Atheism and the existence of peanut butter

[vulcanlogician]

^^^
I got it. It wasn't lame.

[Anomalocaris]

Deity was once conceived of as operating within natural law, and as an expression of natural law, itself.  That's why they had fates.  It's why christer god can't change his mind.

it seems highly unlikely to me that the concept of overarching natural law could predate the ideas that things happen due to inscrutable intervention by some mysterious agent.

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Deity was once conceived of as operating within natural law, and as an expression of natural law, itself.  That's why they had fates.  It's why christer god can't change his mind.

it seems highly unlikely to me that the concept of overarching natural law could predate the ideas that things happen due to inscrutable intervention by some mysterious agent.

[The Grand Nudger]

Deity was once conceived of as operating within natural law, and as an expression of natural law, itself.  That's why they had fates.  It's why christer god can't change his mind.

it seems highly unlikely to me that the concept of overarching natural law could predate the ideas that things happen due to inscrutable intervention by some mysterious agent.

The idea that they're even different things, that there's a split between nature and diety..is a relatively recent development. Ditto to it's inscrutability and mystery.

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

it seems highly unlikely to me that the concept of overarching natural law could predate the ideas that things happen due to inscrutable intervention by some mysterious agent.

The idea that they're even different things, that there's a split between nature and diety..is a relatively recent development.  Ditto to it's inscrutability and mystery.

Yair.  Calvinism taught and still teaches some predestination. The notion that god knows who will be saved and who will de damned. Hence the still common view that god bestows largesse on the saved. I think prosperity gospel fits in there somewhere . Conversely god does not waste largess one damned, so they are the poor and wretched  of the earth*** . They get in coming and going.

I've always that the notion of predestination abrogates free will. Having said that, I lean towards determinism. I accept the idea of both genetic predeterminism as well as psychological determinism. Have quite managed to work out actual percentages. I guess it's moot in that I  feel as if I have freewill, and live as if that is the case--- and I think I've just gone and gotten myself confused again.

*** An interesting reference, still used as a university text book as far as I know.

Max Webber ; "The Protestant Ethic And The Spirit Of Capitalism


The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (German: Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus) is a book written by Max Weber, a German sociologist, economist, and politician. Begun as a series of essays, the original German text was composed in 1904 and 1905, and was translated into English for the first time by American sociologist Talcott Parsons in 1930.[1] It is considered a founding text in economic sociology and a milestone contribution to  in general.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - Wikipedia

[The Valkyrie]

Basically...

God, "I peanut butter, therefore I am!"

[Rahn127]

When it comes to determinism, I'm an advocate that free will still exists. Whatever choice you make creates the path.

Because we can only do one thing at a time, we have to make a choice of what to do. Or we can choose to do nothing.

A rock and I both fall out of an airplane. I have a parachute on. The rock doesn't. If I do nothing, my path will be the same as the rock. But because I have choices, I can alter that predestined outcome. The rock is not alive and cannot make choices or plan for situations that give it choices to make.

[brewer]

[Angrboda]

[brewer]

^^^ Just googled him, found exactly what I'd expected.

[Anomalocaris]

it seems highly unlikely to me that the concept of overarching natural law could predate the ideas that things happen due to inscrutable intervention by some mysterious agent.

The idea that they're even different things, that there's a split between nature and diety..is a relatively recent development.  Ditto to it's inscrutability and mystery.

On the contrary, I think inscrutability and mystery is likely the primeval perception of underlying cause of things.   The main human perceptive framework for inscrutability and mystery derived from social cognitive mechanism evolved to handle complex unpredictable behavior by fellow humans or closely associated animals.   So humans primevally and reflexively associate unpredictability of nature with inscrutability and mystery of capricious, but interactable, beings with whim and will. 

The split is recent, because for much of the time prior to the split there was no perception of the existence any such thing as a nature separate from whim and will of capricious beings that that is the underlying  motivators for things to happen.

---

When it comes to determinism, I'm an advocate that free will still exists. Whatever choice you make creates the path.

Because we can only do one thing at a time, we have to make a choice of what to do. Or we can choose to do nothing.

A rock and I both fall out of an airplane. I have a parachute on. The rock doesn't. If I do nothing, my path will be the same as the rock. But because I have choices, I can alter that predestined outcome. The rock is not alive and cannot make choices or plan for situations that give it choices to make.

That reduces free will to nothing more than the mere possession of substantial probability of behaving in a manner that is different from how something else that is totally lacking in the capacity to behave in the same way would behave.

You might as well say an atom of radioactive isotope has freewill because it can chose to decay or not where as a stable isotope atom will just sit there.