(November 25, 2014 at 5:33 am)robvalue Wrote: But I disagree. We don't have total free will, we are restricted by the laws of the universe and also the limits of our minds and bodies. So we effectively have a range of choices. Some of those choices are clearly harmful.The Bible mostly treats "free will" as the ability to choose between the option to serve god or reject him. Genesis would have been the most straightforward example of this (simple rule- don't eat from this tree) but it confuses the issue by its implication that Adam and Eve did not have free will until after they exercised their free will. After that the number of rules and regulations and commands and threats grows and grows and finally Jesus tells the high priests that god wants "mercy, not sacrifices" which throws the whole thing into even more turmoil by implying that being perfect is less important than being sincere.
So free will might be critically important, or it might not matter as long as you're a "good person." Or the most important thing might be whether or not you convert on your deathbed, in which case neither applies.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
