Stephen T-B

Geebob states: “a drunk who’s family and job are falling apart may assess that refusing the next drink will have minimal cost and maximum benefit. But he really wants that next drink. That desire may reasonably over power this fella. But is there still a chance that he could choose to refuse? It may be a small one, but it would still be real. So this would be an instance where the minimum benefit and maximum cost indeed is the least powerful motivation and least likely to have an effect.” (Your're right, but I think you meant the opposite.)
Decision-making (as I wrote in a post elsewhere) involves a process of determining the costs and benefits of a particular course of action followed by an evaluation of how those costs and benefits weigh up. And what we bring to this process in terms of who and what we are disposes us to make the choice we eventually make.
So the drunk who decides to have the next drink, despite all the trouble it will cause him, does so because his alcoholism comes into the equation - whether he likes it or not.
That isn’t a very good example, I think.
Geebob said that deciding to toss a coin in order to determine a course of action is a free choice. I say it is subject to the same decision-making process that I’ve already described.
He said it was arbitrary; I don’t think that anything we do, having thought about it, is arbitrary.

In reply to my question about whether he could, through sheer will-power, decide not to believe, he wrote: “Perhaps if I perpetually disobeyed him without remorse or repentance or if I experienced a traumatic event that challenged my faith, it would be possible for me to quit believing in God.”
I am curious: do you think all the atheists at Infidels stopped believing for one or other of these reasons you’ve listed?

[ December 19, 2002: Message edited by: Stephen T-B ]</p>

britinusa

I'm sorry, this doesn't make any sense. How can evil even be possible for a perfect (flawless) being? You say they disobeyed god, then the flaw became real; aren't you putting the cart before the horse? Shouldn't it be "the flaw became real, then they disobeyed god"?

Again, this makes no sense. You're saying perfect beings somehow engineered their own flaws? From where did they get the inclination (and ability) to do this?

You're right. I'm a Westerner, and all this corporate stuff is way over my Western head.

So its in our nature to sin. We can't help ourselves, and its all the fault of the "original rebels". But why did these "original rebels" rebel? From where did they get the inclination? In my opinion, this is the crux of the whole free will debate.

[ December 19, 2002: Message edited by: britinusa ]</p>

Wyz_sub10

I hope everyone can find this thread. Still a few good logs on the fire.

geebob

wyz, either you're going to hate me for this or you're going to sigh with relief. I'm not going to respond to your last post for several reasons, the obvious one being the the horrendous length.

I don't have the time to respond to it for one and I don't want to pick and choose what portions to respond to and which ones not to respond to. Some of the things I'd feel most adept at responding to and some of the things I don't know if I personally could go significantly or profitably further with regard to.

certainly there are some topics that I'd like to respond to but apart from your long post, they trail away from the topic and are worthy of their own threads such as some of your objections to the picture of omniscience I've been given.

the most valid reason for discontinuing the conversation with you, in my opinion, is that we've had a significant meeting of the minds. For some of the things I've said, I think that was the best that I can say for the time being as far as you are concerned. We could prifitably continue on some issues, but for now, I think we've said a lot to some benefit.

For this reason, I'm going to continue the discussion with your friends a bit as they think differently than you. For that reason, different angles of the discussion may come out of it and some of the things said may benefit you.

As for the benefit that I said I gained, for example, as a christian who finds abortion repugnant but believes that all aborted infants go to heaven, why is it not justified to abort them gauranteeing their salvation? My answer has to do with the benefits of self determining freedom born out in a life of making libertarian free decisions that fetus's do not have a significant access to for what ever degree of consciousness they may have. So conversations like this help me make connections like that.

I appreciate the challenge you accepted in answering my 23 pages (can't help but gloat over the three pages more that I got over your 20) and hard work it took. For now though, I'm giving such efforts a rest, perhaps until one of the exchanges I have with your friends gets bloated.

I would be happy to continue the discussion with you here if you want to take a few of the things we've discussed and put them in a much shorter post (perhaps less than five pages. THe reason I won't do that my self is that I do not want to make the judgement as to what points to take up.

If you want to start a thread about any of these other things we discussed, I may participate, most likely in a discussion on omniscience or one establishing that claim you made about the NT having a less personalistic, more helenistic approach to God than the old testament. But I don't intend to spend a lot of time here. I have other forums to attend to and I have a formal one on one online debate schedualed for the future on the topic of the possibility of salvation for the unevangelized.

