(February 25, 2015 at 5:25 am)robvalue Wrote: Right! You absolutely should restrict the free will of people who run around causing harm. We have to, since Y-man doesn't seem to be helping.I think disagreements like these come from poor definitions of "Free Will".
On one hand, to theists, the concept of Free Will crucial for us to acknowledge because as long as we do, we validate a certain idea of that theists need so that we can talk about all the horrendous things that people do with it. They want to present us with a dilemma. Either God makes robots, or he gives us the ability to act independenally from his wishes, and what we do will have consequences of cosmic proportions.
But here's where I think they're getting confused...In a discussion of this sort, when an Atheist says something like
" You absolutely should restrict the free will of the people going around doing a bunch of harm"
They are using the concept of Free Will merely to describe that there are a bunch of different people, all independently doing different things, and if the things they are doing are harming others, they need to be prevented from doing them.
This is where we need to be more accurate with our use of the term "Free Will". What causes a psychopath to kill a bunch of teenage boys, keep their remains in a freezer, and then thaw them out later only to have sex with their corpses? Free Will? Among the people who commit atrocities like this, very distinct and consistent similarities show up across the board. These people do things like this because it is their nature to do them. Variables such as childhood development, traumatic experiences, economic status, education level, geographical location, relationship experiences, or lack there of, these are all things that none of these people got to choose and yet everyone of them could be considered dominoes in a row that were all waiting for the first one to tip. If you combine all of those environmental factors with the neurophysiological vessel that was constructed entirely out of genes that they certainly didn't get to choose, it becomes quite hard to think of culpability in the same way. Sure, we should still lock them up until we can find a way to fix it, but it's a problem that we can nonetheless realize needs to be "fixed" rather than an opportunity to relish in the concept of justice served in by an eternal soul roast. This is the first problem for at least Christians like GC.
This is a much more difficult lens for Theists to view human behavior through. Because all of the sudden, our understanding of cause and effect within the mind has reduced this "free will" stuff to nothing more than a colloquial description of people doing stuff. Sure, they can pretend that they would behave differently if they were Jeffrey Dahmer or the like, but the truth is, if they WERE Jeffrey Dahmer, they would have done the exact same things. They would have literally BEEN HIM. So, now what? Well, if you believe an omniscient God created these people, then our understanding of the human brain has only placed Gods finger behind the first tipping domino. From a Theistic perspective, God giving us "Free Will" is more akin to tossing us the keys to a burning vehicle, and then sticking us with the fallout, and if that's the case, whether or not we're holding the keys, the car is definitely registered in Gods name.
