviously the source of the conflict. Certain formulations of free will may just be incoherent, since they don’t seem to play well with anything.
If it’s the ability to make choices according to one’s nature (as alkisvonidas holds), then such foreknowledge doesn’t, but it’s a triviality at best (and begs the question).
What question is that supposed to be begging?
John Moralessays
CR:
What question is that supposed to be begging?
The question of whether one can act other than according to one’s nature. :)
John Moralessays
Vaal, I can’t resist this aside:
The concept of evil as privation comes from Aquinas’ arguments, which sets out to understand the very ontology of God and the nature of sin/evil.
Amusingly, the Church proudly proclaims its direct continuity from Christ’s original apostles* — and your claim is that, before Aquinas, the church had no such concept of evil as privation.
(A millennium of ignorance about the nature of evil!)
—
* Apostolic succesion.
consciousness razorsays
The question of whether one can act other than according to one’s nature. :)
Heh. I’m not sure if you think that’s a serious question.
If there’s a taco too spicy for even God to eat, it wouldn’t be question-begging to note that there may be milder tacos that are more palatable to him. That just tells you something (maybe something trivial, maybe not) about that god and that taco. It does seem fairly relevant to explaining why he’d choose to eat one instead of the other… isn’t that what we need to be able to do?
Are you saying choosing to eat a mild taco, according to his nature, expresses it in a way that assumes he could have chosen to do other than as he actually did? If it just collapses to the first interpretation in #62, then I don’t get why you had considered them separately.
John Moralessays
CR, it’s not a serious question, it’s merely “begged” (presumed in one of its predicates). But it is the implicit question which the proposition addresses.
If one could act contrary to one’s nature, then one’s nature would be to be able to act contrary to one’s nature — which is paradoxical.
(Given that, it’s a badly-formed proposition)
Are you saying choosing to eat a mild taco, according to his nature, expresses it in a way that assumes he could have chosen to do other than as he actually did?
Yes. If one could not actually choose to do otherwise, in what sense is there a choice?
consciousness razorsays
Yes. If one could not actually choose to do otherwise, in what sense is there a choice?
There is a choice in the sense that there is a selection of tacos. The choice you make, based on your nature or based on whatever, is to pick one instead of another. There’s more than one choice, and one of them is chosen. Sounds like a normal sense of choice to me.
I mean, if you want to press the issue hard enough, you might be able to convince yourself that any motivation or reason or cause for making a certain choice somehow implies that there is no such choice. It doesn’t sound right to claim you “could not” do otherwise, if that’s supposed to be understood as logical impossibility. Physics causes you to act a certain way (i.e., your motivations are constituted by some features of physical states), so maybe it’s supposed to be about physical impossibility — but exactly what sense would that be?
Of course you don’t get to “choose” the whole state of the universe or all of the things that motivate your behavior. Why would you need to be able to choose not just what you want but also all of the things that make you want it? Isn’t it enough to make the choice? I don’t get what the benefit would be, if your motivations were something you could arbitrarily will or choose, contra-causally. If they’re not aspects of the events that led up to the situation you’re in, not past experiences that inform a decision, not something that bears on how you would evaluate the consequences of potential choices, not even evolved instincts that you have which might be adaptive somehow… Then what are they and what good would they be? Why would you need control over things like that, or need to be able to will them yourself somehow (without any “outside” influences), if it works just fine to motivate you properly when it isn’t something you will?
John Moralessays
CR:
[CR] Are you saying choosing to eat a mild taco, according to his nature, expresses it in a way that assumes he could have chosen to do other than as he actually did?
[me] Yes. If one could not actually choose to do otherwise, in what sense is there a choice?
[CR] There is a choice in the sense that there is a selection of tacos. The choice you make, based on your nature or based on whatever, is to pick one instead of another. There’s more than one choice, and one of them is chosen. Sounds like a normal sense of choice to me.
<snicker>
Semantic shift is for losers. It befits you.
Bah. That there might exist some set of alternatives is not to what a choice (in context) refers; a choice is the selection of one of those alternatives.
That there might alternatives from which someone could choose one is not the issue at hand; the issue at hand is that whether one could actually choose other than the particular choice one ultimately takes.
(Should not have bothered to take you seriously)
consciousness razorsays
Semantic shift is for losers. It befits you.
I haven’t shifted here. I was trying to get you to think about the meaning of the word differently, since you evidently weren’t entertaining the one I had in mind. If that makes me a loser, so be it. But it’s a little odd that winning would look like accepting whatever claims you make. You might have wanted it to be a rhetorical question, but I don’t particularly care.
the issue at hand is that whether one could actually choose other than the particular choice one ultimately takes.
I get that you believe you should hold onto a claim like this: I don’t make a choice, unless I could have made a different choice. (Is that usually how it goes? I don’t make a comment, unless I could have made a different comment?)
I asked in what sense a different choice could not have been made — no response. Do you mean I could not go back in time to change what caused me to make the choice that I did? Do you mean there’s only one possible way for the whole world to be, and I couldn’t affect that? Do you mean I couldn’t have chosen something, by definition (or more like by fiat), since I couldn’t have chosen what I wanted to choose? Or what exactly is it supposed to mean? Which of those do you think are true, which aren’t, and which are relevant? I’ll try to take you seriously, since it seems like you understand most of the issues well enough, but it would help me if you make it clear what you’re talking about.
Owlmirrorsays
@John Morales:
If it’s the possibility for one to do other than what one will actually do, then foreknowledge of one’s actions indeed precludes that version. As does determinism.
If it’s the ability to make choices according to one’s nature (as alkisvonidas holds), then such foreknowledge doesn’t, but it’s a triviality at best (and begs the question).
Issues relating to coercion are a distraction; obviously, one can only choose from the choices which are available to them, and nobody has unlimited choices*.
Again: freedom of will either means one’s choices are free from coercion, or means nothing.
(Yes, there are other senses of it, but they’re stupid)
consciousness razorsays
Maybe it’ll help to use a concrete example.
I’m going to vote for Clinton and not Trump. (Let’s assume that’s true, that I’m predicting my future behavior correctly.) I’m too informed about how thoroughly awful Trump is to vote for him, and probably there are aspects of my personality, how I’ve been socialized my whole life or other sorts of things which also play a role. It’s very hard to imagine any series of events that would lead me to vote for Trump instead of Clinton — but I would not call that impossible, so it could be that it happens or would happen if certain things were (very) different. So there’s no sense in saying I “could not” have acted otherwise. I could have, so long as different things would have caused me to act otherwise. But that stuff (hopefully) won’t happen, in which case I’ll vote for Clinton.
Does it sound to you like I won’t be choosing to vote for Clinton because I “can’t” vote for Trump? I mean, what is supposed to be lost when you substitute “I’ll choose to vote for Clinton” with “I’ll vote for Clinton”? Note that I haven’t been talking about libertarian freedom here, just that it sounds coherent to me to say that we can make choices.
Is this not a good example? Are there other cases which are supposed to seem like choices but which are not actual ones, since I “could not” have done otherwise in some important sense? What would an example of that be?
chigau (違う)says
shark
John Moralessays
Owlmirror @71, nice. Shame I can’t argue the point with myself of 4 years ago.
(Seems longer)
—
CR, the distinction is between having choices (“There is a choice in the sense that there is a selection of tacos.”) and making a choice (“The choice you make, based on your nature or based on whatever, is to pick one instead of another.”) — they’re both “a choice”, but different senses. Thus my #69.
I’m going to vote for Clinton and not Trump. (Let’s assume that’s true, that I’m predicting my future behavior correctly.) [for reasons] So there’s no sense in saying I “could not” have acted otherwise. I could have, so long as different things would have caused me to act otherwise. But that stuff (hopefully) won’t happen, in which case I’ll vote for Clinton.
Does it sound to you like I won’t be choosing to vote for Clinton because I “can’t” vote for Trump?
What it sounds like to me is that you [will] be choosing to vote for Clinton because you won’t vote for Trump. What it sounds like to me is that you won’t be choosing on voting day, because you’ve already chosen. And what it also sounds like to me is that you could not (given the circumstances) have chosen otherwise and still be you*.
Is this not a good example? Are there other cases which are supposed to seem like choices but which are not actual ones, since I “could not” have done otherwise in some important sense? What would an example of that be?
I don’t think it’s a good example; a good example would be where there is no particular reason to choose one alternative over another. Would you always make the same choice?
—
* To circle back, if God is omni-whatnot, it chose to create this particular reality where you would choose that, therefore it chose what you would choose, so you really had no choice ;)
Owlmirrorsays
Vaal, I can’t resist this aside:
The concept of evil as privation comes from Aquinas’ arguments, which sets out to understand the very ontology of God and the nature of sin/evil.
Amusingly, the Church proudly proclaims its direct continuity from Christ’s original apostles* — and your claim is that, before Aquinas, the church had no such concept of evil as privation.
(A millennium of ignorance about the nature of evil!)
I seem to recall that while Aquinas definitely based his theology on the privative concept of evil, Augustine was a much earlier proponent of the concept.
As darkness is nothing but the absence of light, and is not produced by creation, so evil is merely the defect of goodness. (St. Aug., In Gen. ad lit.)
And per the Catholic Encyclopedia on “Evil” (where I got the above quote), other church fathers and early philosophers offered similar ideas.
consciousness razorsays
John Morales:
And what it also sounds like to me is that you could not (given the circumstances) have chosen otherwise and still be you*.
If circumstances were different, I would have chosen otherwise (and I’d still “be me,” whatever I am). It doesn’t matter that, under precisely the same circumstances as the actual ones, I would not have made a different choice than I actually did. It doesn’t matter, because I’m not claiming (as many others wouldn’t) criteria like that are necessary for making choices.
a good example would be where there is no particular reason to choose one alternative over another.
What’s supposed to make that good? The choices (or apparent choices) people are most concerned about in this context or basically any context — the ones which prompt some to make such extravagant and implausible claims, to try to rescue what they think is important, such as “freedom” — are not ones where there is no particular reason to choose one alternative over another. They typically think the question of whether we have moral responsibility depends on it, for instance, and of course there’s no need to assume moral decision-making must be irrational or arational. So how is your type of example going to be more helpful?
Would you always make the same choice?
Do you mean would I always do it, if the same circumstances were repeated multiple times, or would I always do it no matter how they vary? Yes if the former, and no if the latter. That’s one way to distinguish this compatibilist idea from a libertarian or contra-causal one.
In case you’re worried, I’m never in precisely the same circumstances at different times. So there’s no danger of actually repeating the same choices, over and over. And it doesn’t really bother me that I can’t control everything about the circumstances I’m actually in. I’m not interested in being omnipotent … sounds like it would be too much work. For me it’s sufficient that, far short of being omnipotent, I am capable of influencing what happens, in ways that are beneficial to me and other people/causes/etc. that I care about.
* To circle back, if God is omni-whatnot, it chose to create this particular reality where you would choose that, therefore it chose what you would choose, so you really had no choice ;)
Well, this omni-whatnot God may have had no choice in the matter…. If we’re still discussing whether or not it’s coherent for anybody to have any choices at all, then until we’ve established that it is (unless you’re seriously arguing that it isn’t), you can’t maintain that one special being does make choices. So you have to concede the argument to me that there can be choices, and only then should you proceed with your argument that God chose everything instead of us.
Owlmirrorsays
[Do I have the free will to not comment about free will? I guess not.]
It has been four years, but I think my stance has not really changed. I hope I can word it more clearly than I did then, though.
So, here’s my current attempt: “Free will”, in the sense of “the ability to choose otherwise” cannot actually exist, because regardless of whether the universe is deterministic or nondeterministic, what we call “choices” actually arise from parts of our minds that we don’t have complete control over (and cannot have complete control over), and choosing implies control. We feel like we make choices, but those choices arise from feelings, memories, sensory inputs, and so on. We cannot choose every aspect of those feelings, memories, and sensory inputs (and so on), and we cannot choose to have chosen to have different feelings, memories, and sensory inputs.
Now, given that strong free will is impossible, some people might think that this means that no-one has any control/will at all, which isn’t quite what I intend. “Control/will” is an emergent concept, and to the extent that we can self-modify to some extent, we can learn, change, and make different choices based on what we learn and how we change, and we have some awareness of this, and can direct our lives accordingly. I suggested calling being aware of this ability to learn to make different choices “anti-fatalism”. It might well be a sort of compatibilist free will.
(I may be leaving things out, so I may ponder this more and revise/revisit.)
consciousness razorsays
Hard to believe TZT was four years ago. I miss SGBM.
what we call “choices” actually arise from parts of our minds that we don’t have complete control over (and cannot have complete control over), and choosing implies control.
I think it’s fair to say choosing implies you’re able to do what you’ve chosen: you can “control the outcome,” in some sense. But I don’t think it must mean that you can control all* of the things from which your “choices” arise. If it does, then I guess we may need another word for it (“free will” is already tainted too, so this doesn’t look like a great track record), since like both of us have said you can’t do that. Yet there is something we can do, which distinguishes us from rocks and electrons and such.
*I figure it would need be all causative factors, not merely some. Leaving out any would render this type of “control” you require irrelevant, since the ones you don’t control may affect the outcome you’ve chosen just as well as the ones you do. It’s not clear where this could ever end…. It seems like you’d need to be able to control existing in a whole other world, not just a few things in it that would be inconsistent with the rest of the world you happen to be in. Do you only need control over direct/immediate causes? How do you characterize those, and how are they substantially and relevantly different from other causes? If you need to be omnipotent or nearly so, in order to “choose” something, I think we’ve gone a long way from ordinary meaning of the word.
John Moralessays
CR:
So how is your type of example going to be more helpful?
Because arbitrary choices have the least confounding factors.
If we’re still discussing whether or not it’s coherent for anybody to have any choices at all, then until we’ve established that it is (unless you’re seriously arguing that it isn’t), you can’t maintain that one special being does make choices. So you have to concede the argument to me that there can be choices, and only then should you proceed with your argument that God chose everything instead of us. So you have to concede the argument to me that there can be choices, and only then should you proceed with your argument that God chose everything instead of us.
No; that’s why I wrote “To circle back”. It refers to my earlier claim about one having no meaningful free will if every choice one makes is deliberately predetermined by some external agent. I don’t have to concede, since all along I’ve held that the logic is fine but the premises are rubbish — i.e. the argument itself is valid.
consciousness razorsays
John Morales:
Because arbitrary choices have the least confounding factors.
Alright. I’m not sure what the concern is there. But I suppose it works the same way as when there are more of those factors. Assuming there’s no particular reason to choose one alternative over another, then I’ll make identical choices when the circumstances are identical and different ones when they’re different. (That’s if determinism is true, to keep it simple, but nothing relevant changes if indeterminism is true.)
I take it that there would still be “causes” for my actions, even if they aren’t “reasons” in the sense you’re talking about. Those causes could be different, so I could act differently. So it’s false to say that I could not have done otherwise — that’s assuming determinism and without any of your confounding factors. Maybe something else is meant by the expression, but I still don’t get what that is or why it matters.
It refers to my earlier claim about one having no meaningful free will if every choice one makes is deliberately predetermined by some external agent.
Sure. However, it doesn’t only depend on the premise that the god is omni-whatnot, but also that it can (and did) choose to create a reality, as you put it. Without the latter, it doesn’t follow that it chose to do so. I mean, you might be able to claim some combination of omni-whatnots entail that it chooses, so it was implicit all along, but I don’t know how convincing that will be.
Anyway, it’s not clear why you’re ready to accept (or at least let it pass without argument) that a god had a choice, but not so ready for the case of people like us (given that there isn’t a god predetermining anything, as I know you agree). Doesn’t it seem reasonable to wait until we can straighten out the situation for the existing beings (us) that we know and care about, so we can apply what we learn to this hypothetical case you’re constructing for something that neither of us believes is even real?
John Moralessays
CR:
Assuming there’s no particular reason to choose one alternative over another, then I’ll make identical choices when the circumstances are identical and different ones when they’re different.
There you go; you’re free to choose, but you will always make the same choice under the same circumstances, even when you have no reason to choose one alternative over another.
If you’re happy to believe that means you have free will, fine, but it does mean you could (would) have chosen otherwise.
Anyway, it’s not clear why you’re ready to accept (or at least let it pass without argument) that a god had a choice, but not so ready for the case of people like us (given that there isn’t a god predetermining anything, as I know you agree).
It’s not a god, it’s God. The god. Proper noun, the monotheists’ god.
I thought I was pretty clear: I am pointing out the logical entailment with respect to free will of an omni creator God without accepting the truth of the premises about its attributes and actions (never mind its existence as other than an incoherent idea).
