Nic Hautamaki

or is this argument why we generally accept that only weak atheism flies now:

"We agree that a world in which everyone is both happy and free is the religious vision of the best world. You seem to think that God should have 'made' the actual world into this. And yet, you somehow don't see the contradiction between that and the word free.

In order for the world to be free, it can't always be happy. You have to be able to choose things which are bad. You need to be able to choose to be cruel, or to choose to respond to evil by turning your back on relationships, be they with men or God. That's what freedom means. Free will only exists if your choices are meaningful, and your choices can't be meaningful if they have no effect on other people.

In the world that you think God should have created, you can't hurt others with your choices, and you can't improve life for others through your choices. Actually, you can't even do these things for yourself. After all, the world is all-good, in your example, so improvement is impossible.

So let's lay out my vision, step by step.

1. God values having an independent will come to recognize and worship him.

2. God seeks to create a universe in which to house such independent wills, and contracts Himself in order to do so.

3. God creates a universe which allows these independent wills to exercise their independence by allowing for choice, and for the effects of choice, to be meaningful.

If humans can actually change their world, and can do real kindness, their lives are meaningful. They are able to imitate the positive, creative powers of God in this world, and thus improve it and elevate their lives and the lives of others through deeds or kindness, courage, nobility, charity, and self-sacrifice. That's a better world for achieving God's purposes than any other world. Heaven, for those who believe in it, is not the place in which free will is nurtured. For thsoe who believe it, heaven is a place to balance the tallies. If you had a miserable life but were a great guy, you go to heaven and get rewarded. There is no free will in heaven, b/c onve you're dead, your dontation to the world, in the form of your actions, beliefs, and legacy, are complete. In Judaism, there are frequent expressions of fear of death, not b/c death is so painful or frightening, but b/c it is the close of the period of life in which meaningful service of God is possible."


While I disagree with her definition of Free Will, that's not really the issue. She could just rename her definition to 'ethically meaninful Free Will' or 'morally significant Free Will' and leave me in the same quandary. So does that mean that strong atheism is truly defeated, given that we accept her premises for what God really is, and wants? (which of course we must, lest we start burning straw men)

fishbulb

This is typical free-will bunk. In the first place, we generally say that we have free will when we can make the choice we want, rather than being coerced into making a different choice. If we always want to do good things, then we are never coerced into doing them. Everyone wanting to do only good things would tend to increase the amount of free will we can exercise, because fewer people would be trying to stop us from making the choices we want to make.

Moreover, I don't know about the average Christian who believes in the free will defense, but it seems to me that most other people in the world generally don't want to do evil things. I don't want to kill anyone. I don't want to steal or rape or pillage or torture or cheat. Because I lack the desire to do these things, it seems that I will probably be unable, of my own free will, to make these evil choices; I would have to be coerced into deciding to do these things, and coercion is the opposite of free choice. Does that mean that I have less free will than a sociopath who has no psychological or biological inhibitions against doing these things? Why has god cursed me with a conscience, thereby making it difficult, if not impossible for me to exercise free will and commit evil acts?

All of us are constrained in the choices we can make. Sometimes these constraints are physical: I cannot fly or walk through walls. Sometimes they are psychological or neurological: I probably could not bring myself to kill someone and rob them for personal gain, even if I wanted to. Someimes they are practical: the anticipated consequences of a particular action are so undesirable that we cannot, for all practical purposes, make that choice (a Hobson's choice). Free will is not something you have or you don't: it is something you have to some degree, depending on the situation.

Also, there is a false dilemma presented here. Suppose that a god created a world that was not perfect, but he populated it with humans who, to a person, desired to help one another or, at the very least, to respect and not harm one another. There are still choices to be made, and some of these choices can lead to making life better for everyone. The only difference is that there won't be anyone running around trying to hurt people.

Lastly, this argument completely ignores the dynamics of environment and social structures on human behaviour. It buys in to a pure fantasy notion that we are all in full control of both our desires and actions, and that evil things flow directly from the acts of evil or weak individuals. This is clearly not the case. Surely almost everybody knows about the normative effects of culture, education and socialization. Surely most people now recognize that social structures reinforce certain behaviours and impose a sense of inevitability.

