(April 27, 2020 at 9:58 pm)mrj Wrote: Just to ground the discussion - I find very little justification to believe in a theistic entity. However, I do not consider myself an atheist. At least not yet. And I continue to search for logical and scientific justification for such belief in the name of intellectual honesty. I will readily admit to and even argue for atheist-like arguments, and I have been banned from religious forums many times simply because, as I was told, my arguments were depressing the believers. That being said, there are a few interesting philosophical points that I don;t think atheists can answer. Here's one:
Consider free will. No matter how you look at it, I can't for the life of me see how there is ANY possibility free will exists, whether there is a God or not. Clearly, if you take the deterministic side of things, there is no free will. But even if you subscribe to Liberatarianism, you STILL have to allow for randomness in your actions. In other words, even if we agree that there is a 50% chance I eat that cheeseburger, the execution of that choice cannot be mine and mine alone. WHY did I eat the cheeseburger (if I did so)? The concept of 'choice' is nothing more than the random selection of certain probabilities. In other words, there is NO free will. Randomness does not equal choice. Determinism does not equal choice. No free will either way.
The above would widely be considered as points against Theism - and rightly so. So here is the question then. If there is no free will, WHY then do we have the ILLUSION of free will? There is no evolutionary benefit to our minds thinking we act freely. Procreation of species would not be dependent upon such an illusion. An automaton would act the way it would act, and would react the way it would react - an internal understanding of WHY it did so is irrelevant. So WHY then do we BELIEVE we act freely? Could, perhaps, such illusion be 'provided' by a supernatural being? Could we thus have a soul that encapsulates this illusion?
Is this "proof" of a God? Not really - which is why I put the term in quotes in the subject. But I find the question very interesting. My own rational musings have led me to consider that the "illusion" of free will is in actuality the FEEDBACK loop of how our decisions affect our future actions. For example, if I got a stomach ache from eating that cheeseburger, my future probability of eating it would drop to 40%. This neurological process manifests as 'free will', similar to how transfer of short-term to long-term memory manifests as a dream.
Regardless, I haven't decided yet what the answer is. I welcome your thoughts.
If God did not exist, there could be no free will since everything would determined by natural processes that started at the beginning of the Universe. If the Universe could be rewound and set in motion at the same point once again it would unfold in exactly the same way every single time. So no matter what I do I will always do what I have been predetermined to do. I could try to somehow work against it but of course that was predetermined as well.
Because God created the Universe, and God is transcendent of the material world, He can give His creatures the ability to make meaningful choices. Their behavior is no longer solely determined by the initial conditions of the Universe, because God is also influencing their behavior. If they are predetermined by the Universe to like vanilla ice cream for instance, God can influence them in such a way as to prefer chocolate ice cream.
Human beings also have a spiritual nature which transcends material reality because they possess a soul and a spirit. These are additional influences which feed into the choices that they make. They are influenced not just by the material world, but also the spiritual world and the creatures in it. So, human behavior could never be predicted by material science only. Even if you knew and understood everything about the initial conditions of the Universe you would still be unable to accurately predict human behavior.
~Jesus didn't come to make bad people good. He came to make dead people alive~