(Just as in #65 I’m pointing out the entailment of Vaal’s claim, not accepting it other than arguendo)
John Moralessays
[erratum]
… you could (would) not have …
consciousness razorsays
If you’re happy to believe that means you have free will, fine, but it does mean you could (would) [not] have chosen otherwise.
I wouldn’t say anyone has free will, because I think that term has only gotten more stupid and useless over the centuries. I’m a compatibilist in the sense that I agree (more or less) with that way of characterizing our behavior, but I’m not really on board with an attempt to sell that to people as “free will.” At least at the point where we are now, it’s too confusing to even try.
On the other hand, as Dennett and others have argued, the thing most people care about, when they actually sort through the issues thoughtfully, isn’t libertarian free will but the kinds of abilities (and inabilities) we evidently do have that compatibilists have tried to describe/explain. So if it meant pointless arguments about libertarian free will would cease, if enough people understood that it’s stupid and there’s nothing serious to be concerned about given that there is no such thing, then I wouldn’t have much reason to complain if the term were appropriated for something that actually makes sense. It would make historical discussions about the term harder to follow, but that’s no big loss.
You haven’t explained why choosing otherwise is impossible. I gave you a sense in which another choice could be made, and you’re just asserting that it can’t be — why? What is in contradiction with what, or which types of events could not happen?
It’s not a god, it’s God. The god. Proper noun, the monotheists’ god.
I thought I was pretty clear: I am pointing out the logical entailment with respect to free will of an omni creator God without accepting the truth of the premises about its attributes and actions (never mind its existence as other than an incoherent idea).
Heh, I still have no clue which one you’re talking about, as monotheistic gods come in many varieties, but no matter. What if that God, the God which exists for the purposes of this argument, doesn’t have a choice about creating the world? I mean, you did say “it chose to create” and “therefore it chose what you would choose.” But if that premise is not really supposed to be on the table yet, because you simply didn’t mean to phrase it that way, then I’ll just drop it.
consciousness razorsays
but I’m not really on board with an attempt to sell that to people as “free will.”
I guess “crypto-compatibilist” would be a good label for that. And it sounds ridiculous, so it’s certain to make everyone happy.
John Moralessays
CR, we’re now well and truly into the purity of Wittgensteinian language-games.
You haven’t explained why choosing otherwise is impossible.
No; what I did is accept your claim: “Assuming there’s no particular reason to choose one alternative over another, then I’ll make identical choices when the circumstances are identical and different ones when they’re different.”
(It was not I who claimed that, it was you; I merely acknowledged it and proceeded therefrom)
Heh, I still have no clue which one you’re talking about, as monotheistic gods come in many varieties, but no matter.
I’m not the one making the proposition, monotheists are. Try telling one of them that there is more than one of them, see what response you get.
What if that God, the God which exists for the purposes of this argument, doesn’t have a choice about creating the world?
Leaving aside that it’s redundant to use the definite article for a proper noun, it changes nothing so long as it did create the world and was (at least) omniscient and omnipotent.
I mean, you did say “it chose to create” and “therefore it chose what you would choose.”
Yes, and I was having a little dig at the conceit thereby; it makes no sense to say so in the context of a supposedly timeless God (who is both trascendent and immanent!). There was no spacetime before Creation, there was only the Void (and God!).
But if that premise is not really supposed to be on the table yet, because you simply didn’t mean to phrase it that way, then I’ll just drop it.
Since it’s utterly irrelevant whether a choice was possible or not given that it was the act of an omni creator God, feel free to carry it. Changes nothing other than how much baggage you carry.
John Moralessays
BTW, as a serious aside on the free will topic — I think it akin to the reality-as-a-simulation topic in its non-significance to us.
I think that from our perspective, it’s irrelevant either way; for example, it’s pointless to claim that if free will doesn’t exist, one can’t hold people responsible for their actions (cf. law) since then it’s also the case that one can’t hold people responsible for holding people responsible for their actions.
(What changes? ;) )
consciousness razorsays
I think that from our perspective, it’s irrelevant either way; for example, it’s pointless to claim that if free will doesn’t exist, one can’t hold people responsible for their actions (cf. law) since then it’s also the case that one can’t hold people responsible for holding people responsible for their actions.
I’d say the conversation about it can be helpful, to the extent it makes people think more clearly about things like responsibility, causation, and so forth. But it won’t make much difference that you don’t hold a legal/political system responsible for holding people responsible. It’s most likely going to do that anyway, whatever your thoughts about the subject may be — such systems are a little more powerful than you and harder to budge, no?
Anyway, it seems like a reasonable assumption that it would be better to have systems that aren’t built on a mountain of nonsense. Judges, juries, legislatures, cops, etc., may be more sympathetic to certain people in a lot of ways (particularly ones they’re biased against), if they don’t believe such people can/should be blamed for exercising a type of freedom that doesn’t exist. If we can change the way they’re thinking/acting and get a slightly better system out of it, then we don’t need to be “holding them responsible” for it, whatever that would involve.
Owlmirrorsays
SGBM ॐ, as I recall, was more adamant that not even God could choose other than it had chosen, but I don’t recall that he made a convincing argument.
Let me try something: “Choice” implies a timeline. Even if the timeline splits with each choice, the ones in each branch can’t choose to be in the other timeline. Now, let’s say that God chooses one timeline preferentially. Can God choose what preferences it has? I suspect that most theists making that argument would say that God chooses “the best”, according to criteria that God has. Can God choose to choose which preferences it has; which criteria it uses to judge what is the best? It seems to me that there cannot be a meaningful infinite regression of preferences; if God actually always chooses the preferences that inform its choices, then those preferences are inherent and not chosen. But if God can and does choose different preferences at different times, then God is fundamentally arbitrary, and being arbitrary implies that randomness is fundamental, not free will.
On the other hand, let’s start off with saying that God chooses arbitrarily (something I suspect that most theists would reject). Given that he’s being arbitrary, it is again randomness that is fundamental. (Is it even meaningful to say that God could choose to be arbitrary in a different way? (“I will decide based on a coin flip, unless I don’t like what comes up” ⇐ “don’t like” implies preference, not randomness — but see above about having preferences).)
Finally, let’s posit that a transcendent God experiences all timelines simultaneously, and has no preference for any particular one. Where is there any choice involved there? We in one timeline perceive that timeline as being different from other possible timelines (that is, we can imagine historical counterfactuals where different events occurred at some point in our timeline, leading to different contingent events in the imagined timeline). But God doesn’t choose any of the timelines; God is simply aware of them.
So to sum up: in all non-timeless scenarios, God either has actual preferences (which implies that God cannot choose to have other preferences), or is arbitrary (which implies that randomness is fundamental to God’s nature).
In a timeless scenario, no timeline is preferred, so no choice is even being made.
So not even God can have chosen differently.
John Moralessays
CR:
Judges, juries, legislatures, cops, etc., may be more sympathetic to certain people in a lot of ways (particularly ones they’re biased against), if they don’t believe such people can/should be blamed for exercising a type of freedom that doesn’t exist.
But that’s precisely the case now (cf, extenuating circumstances, compos mentis).
—
Owlmirror:
In a timeless scenario, no timeline is preferred, so no choice is even being made.
It’s worse than that, Jim. In a timeless scenario, no events are possible, never mind choice.
(Change is a concept dependent on time existing; in a timeless scenario, there is no before and after)
Vaalsays
@ 61, consciousness razor,
re “jargon.”
The point of the discussion I was having with John Morales isn’t “whether Aquinas’ metaphysical arguments were any good or not.” (I believe they all fail, and I reject Aquinas’ association of “good” with “existence” and “evil” with “privation.”)
Rather, the point was whether the Thomistic metaphysics (which the Catholic theologians hold to) really does entail that evil is “privation.” In other words…do they really mean it? Answer: Yes. Yes they really do.
If you follow the conversation I had with John Morales…you see how it began: John claimed my religious analogy was inapt by claiming evil is not privative. I replied with an aside that it was the view of Catholics that evil is privative, and John challenged THAT claim as well. I supplied information showing that, whether the majority of pew-goers follow it or not, the official metaphysics of the Catholic church DOES hold that evil is privation – per Aquinas (and yes Augustine is in the mix). Then John said I have a point about evil-as-privation as it pertains to Catholic theology…but then seemed to take it back somewhat by saying that word is used merely as a form of “jargon”….as if to suggest that the Church doesn’t “really mean” privation per se.
But…it does mean exactly that, in the Church’s metaphysics: a true lack, privation; Metaphysically, evil doesn’t have “existence.” That was Aquinas’ point in his metaphysics. And Aquinas, as I said, untangles exactly the issues John seems to be conflating – that is, John apparently thinks the word “privation” is mere jargon, because he can point to the apparently positive “real thing” that the Church means and identifies evil (e.g. Disobedience of God). But Aquinas sought to explain why that would be a confusion: Aquinas admits it seems at first glance that evil is a “thing” not merely a privation, because otherwise you’d only have “the good” existing, but then it makes no sense that “good” would cause evil, unless there were some defect in “good.” So it seems you need some evil to “exist” to cause evil. But since Aquinas is committed to the metaphysics of “good” being synonymous with “existence,” he can’t allow evil to have existence.
Therefore, Aquinas goes to lengths to explain why evil really is only privation, and that it’s good that actually results in evil – that is some good can (“accidentally”) result in some privation or another.
See here the lengths Aquinas goes to, in order to explain how evil happens and *seems* causative, where it can not possibly be causative because it does not possess the necessary aspects of existence to do so:
So, again, I’m not arguing that Aquinas’ arguments are sound: I am arguing for what Aquinas acutally means to conclude, which is that evil really is “privative” and catholic scholars/theologians have generally been on board with those metaphysics. Which is why you will be able to find plenty of Catholic writers explaining those metaphysics (see some of the links I provided).
Anyway, hope that clears up the point. I think that conversation is played out.
Cheers.
Vaalsays
I think we all know evil is a real “thing.” It’s having to click away the damned side-bar pop up adds on this site to read it!
John Moralessays
Vaal:
Which is why you will be able to find plenty of Catholic writers explaining those metaphysics (see some of the links I provided).
What proportion of self-identified Catholics are Catholic writers explaining those metaphysics?
(There are well over 1 billion Catholics extant)
Pointing to the selected minority and claiming they speak for the majority is not very convincing; in fact, Catholicism has been in practice a syncretic religion for a loooooong time; witness the not-coincidental Catholic holidays (Holy Days) congruence with pre-Catholic celebrations.
My wife remains a devout Catholic, but we nonetheless successfully employed contraception until her menopause; my own pubescent) drift from Catholicism was engendered no less from its silliness than from the evident hypocrisy of its adherents. My father-in-law paid lip-service to turning the other cheek — but wrong him somehow, and count the cost. The very current Pope made mention that he would punch anyone who insulted his mom!
Or: what they practice (telling of what they believe) is, in the most part, not what they preach and not congruent to the Credo, nevermind the metaphysics. Citing their theology as their actual belief is so very, very naive.
consciousness razorsays
Owlmirror:
On the other hand, let’s start off with saying that God chooses arbitrarily (something I suspect that most theists would reject). Given that he’s being arbitrary, it is again randomness that is fundamental.
I’m not sure how interchangeably we can treat “random” and “arbitrary” here. To put it really simply, the way I think of it (YMMV), random stuff has no pattern, while arbitrary stuff has no reason. Some subtle differences there to be careful about.
(Is it even meaningful to say that God could choose to be arbitrary in a different way? (“I will decide based on a coin flip, unless I don’t like what comes up” ⇐ “don’t like” implies preference, not randomness — but see above about having preferences).)
Sure, why not? He could choose based on a coin flip, or he could choose based on rolling a d6, a d20, and forth. Infinite possibilities. Maybe the coin flip is just easier for him, since he happened to have a coin handy, and that didn’t have anything do with liking or not liking “what comes up.”
But would you then say “taking the easiest approach” is the fundamental principle at work here (which you may consider a preference), or would it still be randomness since the coin is the thing that “directly” decides the outcome, with no influences pertaining to his knowledge of the outcome? I guess the question is whether we should treat all preferences the same way, or if some could have a different kind of status (which might render them irrelevant or at least make some kind of a difference).
Finally, let’s posit that a transcendent God experiences all timelines simultaneously, and has no preference for any particular one. Where is there any choice involved there?
Well, he may have chosen to have none. It’s possible that he didn’t flip the coin, or whatever it is that he does. But when you add that he is merely aware of them, then I guess that isn’t really what you had in mind.
Still, if he created them all in some sense or another, without choosing or preferring any as you say, then presumably it was possible to create none of them or any number of them. (If one world’s existence somehow depended on the creation or existence of any of the others, then that wouldn’t be true. But I don’t know why that’s a good assumption to make.)
He might not prefer world #573 more than #572 and didn’t choose one instead of the other (since he did make both), but he could’ve stopped creating at #572. Or he could’ve made any number in any order, without creating the one I’m designating #573. That one didn’t need to be there (wherever there is), so he could’ve not made it, but apparently he preferred to do so.
Vaalsays
A few comments on Free Will stuff, if I can jump in a bit…
I wholeheartedly agree with a point John Morales made earlier about the subject of an entities “nature.” That to say something does something against it’s nature is incoherent. That is actually one of my criticisms of Thomistic metaphysics and ideas like Natural Law Morality (which tries to arbitrarily select only some aspects of how a thing can behave as being “it’s nature”).
As to the importance of the free will discussion, sometimes I get to the point where it seems quibbles over semantics. Incompatibilism includes both sides of those who deny free will is compatible with determinism; one side, generally tending to be theists, conclude either free will must be dualistic/ contra-causal, a magical exception to determined events, or the others who decide it does not exist.
The problem that drags me back in to the conversations is the *manner* in which I see free-will deniers speak: you see things like “free will is an illusion” and “we don’t ‘really’ have a choice” and “you couldn’t REALLY do otherwise.” Etc.
And from my position, this tends to be a sloppy use of words, where valid concepts are sort of thrown out like the baby with the bathwater. And in doing so, more confusion results, not less.
consciousness razorsays
But that’s precisely the case now (cf, extenuating circumstances, compos mentis).
I should’ve explicitly mentioned “voters” as well. There are such legal principles, but they don’t constrain behavior very effectively. Some behavior isn’t affected by them at all.
I was talking to a friend not long ago, who told me in all seriousness that it was some kind moral failure that people lacked will if they were contemplating suicide. (We were discussing guns, and I claimed it’s a good public policy to try to lower gun-related suicides. He’s a fucking gun nut, so that amounts to heresy.) Needless to say, this is not a friend whose opinions I trust on many topics. This is nowhere near the first time I’ve heard bullshit like that.
People like that do vote, for instance. That can affect what laws we have, as well as how people interpret and enforce those laws, not to mention all sorts of other shit that happens outside the legal and political systems. If they think victims of suicide deserve it or something (and it has to be stressed this is not at all an isolated example), then I’m sorry to tell you that quoting a few principles in a legal encyclopedia doesn’t change a fucking thing about what actually happens in the real world.
Often, like I said, people are already biased against a person/group considered suspicious or alleged of crimes, ones not “deserving” of welfare benefits, etc. — that’s when you ought to be extra careful about trying to understand what a person is/isn’t capable of, not saying to yourself “oh well, it doesn’t fucking matter at all what I think about how people actually work.” And if you do have this bizarre idea — which you think you can pull out of your ass whenever it’s useful for oppressing the group you hate or protecting your guns or whatever the fuck it is that makes you want to use it — this idea that people have some kind of magical fucking freedom that makes them responsible for things they couldn’t do, then you’re not going to be not going to be making very good decisions.
Vaalsays
@77 – Owlmirror wrote:
“So, here’s my current attempt: “Free will”, in the sense of “the ability to choose otherwise” cannot actually exist, “
But…the conversation really turns on what one means by “the ability to choose otherwise.” If you mean by that, reference to some ideal where one could choose otherwise given the exact same state of the universe, then, agreed, we have no such ability to choose otherwise. But if in describing our ability to choose otherwise we mean something like a normal empirical appraisal of our own powers, then we really do have the ability to choose otherwise. Even in a deterministic world, we would have to do exactly what we do when thinking “what should I choose, A or B?” We would have to think of ourselves as an identify existing THROUGH time, not frozen in one causal state of the universe. We’d have to appraise our abilities inductively (through time) – to determine if “I have the ability to do X.” And then we would have to play out our choices by employing If/Then reasoning, by which we understand normal empirical truths or probabilities: “I AM capable of either action, driving or walking, so which do I desire to do? Well…IF I choose to drive to work, THEN I will get there faster than walking but then I won’t get the health benefit of walking, and …”
And I would say this actually comports best to the way we normally reason about our choices, and it’s entirely compatible
with everything being determined as it does not rely on our having to “do otherwise” in the context of “exactly the same physical state of the universe.” The way we apprehend truths about “what choices I can make” is the same as the truths we apprehend about everything else in the empirical world – e.g. it isn’t an “illusion” to say that “water CAN be either frozen OR liquid or made to evaporate, given certain temperatures” – it’s a way of apprehending truths about the nature of water, even given it’s processes are entirely determined.
