rainbow walking

Originally posted by Duck of Death:
[QB]Rainbow Walking, thanks for your response. I find it totally obscure, but nonetheless.....

Perhaps I should simplify the problem by asking a very simple question to theists:

Do you agree that evil is the result of free will?

Yes or no.

rw: No. Good and evil are just different sides of the same coin. You can't have one without the other in this event horizon. These attributes were created by God. Having been placed within man's reach was also intentionally established to begin the process of creating new creatures to replace the angels but who will occupy a position much closer to God than the angels did. Thus the necessity to temper the will and train the creature to choose the good and forsake the evil.

CodeMason

Aaaah, the mind of a theist.

Photocrat

You're neglecting the process we've been through in that question. When we're born, we're something of a blank slate [we don't have to be *totally* blank, lest this delve into a controversy over psychology :] and we add to that by our choices. What your question assumes is that there must exist some way of making us into what we will become without going through the process we've been through. That is by no means a given. I suppose you'll bring up omnipotence, but how do you define 'omnipotent'?

I, for one, define that as 'able to do any logically possible thing' [which avoids silly contradictions :] So where does that leave us? Well, for one, you cannot allow "loaded" constructs [like "loaded questions" they are constructs which assume things about themselves; not unlike the problems with self-referential statements & such :]

Now then, unfortunately, the "why doesn't God create people who will always obey Him and yet have free will" is a pretty loaded construct.

That's not to say we cannot come to obey God, after we 'internalize' the scriptures and such. Without living through life until we learned what love meant, it would not be possible for us to love God, for one thing. But the fact that we can come to that does not necessarily imply that we could come to that state without going through the process of salvation. If anything, Christian tradition denies that.

Drat, I should save part of this and get on my attack on the intellectual foundations of atheism. I mean, I was going to make the first bit of it about this. Granted, it's not much of an "attack" [it was to be only the first part... :] but since it's such a barrier I did want to deal with it first, even so...

jpbrooks

Photocrat's point about the necessity of the "process" of salvation seems to be a cogent one. While it is logically possible for God to have simply created a sinless world of beings with "free will" at the outset of creation, it would not actually have been possible for "Him" to create us (i.e., beings whose genuine experiences of space-time events follow one another sequentially, include encounters with sins, evils, and temptations, and, as such, provide learning opportunities) as beings who have already achieved the "end state" of the "process" of salvation at the outset.

Nevertheless, Duck of Death does appear to have pointed out the inadequacy of assuming that the ultimate reason why God allows evil is simply to allow humans to have and exercise "free will". There is no way for the Christian to (cogently) argue against this objection to the "free will defense" without abandoning its basic assumption and "dragging in" further assumptions that are more fundamental.

-John Phillip Brooks

[ January 21, 2002: Message edited by: jpbrooks ]</p>

Adrian Selby

"Now then, unfortunately, the "why doesn't God create people who will always obey Him and yet have free will" is a pretty loaded construct."

How is this loaded.

No doubt ruining some of JL Mackie's reasoning on this, it can be argued that if free will is the most important thing, we could have been created with free will but we happened only to have chosen to do 'the right thing' every time we make a choice, because to suggest that we must somewhere have had to do the wrong thing is to say that evil is a necessary component of free will, when free will, by definition, means one does not have to do any kind of act. Why do we not therefore make choices that are always good when its possible that free will can be such that we never happen to chose evil.

What's bothers me is the sheer amount of evil done because of free will. In quantitative terms the free will God has given us is extremely destructive in terms of this 'veil of tears' genocides, poverty it goes on and on. For millenia after millenia. For the right to a place in heaven an awful lot of people are in agony with disease and sickness, butchered in war etc.

Perhaps what I'm arguing for is enlightened free will, that God makes us free but with a better understanding of what is good. As it stands, people are flying planes into buildings in his name.

Emotive note: If this is the best God can do, I don't respect him enough to want to be near him anyway.

Adrian

Secular Pinoy

Two articles that would be of some help:

<a href="http://www.scandalism.com/story/views/argument.html" target="_blank">Three Reductio ad Absurdum Arguments Against Christianity</a>

<a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/michael_martin/heaven.html" target="_blank">Problems With Heaven</a>


&lt;edited ot fix links&gt;

[ January 21, 2002: Message edited by: secularpinoy ]</p>

Oolon Colluphid

As usual, I'm left wondering what the evidence is for the existence of this alleged 'heaven'. I take it that those proposing it have some? Otherwise, what's the point in discussing it? Perhaps you wonder what I feed the huge invisible dragon I keep in my garage too?

TTFN, Oolon

phlebas

I've always found this to be an interesting, if eventually futile, question. (It generally seems to spawn from the "problem of evil" argument, which is IMHO pretty weak anyway.)

The first step is to show that "free will" is such a good thing that it is worth risking eternal punishment for. Since we couldn't tell the difference between being preprogrammed and being a free agent, it doesn't seem worth it to me. But it becomes a Good Thing in the mind of the theists, because its their typical fallback response to the problem of evil.

If we're assuming that residents in Heaven (or at least God himself) have free will but never choose to do evil. Satan aside, if even one being in Heaven spends its entire existence not being evil, then evil is not a necessary by-product of free will.

So what's the difference between humans and angels?

I can think of two things right off: 1) angels are generally perceived to have more wisdom, and 2) angels lack the emotional and mental baggage that sometimes lead human beings into bad decisions.

So the question becomes "why didn't God make us smarter, so we can make better choices? And why didn't he make us less a slave to our emotions?"

Some theists claim that Jesus led a perfect, sinless life -- was he simply a better version of human, or was he not a human at all? If he was a better model, the why are we held accountable for our design flaws? If he wasn't human, then what was the point of him showing up? Or did Jesus not have free will? (And wouldn't the story have been different if Judas had free will and opted not to rat out Jesus?)

