Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

When I heard about the Libet thing I was pretty stoked because it basically was reinforcement of my long-held stoner theory that i have literally never made a conscious decision in my life

I've never shaken the impression that free will is something Xtians invented to specifically prop up their theological power structure (ie only via free will can you "choose" redemption through Christ and wgaf about that)

xp

It does seem to me that we're constrained to experience our actions in the world in a certain way, as though we're picking among possible futures. But we can also know reflectively that that's false. There are multiple levels of belief here.

I don't find determinism terrifying, I just accept it. it has no bearing on the decisions I make or how I behave tbh, I just consider it a fact. Considering my conscious identity as somehow separate or outside of the processes that govern the universe seems bizarre to me.

― Οὖτις

so you believe there is a universal order, scientific principles that dictate human thought and action as there are scientific principles that dictate the movements of the planets?

it has no bearing on the decisions I make or how I behave tbh, I just consider it a fact.

You say it has no bearing, but that cannot be true. There cannot be facts that have no implications. You're just not examining or acknowledging them. As facts go, this one seems more like a garden variety opinion.

I've never shaken the impression that free will is something Xtians invented to specifically prop up their theological power structure (ie only via free will can you "choose" redemption through Christ and wgaf about that)

xp

― Οὖτις

does the notion of free will as a philosophy predate aquinas? i'm not too familiar with the history of the concept.

I don't really understand how it can be otherwise, rushomancy. The mental construct that constitutes "me" is as much the product of physical laws and processes as anything else in the universe, and as such at any given moment it is the product of all the processes and events that preceded the current moment. Ego is an illusion etc.

xp

i'm not really sure that there's an all-encompassing scientific consensus on the nature of indeterminacy in the cosmos, of chance. (if there is i certainly don't understand it!) it could be that human choice, such as it is, is simply one form of indeterminacy. this allows for a certain amount of genuine freedom of action (or freedom of inaction, if you prefer) on an individual level while still establishing humanity as a natural creature, fully subservient to natural law.

just to be clear here, if what constitutes "me" is as much a product of physical laws as anything else in the universe and is simultaneously "an illusion", doesn't that imply that the universe is equally an illusion? and if the definition of "the universe" is everything known and unknown, then wouldn't physical laws be a subset of "the universe" and therefore equally an illusion?

mmmm, i don't think so? the illusion in question is that of selfhood, of the possibility of fully autonomous action. there is not, that any of us are aware of, any such cosmic overmind that believes itself to be free to do as it wishes, so no, there aren't really any additional "illusions" to deal with here.

I meant that seeing myself as somehow outside of/separate from the universe is not possible, that's the illusory part, the ego that thinks there's a distinct "me" from everything that is "not me". It's all bound together and there is no way for me to observe or confirm anything outside of that. Everything I observe could be an illusion, I have no way of confirming that, as I am restricted to the observational framework at my disposal. "the eye cannot see itself", that kind of thing.

xp

or as rushomancy says: the illusion in question is that of selfhood, of the possibility of fully autonomous action

the sum total of observable phenomenon at my disposal indicates that I am part of a vast universe that operates according to observable principles - there is no evidence that having consciousness places me outside of that

i am 'that' and you are 'that', nuff said

it could be that human choice, such as it is, is simply one form of indeterminacy.

can u expand on this please?

xxp:

I suspect the idea of free will became a necessary construct to account for human and natural evils with the arrival of dualisms and monotheisms from the East. There's not much free will in classical Greek tragedy, yet free will is explicitly described in the Zoroastrian avastas. Ahriman could do good, as he demonstrates by creating the peacock, but he chooses to do evil. 2nd temple Judaism and Christianity inherited that. Why do men do evil in a world created by an omnibenevolent, omnipotent deity? Because God bestowed the gift of free will. The argument kind of breaks down with natural evil. Why did little Suzy get bone cancer; because God's gift of free will provides a test of our responses?

I suspect the idea of free will became a necessary construct to account for human and natural evils with the arrival of dualisms and monotheisms from the East.

this is my impression. OT is a little ambiguous on the free will thing, God p reliably bristles at any questioning of his omnipotence (and it's made explicitly clear that loads of the suffering of humanity is God's will). otoh does Abraham have free will when he's deciding whether or not to follow God's commandments? I'll defer to Mordy here.