@77 – Owlmirror wrote:
…because regardless of whether the universe is deterministic or nondeterministic, what we call “choices” actually arise from parts of our minds that we don’t have complete control over (and cannot have complete control over), and choosing implies control. We feel like we make choices, but those choices arise from feelings, memories, sensory inputs, and so on. We cannot choose every aspect of those feelings, memories, and sensory inputs (and so on), and we cannot choose to have chosen to have different feelings, memories, and sensory inputs.
Your use of the term “we” (or “I”) seems to assume some division of “you” that is separate from the “decision-making” part of the brain. You are speaking like a dualist. Do you mean to?
Why would you think that a part of your brain that makes decisions is not “you” making decisions? To say “I” didn’t have control over that part is to assume that weird dualism I’m talking about – that the part making the decision was not “you” and therefore “out of your control.”
If you decide between going to Africa or Europe for a vacation, and choose Africa, and make all the rational deliberations about how you’ll get there, what you need for the trip etc…what sense will it make that this was not “really you” making the decisions, or controlling the decisions. Even if some portion of the decision making starts in a non-concious form and makes it to consciousness later…why wouldn’t that still be “you” making the decisions; the state where you become aware of the reasons you had for making the decision?
Think of it: if the reasons you are aware of for why you made a decision really AREN’T the reasons “you had” for making the decision, then most of what people do would be made mysterious and unintelligible. Including the very reasons you have for your conclusion in the first place! That some of our processing goes on pre-consciously is a plausible conclusion, but to go from that to denying that part as being “us” or “not representing our own control” is deeply problematic given just how much it would have to explain, coherently.
I see that you edge toward a version of compatibilist free will, and I generally agree, but it appears to me (if I got the gist right) that you start off with some dubious assumptions.
Agree, disagree?
Cheers!
Vaalsays
John Morales: “What proportion of self-identified Catholics are Catholic writers explaining those metaphysics?”
Why are you still on about that when I conceded, early, that pew-going Catholics won’t necessarily know of or understand the metaphysics of Catholic theologians. I had clarified that I was pointing not to “every catholic” but to tradition within the Catholic church, derived from Aquinas (and also Augustine) in which evil is understood to be privation.
“Citing their theology as their actual belief is so very, very naive.”
I have argued about a strain of philosophy held within the Catholic church and even referenced the theology of a recent Pope, as explained by a Cardinal, in which evil is described exactly as I’ve been talking about: as privative, in the ontological sense.
If you mean to assert that the Pope didn’t really believe what he had said he believed, or that Catholic theologians explicating similar metaphysics don’t believe what they are writing, I’m afraid you’ve given me little actual evidence or reason to take your word over theirs.
But, I don’t see anywhere else for this conversation to go now…it seems bent on any quibble possible to avoid just conceding my point that there really is a tradition within the Catholic church of seeing evil in ontological terms as “privation.”
John Moralessays
Vaal:
Why are you still on about that when I conceded, early, that pew-going Catholics won’t necessarily know of or understand the metaphysics of Catholic theologians.
Because it was a response to what I quoted you writing, well after your early concession.
(Had you not done so, there would have been no such retort)
If you mean to assert that the Pope didn’t really believe what he had said he believed, or that Catholic theologians explicating similar metaphysics don’t believe what they are writing, I’m afraid you’ve given me little actual evidence or reason to take your word over theirs.
I don’t know what this particular Pope might have written about turning the other cheek (Matthew 5:39), but I do know what was reported (and recorded) as his claim about the punching.
Point being that Catholics’ purported beliefs are belied by their actual actions — the very epitome of hypocrisy.
But, I don’t see anywhere else for this conversation to go now…it seems bent on any quibble possible to avoid just conceding my point that there really is a tradition within the Catholic church of seeing evil in ontological terms as “privation.”
How quickly you forget your acknowledged concession!
Owlmirrorsays
@consciousness razor:
I’m not sure how interchangeably we can treat “random” and “arbitrary” here. To put it really simply, the way I think of it (YMMV), random stuff has no pattern, while arbitrary stuff has no reason. Some subtle differences there to be careful about.
Well… I can think about it, but at this time, it seems to me to be describing the same sort of thing in different ways. Doesn’t random stuff have no pattern for no reason? Aren’t things that happen with no reason things that have no pattern?
There may be some better way to describe it.
Well, he may have chosen to have none. It’s possible that he didn’t flip the coin, or whatever it is that he does. But when you add that he is merely aware of them, then I guess that isn’t really what you had in mind.
I was thinking of a vast multiverse of timelines; ones where every single possible different sort of universe have come into existence, many differing from their neighbors only in that one atom jiggled in a slightly different way, or didn’t exist. And God is aware of all of them together, every possibility played out in space and over time.
He might not prefer world #573 more than #572 and didn’t choose one instead of the other (since he did make both), but he could’ve stopped creating at #572. Or he could’ve made any number in any order, without creating the one I’m designating #573. That one didn’t need to be there (wherever there is), so he could’ve not made it, but apparently he preferred to do so.
Ah, I see. So in this scenario, God does have at least one preference: for this vast multiverse of all possibilities to exist rather than otherwise.
John Moralessays
Owlmirror, that’s apropos to the OP:
And God is aware of all of them together, every possibility played out in space and over time.
“The void laughs again, unfriendly: “There is life eternal within the eater of souls. Nobody is ever forgotten or allowed to rest in peace. They populate the simulation spaces of its mind, exploring all the possible alternative endings to their life. There is a fate worse than death, you know.””
If you mean by that, reference to some ideal where one could choose otherwise given the exact same state of the universe, then, agreed, we have no such ability to choose otherwise. But if in describing our ability to choose otherwise we mean something like a normal empirical appraisal of our own powers, then we really do have the ability to choose otherwise.
It looks like what what you write in the second sentence above (and everything following it), is what I was trying to get at in my penultimate paragraph @#77 — “will” as an emergent concept; awareness of possibilities and the sense of making choices; anti-fatalism. Yes?
Your use of the term “we” (or “I”) seems to assume some division of “you” that is separate from the “decision-making” part of the brain. You are speaking like a dualist.
I am baffled as to how you come to the conclusion that emphasizing that there is much about how the brain (and body) works that is not under our control, is “dualism” (although, come to think of it, I wanted to be nonspecific enough that the argument would still work even if dualism were true).
Why would you think that a part of your brain that makes decisions is not “you” making decisions?
Because I’ve read some works on cognitive psychology and neuroscience, which emphasize that our bodies and brains (and therefore our minds, as something that results from that brain working) work in ways that we don’t really understand or have control over (we can sometimes become aware of this, and try and exert control, but only to a certain degree).
To reference your Shreddies/Cheerios example above — do you have control over the fact that you enjoy eating both, and give preference to both of them as breakfast possibilities over other possible options, such as dormice fried in axle grease, or a salad of dandelion greens sprinkled with sawdust and lint?
You might think the options I gave to be disgusting in several different ways (I certainly do), but do you have control over your feelings of disgust?
If you decide between going to Africa or Europe for a vacation, and choose Africa, and make all the rational deliberations about how you’ll get there, what you need for the trip etc…what sense will it make that this was not “really you” making the decisions, or controlling the decisions. Even if some portion of the decision making starts in a non-concious form and makes it to consciousness later…why wouldn’t that still be “you” making the decisions; the state where you become aware of the reasons you had for making the decision?
Why do you think you’ll ever become aware of all of the reasons?
Think of it: if the reasons you are aware of for why you made a decision really AREN’T the reasons “you had” for making the decision,
Or rather, the reasons you are aware of are underlain by reasons you aren’t aware of.
then most of what people do would be made mysterious and unintelligible.
I’m not sure that it would be “most” — but I could be wrong.
Various branches of psychology and neuroscience are trying to make the matter more intelligible and less mysterious, but we certainly are not at 100% clarity.
That some of our processing goes on pre-consciously is a plausible conclusion, but to go from that to denying that part as being “us” or “not representing our own control” is deeply problematic given just how much it would have to explain, coherently.
I think it’s the other way around, really.
Do you really think you can explain, down to every level of brain function, why you prefer to argue on the internet, rather than play video games or read books, or watch television? I certainly make no pretense of such complete self-insight.
Owlmirrorsays
@John Morales: Apropos to SF, in expanding on my example, I was reminded of a different work:
In the endless universe there has been nothing new, nothing different. What has appeared exceptional to the minute mind of man has been inevitable to the infinite Eye of God. This strange second in a life, that unusual event, those remarkable coincidences of environment, opportunity, and encounter… all of them have been reproduced over and over on the planet of a sun whose galaxy revolves once in two hundred million years and has revolved nine times already. There has been joy. There will be joy again.
(I would be astonished if you had not read The Demolished Man)
consciousness razorsays
Owlmirror:
Doesn’t random stuff have no pattern for no reason? Aren’t things that happen with no reason things that have no pattern?
I wouldn’t say so. I mean, you can (apparently) make sense of these sorts of statements:
– “This random, patternless stuff occurs for the reasons that X, Y, Z. We used a truly random number generator, for the reason that our program works better that way. It makes that patternless stuff for us for that reason.”
– “This pattern of mud cracks isn’t here for a reason. It simply did form that way, as the soil dried and cracked due to natural processes. Nobody ordered that, no supernatural teleology, etc.”
A different sort of example: you could say things like “pick any arbitrary pattern of Xs.” That’s not so much implying that there is no reason behind the pattern or your choice of pattern, but more like that it doesn’t matter (for these purposes) what those reasons may be, since any will suffice as long as the results meet certain criteria (ones such that it is a pattern of Xs).
You may express the same kind of idea with “pick any random pattern of Xs.” That probably shouldn’t be understood as “pick any patternless pattern of Xs,” since for any X that’s an impossible type of X to pick. It’s more like a suggestion that you try to randomly pick a pattern, but again (although they supposedly don’t matter) there may still be reasons why you’ve randomly chosen one of the possible patterns. Maybe the reason is that that one was simple, easy to choose, easy to define clearly/rigorously, aesthetically pleasing, corresponds to the actual empirical results you’ve gotten, etc. The statement that you had a reason to pick that one (or that there were reasons for whatever) is just different from the statement it has a pattern.
Not that it makes an obvious difference with anything you were saying. But it has the potential go off the rails, if it’s not clear how we can interpret these terms.
And God is aware of all of them together, every possibility played out in space and over time.
But you mean that it isn’t a “creator god”? It didn’t create them but is just a passive observer? In that case it seems trivial that God didn’t choose to create that … but in that case, it wouldn’t make a difference if it were a single simple universe or the biggest baddest multiverse imaginable.
So in this scenario, God does have at least one preference: for this vast multiverse of all possibilities to exist rather than otherwise.
That doesn’t seem to be going far enough. For each of the possibilities, it’s true (presumably) that it may not have existed. It’s not all or nothing. Being possible doesn’t imply it’s actual, and it also doesn’t mean it must exist — unless you’re saying there’s some other principle at work which is forcing God’s hand into making every possible thing. So if God chooses that, then there are as many of those preferences as there are possible worlds, which I guess is infinite (or much more than one).
Just so I have the right sort of picture, are these splitting “events” supposed to be branches structured like a “Y” or more like parallel tracks that look like “||”? Does a unique past history exist which leads to each different “branch” at some present/future state (as in the latter case), or do some present/future states share some of the same past?
a_ray_in_dilbert_spacesays
“Random” is a slippery concept. It turns out that it is very hard to define “random” in terms that are not circular. This has had important implications for probability–where randomness is central to most formulations. Kolmogorov probably had the most satisfying definition–a series was considered random if it could not be defined by rules or other specifications in fewer bits that were in that system. Of course, that only works for finite series.
This problem was so fundamental that it was one of the motivations of the early Bayesians for rejecting frequentist probability.
consciousness razorsays
Let me clarify:
So if God chooses X and Y and Z and not P (where all are possible worlds), then there are as many of those preferences as there are possible worlds, which I guess is infinite (or much more than one).
The point is just that you have a bunch of “and” connectors, with perhaps some “nots” strewn about hither and thither. I don’t know why I would have to think God chooses “XYZ~P”, or else he doesn’t choose “XYZ~P”, as if that were a single thing that amounts to a single choice. The claim seems to be that X is a possible world, full stop. It could exist, which is to say it could exist independent of the Y possible world, independent of Z, independent of not-P, and so forth.
consciousness razorsays
My last comment was not in response to a_ray_in_dilbert_space. I agree that “randomness” is very slippery. I’m sure I didn’t do justice to all of the different senses of it, and I didn’t mean to address how each relates to arbitrariness in the sense of not having a (relevant or important) reason. The point is just that many don’t mean that and may introduce a lot of unnecessary confusion.
Owlmirrorsays
@consciousness razor:
I mean, you can (apparently) make sense of these sorts of statements:
– “This random, patternless stuff occurs for the reasons that X, Y, Z. We used a truly random number generator, for the reason that our program works better that way. It makes that patternless stuff for us for that reason.”
– “This pattern of mud cracks isn’t here for a reason. It simply did form that way, as the soil dried and cracked due to natural processes. Nobody ordered that, no supernatural teleology, etc.”
Yes, but that’s because of polysemy: “reason” can be used in the sense of “having some contingent history which explains the current situation” (non-teleological) or in the sense of “because some intelligent agent intended it that way” (teleological).
Frex, the second example could be phrased as: “The reason we see this pattern of mud cracks is because of the natural process of the mud drying and shrinking under a hot sun, and then the entire surface being baked so hard that it never turned into mud again, and then being buried under later sediments, and then being exposed again” (non-teleological sense of “reason”)
That doesn’t seem to be going far enough. For each of the possibilities, it’s true (presumably) that it may not have existed. It’s not all or nothing. Being possible doesn’t imply it’s actual, and it also doesn’t mean it must exist — unless you’re saying there’s some other principle at work which is forcing God’s hand into making every possible thing. So if God chooses that, then there are as many of those preferences as there are possible worlds, which I guess is infinite (or much more than one).
Good point. I hadn’t actually unpacked what it is that God is doing in the scenarios. I’m not sure it matters if God is setting up the conditions for the multiverse so that each universe splits off, or creates an infintely large number of universes that start off and have those differences develop later, or actively brings about each split from some presumably empty root universe. Something I may need to ponder more.
But thinking about it now makes me wonder: Is choosing literally everything possible an actually meaningful “choice”? Does it really make sense to say that an infinitely-choosing God has free will? Does God have the ability to not choose something?
Clearly, the idea needs work.
consciousness razorsays
Yes, but that’s because of polysemy: “reason” can be used in the sense of “having some contingent history which explains the current situation” (non-teleological) or in the sense of “because some intelligent agent intended it that way” (teleological).
Well, it’s not obvious that patterns, as such, always have that sort of reason or explanation behind them. I guess I gave you a poor example. Let me try a few more.
Couldn’t it just be a brute fact that the cosmic microwave background radiation happens to be in that specific pattern? There’s a little bit of contingent history to talk about, from the actual radiation extrapolating back to earlier moments of the big bang … so tell that story if you like. But the “initial” condition which led to the CMB may not have any further explanation. Maybe that’s just it: it’s got some pattern, and that’s all there is to say. There’s no sensible answer to why that pattern is what it is.
Similarly, if you think of, say, a law of physics, that’s a pattern or regularity that we see in the world which is useful for understanding lots of stuff. But there may not be any further reason for what the laws are or why they take the particular form that they do. Why do they have that shape? At some point, if you keep digging as far as you could go, the answer could just be: no reason at all. The laws are just a part of the system we’ve come up with for describing what predictably happens (NB: merely being predictable entails we’d represent it with some pattern or another), and there may be no reason or explanation for whatever they turn out to be.
Or if you just have a geometric shape like a triangle or a rectangle, what are we supposed to identify as “the reason” for that? I mean, you can define what it is, use it in various ways, prove other things with it, etc. So while some triangle or another is definitely a pattern, that doesn’t seem to imply it has a “reason” for being itself.
I like this video – simple, but not trivial.
What I can never understand about the theists I meet, is how they can even entertain the idea of free will. They (in my experience, all Christians) believe that their God is omniscient, while at the same time believing in free will. Okay, I say, so this God knows all things, right … including what I am about to do? And everything that everyone else will ever do?