Knowing where they come from, we should suppose that no good-hearted person would ever buy a pair of Nikes or other garment manufactured in third world countries using de facto child slave labour, and no good person would work for an organization that is involved in such despicable practices, much less make the decision to engage in them. But things are more complicated than that. It is not the case that everyone who works for or buys Nike (and most other brand name clothing) is evil; the problem is systemic: a function of social, cultural, and economic realities in the United States, the West, and around the rest of the world more than it is the moral decisions of one or a few people. In other words, everyone is to blame, to some extent, for the problem, but no one can be singled out as being wholly or even primarily responsible. Improving the situation requires the participation and will of millions of people. The problem is that we are animals; our behaviour can be modelled, genetically mapped, and predicted. The fantasy of humans as fully autonomous self-determining beings is just that. The evidence against this notion would seem to be overwhelming. If we were created by a god, then this god created us as animals, bound every bit as much by our biological chemistry as by our conscious thought. The premises of the free will defense are flatly contradicted by what we know about human biology behaviour.

[edited to fix some bad grammar, but not all of it.]

Hawkingfan

This is silly and contradicts the theist view more than the atheist view. Because it would mean that there is no free will in heaven. So heaven cannot be "the religious vision of the best world" because it lacks freedom. And since it lacks freedom, it lacks happiness.

braces_for_impact

Please demonstrate this assertion. I decided to wear my white socks this morning, and not my black ones. It was of my own free will, yet in the grand scheme of things it was a 'meaningless' choice. How do you reconcile this?

If I hurt another with my choice, has not their free will been removed? Something took place that caused harm to them which was out of their control. what about natural phenomena? Nature can cause us great harm, how is nature a byproduct of our free will?

For what possible reason? If god is perfect, then he lacks nothing. A being that is truly perfect has no wants or desires, it is in perfect equilibrium and would not desire the love of puny, helpless, petty human beings.

Why? See my above statement regarding perfection. Th only reason an all powerful being would require an entire universe of people to love and worship him is insecurity. A being which is insecure is not perfect.

All presumably for the choice of coming to him and kissing his holy arse for all eternity? I question the morals of a being that would allow others to hurt and kill each other, and create a universe which is endemic with suffering merely to create a body of worshippers to perpetually stroke his ego. Please give me another possible reason why this deity would do this?
He does not need servants since he is all powerful, remember?

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery eh? I agree, this is why we made gods in our own image, and notice they are benevolent and destructive on a whim, just like humanity in general. All of the noble traits listed above are HUMAN traits, and do not require an all powerful deity with an insecurity complex as a source for those traits.

Sounds here like there is some presuming to know the mind of an "unknowable" deity here. A bit arrogant I think, and unproven. It would be a better human world though, by humans and for humans.

And some say that people that believe in no afterlife have meaningless lives? I'd rather become a memory and be non existent than some play thing robot for some deity with a self esteem problem. ACK!

Jamie_L

Nic,

The thing is, our supposed free will to do good and evil is already severely restricted. Some examples:

* I cannot inflict intense physical pain on someone with the snap of my fingers.
* I cannot cause someone to feel physical pleasure merely by looking at them from across the room and wanting it to happen.
* I cannot heal wounds by touching them.
* I cannot stop bullets from hitting someone through force of will alone.

If one looks closer, one further realises that our free will to do good and evil is not balanced. It is clearly weighted in favor of causing suffering. It is much easier to cause suffering than eliviate suffering or cause pleasure. Some examples:

* I can cause someone intense pain by walking up to them and punching them in the nose. If I come across someone who has been punched in the nose, however, I cannot make their pain go away through similar gesture.
* Given the right circumstances and preparation, I can rape someone in a short amount of time, causing intense physical and emotional suffering. Healing those physical wounds takes time, and healing the mental wounds takes significant time and effort, and in some cases may not be completely possible.
* We can drop nuclear bombs that will kill millions. We cannot, however, drop devices that will cure an epidemic of ebola or excavate people trapped in an urban earthquake, or erase the aftermath of a bomb, for that matter.