Anyway, Duck, you're not likely to get a satisfactory answer from any theists. This whole topic touches on one of the biggest (IMHO) theological questions: why did a perfect being create a universe? Until a theist can satisfactorily answer THAT one, I think the other arguments are just mental masturbation.

Lonergan

I don't want to drag this discussion too far off
track, but I can't help but comment on the
definition of omnipotence given by Protocrat.
-----------------------------------

I suppose you'll bring up omnipotence, but how do you define 'omnipotent'?

I, for one, define that as 'able to do any logically possible thing' [which avoids silly contradictions :] So where does that leave us? Well, for one, you cannot

---------------------------------------

Without going into the details, free will itself
appears to be logically impossible. If the claim
is made that action X was free, then was it caused
or uncaused ? If it was caused, it was not free.
If it was uncaused, it was not free since freedom
implies the ability to cause action. Action, of
course, also refers to mental activity. This may
seem like an oversimplification, but I don't think
that it is if thought through. Christians like to
claim that God gave humans free will, but even God
cannot do the logically impossible.

jpbrooks

Ok.
I'm not an advocate of the "free will defense" or most of the other contemporary forms of theodicy held by many Christians. And I'm only doing this because no other Christians/Theists seem to be interested in responding to these points. My interests in philosophy, for the most part, lie outside apologetics, but I do recognize the importance of addressing these kinds of questions. I'm going to be too busy, for (at least) the rest of the week, with other matters to follow up these responses. But in the interest of generating further, and perhaps more probing, questions from both Christians and non-Christians about the issues that are raised by these questions, I will try to reply to them as an "advocate" of contemporary Christian theodicies.

Adrian Selby,

It may be argued that current events such as this are part of our moral education that is intended (by God) to eventually lead to enlightened free will in those who will reside in "heaven".

God is showing "tough love" that lets us (innocent or not) experience the consequences of living in a world of sinful people, rather than a "sappy" sentimental "love" that would spare us such consequences and never teach us much of anything moral. The focus is, again, on the people that will populate "heaven".

secularpinoy,

An advocate of the "Soul Making" defense (SMD) might argue that, while moral evil is not necessary to provide obstacles to overcome, the problem of the temptation to do evil would never be addressed in a world that is never allowed to contain any actual moral evil. A world that always prevents us from doing the (evil) things that there is no reason to suppose we couldn't do, would just raise curiosities in us that could never be satisfied. And such a world could hardly be considered a "better" world (even by us) than one that does satisfy our curiosities.

Moreover, how could "free" beings with our psychological attributes be prevented from doing things that they would desire to do without violating their "free will"?

Oolon Colluphid,

While evidence for an immaterial "realm" of the dead may be somewhat difficult to come by, an "afterlife" would be required by an absolutely just God to mete out punishments and rewards for deeds that are done by humans that didn't (and won't) get redressed in this life.
The only instance in which an "afterlife" would not be needed to redress unresolved moral issues is one in which no innocent people would ever die or experience any kind of evil, and where everyone who did sin only had the opportunity to sin once before dying. In that instance, death would be the penalty for sin and would be justly meted out (in this life) only to those who sinned.
But (again) it is highly unlikely that such a state of existence could be brought about among "free" beings without violating their "free will".
Thus, the concept of an "afterlife" is intertwined with the concept of a perfectly just God who creates a world like ours. To consider the possibility of such a creator God automatically "drags in" the possibility of an "afterlife".

phiebas,

Whether there is actually a difference depends on one's definition of "free angency". But we are aware that certain feelings, like fear, seem to occur in us automatically, without our intention, in response to certain situations in which we find ourselves. We also experience dreams which seem to come to us when we are asleep, without our intention. This seems to suggest that we are "preprogrammed" to have certain experiences.

Correct. (Of course, Christ would be such a being.)

But, of course, this would not explain how the angel Satan could bring himself to sin.

It may be argued that God is making us smarter by submitting us to an "educational" process that occurs over time. He wanted to create beings who were self-motivated and would do things because they wanted to do them; not because some "higher" beings were "pulling their strings". A world of "puppets" could hardly be considered a morally "better" world than one with beings in it who act on the basis of their own emotions and desires.

A world made up entirely of beings who are exactly like Christ cannot exist. Christ was unique among humans because he was the product of one human parent who didn't share his attributes. So, it is impossible for God to produce a world of such "better models".

Furthermore, the underlying reasons why we choose to sin or do evil are irrelevant to the issue of accountability, rewards and penalties for intentional acts, etc.. Humans are morally accountable for their choices. Since it would be impossible for God to construct a sound argument that demonstrates His culpability for causing someone to sin against Him, the soundness of any argument that would place the blame for human sin on God, itself, presupposes the actuality of intentional thinking about moral choice (and thus, of moral accountability) in humans.

Exactly. He had to be human as well as God.

Yes and yes. And again, depending on one's definition of "free", Judas did have "free will".

A "perfect" being does whatever "He", "She", or "It" does because "He, "She", or "It" desires to do it. To assume that the being does anything for any other reason is to assume that "He", "She", or "It" does what "It" does out of necessity. And that would imply a "less perfect" being because an even more transcendent being would be needed to account for the necessity in the original being.

Lonergan,

What if X were caused by the agent himself or herself rather than by some antecedent agency?

I'm somewhat uneasy about the definition of omnipotence as the ability to do whatever is logically possible. It doesn't seem to adequately explain how God would choose one logically possible alternative over another.

But, as far as the issue of "free will"/determinism is concerned, there seems to be no inconsistency in the "compatibilistic" position unless "free" means without any cause at all.

[ January 22, 2002: Message edited by: jpbrooks ]</p>