No, they say, that’s not determined, that comes under free will.
But didn’t you just claim that your God knows everything?
Ummm… they say.
Logic is not their strong suit.
The 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons has an interesting twist on this argument: evil gods make their creations evil, because those gods don’t care about the inner lives of their creations, but good gods know the powerful imposing one’s will on others, even if done with the best of intentions, is not a good act in that game’s moral universe. Thus, good gods made creatures that can be evil and set an example in other ways.
Of course, in Dungeons and Dragons, the existence of gods is easily confirmable by the fact that certain pious people can channel miracles on demand while everyone else has to be content with fireballs. Certainly it’s hard to argue that a god whose only input is the very occasional prophet and a set of stories with questionable morals is really having a go.
This omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent thing is the biggest plot hole in christian mythology. Whoever introduced this idea certainly didn’t think about it much. That’s why I prefer fictional mythologies over real ones: these make sense. And lol, I just noticed something: real religions/mythologies, which, in a sense, evolved, have flaws, which artifical (aka: intelligently designed) ones lack.
But, I also have a simpler explanation for the whole free will vs omnipotence thing. It was rather obvious last time I let myself drag into a church: the christians are obviously scared of their deity, they call it things like “allpowerful”, “allknowing” or “benevolent” just to appease it.
Of course! This opens even more rabbit holes:
Argument: Evil God will cannot allow free will since it will not be acceptable to Evil God. Evil God will only be happy with absolute control.
Counter: So, you think ‘free will’ is benevolence from Good God? In that case, why do ALL Good Gods require absolute, unquestioning obedience from you, even at the threat of everlasting hell?
Actual case: Absolute unquestioning obedience is REQUIRED for priests to control masses.
It’s fine as a response to a free will defense, but lots of bad shit happens that isn’t caused by anyone’s actions, intentionally or otherwise. Think of devastating earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc., which can cause an incredible amount of (totally pointless) suffering.
That sort of bad shit needs to be accounted for by theists too, since gods are supposed to be creators of the whole world and everything in it, not only creators of people who are thought to have free will. It’s just hanging on a little too long to the assumption that agents do good or evil stuff (whether they’re supposed to be gods or human beings), to the exclusion of other non-agencies which may also cause such stuff.
It seems like once you see that you shouldn’t necessarily associate an agent with good or bad stuff, then it’s clear that you have more work to do than you might have thought, justifying the claim that a particular agent (a god) is responsible for certain types of good stuff (or all good stuff). The follow-up claim, that only because of another supposed feature of agents (humans’ free will) is it the case that this god might be let off the hook for bad stuff (since we chose to make that happen), just isn’t right for several different reasons.
But playing along with the idea that it’s agents all the way down doesn’t seem like the right approach to take. At some point, you need to be able to introduce an idea that perhaps the earthquake didn’t destroy this town because God has a good plan and works in mysterious ways to make it happen (so it’s all ultimately okay somehow). The earthquake, while bad for the people hurt by it, might not be the result of anybody intending to do anything good or bad or anything else, not in fact for reasons that we know or for reasons that we don’t know — that’s a possibility too, that bad shit simply fucking happened, pointlessly.
If you don’t go there, of course theists can just slide away from talking about our free will, flip the record to the B side and start playing their greatest hits about how some special agent mysteriously intends everything we don’t, so we simply may not know what those intentions are. When it goes like that, they never quite approach the idea that they didn’t have a good reason to think there is a god doing anything at all. After all, one type of thing they might cite as a reason is the fact that there is some good in the world, but that is precisely the kind of assumption (good = morally significant = an agent must’ve done it) they should’ve been questioning from the beginning. In any case, it shouldn’t be about trying to find a plausible way to hide certain things behind our ignorance.* It’s about what’s true of the whole world, however ignorant we may or may not be.
*”But look here, theist, we can hide an evil demon behind the veil too. Ha ha, that’s so silly. People obviously don’t believe in evil spirits…. Hold on, what’s that? They do? Okay, back to the drawing board, I guess. Sorry for the interruption, move along.”
Ask a Christian “what does God want from us?” and you will get an answer like “To worship him and love each other” or something, which is not giving us any actual consideration you might notice. But then reword it to say “What does God want humanity in general to accomplish? What do we DO?” and you will get nothing.
Why? because if the Bible story is true, God is a PET owner, and we’re the pets. It’s not good or evil, it’s having a pet to watch and play with. we’re not loved as we understand it, we’re patronizingly loved like “Ooo, I LOVE that rabbit!”. doesn’t mean we’d die for it if push came to shove, unlike love for OUR children which most parents would do.
Think of it…Genesis makes it clear we’re not supposed to be intelligent…the moment we were we were kicked out. We weren’t supposed to invent anything because all needs and desires (limited without intelligence) were taken care of in “paradise”. No goals, no dreams, no point. But Adam was alone and bored, unhealthy so eve was “made” (after testing out the other animals…use your imagination on bestiality WITHOUT lust of any form, no sin yet remember?). So now Adam has Eve, so go ahead and breed if you want, more purebreds make a nice collection.
Now think of your average hamster owner. Isn’t the desires basically the same? Just saying to the hamster figuratively “Be comfortable and good, love me back, and I’ll care for you. Don’t get too smart though or you’ll be a threat and I’ll throw you into the wild woods! I don’t really care if you try to do anything else because nothing you do is meaningful to me. Just be cute and I’ll play with you occasionally. Sometimes my little sister might shake the cage, sorry.”
There is a parallel you have to admit.
All hail Sithrak! Even now he oils the spit.
The Christian god always seemed like the 5-year-old’s final argument of “infinity.” Yes, you have many gods, your thunder god, and sea god, and war god… but my god is infinity good and infinity strong and infinity smart! So there!
Utterly childish.
the middle eastern god is nonsensical and contradictory and as has been mentioned childish in the extreme. If it wasn’t for the fact that people are raised in it’s ignorance no person with any education into the nature of the realty would have anything to do with it other than appreciate the most benevolent aspects of the believers practices.
uncle frogy
Logic doesn’t matter. Christians can reconcile that Jesus was fully human and fully divine. Does not compute. Catholics recognize that the eucharist doesn’t physically change in any molecular or chemican fashion when it is consecrated, yet it is literally. not metaphorically, the body of Jesus afterwards. Does not compute.
They can be quite specific about God’s requirements, but when bringing up why he allows spina bifida, then you get the “It would be arrogant to claim to know God’s mind but I can tell you whatever it is it is for the best.”
A variation on the thinking in the video is this one: what if God populated the bible with a mix of good suggestions and bad ones in order to determine which bits of advice each individual chose to follow? A theological ink blot test.
I don’t know how Christians reconcile the conception of a purely good God with Isaiah 45:7 which more or less lets the cat out of the bag. Yet they believe that this too is the infallible word of their God.
Personally I don’t see the problem. The concept of “good” is only knowable in contrast to the complimentary concept of “evil”. “God” could not create a world with good and without evil anymore than such a God could create inside without simultaneously creating inside. Of course there’s no need for an imaginary “god” to create any of these things in the first place since they are conceptual categories of the human mind, not features of the physical universe. You may know that your baseball is inside your house, but neither the baseball nor the house know anything at all so far as we know. And they also don’t know that they are “yours” for that matter.
“inside without outside” is what I meant to write, honest.
“What I can never understand about the theists I meet, is how they can even entertain the idea of free will.”
I can go you one better. I have relatives who are Calvinist missionaries.
If ever there was an oxymoronic job description, that’s it.
I honestly don’t know how they rationalize it. We have a tacit, but very strong, understanding that we don’t talk religion or politics when we get together (usually only once every 2-3 years anyway), so I’ve never asked them.
I would argue that if there is a truly omniscient deity, then he doesn’t have free will, either (idea not original to me, of course).
consciousness razor@5″It seems like once you see that you shouldn’t necessarily associate an agent with good or bad stuff,”
I think that should be “external agent” since good and bad are always associated with agents, it’s just that the agents involved are – us. Storms and earthquakes are neither “bad” nor “good”, so far as the universe as a whole is concerned, they just are. “Bad” and “good” are concepts in minds, not realities of the “external” world.
Wait, it’s a mistake for me to have said “they just are” as far as the universe is a whole is concerned. So far as we know “is” and “is not” are also concepts in minds, and the universe as a whole does not appear to either “know” or “not know” anything at all exists. This philosophy stuff can be tricky.
If there is a god why not call it The Indifferent One? Or, better yet, call him Meh. Yeah, says the almighty Meh, I made the universe, but what a tedious thing it is to keep track of 2 trillion galaxies. Maybe I’ll come back later and check in and see how things are going. Or maybe not. Meh.
So do christians believe there is free will in heaven? If so, there is an infinite amount of time to screw up. If it is not possible to fail in heaven, why is it possible to fail with free will on earth? Or is there no free will in heaven? Or is it all make-believe?!
It’s all a bit like the legendary builder, who did jobs that were good, quick, and cheap. Choose any two.
So you need the Trinity to get a god who is good, knowing, and powerful. None of the bits have all three. So there’s the god-part who is good and powerful, but he doesn’t know what the one who is knowing and powerful is up to, and he isn’t good. The one who is good and knowing hasn’t got the power to do anything about the other two.
There. I’ve just reconciled Christianity and Catharism, just in time to prevent the crusade and thousands of deaths… it is 1209 isn’t it? No, that’s the time….
@16
last question answer = yes
uncle frogy
Another defense I have heard from an apologist to the same question (why god is good yet permits evil), is that god only permits bad things so as to inspire ‘contingent good’ in people that observe and want to counter said bad thing. Some typical examples that I have heard are that god permits deprivation and poverty to inspire others to give generously, he permits illness and injury to inspire selfless work by groups such as Doctors Without Borders or the Fred Hollows Foundation he permits war to inspire a love of peace; the list goes on.
But the obvious rebuttal to this is that this logic is also perfectly applicable to the possibility to god being evil. The response to the suggestion of an evil god is going to be same but in reverse: how can he be evil if he permits good in the world? Checkmate, atheists!
The rebuttal to this is of course a simple reversal of the logic employed in the first paragraph. Evil god permits good in the world as a way of inspiring ‘contingent evil’ in people. Wealth and lavish lifestyles inspire jealosy and miserliness in the haves and envy and theft in the have-nots, peace and prosperity in one nation may inspire wars of conquest in their neighbours, good health in some inspires bitterness in the chronically ill… and so on. The underlying logic is equally applicable to opposing claims and so cannot be considered a compelling argument for either.
No, it does not work.
The problem with this kind of argumentation is that it is treating the concepts of “good” and “evil” in a rather manichean fashion as to opposed, but yet equal forces, some kind of inner drive, set either on positive or negative. It implies the picture of a cartoonish world of evildoers only enjoying evil things, waking up in the morning from evil sleep to make bad breakfast (’cause that would be evil).
They are of course much more complicated – even the theistic apologists know thhis. One simple aspect wohld be, that a “good” (in a simplistic fashion) person would be interested in spreading its philosophy, converting other people to the cause of doing good and minimizing suffering. Whereas an “evil” person would not care, perhaps looking for naive, easy-to-rip-off – suckers.
Of course the qouestion of theodizee still stands All concepts of good that we have incorporate in some way the impetus to spread it. A moral person wo could, but wouldn’t do it … isn’t.
No, that does not follow at all. Something does not have to be knowable in order to exist.
Ed Seedhouse:
This is too simplistic and confusing a few different things.
We think things are good or bad for us, as moral agents. They can be beneficial or harmful, impede or promote progress, increase or decrease the chances of being successful — to us or for us, since there are certain things in life that we want or need. There are no moral goods or evils for something like a rock, which isn’t an agent and is unable to stand in relations like those with other stuff.
That’s all very different from claiming such agents must themselves be causes of (or perhaps morally responsible for) all the good or bad things, or in other words that no non-agents can have effects which are good or bad for agents. That’s simply false: if a rock falls on your head and kills you, that’s probably bad for you. Nobody (not a god or a rock-moving spirit or anyone else) needs to have caused that rock to fall on your head. Someone might do that if they’re capable, but it isn’t necessary — it could have genuinely good/bad consequences for you, regardless of the type of thing or which series of events caused it.
I would say all of this is much clearer and more plausible than whatever it is you’re rambling about.
What could this even mean? You’re apparently not claiming they aren’t “real” (e.g., pain, pleasure, racism, democracy, however good or bad any such things are), but that they are not “external”…. Who cares? What difference does it make to any of this, whether those are internal or external (or both, neither?) to a mind or to a bunch of minds?
It makes no difference, but let me ask…. If an idea that you have is internal to your mind, doesn’t that imply it’s external to mine? So when and where did you have reason to say truthfully and in all generality that such things are “not realities in the external world”? Am I not a part of the external world, from your perspective, just like you are from mine? Am I a figment of your imagination? Do both of our minds exist, not in the physical world but in some other (apparently non-spatial) realm? Why are we taking any bullshit like this seriously?
Where is this going? You’re making mistakes, but claiming that there are things isn’t one of them, for fuck’s sake.
Existence may be something you think about — it could be a concept you have in your mind — but that does not imply anything about what there is (or isn’t). Nobody has any reason to give a fuck about whether the universe (the part that isn’t you) knows anything. If you drop all of the deepities and esoteric nonsense, we can try to have a coherent discussion about actual stuff. Because there is actual stuff.
I don’t think the free will excuse is the same for the evil god though. If he made everyone and everything evil it wouldn’t be a sustainable universe, so that’s a reason to make it just reasonably evil and a bit good without having to invoke free will. I think for the free will argument the standard counterpoint works best: there’s a whole bunch of really, super, uber shitty stuff that happens without anyone’s will, free or otherwise.
@consciousness razor.
If God created the universe, then god is responsible for everything that happens in it. A creator can’t blame the creation for its flaws. If s/he didn’t intend bad things, god is shoddy, if s/he did, evil.
My answer to the free will defense is that even if god has ineffable, supposedly good (how do they know?) reasons for allowing free will, god has still created persons for god’s own ends and using persons to ones own ends is immoral.
We live in a world where *every* single creature, to survive, needs to horribly kill plenty of others.
It is inherently built into the system, it’s inescapable.
How fucked up must be the mind that conceived this?
God exists and He is a sadistic psychopath.
How so? God can do what god wants, you’re assuming an evil universe is ceteris paribus the same as this universe.
Yes of course things are more complicated than the simplistic binary of innately good people vs. innately bad people, and yes most people recognise this; and yet that fact does not stop a) critics of religion posing the ‘problem of evil’ to an apologist, nor b) the apologist responding with the ‘necessary free will’ argument outlined in the OP (or the ‘contingent good’ alternative argument outlined by myself at #19). When it is presented in that manichean manner by the apologist, it can be responded to in that manner by the critic. It works as a rebuttal because it addresses the argument as presented.
Well, I’m not so sure about that. I mean, consider that the USA’s “founders” (the whole generation, not a handful of dudes) created this country — they gained independence, formed alliances, made the constitution, got the whole ball rolling basically. It doesn’t follow that because they created it, they’re responsible for everything that has happened since. You probably wouldn’t blame Donald Trump on, let’s say, Jefferson or his whole generation — not unless you could show some fairly strong connection to that effect. But of course, like I said, they are (at least partly) responsible for a whole lot of it, even if not absolutely everything. Maybe you’d say a creator god isn’t analogous, but I don’t really know.
Anyway, my point is that there isn’t a god who created the universe (or did anything else). If that’s true, then there isn’t one to hold responsible when a tornado kills your dog or whatever. And I know I didn’t cause the tornado. Jefferson didn’t. Trump didn’t. The gay agenda didn’t. The big evil conspiracy of conspirators didn’t. It’s just the sort of shitty thing that happens sometimes.
An omnipotent god would be responsible for anything bad in their universe, since their powers would allow them to either build a perfect universe, or fix a broken one. The Old Testament God, or the gods of people like the Greeks and Romans, not so much, since they’re portrayed as superpowered versions of the local rulers.
I should have added those gods are shown as having the same vices as humans, such as jealousy and anger.
consciousness razor@22: “Where is this going? You’re making mistakes, but claiming that there are things isn’t one of them”
I don’t understand you here and think you misunderstand me, but I could of course be wrong about both thoughts. I don’t think I claimed that there are “things” although I do think that minds are real (and physical) and concepts that minds have are real phenomena in the world as whole. But “things” are another construction of language in human minds, not actual physical phenomena. The map is not the territory and the word is not the thing.
You are not me and I am not you, but on the other hand we are physically connected to each other and the world we are a part of, nothing in the least mystical about that. Statistically it is virtually certain that atoms that once “inhabited” your body are now in mine, and vice versa.
