Alonzo Fyfe

In the Secular Support and Lifestyles section I am posting a series of articles having to do with my struggle to find an ethics without God.

Part VIII of that series concerns free will.

The absence of free will has long been considered a problem for ethics. I present a conception that raises no such problem.

In fact, it seems to me that a proper understanding of the free will problem provides an answer to what I had been taught was a fatal problem with rule-utilitarian theories of ethics.

I am interested in whatever feedback you may consider relevant.

John Page

Hi Alonzo!

From the OT, the knowledge of good and evil came from eating the fruit of the tree bearing the same name.

So, the environment created by god contained the seeds of man's acquisition of the knowledge of good and evil. But how could man have known that eating the fruit was wrong/evil if he had no knowledge of good and evil.

Irrespective of the argument as to whether we have free will or not, it seems that in the OT man attained his knowledge of good and evil despite the express wishes of god to the opposite. Thus, one might argue, either it is the case that:

a) atheists are living more as god intended than Adam (because they have no sense of good and evil having not eaten the fruit of that tree) or;
b) atheists and religious people alike inhabit the world and taste the same fruits and develop their sense of good and evil in the same way.

Either way, the atheist wins in the away game played in the Garden of Eden memorial stadium.

Cheers, John