(April 28, 2020 at 2:14 am)cleansed Wrote:(April 27, 2020 at 9:58 pm)mrj Wrote: 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.
This is a typical religious response. We have free will because God gave us free will, even though all evidence, logic, and intuition conflicts with such a statement. Besides, the notion that God is omniscient is incompatible with free will in any way. Even ideas such as God having 'middle' knowledge and knowledge of all possibilities including that which will happen make no sense. Many modern theologians dispense with God being omniscient - it just can't be reconciled.
Regardless, saying God 'gives us the ability to make meaningful choices' is an assertion with no underlying rationale, much less proof. If so, HOW do we make such decisions? How do we change the current deterministic course of events in a willful way? No answer. Because you can't. Even those who claim there is randomness at the quantum level cannot resolve this, because it is STILL randomness. Execution of some probability is not willful action.
Which still leads me to WHY do we believe we have free will? What evolutionary benefit is there to thinking my actions are willful when they are not? The outcome would be the same either way. Again, I bring up the example of dreaming. Dreaming is an evolutionary disadvantage. It requires you to sleep and be defenseless. Yet we do dream because that is the manifestation of our nerves firing as short-term memory transforms into long-term memory. So why is deterministic or random (depending on your view) action manifested as the illusion of 'free will'? I don't have an answer (although I suggested one above). As such, could such an illusion be provided to us via divine spark?