I don’t believe in a magical nonphysical separate “I” that lives somewhere in my head apart from my brain. I might say that my “self” is my brain, or perhaps an idea in my brain, but my brain does not exist apart from my body and my body doesn’t exist apart from the world it inhabits. Difference and separation are different words for different concepts. I would agree that we are different people, but not that we are separate.
If this is seen as irrelevant or sealioning then I apologize in advance. I believe I am just trying to make myself clear but may be failing utterly.
consciousness razor@22 “If you drop all of the deepities and esoteric nonsense, we can try to have a coherent discussion about actual stuff. Because there is actual stuff.”
We agree there is actual stuff at least in the sense that our words are useful in pointing out that “stuff” to each other. If you say “here is a cup of tea” I will know what you mean perfectly well, although the cup of tea doesn’t know what it is. I wasn’t trying to be “deep” but apparently I failed. Not for the first or last time I suspect.
True, but that’s because ‘humans founding and writing the new constitution of a nation’ is not at all analogous to ‘supernatural agent creating a universe and all physical laws.’ Theists are the ones making the extreme claim of everything being within the purview of their deity, not just at the moment of creation but also for all time. If that is they (ludicrous) claim they want to make, then it follows that all things good and bad created by that deity are his responsibility.
The explanation works unless you are a Zoroastrian or read al-Ghazali’s “Incoherence of the Philosophers”.
I guess this is pretty much where I get off the train. It doesn’t matter (for these purposes) whether the cup of tea knows anything. It doesn’t matter whether anybody knows anything, or even if there is anyone who could potentially have any sort of knowledge, beliefs, concepts, etc. Maybe there’s a universe with only a cup of tea in it and nothing else — try to picture that. If in fact there’s a cup of tea in that universe, it is simply a fact: the cup of tea exists. Things we do or don’t know, or the ideas in our heads or the words we might use to try to understand each other (whether they’re about the tea or ourselves or anything else) have no bearing whatsoever on that.
If there is a good or bad experience which a person has, for example, that is also simply a fact. We know empirically that it’s a thing which sometimes happens to the sort of thing I was describing as a “moral agent.” And we also know it isn’t something that happens to rocks, for instance. We can use that information. It isn’t germane to questions of whether they’re real or how they relate to agency, when you claim goods/evils are “not external,” that the universe (other than perhaps that agent who is affected) doesn’t know or isn’t concerned, and so forth.
The distinction I was drawing was between the sorts of things can be affected positively or negatively (in a moral sense) on the one hand, and those things which can cause such effects. You were right to say that good/bad are “associated” with agents, in the former sense. But that fails to say the “association” doesn’t need to run the other way, since agents don’t need to be causes of morally significant events. That seems to address the point fairly adequately. It doesn’t look like there are any other critical points to bring up about it.
@25 F.O.
Which, I think, feeds Christian/Buddhist conceptions of self-loathing (or selflessness, or pity, it’s a sliding scale really), as well as ideas like Supremacy of Man, or institutional racism. For God to be true, clearly not all lives are equally sacred. I think there’s something of the ball-fondling of the free market inherent in there, too.
I’ve always seen Christian and Buddhist philosophy as two sides of the same coin, and this is that coin in a nutshell.
I was underwhelmed by this video.
It spends the first 25% of the video setting up the dualism vs. materialism veil as though that would be the gyst of the argument. And then the actual argument has nothing to do with it. Then he introduces the concept of evil god as though that would be utterly inconceivable and absurd and a clincher when people have believed in evil god(s) for ever. There’s utterly no reason evil god is unbelievable… unless you take that most apologists believe in good god. But if we are countering the argument “must be true if a lot of people believe it” we should counter it not that something no-one believes is equally logical, but that it’s *more* logical that beliefs are sociological by products rather than underlying realism. But that’s clearly not the argument if we are talking of good and evil gods.
Then he thinks the (admittedly preposterously weak) free will => evil argument that under evil god free will => good would be equally valid which doesn’t make any sense, as good god would have a reason for wanting to cut the strings but evil god would not. Good good cuts the string because it makes people responsible for the good they do and that’s good. Meh, if you say so. Evil god cuts the string because it makes people responsible for the evil they do … and that’s evil?
@1 – quotetheunquote wrote:
“What I can never understand about the theists I meet, is how they can even entertain the idea of free will. They (in my experience, all Christians) believe that their God is omniscient, while at the same time believing in free will.
Depend on your theory of free will. On a compatibilist view, free will is compatible with determinism, hence every determined event could in principle be known before-hand by a Being with sufficient knowledge – e.g. God. And yet
it would still make sense to speak of instances in which we are free to do as we wish, and other times when we are constrained.
A majority of philosophers hold the compatibilist view of free will (and some rather bright fellas like Sean Carroll also
are compatibilists). So if we are going to claim the Christian is being illogical, we better hit the target.
@11 – Ed Seedhouse, wrote:
“The concept of “good” is only knowable in contrast to the complimentary concept of “evil”. “God” could not create a world with good and without evil anymore than such a God could create inside without simultaneously creating inside.”
That’s a fallacy bandied about by Christians.
You are conflating descriptions with ontology (labels mixed up with “what exists”). It’s often accompanied by the analogy to light and darkness “light and darkness require one another to exist.” No they don’t. Light exists. Physically. If we were never in darkness, we would still always be seeing via the electromagnetic radiation that stimulates our eyes. We’d still be explaining how we “see” via light, since it existed. The fact we may not have a label or concept of “darkness” (if for some reason we never did) doesn’t entail light, and our apprehension of it, would be a fact.
Same with good and evil. There could always exist “reasons for doing the things we currently call ‘good’ ” whether reasons for doing bad exist or not. (And, in fact, if many moral theories are correct- there AREN’T reasons to do evil). Just like light would be a physical fact without darkness, our doing good actions would be a physical fact without anyone doing evil. It’s especially acute for Christians, since an All Powerful God could have made us with a more noble nature, to always choose The Good.
(And there are compatibiist reasons why that does not invalidate free will….)
^^^^ typo correction:
“The fact we may not have a label or concept of “darkness” (if for some reason we never did) doesn’t entail light…..wouldn’t be a fact.”
Vaal, you’re confused. Compatibilism doesn’t rescue the idea that God created everything knowing precisely every outcome before said creation (kinda pointless, no? Might as well have created the final state and not bothered with the in-between).
Exactly as quotetheunquote did.
—
Your second point to Ed Seedhouse is also flawed; your analogy is inapt because darkness is a privative definition in relation to light, whereas evil is not a privative (the absence of good is not itself evil).
… but hey, Ed Seedhouse did write ‘complimentary’ rather than ‘complementary’. So that was erroneous.
God is a trickster: neither good nor evil — she just likes to yank your chain.
the whole idea of god seems to not answer anything really. at least I can.t make it work for me neither can I even follow the discussion after that.
like this there is a god he creates the universe stop right there forget about good and bad for the moment. were does this universe come from or what does the god make it out of and where does that stuff come from?
where is this universe in relation to this god who exists.
it sure looks to me that the middle eastern god which is the one that is the primary focus here is still to a large part a god like the Greeks or Romans had only even bigger and more powerful personality the biggest and most powerful personality of all apparently, and still a limited thing for all that. If it is some other type of god one that is not separated from anything that is the sum total of everything I fail to see the need to discus the god as if it is some kind of being only from a higher realm but still like everything else intrinsically god in the same way as everything else is.
the former god would be the determining factor in good or evil as described by the interpreters of the god of which there are many and disagree on much that is fundamental about this god of theirs.
if it is the later type of god then it is some what different since it could be said that everything is a kind of illusion with its own complications for deciding what is good and bad. namely it is all a play of gods and part of the illusion.
Both add a level of speculation and complication that I find not particularly helpful.
It also does not help that we humans have been talking about this thing for a very long time and much of the discussion is influenced by ancient languages taken out of cultural context and using concepts that are not quite accurate in describing what we find the universe to be.
I suspect that the idea of free will that is being used does not hold up to scrutiny as closely as it has been thought of in the past. We are far more constrained by conditioning, experience and learning and the inborn nature of our physical bodies, our psychological state and the influences of everything around us then we like to admit
tying believers in logical knots can be fun at times the little video is it can be a lot of work.
uncle frogy
The gnostics had a convenient way out of this (the world was created by a god-like being, but he was deranged, incompetent and abusive and demanded worship, in contrast the true god will totes free you from this awful world if you jump through these hoops) but the mainstream christians had some fairly strong negative opinions of that sort of thing put them all to the fire and sword and destroyed all their texts. This is apparently how the catholics thought they should prove they weren’t a religion of evil, suffering and oppression. Good show, folks.
@40 John Morales,
I’m not confused. Go look at what quotetheunquote wrote again. quotetheunquote made a specific statement about the logical consequence of one of God’s attributes: God’s omniscience – that it follows from the fact that God knows everything that will happen to “therefore we would have no free will.” If you understand compatibilist free will, you will know it is compatible with everything in principle being predictable by an omniscient Being. (That is, free will is compatibil with all our actions being determined by the state of the universe from one moment to the next, hence if you knew all the facts about the state of affairs you would know what will happen next – as an Omniscient Being, or “knowledgeable enough Being” would).
And I’ve seen a lot of people criticize the idea of Christians having free will on that ground: “If God KNOWS you are going to choose to go to France for your vacation, then it means you can not choose to do otherwise, therefore this is inconsistant with having free will.” But it’s not inconsistent with compatibilist free will. (And even among Christianity, where free will has been debated within the context of God’s omniscience, one of the schools of thought is that we must have some form of compatibilist free will with God’s foreknowledge).
Now, if one wants to actually make the argument by adducing other traits of God – God’s from God’s Omnipotence and role as Creator, then the argument can become more interesting (and certainly that will mean God bears additional responsibility for every action we take, but whether this still puts the lid on having compatibilist free will is an argument to be had…).
Cheers,
Whoops forgot:
@40 John Morales,
Your second point to Ed Seedhouse is also flawed; your analogy is inapt because darkness is a privative definition in relation to light, whereas evil is not a privative (the absence of good is not itself evil).
A large portion of Christianity (e.g. Catholics) hold that evil is indeed privative.
That aside, I don’t see how you’ve made a point against what I wrote, which was to say in either the case of Light or Good Actions (or good reasons for actions), both describe “things that exist” and therefore do not depend on the absence of their opposite. No more than the opposite of “snakes” would have to exist, or the opposite of “playing hockey” for either of those two occur. If all we did was play hockey, then the usefulness of the *label* ‘not playing hockey’ may be dubious, but the facts of what we are doing still occur. This is why I said not to mix ontology with labels.
Vaal:
No, I am not a student of Christianity and its various arguments. I had never heard of “compatabilist free will” before today.
But what it sounds like to me, is a patent absurdity – and a construct that was built with the express purpose of doing an “end run” around the problem of God’s omniscience. As in, “we’re going to create this new thing, call it “compatibilist free will” and what it means is, your fate is both pre-determined and not pre-determined at the same time.”
Hmmm. No. This make about as much sense as the host being both god’s flesh and bread at the same time. (Although I have only Jaybee’s word that any Catholics believe this, I had not hear of this before.)
@quotetheunquote
Compatibilism is not argued exclusively by theists — far from it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism
(my emphasis)
Stephen Hawking has also argued in one of his lectures that determinism is often confused with the lack of free will. And, in fact, “free will” makes little to no sense if interpreted as “anything can happen”. If offered ice-cream, would you require to be equally probable for me to eat it, reject it or shove it in my eye socket in order to accept that I have free will in the matter? What does it matter if you know I’ll accept it? What does it even matter if I belong to a race of beings that you designed, and I happen to find ice-cream irresistible? I’ll still eat it because I want to, not because you forced me to. Whether or not I can choose what I want is another matter, and it’s best not to call that free will.
#47, cont.
All in all, I find Raymond Smullyan’s line of arguing in “Is God a Taoist?” far more logical than either Stephen Law’s or any apologist’s. A sentient being without free will is as absurd as square triangles or round cubes. Wherever there’s an agent capable of pondering the possible consequences of their actions, as well as of external events, there is automatically free will, which can then be thwarted. When theists speak of “free will”, they really have in mind something entirely different — say, “God’s Prime Directive”, or “non-interference clause”. God could indeed have created automata without free will, but these would have been non-sentient, and in fact incapable of either good or evil. We have done so ourselves, and we understand the implications: we neither fine cars nor incarcerate firearms.
quotetheunquote:
So you’re an incompatibilist. Do you think determinism is true or not?
alkisvonidas:
I’m not sure what he’s said about it, but it’s not too hard to see how these ideas start to unravel.
Suppose you have an indeterministic world: some undetermined thing happens in it … an electron moves over there, a photon walks in and orders a beer, whatever you like. I do not will such things to happen. If my willing stuff is constituted by some things (lots of them, if we’re talking about the scale of the atoms in my brain) which physically happen in the world, then it does not follow that because those things are undetermined, my will is therefore any more “free” than it would be if those things were determined. I don’t get how I’d be willing things freely in any coherent sense, when an electron does stuff randomly or isn’t caused deterministically by physical laws or its environmental conditions….
Anyway you slice it up, however the physics actually works, it doesn’t look like I have control over that kind of stuff. The fact that something random caused my behavior (if that is a fact) does not entail that I got to choose my behavior. So compatibilism, of a certain type of “free will” which isn’t claiming violations of physics, seems less absurd than the idea that making my choices indeterministic is making them “free.” So maybe incompatibilism is the wackier idea that you shouldn’t be taking so seriously.
quotetheunquote,
Before dismissing an entire school of philosophy off-hand, you might want to do a bit of research into the philosophical subject of free will – it’s not simply theistic – secular philosophers tend to think it’s the only coherent version of free will.
I see some initial links have been provided. Google is friend :-)
Vaal:
Yeah, it does. Again: under that conceit, whatever anyone ever does (and all the choices they face and all the decisions they take) is exactly as God wanted them to be before Creation. No version of free will survives that — only the illusion thereof.
I was brought up Catholic, and that’s quite contrary to the teachings.
cf. http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s1c1a4.htm
John Morales,
But….do you understand the Omniscience angle and compatibilist free will? How my reply to quotetheunquote was in fact correct, given how he phrased the problem as a problem Omniscience specifically poses to free will?
As I said, I agree the argument for maintaining compatibilist free will becomes more interesting when you add in God as our creator. But your simple declaration that no free will survives it is not an argument. For that, you’d have to have a good understanding of compatibilism. Are you familiar with that philosophical position? One way of putting it is that to say I am “free to choose” between two breakfast cereals (or more important choices) is simply a standard empirical claim of my nature and powers in similar situations. Why do I think I can choose Shreddies instead of Cheerios? Because I understand from my general experience I have that capability, and so long as I’m “free to choose” – that is not constrained physically or coerced by threat – then I could choose what I wish. Whether a God designed such a state of affairs or not, they would still exist and require the same description between scenarios in which I was constrained to do as I desired, or not. And, again, since this is all compatible with everything being completely determined at the outset…the Creator God is not an obvious problem to this form of free will. You may argue that you don’t think compatibilist free will is *real* free will (as I said, the majority of Philosophers who specialize in it will disagree).
But that’s another question vs whether it’s compatible with the Creator God.
As for your Catholic education, did you never learn of the centrality of Aquinas’ influence on the Catholic church’s metaphysics? It’s quite possible I suppose, given that members who sit in the pews don’t get deeply into the philosophy
of their own faith.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Aquinas
“Thomas’ philosophical thought has exerted enormous influence on subsequent Christian theology, especially that of the Catholic Church,”
Read the first paragraph on the wiki page to see the influence of Aquinas on The Church. The Catechism that you quote is *not* a philosophical discussion about the ontological nature of sin and evil, but more an expression of “what sin looks like” in practice. More what the effects of sin have in practice.
But to understand the metaphysics, you have to look to the philosophical underpinnings set forth by Aquinas, especially his famous arguments for God, in which he identifies the nature of God as the only being of “pure act” and of having “no deprivation.” On Aquanis’ view, evil has no ontological existence, it is the absence, the deprivation, of an entity reaching it’s final cause or “end.” This is why Catholics famously argue the “problem of evil” doesn’t really apply to God, since evil is not a “thing” that God could cause.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14004b.htm
Evil is defined by St. Thomas (De malo, 2:2) as a privation of form or order or due measure.
