Last thursdayism

[Jehanne]

I feel the effects of gravity, which can very precisely be modeled. I do not feel God, and a Cosmos with God and one without continue to result in the exact same outcomes and predictions. Occam's Razor leads me to embrace a godless Universe. God, if he/she/it exists, deserves better than his/her/its Internet apologists.

[Angrboda]

My view is that time and God is an important question where free will and omniscience intersect.  Depending on the definition of free will, there's a strong argument to be made that the Christian God can't exist.  The alternative is to believe an odd view of free will which seems more compatibility -- with its attendant mereological issues -- than libertarian.

The following is cross-posted from AD.org.

Two types of incompatibilism

Plantinga's defense presupposes incompatibilism. Incompatibilists, however, disagree over what we might call the Principle of Alternate Possibilities:
PAP. S is free with respect to A only if S has it within his power to do otherwise.

Of course, compatibilists like to understand the power to do otherwise in such a way that one has it even though there is no possible world in which one does other than what one did, given the distant past and the laws of nature.  Incompatibilists, however, tend to deny this. As one prominent incompatibilist likes to put the point: if someone is free with respect to an action when deciding whether to do it, they are "in a situation strongly analogous to that of someone who is hesitating between forks in a road."

To say that one has free will is to say that when one decides among forks in the road of time (or, more prosaically, when one decides what to do), one is at least sometimes able to take more than one of the forks has free will if sometimes more than one of the forks in the road of time are "open" to one. One lacks free will if on every occasion on which one must make a decision only one of the forks before one -- of course it will be the fork one in fact takes -- is open to one.

On this picture of freedom, the power to do "forks" in the road of time, not merely that there seem to be such "forks".

Some incompatibilists reject PAP and the picture of a forking road that comes with it. They replace it with something like the Principle of Ultimate Causes:
PUC. S is free with respect to A only if the ultimate cause of A is S's own will and cognitive faculties.

Incompatibilists who replace PAP with PUC say that it is possible for one to act freely even if there are no alternatives "open" to one. But, they say, it does not follow that it is possible for one to act freely if one's action is determined by the distant past and the laws of nature since, in that case, the ultimate cause of one's action is not one's own will and cognitive faculties. Thus, they say, their view remains resolutely incompatibility.

“Transworld Sanctity and Plantinga’s Free Will Defense.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, vol. 44, no. 1, 1998, pp. 1–21

[Ranjr]

So if time is a function of gravity, then free will is the eigenvector of my good and bad choices.  Whew, now I get it.

[Angrboda]

So if time is a function of gravity, then free will is the eigenvector of my good and bad choices.  Whew, now I get it.

[Ranjr]

Meatloaf is a dependable meter of time.  A solid reminder that it's Thursday.

[Angrboda]

Meatloaf is a dependable meter of time.  A solid reminder that it's Thursday.

[Paleophyte]

Congratulations Mods! The OP was banned last Wednesday and as a result has now never actually existed according to Last Thursdayism. I know you guys have been known to swing the ban hammer hard when needed but I think that this is the first time you banned one so completely that it ceased to have ever been.

[R00tKiT]

Yep try and prove me wrong all you want I have absolutely no proof so this view is as useful as there being a very small tea pot orbiting Jupiter that's always just to small to see. Yep I'm convinced it all started last Thursday as if this reality had always existed. How do I know this I feel it true in my soul. I think it's all just going to suddenly end next Thursday so I'm having a party Wednesday. I may have my dates wrong the last Thursday which reality appeared may not have happened so I may have to have more Wednesday parties. I excuse the fact that it seems as if it's real on getting my dates right or that this is just a bit prep existence that only seems real to get me ready for next Thursday. 
Ok I don't really believe this but it makes as much sense as any of the other religions and with this version of last thursdayism you can have wednesday parties every other wednesday.

This simply shows that deductive arguments are useless outside of the very narrow framework of axioms/principles/pressuppositions which they were built on. Most of the things we know about the world aren't a result of any deduction, but rather induction from available data.

The fact that there is an external world, or that the universe existed 5 minutes ago, can't be proven right (or wrong) by any deductive argument. This also applies to the appearance of design, that non theists have so eagerly tried to deny and explain away for centuries, it will always point to a creator, whereas they keep asking us to prove an entirely different -and unwarranted- claim : that the apperance of design entails a creator.

[The Grand Nudger]

Well, I guess that's that, then, and you can hang your participation here up? The arguments you're always asking us to consider are somehow and meaningfully useless, according to you.

This is actually something I've had trouble wrapping my head around for the entire time that I've been here. Batshit apologists like yourself seem to suggest that any of the many arguments™ they bring ought to be informative..you even wave your hands that way in that post. Then, if and when they're shown not to be or worse, when arguments strongly suggest that your beliefs are inaccurate or malformed, batshit apologists...such as yourself.....tell us that argumentation isn't really informative after all.

It's as if people believe that truth only exists insomuch as it conforms with and confirms their assertions...and if it doesn't, why, then there' no real truth at all, is there? This is wholly outside of my experience as a human being. I cannot even imagine believing that something either is true..or, if it is false, then there can be no truth. I've never genuinely held two such directly antithetical ideas in my head at once that I can remember. It's probably why I find belief systems like that so fascinating. They're just alien to me.