RE: Atheism and the existence of peanut butter
October 31, 2021 at 1:08 pm
(This post was last modified: October 31, 2021 at 1:21 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(October 31, 2021 at 2:46 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote:(October 31, 2021 at 1:22 am)Anomalocaris Wrote: 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.
(October 31, 2021 at 10:18 am)Rahn127 Wrote: 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.