And this has been the Catholic Church’s official metaphysical understanding of evil ever since. So it should be no surprise that an examination of the teaching of the Pope, here for instance Pope John Paul II, you will see these metaphysics of evil:
https://www.ewtn.com/library/Theology/barragpain.htm
“As for evil, it is a deprivation; it has no positive value in itself and therefore cannot be a positive cause or principle, for its origin is a mere privation. “
http://www.catholicapologetics.info/catholicteaching/philosophy/evil.htm
“Evil is certainly real, yet it is not itself a thing; it simply we can say affects a reality which, in all that it has of being, is positive and good[1]. Evil is then a privation of a due good which belongs to a thing according to its nature.”
Also see:
http://www.catholic.com/magazine/articles/the-problem-of-evil
“For evil is not a mere absence of good, it is an absence of due good, of good that ought to have been present; hence, a privation. “
http://www.catholiceducation.org/en/culture/catholic-contributions/narcissism-and-the-dynamics-of-evil.html
“Evil is thus a lack of due being. It is a deficiency, a corruption, a privation, a lack of something that should be there.”
I certainly can’t speak to what you were taught personally. But…yes…it’s true!….the official Catholic Church’s position on evil has for a long time been that it is a privation, not an “ontological thing unto itself.”
(Not that I’m defending that view of evil: I disagree with it).
Cheerio,
Vaal
Vaal:
Yup. And quotetheunquote was quite explicit he referred to theists’ (Christians in particular) notion of free will. For the third and last time: that conceit is embedded in teleology, so that whatever choices one makes were predetermined by God before creation, by virtue of its purported omniscience and omnipotence. Everything anyone thinks and does is precisely what God chose for that someone to do, and if you think that allows for any meaningful concept of free will, well… we will never come to an agreement.
Yes. And it’s been argued here ad nauseam over the years.
Duh.
Because God decided to make a Creation where you would think you could choose.
You’re “choosing” what God chose for you to choose.
(Calvinists at least acknowledge that entailment)
—
Not via the Church, other than through the Catechism. But I’m pretty familiar with his writings.
Precisely. And your initial claim was “A large portion of Christianity (e.g. Catholics) hold that evil is indeed privative.”.
The more theological the claim, the more etiolated from adherents’ actual beliefs and practices. Now, if you’re using Catholics as a metonym for the Church’s professed theology, you have a point — but do note that its usage of “privation” is jargon; it refers to the deliberate withholding or rejection of due goodness, not merely to its absence*. In short, evil is disobedience to God.
If not, I can assure you that in practice, almost all of the Catholic adherents I know believe evil to be an external something (whether a agency, a force, an influence, an idea or whatever) that can affect people.
(And the Devil is evil incarnate)
—
* In that theology, only humans are capable of good and evil — the result of the Original Sin.
@ John Morales
That… doesn’t even make sense. I honestly can’t imagine anyone seriously believing that notion.
Are you saying that God intended, in every minute detail, every tiny decision and turn of my life? That it was part of a divine plan that I put 2 spoonfuls of sugar in my coffee this morning, instead of 1?
Even if I DID believe in an all-powerful God that originated everything, I’d still acknowledge that huge arrays of events that He knows would inevitably happen would be just irrelevant to His plan. Things just had to be one way or another, but there’s no reason to think that everything has a purpose. And if God is indeed all-powerful and not a sham, then events would unfold as natural consequences of previous conditions. My actions and everybody else’s would be the natural result of my character, my upbringing, the surrounding conditions and current whims. Why, then, say that I think I choose, instead of actually choosing? What on Earth is the difference between these two? I remain baffled.
alkisvonidas:
Yes, that’s precisely to what omniscience and omnipotence refer. And let’s not forget omnipresence and omnibenevolence and so forth.
Heh. That’s because it’s not natural, it’s Divine. Your character was known to the nth degree before Creation (if not, whence this purported omniscience?) and God had the power to make it so (else, whence this purported omnipotence?)
—
Of course it is nonsensical, but there you have it. You need faith to fathom the omnigrandeur and omni-ineffability of God.
PS another corollary is that everything everywhere everywhen is precisely as God wants it to be (were God to want it otherwise, it would be otherwise — unless God is perverse and chooses to have things be other than what it wants, despite its omni-attributes).
John Morales:
It’s not clear if you’re claiming that compatibilist, non-libertarian free will is not meaningful. Would you say that? Or is this meant to be more specific to theological arguments which presuppose a god with omni- features? There does at least seem to be a few ways out of the inconsistency for theists, who may not believe god is omnipotent and/or omniscient. They could also try to have a timeless version of an infallible agent, but that looks incoherent to me since agency seems to rule out things like that.
One issue that hasn’t come up very explicitly is the notion that the past (times when, inter alia, you describe conditions like “God chose X”) is supposed to be necessary in some sense, while that’s not supposed to be true of the present or future (not if “free” or contingent choices can happen now/later). It does seem like that kind of view is at least highly problematic. What exactly makes the past different?
It seems wrong to assume that a determinist is committed to a claim like that. You don’t need a proposition like “past states cause present/future ones.” That might be a simple, casual, shorthand way to talk, but it’s very misleading. Physical dynamical laws are understood to describe things symmetrically in time, so it’s just as meaningful (that is, not very) to say “present/future states cause past ones.” Why pick one in favor of the other?
But even “cause” is the wrong term. For one thing, first of all, causation (whenever you are going to use the term) simply doesn’t mean “makes necessary” or anything of the sort. Secondly, it’s a bit of a mouthful to say this: things time-evolve such that a unique state at one time determines a unique state at any other time. But that’s apparently the sort of thing you should be saying. None of the states may be “necessary,” you’re not picking out ones in the past as special or privileged in any way, and they’re not “causing” each other. All sorts of ideas like that confuse people about these issues, and those are only compounded by confusions about freedom, will, choosing, agency, and so forth.
cr @57:
Well, no. If CPT symmetry holds (as it seems to), then CP violations in the Standard Model imply time reversal asymmetry.
Rob Grigjanis:
Fair enough, but that’s presumably not one of the asymmetric distinctions between the past and future that anyone is talking about. So if my statement is amended to account for that, I’m pretty sure all of the same points still hold.
“Yup. And quotetheunquote was quite explicit he referred to theists’ (Christians in particular) notion of free will.”
And he was explicit in focusing on the single attribute that he found to be incompatible with free will: God’s Omniscience.
Many people have an intuition that if someone knows in advance exactly what you are going to do, that this is incompatible with “real” free will. No other attribute needs to be invoked because the possibility Omniscient Foreknowledge in of itself seems to violate free will. This is a very common , specific argument often presented by
atheists – and usually by atheists with an incompatibilist intuition of free will.
That is exactly the form of the argument quotetheunquote presented. He spoke strictly of God’s foreknowledge of our actions, drawing the common direct line between God’s Omniscience and free will. His second reply re-enforced this by saying compatibilism s an “end run” around the problem of God’s Omniscience. (And the specific consequences of foreknowledge to free will is why so many theists tackle the problem by proscribing what God knows, or could or not know, about human free willed choices).
So, he was clear and I was clear in addressing exactly what he wrote. If you wish to make an argument quotetheunquote did not in fact make, and invoke God’s other attributes and predestination for your own specific argument….more power to you.
Sor far you just keep asserting the incompatibiism of any free will with a Creator God, but have provided no argument demonstrating how compatibilism is, in fact, incompatible. But your replies suggest you are weary of the subject, that your mind is made up on the matter and as you say agreement is unlikely. Ok, I’ve been forewarned. No problem.
“Now, if you’re using Catholics as a metonym for the Church’s professed theology, you have a point “
Yes, that was my point. In a massive sect with over a billion adherents, I can’t be responsible for accounting for every
variation among the adherents, so it was a short form for referencing Official Church understanding. That’s why I also disagreed with your follow up claim that evil as privation is not the teaching of The Church. I don’t think one can reasonably claim “the church doesn’t teach X” by pointing to one set of teaching and ignoring the well known tradition where the church does appeal to the metaphysics I referenced. Also, I’ve interacted with many Catholics who have promulgated the Church’s view of evil as privation. And as the links suggest, those who bother to learn the Churches official view promulgate that understanding.
“but do note that its usage of “privation” is jargon;”
I disagree. The concept of evil as privation comes from Aquinas’ arguments, which sets out to understand the very ontology of God and the nature of sin/evil. He arrives at the ontological understanding of “good” where “good” is synonymous with “being” and evil, not “being anything/existing” can not cause anything. This is an important foundation for the whole metaphysics, upon which official Church understanding of sin is derived. Yes it looks *on the surfacet to us* like evil is a thing because it seems like evil causes things to happen. But Aquinas untangles exactly those types of misunderstandings (or seeks to) in his Summa Theologiae.
If it amounts to just jargon to you, ok, but I’ll leave you to take it up with Aquinas..
Vaal:
Now come on. You said you disagreed that it’s jargon. I guess we’d have to take it up with the dead guy if this were going anywhere, since you didn’t offer a satisfactory reason to disagree with Morales’ assessment. But what good would that do?
Aquinas may claim that “good is synonymous with “being,” but that’s a claim which need not be accepted. (All of what follows also applies to evil and its supposed counterpart nonexistence.) Accepted or not, that is not the understanding the vast majority of people have of either of those terms, which is how I’ll characterize common usage as opposed to jargon. They’re not synonyms. By “the vast majority of people,” I mean something like non-Thomists, and probably even all Thomists when they aren’t specifically making arguments directly related to these concepts. Taking it up with Aquinas would not settle that, since his authority on his own doctrines, whatever that may be worth, isn’t worth shit when we’re talking about what a term does or doesn’t mean to anybody else.
Vaal, not so much weary as bored. And yes, my mind is made up until something new comes up.
Obviously, it depends what one calls free will (aka volition).
If it’s the possibility for one to do other than what one will actually do, then foreknowledge of one’s actions indeed precludes that version. As does determinism.
If it’s the ability to make choices according to one’s nature (as alkisvonidas holds), then such foreknowledge doesn’t, but it’s a triviality at best (and begs the question).
Issues relating to coercion are a distraction; obviously, one can only choose from the choices which are available to them, and nobody has unlimited choices*.
—
* Well, except God. It’s a special being.
John Morales:
I’m not sure if that’s how you want to put it — the word “possibility” seems a little misplaced. It isn’t that you must necessarily do whatever you actually do, because all other options are impossible, or in other words that this is the only way the world could be. Alternative actions may be “possible” in a lot of senses (logically possible, etc.), but the claim is that you are unable to affect certain things that would result in you making a different choice. Does that seem like an improvement to you?
Like I said above, this looks like it hinges on certain specific assumptions (at least partly) about what you’re able to do. A simple reason (maybe not the only one) that you can’t affect those things that would result in a different choice is that those things are all in your past. You apparently aren’t the sort of thing which can affect (in the present) what the past was like, or you may say even more generally that “causation” doesn’t work that way. But it’s not very clear how determinism is supposed to enter the picture. What does that have to do with it?
I already talked about how indeterminism doesn’t offer any obvious support for free will (libertarian or otherwise). If both determinism and its negation seem to create the same difficulties, it’s pretty silly to point at determinism as if it were obviously the source of the conflict. Certain formulations of free will may just be incoherent, since they don’t seem to play well with anything.
What question is that supposed to be begging?
CR:
The question of whether one can act other than according to one’s nature. :)
Vaal, I can’t resist this aside:
Amusingly, the Church proudly proclaims its direct continuity from Christ’s original apostles* — and your claim is that, before Aquinas, the church had no such concept of evil as privation.
(A millennium of ignorance about the nature of evil!)
—
* Apostolic succesion.
Heh. I’m not sure if you think that’s a serious question.
If there’s a taco too spicy for even God to eat, it wouldn’t be question-begging to note that there may be milder tacos that are more palatable to him. That just tells you something (maybe something trivial, maybe not) about that god and that taco. It does seem fairly relevant to explaining why he’d choose to eat one instead of the other… isn’t that what we need to be able to do?
Are you saying choosing to eat a mild taco, according to his nature, expresses it in a way that assumes he could have chosen to do other than as he actually did? If it just collapses to the first interpretation in #62, then I don’t get why you had considered them separately.
CR, it’s not a serious question, it’s merely “begged” (presumed in one of its predicates). But it is the implicit question which the proposition addresses.
If one could act contrary to one’s nature, then one’s nature would be to be able to act contrary to one’s nature — which is paradoxical.
(Given that, it’s a badly-formed proposition)
Yes. If one could not actually choose to do otherwise, in what sense is there a choice?
There is a choice in the sense that there is a selection of tacos. The choice you make, based on your nature or based on whatever, is to pick one instead of another. There’s more than one choice, and one of them is chosen. Sounds like a normal sense of choice to me.
I mean, if you want to press the issue hard enough, you might be able to convince yourself that any motivation or reason or cause for making a certain choice somehow implies that there is no such choice. It doesn’t sound right to claim you “could not” do otherwise, if that’s supposed to be understood as logical impossibility. Physics causes you to act a certain way (i.e., your motivations are constituted by some features of physical states), so maybe it’s supposed to be about physical impossibility — but exactly what sense would that be?
Of course you don’t get to “choose” the whole state of the universe or all of the things that motivate your behavior. Why would you need to be able to choose not just what you want but also all of the things that make you want it? Isn’t it enough to make the choice? I don’t get what the benefit would be, if your motivations were something you could arbitrarily will or choose, contra-causally. If they’re not aspects of the events that led up to the situation you’re in, not past experiences that inform a decision, not something that bears on how you would evaluate the consequences of potential choices, not even evolved instincts that you have which might be adaptive somehow… Then what are they and what good would they be? Why would you need control over things like that, or need to be able to will them yourself somehow (without any “outside” influences), if it works just fine to motivate you properly when it isn’t something you will?
CR:
<snicker>
Semantic shift is for losers. It befits you.
Bah. That there might exist some set of alternatives is not to what a choice (in context) refers; a choice is the selection of one of those alternatives.
That there might alternatives from which someone could choose one is not the issue at hand; the issue at hand is that whether one could actually choose other than the particular choice one ultimately takes.
(Should not have bothered to take you seriously)
I haven’t shifted here. I was trying to get you to think about the meaning of the word differently, since you evidently weren’t entertaining the one I had in mind. If that makes me a loser, so be it. But it’s a little odd that winning would look like accepting whatever claims you make. You might have wanted it to be a rhetorical question, but I don’t particularly care.
I get that you believe you should hold onto a claim like this: I don’t make a choice, unless I could have made a different choice. (Is that usually how it goes? I don’t make a comment, unless I could have made a different comment?)
I asked in what sense a different choice could not have been made — no response. Do you mean I could not go back in time to change what caused me to make the choice that I did? Do you mean there’s only one possible way for the whole world to be, and I couldn’t affect that? Do you mean I couldn’t have chosen something, by definition (or more like by fiat), since I couldn’t have chosen what I wanted to choose? Or what exactly is it supposed to mean? Which of those do you think are true, which aren’t, and which are relevant? I’ll try to take you seriously, since it seems like you understand most of the issues well enough, but it would help me if you make it clear what you’re talking about.
@John Morales:
Oddly enough, your comment from TZT four years ago was a bit different.
Maybe it’ll help to use a concrete example.
I’m going to vote for Clinton and not Trump. (Let’s assume that’s true, that I’m predicting my future behavior correctly.) I’m too informed about how thoroughly awful Trump is to vote for him, and probably there are aspects of my personality, how I’ve been socialized my whole life or other sorts of things which also play a role. It’s very hard to imagine any series of events that would lead me to vote for Trump instead of Clinton — but I would not call that impossible, so it could be that it happens or would happen if certain things were (very) different. So there’s no sense in saying I “could not” have acted otherwise. I could have, so long as different things would have caused me to act otherwise. But that stuff (hopefully) won’t happen, in which case I’ll vote for Clinton.
Does it sound to you like I won’t be choosing to vote for Clinton because I “can’t” vote for Trump? I mean, what is supposed to be lost when you substitute “I’ll choose to vote for Clinton” with “I’ll vote for Clinton”? Note that I haven’t been talking about libertarian freedom here, just that it sounds coherent to me to say that we can make choices.
Is this not a good example? Are there other cases which are supposed to seem like choices but which are not actual ones, since I “could not” have done otherwise in some important sense? What would an example of that be?
shark
Owlmirror @71, nice. Shame I can’t argue the point with myself of 4 years ago.
(Seems longer)
—
CR, the distinction is between having choices (“There is a choice in the sense that there is a selection of tacos.”) and making a choice (“The choice you make, based on your nature or based on whatever, is to pick one instead of another.”) — they’re both “a choice”, but different senses. Thus my #69.
What it sounds like to me is that you [will] be choosing to vote for Clinton because you won’t vote for Trump. What it sounds like to me is that you won’t be choosing on voting day, because you’ve already chosen. And what it also sounds like to me is that you could not (given the circumstances) have chosen otherwise and still be you*.