To summarize:
1. Our wills are not completely free in the world as it exists now.
2. Our wills are not even free to choose equally between good and evil.

Thus, it is erroneous to say that God requires our wills to be totally free, because that is not the case. If we have free will now, it is erroneous to say that weighting our free will towards good or evil eliminates our free will. Our free will is currently weighted (towards evil).

In fact, the theist has a dilema with respect to free will, because the theist needs to explain why a supposedly benevolent God has set things so as to encourage evil and suffering.

Lastly, I do not necessarily agree that the best world is one in which people are both happy and free. A world in which people are happy is the best world. The only reason we instinctively talk about the importance of being free is because we believe lack of freedom results in less happiness. That cannot be taken for granted however, and must be demonstrated. The best world is one with the most happiness (i.e. minimal suffering).

Jamie

fishbulb

Good point. It is important to remember that values like freedom, honesty, and equality are valued because they are thought to be a means to an end: happiness and security. There are countless cases where someone or some group has elevated such principles to ends in themselves, and the result has often been to increase insecurity and unhappiness.

Silent Dave

I'm surprised that no one mentions what is, in my opinion, the biggest problem with the Free Will defense: that there is nothing in the Bible to suggest that God values free will above all else. In fact, there are several passages in which God directly interferes with someone's free will in order to cause them to have certain beliefs.


Dave

Nic Hautamaki

since many of you have the same problems with this defense, I'll try to clear them all up at once.


a) Your counter definitions of Free Will are not really relevant here, because I'm not just trying to show that atheism is more rational than theism (I've already succeeded there) I'm trying to show that Theism is actually irrational. I'm on the attack, so I have to concede the theist's definitions.

So, this Theist accepts that free will is possible without evil but she says that it is meaningless free will. To her, the free will that counts is morally significant free will. Her best possible world is one in which humans have the ability to make ethical choices with good and evil consequences. All other free will is irrelevant. Her best possible world is one in which people can choose good or evil, that there are real and tangible (and perhaps horrifying) consequences to our choices, and that in the end, eventually, all people will choose God. That is what she says the world is (and will be). Since I'm trying, in effect, to logically disprove her God, what I need to do is accept that those premises are true and see if the conclusion (the world we have) doesn't follow.


b) Your arguments against Heaven are well made, and served well to silence the Christian, the theist in question is actually a Jew, and apparently doesn't really care about the afterlife. She's perfectly happy accepting a heaven that no longer has morally significant free will, but she would actually prefer to live in this world rather than that heaven. She says that Jews (and the OT) frequently make reference to the fact that death is a tradgedy.


OK, Jamie_L I believe you're on a good track, but what I wonder about is whether your argument really counter's her viewpoint fully. It seems as though what matters is not the physical results of an act, but the moral significance of it. Even though it's easier to physically inflict pain, it doesn't follow that comforting a hurt person is somehow less good than hurting someone is evil, even though the tangible results are less.

Silent Dave your point may be the most poignant of all, but I can't verify it, not owning a Bible and not having it memorised. If somebody can verify that God actually does not value humanity having a morally significant free will, and freely choosing him, that would go a long way to take the wind out of her sails, but my guess is that most theists would accept her viewpoint.

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by Nic Hautamaki :

The leading atheistic philosophers -- Drange, Draper, Grim, Martin, Morriston, Rowe, Bruce Russell, et al. -- seem to be strong atheists. So I don't think anyone believes that only weak atheism flies now.

The following is not the problem of evil:

(1) If God existed, everyone would be happy.
(2) Not everyone is happy.
(3) Therefore, God does not exist.

This is closer:

(4) If God existed, there would be less intense suffering and premature death.
(5) It is not the case that (the consequent of (4)).
(6) Therefore, God does not exist.

Further, God could let us have all the free choices we want, but prevent the actions that come about because of those choices more often. He does it already with the use of some natural laws.

braces_for_impact

Ah if only I could.