(September 8, 2010 at 1:28 am)Flobee Wrote: Yeah it's strange isn't it that computers were created by intelligent beings and according to you the human brain was created by pure intelligence and yet the brain far exceeds any technology or human invention ever intelligently designed.
But if the brain was not the act of intelligence what reason do we have for trusting it? And I mean if we don't really have free will and our brains were created by unintelligence and we are not really guided by intelligence we are simply being controlled by deterministic natural laws I just don't see why we should trust anything.
You must have missed my meaning. I didn't say the human brain was created by "pure intelligence," unless by that term you mean selective "intelligence" inherent in natural selection. Human brains came about — I wouldn't like to say "created" — by the same natural forces as every other brain in the animal kingdom. Some brains, indeed, can't be trusted (terrorists, extremists), while others, generally law-abiding citizens can, until they give us a reason not to trust them. Nonbelievers have free will to do whatever they want as long as they accept the positive or negative consequences. Indeed, it's in their best interests to act as polite and civil members of society, but they are free to carry on with any other behavior if they wish.
Believers, on the other hand, don't have free will because, at least from the Christian view, you either believe and have eternal life or don't believe and perish in eternal separation from God. There are no other options. You can't "opt out" as it were of the whole eternal life thing and simply choose to die a mortal death like dogs or cats, for even nonbelievers, according to doctrine, are eternal beings as well ... it's just that their eternity will be filled with weeping and gnashing of teeth. As the popular mural goes: "Heaven or Hell. It's your choice." While this presents the illusion of some kind of free will, it's not really free will because of the lack of a third or fourth or fifth option. God doesn't really let us choose, for the consequences and causes of each possible choice predate the choice itself. "Created sick, but commanded to be made well ..."
Our Daily Train blog at jeremystyron.com
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We have lingered in the chambers of the sea | By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown | Till human voices wake us, and we drown. — T.S. Eliot
"... man always has to decide for himself in the darkness, that he must want beyond what he knows. ..." — Simone de Beauvoir
"As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again." — Albert Camus, "The Stranger"
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We have lingered in the chambers of the sea | By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown | Till human voices wake us, and we drown. — T.S. Eliot
"... man always has to decide for himself in the darkness, that he must want beyond what he knows. ..." — Simone de Beauvoir
"As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again." — Albert Camus, "The Stranger"
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