I don’t think it’s a good example; a good example would be where there is no particular reason to choose one alternative over another. Would you always make the same choice?
—
* To circle back, if God is omni-whatnot, it chose to create this particular reality where you would choose that, therefore it chose what you would choose, so you really had no choice ;)
I seem to recall that while Aquinas definitely based his theology on the privative concept of evil, Augustine was a much earlier proponent of the concept.
And per the Catholic Encyclopedia on “Evil” (where I got the above quote), other church fathers and early philosophers offered similar ideas.
John Morales:
If circumstances were different, I would have chosen otherwise (and I’d still “be me,” whatever I am). It doesn’t matter that, under precisely the same circumstances as the actual ones, I would not have made a different choice than I actually did. It doesn’t matter, because I’m not claiming (as many others wouldn’t) criteria like that are necessary for making choices.
What’s supposed to make that good? The choices (or apparent choices) people are most concerned about in this context or basically any context — the ones which prompt some to make such extravagant and implausible claims, to try to rescue what they think is important, such as “freedom” — are not ones where there is no particular reason to choose one alternative over another. They typically think the question of whether we have moral responsibility depends on it, for instance, and of course there’s no need to assume moral decision-making must be irrational or arational. So how is your type of example going to be more helpful?
Do you mean would I always do it, if the same circumstances were repeated multiple times, or would I always do it no matter how they vary? Yes if the former, and no if the latter. That’s one way to distinguish this compatibilist idea from a libertarian or contra-causal one.
In case you’re worried, I’m never in precisely the same circumstances at different times. So there’s no danger of actually repeating the same choices, over and over. And it doesn’t really bother me that I can’t control everything about the circumstances I’m actually in. I’m not interested in being omnipotent … sounds like it would be too much work. For me it’s sufficient that, far short of being omnipotent, I am capable of influencing what happens, in ways that are beneficial to me and other people/causes/etc. that I care about.
Well, this omni-whatnot God may have had no choice in the matter…. If we’re still discussing whether or not it’s coherent for anybody to have any choices at all, then until we’ve established that it is (unless you’re seriously arguing that it isn’t), you can’t maintain that one special being does make choices. So you have to concede the argument to me that there can be choices, and only then should you proceed with your argument that God chose everything instead of us.
[Do I have the free will to not comment about free will? I guess not.]
It has been four years, but I think my stance has not really changed. I hope I can word it more clearly than I did then, though.
So, here’s my current attempt: “Free will”, in the sense of “the ability to choose otherwise” cannot actually exist, because regardless of whether the universe is deterministic or nondeterministic, what we call “choices” actually arise from parts of our minds that we don’t have complete control over (and cannot have complete control over), and choosing implies control. We feel like we make choices, but those choices arise from feelings, memories, sensory inputs, and so on. We cannot choose every aspect of those feelings, memories, and sensory inputs (and so on), and we cannot choose to have chosen to have different feelings, memories, and sensory inputs.
Now, given that strong free will is impossible, some people might think that this means that no-one has any control/will at all, which isn’t quite what I intend. “Control/will” is an emergent concept, and to the extent that we can self-modify to some extent, we can learn, change, and make different choices based on what we learn and how we change, and we have some awareness of this, and can direct our lives accordingly. I suggested calling being aware of this ability to learn to make different choices “anti-fatalism”. It might well be a sort of compatibilist free will.
(I may be leaving things out, so I may ponder this more and revise/revisit.)
Hard to believe TZT was four years ago. I miss SGBM.
I think it’s fair to say choosing implies you’re able to do what you’ve chosen: you can “control the outcome,” in some sense. But I don’t think it must mean that you can control all* of the things from which your “choices” arise. If it does, then I guess we may need another word for it (“free will” is already tainted too, so this doesn’t look like a great track record), since like both of us have said you can’t do that. Yet there is something we can do, which distinguishes us from rocks and electrons and such.
*I figure it would need be all causative factors, not merely some. Leaving out any would render this type of “control” you require irrelevant, since the ones you don’t control may affect the outcome you’ve chosen just as well as the ones you do. It’s not clear where this could ever end…. It seems like you’d need to be able to control existing in a whole other world, not just a few things in it that would be inconsistent with the rest of the world you happen to be in. Do you only need control over direct/immediate causes? How do you characterize those, and how are they substantially and relevantly different from other causes? If you need to be omnipotent or nearly so, in order to “choose” something, I think we’ve gone a long way from ordinary meaning of the word.
CR:
Because arbitrary choices have the least confounding factors.
No; that’s why I wrote “To circle back”. It refers to my earlier claim about one having no meaningful free will if every choice one makes is deliberately predetermined by some external agent. I don’t have to concede, since all along I’ve held that the logic is fine but the premises are rubbish — i.e. the argument itself is valid.
John Morales:
Alright. I’m not sure what the concern is there. But I suppose it works the same way as when there are more of those factors. Assuming there’s no particular reason to choose one alternative over another, then I’ll make identical choices when the circumstances are identical and different ones when they’re different. (That’s if determinism is true, to keep it simple, but nothing relevant changes if indeterminism is true.)
I take it that there would still be “causes” for my actions, even if they aren’t “reasons” in the sense you’re talking about. Those causes could be different, so I could act differently. So it’s false to say that I could not have done otherwise — that’s assuming determinism and without any of your confounding factors. Maybe something else is meant by the expression, but I still don’t get what that is or why it matters.
Sure. However, it doesn’t only depend on the premise that the god is omni-whatnot, but also that it can (and did) choose to create a reality, as you put it. Without the latter, it doesn’t follow that it chose to do so. I mean, you might be able to claim some combination of omni-whatnots entail that it chooses, so it was implicit all along, but I don’t know how convincing that will be.
Anyway, it’s not clear why you’re ready to accept (or at least let it pass without argument) that a god had a choice, but not so ready for the case of people like us (given that there isn’t a god predetermining anything, as I know you agree). Doesn’t it seem reasonable to wait until we can straighten out the situation for the existing beings (us) that we know and care about, so we can apply what we learn to this hypothetical case you’re constructing for something that neither of us believes is even real?
CR:
There you go; you’re free to choose, but you will always make the same choice under the same circumstances, even when you have no reason to choose one alternative over another.
If you’re happy to believe that means you have free will, fine, but it does mean you could (would) have chosen otherwise.
It’s not a god, it’s God. The god. Proper noun, the monotheists’ god.
I thought I was pretty clear: I am pointing out the logical entailment with respect to free will of an omni creator God without accepting the truth of the premises about its attributes and actions (never mind its existence as other than an incoherent idea).
(Just as in #65 I’m pointing out the entailment of Vaal’s claim, not accepting it other than arguendo)
[erratum]
… you could (would) not have …
I wouldn’t say anyone has free will, because I think that term has only gotten more stupid and useless over the centuries. I’m a compatibilist in the sense that I agree (more or less) with that way of characterizing our behavior, but I’m not really on board with an attempt to sell that to people as “free will.” At least at the point where we are now, it’s too confusing to even try.
On the other hand, as Dennett and others have argued, the thing most people care about, when they actually sort through the issues thoughtfully, isn’t libertarian free will but the kinds of abilities (and inabilities) we evidently do have that compatibilists have tried to describe/explain. So if it meant pointless arguments about libertarian free will would cease, if enough people understood that it’s stupid and there’s nothing serious to be concerned about given that there is no such thing, then I wouldn’t have much reason to complain if the term were appropriated for something that actually makes sense. It would make historical discussions about the term harder to follow, but that’s no big loss.
You haven’t explained why choosing otherwise is impossible. I gave you a sense in which another choice could be made, and you’re just asserting that it can’t be — why? What is in contradiction with what, or which types of events could not happen?
Heh, I still have no clue which one you’re talking about, as monotheistic gods come in many varieties, but no matter. What if that God, the God which exists for the purposes of this argument, doesn’t have a choice about creating the world? I mean, you did say “it chose to create” and “therefore it chose what you would choose.” But if that premise is not really supposed to be on the table yet, because you simply didn’t mean to phrase it that way, then I’ll just drop it.
I guess “crypto-compatibilist” would be a good label for that. And it sounds ridiculous, so it’s certain to make everyone happy.
CR, we’re now well and truly into the purity of Wittgensteinian language-games.
No; what I did is accept your claim: “Assuming there’s no particular reason to choose one alternative over another, then I’ll make identical choices when the circumstances are identical and different ones when they’re different.”
(It was not I who claimed that, it was you; I merely acknowledged it and proceeded therefrom)
I’m not the one making the proposition, monotheists are. Try telling one of them that there is more than one of them, see what response you get.
Leaving aside that it’s redundant to use the definite article for a proper noun, it changes nothing so long as it did create the world and was (at least) omniscient and omnipotent.
Yes, and I was having a little dig at the conceit thereby; it makes no sense to say so in the context of a supposedly timeless God (who is both trascendent and immanent!). There was no spacetime before Creation, there was only the Void (and God!).
Since it’s utterly irrelevant whether a choice was possible or not given that it was the act of an omni creator God, feel free to carry it. Changes nothing other than how much baggage you carry.
BTW, as a serious aside on the free will topic — I think it akin to the reality-as-a-simulation topic in its non-significance to us.
I think that from our perspective, it’s irrelevant either way; for example, it’s pointless to claim that if free will doesn’t exist, one can’t hold people responsible for their actions (cf. law) since then it’s also the case that one can’t hold people responsible for holding people responsible for their actions.
(What changes? ;) )
I’d say the conversation about it can be helpful, to the extent it makes people think more clearly about things like responsibility, causation, and so forth. But it won’t make much difference that you don’t hold a legal/political system responsible for holding people responsible. It’s most likely going to do that anyway, whatever your thoughts about the subject may be — such systems are a little more powerful than you and harder to budge, no?
Anyway, it seems like a reasonable assumption that it would be better to have systems that aren’t built on a mountain of nonsense. Judges, juries, legislatures, cops, etc., may be more sympathetic to certain people in a lot of ways (particularly ones they’re biased against), if they don’t believe such people can/should be blamed for exercising a type of freedom that doesn’t exist. If we can change the way they’re thinking/acting and get a slightly better system out of it, then we don’t need to be “holding them responsible” for it, whatever that would involve.
SGBM ॐ, as I recall, was more adamant that not even God could choose other than it had chosen, but I don’t recall that he made a convincing argument.
Let me try something: “Choice” implies a timeline. Even if the timeline splits with each choice, the ones in each branch can’t choose to be in the other timeline. Now, let’s say that God chooses one timeline preferentially. Can God choose what preferences it has? I suspect that most theists making that argument would say that God chooses “the best”, according to criteria that God has. Can God choose to choose which preferences it has; which criteria it uses to judge what is the best? It seems to me that there cannot be a meaningful infinite regression of preferences; if God actually always chooses the preferences that inform its choices, then those preferences are inherent and not chosen. But if God can and does choose different preferences at different times, then God is fundamentally arbitrary, and being arbitrary implies that randomness is fundamental, not free will.
On the other hand, let’s start off with saying that God chooses arbitrarily (something I suspect that most theists would reject). Given that he’s being arbitrary, it is again randomness that is fundamental. (Is it even meaningful to say that God could choose to be arbitrary in a different way? (“I will decide based on a coin flip, unless I don’t like what comes up” ⇐ “don’t like” implies preference, not randomness — but see above about having preferences).)
Finally, let’s posit that a transcendent God experiences all timelines simultaneously, and has no preference for any particular one. Where is there any choice involved there? We in one timeline perceive that timeline as being different from other possible timelines (that is, we can imagine historical counterfactuals where different events occurred at some point in our timeline, leading to different contingent events in the imagined timeline). But God doesn’t choose any of the timelines; God is simply aware of them.
So to sum up: in all non-timeless scenarios, God either has actual preferences (which implies that God cannot choose to have other preferences), or is arbitrary (which implies that randomness is fundamental to God’s nature).
In a timeless scenario, no timeline is preferred, so no choice is even being made.
So not even God can have chosen differently.
CR:
But that’s precisely the case now (cf, extenuating circumstances, compos mentis).
—
Owlmirror:
It’s worse than that, Jim. In a timeless scenario, no events are possible, never mind choice.
(Change is a concept dependent on time existing; in a timeless scenario, there is no before and after)
@ 61, consciousness razor,
re “jargon.”
The point of the discussion I was having with John Morales isn’t “whether Aquinas’ metaphysical arguments were any good or not.” (I believe they all fail, and I reject Aquinas’ association of “good” with “existence” and “evil” with “privation.”)
Rather, the point was whether the Thomistic metaphysics (which the Catholic theologians hold to) really does entail that evil is “privation.” In other words…do they really mean it? Answer: Yes. Yes they really do.
If you follow the conversation I had with John Morales…you see how it began: John claimed my religious analogy was inapt by claiming evil is not privative. I replied with an aside that it was the view of Catholics that evil is privative, and John challenged THAT claim as well. I supplied information showing that, whether the majority of pew-goers follow it or not, the official metaphysics of the Catholic church DOES hold that evil is privation – per Aquinas (and yes Augustine is in the mix). Then John said I have a point about evil-as-privation as it pertains to Catholic theology…but then seemed to take it back somewhat by saying that word is used merely as a form of “jargon”….as if to suggest that the Church doesn’t “really mean” privation per se.
But…it does mean exactly that, in the Church’s metaphysics: a true lack, privation; Metaphysically, evil doesn’t have “existence.” That was Aquinas’ point in his metaphysics. And Aquinas, as I said, untangles exactly the issues John seems to be conflating – that is, John apparently thinks the word “privation” is mere jargon, because he can point to the apparently positive “real thing” that the Church means and identifies evil (e.g. Disobedience of God). But Aquinas sought to explain why that would be a confusion: Aquinas admits it seems at first glance that evil is a “thing” not merely a privation, because otherwise you’d only have “the good” existing, but then it makes no sense that “good” would cause evil, unless there were some defect in “good.” So it seems you need some evil to “exist” to cause evil. But since Aquinas is committed to the metaphysics of “good” being synonymous with “existence,” he can’t allow evil to have existence.
Therefore, Aquinas goes to lengths to explain why evil really is only privation, and that it’s good that actually results in evil – that is some good can (“accidentally”) result in some privation or another.
See here the lengths Aquinas goes to, in order to explain how evil happens and *seems* causative, where it can not possibly be causative because it does not possess the necessary aspects of existence to do so:
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1049.htm
So, again, I’m not arguing that Aquinas’ arguments are sound: I am arguing for what Aquinas acutally means to conclude, which is that evil really is “privative” and catholic scholars/theologians have generally been on board with those metaphysics. Which is why you will be able to find plenty of Catholic writers explaining those metaphysics (see some of the links I provided).
Anyway, hope that clears up the point. I think that conversation is played out.
Cheers.
I think we all know evil is a real “thing.” It’s having to click away the damned side-bar pop up adds on this site to read it!
Vaal:
What proportion of self-identified Catholics are Catholic writers explaining those metaphysics?
(There are well over 1 billion Catholics extant)
Pointing to the selected minority and claiming they speak for the majority is not very convincing; in fact, Catholicism has been in practice a syncretic religion for a loooooong time; witness the not-coincidental Catholic holidays (Holy Days) congruence with pre-Catholic celebrations.
My wife remains a devout Catholic, but we nonetheless successfully employed contraception until her menopause; my own pubescent) drift from Catholicism was engendered no less from its silliness than from the evident hypocrisy of its adherents. My father-in-law paid lip-service to turning the other cheek — but wrong him somehow, and count the cost. The very current Pope made mention that he would punch anyone who insulted his mom!
Or: what they practice (telling of what they believe) is, in the most part, not what they preach and not congruent to the Credo, nevermind the metaphysics. Citing their theology as their actual belief is so very, very naive.
Owlmirror:
I’m not sure how interchangeably we can treat “random” and “arbitrary” here. To put it really simply, the way I think of it (YMMV), random stuff has no pattern, while arbitrary stuff has no reason. Some subtle differences there to be careful about.
Sure, why not? He could choose based on a coin flip, or he could choose based on rolling a d6, a d20, and forth. Infinite possibilities. Maybe the coin flip is just easier for him, since he happened to have a coin handy, and that didn’t have anything do with liking or not liking “what comes up.”
But would you then say “taking the easiest approach” is the fundamental principle at work here (which you may consider a preference), or would it still be randomness since the coin is the thing that “directly” decides the outcome, with no influences pertaining to his knowledge of the outcome? I guess the question is whether we should treat all preferences the same way, or if some could have a different kind of status (which might render them irrelevant or at least make some kind of a difference).