The cart and the horse are the same. The disobedience is the flaw. The reasoning for the disobedience was based upon good things. Eve saw that the fruit was pleasing to the eye, good for food, and desirable for wisdom. All of these desires are good. the presence of evil is dependent upon the twisting and corrupting of the good. You can have good without evil but you can't have evil without good. Now all of these good elements were used against God's command. All of these things that precipitated the temptation had a good context. It was merely in the context of disobedience that they contribute to a flaw. the disobedience was the only flaw here and I don't see a necessity to reduce it any further.

a possibility for flaw just isn't a flaw.

their freedom was a self determining freedom. Creatures that have the power of self determinism can originate actions that truly didn't have to be. so yes, they are the source of their own flaws.

Well not all notions of corporate responsibility is beyond all westerners. Take liberals for instance and one of their causes that I have come to view as rather appropriate. Here in the US, we have real monster in our past. We enslaved people for the color of skin and often treated them like animals. Now they think we should make reparations some how even though the slavery ended 200 years ago. I think they're right in as much as some of the race conflicts in our nation still persist to this day. I personally didn't enslave any africans, but If I have a little less oportunity because of affirmative action, It is because I am part of a nation that did something very bad and I don't see that exempting myself from all corporate responsibility is going to help much.

THis doesn't fully explain the issue, but I think it sheds a significant amount of light on it.

It's not a quintessential example of freedom if that's what you mean by a good example, but it provides an adept counter-example to your claim that no-one chooses to do that which provides minimal benefit for maximum cost.

His desision to not drink may not be libertarian free because he doesn't have the massive will power left in him to overcome it, but very likely, the choice to join a support group and rehab and from there, with the help he recieves, libertarian moments will come back full force the next time he is tempted where he may over power the temptation or vice versa.

I make choices all the time that are arbitrary that involve a little thinking. What t-shirt to wear for instance. And I could easily decide in those moments to flip a coin to determine the outcome.

I'm sure there are some. definitely not all. These aren't really reasons though. They are conditions.

[ December 21, 2002: Message edited by: geebob ]</p>

Hail

Well, these days I don't think omniscience NECESSARILY denies free will. In most scenarios it does, but it seems logically possible for God to give us "free will" by involving some element of randomness in our creation process. Being omnipotent, generating randomness should be no problem.
However, this still results in:
1) God KNOWS what our free choices will be and still chooses to create those who will disobey him. Thus, he effectively chooses to create someone he knows he will punish.

2) God holds us responsible for a random set of initial conditions over which we had no control. Neither of these results seem very benevolent.

Jamie

==
Neither of these scenarios really adds up, it's a carry over from some ancient and way more primitive beings than our selves. In those days they had lots of tennie-bopper kings and mucho superstition you could even get people to believe the rats came from piles of old rags.
The way I see it God or the universal consciousness set up a system where life can be experienced in a linear or sequential format. It helps the individual portions of himself, which is you, experience what God is and help to make the individual selves more and more able to sense beauty of it all or increase your capacity to realize the ecstasy of it. The individual starts off not knowing and it then it's just one "miraculous" discovery after another from there on that makes it an experience. The system is set up in such a way that people can't access things that would cause real damage to the/or your universal consciousness. You weren't that inept. God knows where everything is headed ultimately but what happens on a planet between individuals is not something that God needs to be able to predict. Still with entirety of your memories available among other thing like knowing what your personal mission is and so, the universal consciousness can predict these things quite well. It is more conscious of the reason why you do what you do than you are and understands why you make whatever errors already. The basis for defining an error being: does it help you to be what your grandest vision of self is or not. This is because you are Love and you don't feel comfortable being malevolent so your grandest vision of self is always harmonious and unique because of the room for freedom of expression built into the system. The experience is about Life and Life already is and a key ingredient of life is freedom. Without it we would be engaging in an other exercise about something other than Life. And again hey that's how I see it.

Wyz_sub10

geebob,

No problem. My last post took 4 hours from my working day.

I'm sure we'll meet up on another thread, and in any case, I am off to visit the relatives for the holidays, away from the computer.

Cheers and happy holidays.