Xtianity really runs with the concept though, because of the whole salvation-through-choosing-Christ angle.

Christian theology m/l doesn't work without free will.

it seems to me that OT narratives make no sense without a concept of free will and that sin and punishment in particular make no sense without such an idea. for example take a look at Exodus 9:12 which has inspired an entire literature on the question of why Pharaoh was punished if God intervened in his free will. and particularly consider that the passage only makes sense within a context where free will is assumed.

the question of why Pharaoh was punished if God intervened in his free will

God's just an incomprehensible + angry jerk, maybe? but yes the passage does imply an assumption of free will.

Also Exodus 10:20, 10:27, 11:3, 11:10, 12:36 etc. When there's this much interference in decisions, its fair to ask whether the few times there isn't is just authorial omissions.

Just because the idea of free will can be used in a monotheistic framework to remove from God the burden of originating evil actions, allowing God to be wholly just and benevolent by placing the locus of sin and evil in humans, doesn't mean that this is its only application, or that it is a false belief when it is removed from that monotheism. So, who cares whether it originated with Aquinas or in xtian apologetics.

As I understand it, Calvinism embraced the idea of determinism by putting the burden of choice back onto God, then defining every choice God manifests in the world as both good and just, whether we understood it or not. This simplified their theology considerably. We all start out as hopelessly sinful. Whatever we experience is due to God's justice or his mercy. You could pray for mercy, but you got whatever God gave you and if it was shitty, what more could a sinful human expect from a just God?

The sort of purely mechanistic physical determinism Οὖτις is repping for originates much later than xtianity and has its roots in the Newtonian revolution. afics, examining the origins for these questions and their answers reveals nothing about their validity.

The classical explanation regarding free will and the Egyptians is that they had committed such heinous crimes that they didn't deserve to be scared into repentance (which would have happened in the natural course of the 10 plagues -- and also suggests some of this is likely a literary device to express how great were the horrors delivered on them that were it not for divine intervention they would've capitulated almost immediately). Anyway, most of the OT only makes sense assuming free will. Just off my head, for example, the trials of Abraham - what was exemplary about binding Isaac if he didn't chose to do it? What does it mean when he argues with God about destroying Sodom? God chooses the Jewish people to study his Torah and perform his mitzvot. If everything is deterministic then why? I can think of a thousand other examples of narratives that seem to clearly imply that the world being described contains actors with free will.

The sort of purely mechanistic physical determinism Οὖτις is repping for originates much later than xtianity and has its roots in the Newtonian revolution

not really. the idea that people are just small parts of a vast machinery where the concept of free will is either irrelevant or nonexistent are ancient - the Greeks have already been cited and its in the vedas too

Like the whole thing is a narrative of God commanding people to do things and people either fulfilling His command or failing to (and often complaining about it). It would be pretty weird to have this huge document about God instructing people to do things and then forcing them to do them or not do them and then punishing or rewarding them based on his own determined consequences.

Just because the idea of free will can be used in a monotheistic framework to remove from God the burden of originating evil actions, allowing God to be wholly just and benevolent by placing the locus of sin and evil in humans, doesn't mean that this is its only application

It's not just an explanation for the evil paradox, but also a requirement to have any system of reward and punishment at all really afaict. There are much better explanations for the evil paradox anyway. I prefer apologetics like "god created good and evil too and is himself not bound to those definitions" which gets a lot of kabbalistic language regarding his ultimate "plan" or stories about things that seem evil or turn out to be good.

The argument kind of breaks down with natural evil. Why did little Suzy get bone cancer; because God's gift of free will provides a test of our responses?

yes, essentially. or that the plan in general is beyond our comprehension and so understanding why certain things are necessary for it is equally beyond our comprehension. the metaphor is a child being told no by their parents and not being able to understand that it's for their own good but obv to an infinite degree greater. who says that good and evil have any play in what god is trying to accomplish through inventing a finite reality and world within the context of infinite beinghood (and non-beinghood, etc) anyway?

just swap out capricious deities/the fates for the laws of physics and its p much the same

xp

It would be pretty weird to have this huge document about God instructing people to do things and then forcing them to do them or not do them and then punishing or rewarding them based on his own determined consequences.