Well, he may have chosen to have none. It’s possible that he didn’t flip the coin, or whatever it is that he does. But when you add that he is merely aware of them, then I guess that isn’t really what you had in mind.
Still, if he created them all in some sense or another, without choosing or preferring any as you say, then presumably it was possible to create none of them or any number of them. (If one world’s existence somehow depended on the creation or existence of any of the others, then that wouldn’t be true. But I don’t know why that’s a good assumption to make.)
He might not prefer world #573 more than #572 and didn’t choose one instead of the other (since he did make both), but he could’ve stopped creating at #572. Or he could’ve made any number in any order, without creating the one I’m designating #573. That one didn’t need to be there (wherever there is), so he could’ve not made it, but apparently he preferred to do so.
A few comments on Free Will stuff, if I can jump in a bit…
I wholeheartedly agree with a point John Morales made earlier about the subject of an entities “nature.” That to say something does something against it’s nature is incoherent. That is actually one of my criticisms of Thomistic metaphysics and ideas like Natural Law Morality (which tries to arbitrarily select only some aspects of how a thing can behave as being “it’s nature”).
As to the importance of the free will discussion, sometimes I get to the point where it seems quibbles over semantics. Incompatibilism includes both sides of those who deny free will is compatible with determinism; one side, generally tending to be theists, conclude either free will must be dualistic/ contra-causal, a magical exception to determined events, or the others who decide it does not exist.
The problem that drags me back in to the conversations is the *manner* in which I see free-will deniers speak: you see things like “free will is an illusion” and “we don’t ‘really’ have a choice” and “you couldn’t REALLY do otherwise.” Etc.
And from my position, this tends to be a sloppy use of words, where valid concepts are sort of thrown out like the baby with the bathwater. And in doing so, more confusion results, not less.
I should’ve explicitly mentioned “voters” as well. There are such legal principles, but they don’t constrain behavior very effectively. Some behavior isn’t affected by them at all.
I was talking to a friend not long ago, who told me in all seriousness that it was some kind moral failure that people lacked will if they were contemplating suicide. (We were discussing guns, and I claimed it’s a good public policy to try to lower gun-related suicides. He’s a fucking gun nut, so that amounts to heresy.) Needless to say, this is not a friend whose opinions I trust on many topics. This is nowhere near the first time I’ve heard bullshit like that.
People like that do vote, for instance. That can affect what laws we have, as well as how people interpret and enforce those laws, not to mention all sorts of other shit that happens outside the legal and political systems. If they think victims of suicide deserve it or something (and it has to be stressed this is not at all an isolated example), then I’m sorry to tell you that quoting a few principles in a legal encyclopedia doesn’t change a fucking thing about what actually happens in the real world.
Often, like I said, people are already biased against a person/group considered suspicious or alleged of crimes, ones not “deserving” of welfare benefits, etc. — that’s when you ought to be extra careful about trying to understand what a person is/isn’t capable of, not saying to yourself “oh well, it doesn’t fucking matter at all what I think about how people actually work.” And if you do have this bizarre idea — which you think you can pull out of your ass whenever it’s useful for oppressing the group you hate or protecting your guns or whatever the fuck it is that makes you want to use it — this idea that people have some kind of magical fucking freedom that makes them responsible for things they couldn’t do, then you’re not going to be not going to be making very good decisions.
@77 – Owlmirror wrote:
“So, here’s my current attempt: “Free will”, in the sense of “the ability to choose otherwise” cannot actually exist, “
But…the conversation really turns on what one means by “the ability to choose otherwise.” If you mean by that, reference to some ideal where one could choose otherwise given the exact same state of the universe, then, agreed, we have no such ability to choose otherwise. But if in describing our ability to choose otherwise we mean something like a normal empirical appraisal of our own powers, then we really do have the ability to choose otherwise. Even in a deterministic world, we would have to do exactly what we do when thinking “what should I choose, A or B?” We would have to think of ourselves as an identify existing THROUGH time, not frozen in one causal state of the universe. We’d have to appraise our abilities inductively (through time) – to determine if “I have the ability to do X.” And then we would have to play out our choices by employing If/Then reasoning, by which we understand normal empirical truths or probabilities: “I AM capable of either action, driving or walking, so which do I desire to do? Well…IF I choose to drive to work, THEN I will get there faster than walking but then I won’t get the health benefit of walking, and …”
And I would say this actually comports best to the way we normally reason about our choices, and it’s entirely compatible
with everything being determined as it does not rely on our having to “do otherwise” in the context of “exactly the same physical state of the universe.” The way we apprehend truths about “what choices I can make” is the same as the truths we apprehend about everything else in the empirical world – e.g. it isn’t an “illusion” to say that “water CAN be either frozen OR liquid or made to evaporate, given certain temperatures” – it’s a way of apprehending truths about the nature of water, even given it’s processes are entirely determined.
@77 – Owlmirror wrote:
…because regardless of whether the universe is deterministic or nondeterministic, what we call “choices” actually arise from parts of our minds that we don’t have complete control over (and cannot have complete control over), and choosing implies control. We feel like we make choices, but those choices arise from feelings, memories, sensory inputs, and so on. We cannot choose every aspect of those feelings, memories, and sensory inputs (and so on), and we cannot choose to have chosen to have different feelings, memories, and sensory inputs.
Your use of the term “we” (or “I”) seems to assume some division of “you” that is separate from the “decision-making” part of the brain. You are speaking like a dualist. Do you mean to?
Why would you think that a part of your brain that makes decisions is not “you” making decisions? To say “I” didn’t have control over that part is to assume that weird dualism I’m talking about – that the part making the decision was not “you” and therefore “out of your control.”
If you decide between going to Africa or Europe for a vacation, and choose Africa, and make all the rational deliberations about how you’ll get there, what you need for the trip etc…what sense will it make that this was not “really you” making the decisions, or controlling the decisions. Even if some portion of the decision making starts in a non-concious form and makes it to consciousness later…why wouldn’t that still be “you” making the decisions; the state where you become aware of the reasons you had for making the decision?
Think of it: if the reasons you are aware of for why you made a decision really AREN’T the reasons “you had” for making the decision, then most of what people do would be made mysterious and unintelligible. Including the very reasons you have for your conclusion in the first place! That some of our processing goes on pre-consciously is a plausible conclusion, but to go from that to denying that part as being “us” or “not representing our own control” is deeply problematic given just how much it would have to explain, coherently.
I see that you edge toward a version of compatibilist free will, and I generally agree, but it appears to me (if I got the gist right) that you start off with some dubious assumptions.
Agree, disagree?
Cheers!
John Morales:
“What proportion of self-identified Catholics are Catholic writers explaining those metaphysics?”
Why are you still on about that when I conceded, early, that pew-going Catholics won’t necessarily know of or understand the metaphysics of Catholic theologians. I had clarified that I was pointing not to “every catholic” but to tradition within the Catholic church, derived from Aquinas (and also Augustine) in which evil is understood to be privation.
“Citing their theology as their actual belief is so very, very naive.”
I have argued about a strain of philosophy held within the Catholic church and even referenced the theology of a recent Pope, as explained by a Cardinal, in which evil is described exactly as I’ve been talking about: as privative, in the ontological sense.
If you mean to assert that the Pope didn’t really believe what he had said he believed, or that Catholic theologians explicating similar metaphysics don’t believe what they are writing, I’m afraid you’ve given me little actual evidence or reason to take your word over theirs.
But, I don’t see anywhere else for this conversation to go now…it seems bent on any quibble possible to avoid just conceding my point that there really is a tradition within the Catholic church of seeing evil in ontological terms as “privation.”
Vaal:
Because it was a response to what I quoted you writing, well after your early concession.
(Had you not done so, there would have been no such retort)
I don’t know what this particular Pope might have written about turning the other cheek (Matthew 5:39), but I do know what was reported (and recorded) as his claim about the punching.
Point being that Catholics’ purported beliefs are belied by their actual actions — the very epitome of hypocrisy.
How quickly you forget your acknowledged concession!
@consciousness razor:
Well… I can think about it, but at this time, it seems to me to be describing the same sort of thing in different ways. Doesn’t random stuff have no pattern for no reason? Aren’t things that happen with no reason things that have no pattern?
There may be some better way to describe it.
I was thinking of a vast multiverse of timelines; ones where every single possible different sort of universe have come into existence, many differing from their neighbors only in that one atom jiggled in a slightly different way, or didn’t exist. And God is aware of all of them together, every possibility played out in space and over time.
Ah, I see. So in this scenario, God does have at least one preference: for this vast multiverse of all possibilities to exist rather than otherwise.
Owlmirror, that’s apropos to the OP:
“The void laughs again, unfriendly: “There is life eternal within the eater of souls. Nobody is ever forgotten or allowed to rest in peace. They populate the simulation spaces of its mind, exploring all the possible alternative endings to their life. There is a fate worse than death, you know.””
A Colder War
@Vaal:
It looks like what what you write in the second sentence above (and everything following it), is what I was trying to get at in my penultimate paragraph @#77 — “will” as an emergent concept; awareness of possibilities and the sense of making choices; anti-fatalism. Yes?
I am baffled as to how you come to the conclusion that emphasizing that there is much about how the brain (and body) works that is not under our control, is “dualism” (although, come to think of it, I wanted to be nonspecific enough that the argument would still work even if dualism were true).
Because I’ve read some works on cognitive psychology and neuroscience, which emphasize that our bodies and brains (and therefore our minds, as something that results from that brain working) work in ways that we don’t really understand or have control over (we can sometimes become aware of this, and try and exert control, but only to a certain degree).
To reference your Shreddies/Cheerios example above — do you have control over the fact that you enjoy eating both, and give preference to both of them as breakfast possibilities over other possible options, such as dormice fried in axle grease, or a salad of dandelion greens sprinkled with sawdust and lint?
You might think the options I gave to be disgusting in several different ways (I certainly do), but do you have control over your feelings of disgust?
Why do you think you’ll ever become aware of all of the reasons?
Or rather, the reasons you are aware of are underlain by reasons you aren’t aware of.
I’m not sure that it would be “most” — but I could be wrong.
Various branches of psychology and neuroscience are trying to make the matter more intelligible and less mysterious, but we certainly are not at 100% clarity.
I think it’s the other way around, really.
Do you really think you can explain, down to every level of brain function, why you prefer to argue on the internet, rather than play video games or read books, or watch television? I certainly make no pretense of such complete self-insight.
@John Morales: Apropos to SF, in expanding on my example, I was reminded of a different work:
(I would be astonished if you had not read The Demolished Man)
Owlmirror:
I wouldn’t say so. I mean, you can (apparently) make sense of these sorts of statements:
– “This random, patternless stuff occurs for the reasons that X, Y, Z. We used a truly random number generator, for the reason that our program works better that way. It makes that patternless stuff for us for that reason.”
– “This pattern of mud cracks isn’t here for a reason. It simply did form that way, as the soil dried and cracked due to natural processes. Nobody ordered that, no supernatural teleology, etc.”
A different sort of example: you could say things like “pick any arbitrary pattern of Xs.” That’s not so much implying that there is no reason behind the pattern or your choice of pattern, but more like that it doesn’t matter (for these purposes) what those reasons may be, since any will suffice as long as the results meet certain criteria (ones such that it is a pattern of Xs).
You may express the same kind of idea with “pick any random pattern of Xs.” That probably shouldn’t be understood as “pick any patternless pattern of Xs,” since for any X that’s an impossible type of X to pick. It’s more like a suggestion that you try to randomly pick a pattern, but again (although they supposedly don’t matter) there may still be reasons why you’ve randomly chosen one of the possible patterns. Maybe the reason is that that one was simple, easy to choose, easy to define clearly/rigorously, aesthetically pleasing, corresponds to the actual empirical results you’ve gotten, etc. The statement that you had a reason to pick that one (or that there were reasons for whatever) is just different from the statement it has a pattern.
Not that it makes an obvious difference with anything you were saying. But it has the potential go off the rails, if it’s not clear how we can interpret these terms.
But you mean that it isn’t a “creator god”? It didn’t create them but is just a passive observer? In that case it seems trivial that God didn’t choose to create that … but in that case, it wouldn’t make a difference if it were a single simple universe or the biggest baddest multiverse imaginable.
That doesn’t seem to be going far enough. For each of the possibilities, it’s true (presumably) that it may not have existed. It’s not all or nothing. Being possible doesn’t imply it’s actual, and it also doesn’t mean it must exist — unless you’re saying there’s some other principle at work which is forcing God’s hand into making every possible thing. So if God chooses that, then there are as many of those preferences as there are possible worlds, which I guess is infinite (or much more than one).
Just so I have the right sort of picture, are these splitting “events” supposed to be branches structured like a “Y” or more like parallel tracks that look like “||”? Does a unique past history exist which leads to each different “branch” at some present/future state (as in the latter case), or do some present/future states share some of the same past?
“Random” is a slippery concept. It turns out that it is very hard to define “random” in terms that are not circular. This has had important implications for probability–where randomness is central to most formulations. Kolmogorov probably had the most satisfying definition–a series was considered random if it could not be defined by rules or other specifications in fewer bits that were in that system. Of course, that only works for finite series.
This problem was so fundamental that it was one of the motivations of the early Bayesians for rejecting frequentist probability.
Let me clarify:
So if God chooses X and Y and Z and not P (where all are possible worlds), then there are as many of those preferences as there are possible worlds, which I guess is infinite (or much more than one).
The point is just that you have a bunch of “and” connectors, with perhaps some “nots” strewn about hither and thither. I don’t know why I would have to think God chooses “XYZ~P”, or else he doesn’t choose “XYZ~P”, as if that were a single thing that amounts to a single choice. The claim seems to be that X is a possible world, full stop. It could exist, which is to say it could exist independent of the Y possible world, independent of Z, independent of not-P, and so forth.
My last comment was not in response to a_ray_in_dilbert_space. I agree that “randomness” is very slippery. I’m sure I didn’t do justice to all of the different senses of it, and I didn’t mean to address how each relates to arbitrariness in the sense of not having a (relevant or important) reason. The point is just that many don’t mean that and may introduce a lot of unnecessary confusion.
@consciousness razor:
Yes, but that’s because of polysemy: “reason” can be used in the sense of “having some contingent history which explains the current situation” (non-teleological) or in the sense of “because some intelligent agent intended it that way” (teleological).
Frex, the second example could be phrased as: “The reason we see this pattern of mud cracks is because of the natural process of the mud drying and shrinking under a hot sun, and then the entire surface being baked so hard that it never turned into mud again, and then being buried under later sediments, and then being exposed again” (non-teleological sense of “reason”)
(“Everything happens for a reason” is an example of a deepity based on this equivocation — the trivial (true) meaning is non-teleological; the profound (but false) meaning is meant to imply universal teleology. See also: “Please let me be the first to punch the next person who tells you everything happens for a reason” — either the sentiment is utterly trivial, or is profound and horrible in its implications)
@consciousness razor:
Good point. I hadn’t actually unpacked what it is that God is doing in the scenarios. I’m not sure it matters if God is setting up the conditions for the multiverse so that each universe splits off, or creates an infintely large number of universes that start off and have those differences develop later, or actively brings about each split from some presumably empty root universe. Something I may need to ponder more.
But thinking about it now makes me wonder: Is choosing literally everything possible an actually meaningful “choice”? Does it really make sense to say that an infinitely-choosing God has free will? Does God have the ability to not choose something?
Clearly, the idea needs work.
Well, it’s not obvious that patterns, as such, always have that sort of reason or explanation behind them. I guess I gave you a poor example. Let me try a few more.
Couldn’t it just be a brute fact that the cosmic microwave background radiation happens to be in that specific pattern? There’s a little bit of contingent history to talk about, from the actual radiation extrapolating back to earlier moments of the big bang … so tell that story if you like. But the “initial” condition which led to the CMB may not have any further explanation. Maybe that’s just it: it’s got some pattern, and that’s all there is to say. There’s no sensible answer to why that pattern is what it is.
Similarly, if you think of, say, a law of physics, that’s a pattern or regularity that we see in the world which is useful for understanding lots of stuff. But there may not be any further reason for what the laws are or why they take the particular form that they do. Why do they have that shape? At some point, if you keep digging as far as you could go, the answer could just be: no reason at all. The laws are just a part of the system we’ve come up with for describing what predictably happens (NB: merely being predictable entails we’d represent it with some pattern or another), and there may be no reason or explanation for whatever they turn out to be.
Or if you just have a geometric shape like a triangle or a rectangle, what are we supposed to identify as “the reason” for that? I mean, you can define what it is, use it in various ways, prove other things with it, etc. So while some triangle or another is definitely a pattern, that doesn’t seem to imply it has a “reason” for being itself.