not denying it's weird, but OT God can be plenty inscrutable, maybe he just likes telling himself a good story. how do you square free will w an omnipotent deity? why would God want to give people free will, anyway? (makes for a better story maybe lol)

there are jewish philosophies that circumscribe the parameters of free will fwiw - i've heard often among litvak dogma that free will only applies to a very particular range of moral actions within which you have choice. for a professional thief they may have no free will not to steal at all bc it's engrained in their behavior, and a fanatically observant person may have no free will about not eating pork bc they would never do it in a million years. but maybe they have free will in some other area - how they treat someone maybe, or whether the thief murders someone who discovers them stealing, etc. my theological heritage tho squares everything differently which is by positing that the only free will that exists is that which is generated in a shared process between an infinite creator and his finite creation. that when i chose to act the free will comes from really god choosing to act bc infinity encompasses everything. that seems like a kind of determinism but really it's just redefining the human soul as itself an expression of contracted divine will.

The real answer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKIp6CTliL4

acc to chassidic/kabbalistic strands basically all of reality is god telling himself a good story so that's a good way of rendering it i think. once you consider the ramifications of infinity there are a lot of questions. like how any finite thing could exist within it in the first place (which ends up being the question a lot of kabbalah is trying to answer).

xp:
Early Torah God isn't omnipotent and omniscient, just very powerful. My sense is its only with the post Assyrian captivity prophets that Yahweh is viewed as omnipotent, even outside of Israel, using foreign powers to punish his chosen. This coincides with the 6th century's Job, where His will is incomprehensible to man.

The interpretation of the Early Torah God takes on a different cast when He isn't omnipotent and omniscient. He doesn't know that Eve will eat the apple or Abraham will tie up Isaac. He's a tinkerer, experimenting with his petri dish. Abraham might have gone along with the test, but perhaps the last few patriarchs God asked refused and hence didn't become generation FO for his Israelite lineage.

that when i chose to act the free will comes from really god choosing to act bc infinity encompasses everything. that seems like a kind of determinism but really it's just redefining the human soul as itself an expression of contracted divine will.

I like this

xp

sunday is purim. the word purim, acc to the talmud, comes from the word 'pur' - a contemporaneous Persian word for lots, like a lottery. it refers to the lottery that Haman throws to determine in which month he should have all the jews killed. there's a lovely essay from the rebbe that i've been learning w/ my dad about how basically lotteries access a higher level of sublime divinity than the normal state of reality since it uses will to subjugate itself to a higher more amorphous form. in this level (a level that precedes any contraction that leads to finitude -- aka raw infinity stuff) everything is equal. good and evil. mordechai and haman. etc. (on purim there's a directive to drink until you cannot tell the difference between mordechai and haman - aka achieve a mental state of consciousness that mimics in some way this pre-creative state of divinity.) this is why one of the meanings of yom kippur (aka yom kippurim) is "yom" day "ki" like "purim" bc purim is such a sublime state that even yom kippur, the holiest day of the year, only approximates its divine access.

xxp if we're talking biblical anthropology i'm a little sloppy on my documentary hypothesis theory but i think you're correct that the earliest bible stories predate the later ones by a significant period time (but of course it was all redacted). so i wouldn't be surprised if you can find the heartbeat of an earlier limited omnipotence from when yahweh or el were a part of pantheon beliefs (which acc to this theory then passes into monolatry and now even full blown monotheism iirc until the era of Ezra). but the shift to monotheism happens quickly enough imo that divine omnipotence isn't particularly hard to read back into the narrative.

and not* even

it could be that human choice, such as it is, is simply one form of indeterminacy.

can u expand on this please?

― Mordy

i'll try, though i do want to say i'm not speaking from any sort of position of authority and could have all this totally wrong.

was the complete history of the universe, from beginning to end, written at the big bang? could one extrapolate everything that has come to pass, everything that will come to pass, from that first moment? or does random stuff happen? there seems to be, from my completely lay perspective, at least the possibility for genuine randomness, of things we cannot predict happening. and human consciousness might, to some extent, have elements of that.

or it might not. hell if i know.

ok i thought that was what you meant - "indeterminacy" is a term of art tho and i wanted to be sure.

i'm a big fan of the first cause argument without which i think you must conclude some kind of natural mechanic for randomness / spontaneous generation of reality.

agreed

I suspect the idea of free will became a necessary construct to account for human and natural evils with the arrival of dualisms and monotheisms from the East. There's not much free will in classical Greek tragedy, yet free will is explicitly described in the Zoroastrian avastas. Ahriman could do good, as he demonstrates by creating the peacock, but he chooses to do evil. 2nd temple Judaism and Christianity inherited that. Why do men do evil in a world created by an omnibenevolent, omnipotent deity? Because God bestowed the gift of free will. The argument kind of breaks down with natural evil. Why did little Suzy get bone cancer; because God's gift of free will provides a test of our responses?

― Sanpaku

classic theodicy right there. millennia people have been trying to prove that god exists despite the existence of purposeless suffering. nobody's succeeded yet, and my personal thought is that nobody ever will because you can't fucking do it.

closest i've seen is not a theodicy proper but a defense offered by a guy named plantinga. now he's old right now and spending a whole lifetime as a christian philosopher has rotted his brain, but the plantinga defense what he came up with way back in the 1960s is the closest i've seen. this defense is not a proof of anything, but points out, and i'm not a philosopher so i could be getting this wrong, that it's entirely _possible_ that a god possessing certain values, including prioritizing human free will as a positive good, would not be able to create a world free of "natural evil" without rendering the concept of human "free will" an absurdity, without getting into "can god make a rock so big he can't lift it" territory.

people have been trying to prove that god exists despite the existence of purposeless suffering.

not too hard really. all you have to do is tweak god's attributes a bit to fit observable reality. an omnipotent, but amoral, god would probably be sufficient, but I haven't drilled deep enough on this idea to see if it requires other tweaks to work. essentially, all of empirical science could be interpreted as an inquiry into god's actual nature, which can only be understood in light of a true understanding his creation.

theodicy doesn't really bother me so much bc it seems to me like an internally consistent infinite creator would necessarily have to encompass both good and evil being the creator of both. a rabbi in high school once told me that everything god does it good because goodness is a trait higher than god. i was like "woah check yourself there i'm pretty sure that's insane."

turtles all the way up

lol

it seems to me that OT narratives make no sense without a concept of free will and that sin and punishment in particular make no sense without such an idea. for example take a look at Exodus 9:12 which has inspired an entire literature on the question of why Pharaoh was punished if God intervened in his free will. and particularly consider that the passage only makes sense within a context where free will is assumed.

― Mordy, Friday, March 10, 2017 11:55 AM (one hour ago)

I don't think this is true at all. Rather, the OT concept of sin strikes me as similar to that of social shame. It (sin) attaches itself to people or groups as a result of wrong-doing like a kind of metaphysical stain. This stain, if sufficiently large, can only be erased by spilling the blood of the sinner (or some acceptable substitute, e.g. scapegoat).

Of course, there's anger on the part of those wronged (e.g., God) as well as desire to punish the sinner, but these things don't necessarily depend on a belief in free will. Like the social "stain" of sin itself, feelings of loss, shame, outrage and desire for redress and can just fine exist without that.

This kind of impersonal, mechanical view of sin as something that is called into being by human action - and not that which motivates human action - makes sense of Christ's sacrifice. His spilled blood (since someone's blood is needed) washes away all sin forever. Not the sin that grows in human hearts, but the sin that blights communities, demands the slitting of throats, and calls down the lord's judgment.

Finally encountered a less versified source of the famous Epicurus quote, from Lactantius's On the Anger of God

God, he says, either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or He is able, and is unwilling; or He is neither willing nor able, or He is both willing and able.
If He is willing and is unable, He is feeble, which is not in accordance with the character of God;
if He is able and unwilling, He is envious, which is equally at variance with God;
if He is neither willing nor able, He is both envious and feeble, and therefore not God;
if He is both willing and able, which alone is suitable to God, from what source then are evils?

I don't think you can read that into that passage. The OT distinguishes between times that Pharoah hardened his own heart and God heartened his heart. I think that necessarily implies that the earlier times were free will and the later times were not. xp

if He is able and unwilling, He is envious, which is equally at variance with God;

weakest link here imo

if He is able and unwilling, He is envious, which is equally at variance with God

probably a translation issue, but that "envious" makes no sense to me. Of whom or of what? And why?

I'm guessing the idea behind the "envious" would be that God is being spiteful, because the essence of evil is that it is not merely a bad thing, but wrong, unjust and undeserved. God envies the excellence of his innocent victims and deliberately brings ruin upon them out of his envy and spite. Hmmm.