Wackyboy

HRG,

Please note that I said my statements were from a Christian perspective. I didn't not "hijack" any terms. I believe that God is the moral lawgiver for the universe and even though you reject Him and his authority he still works in your life enough to give you a sense of moral law.

Furthermore I resent the implication that us dirty theists are twisting your words for our own malevolent intentions.

If there is a discussion underfoot that is open to the general public AND if that discussion involves whether or not God is bound by moral law AND if I happen to believe that all moral law flows from God AND if I clearly state that this is my opinion and I have no intentions of forcing it upon you with any sorts of threats of bodily harm -- all of which is true THEN why not just let me have my opinion and agree to disagree instead of insulting me and all other theists with me.

Anyway, to answer your question, defined by me, it's my opinion and belief -- you can take it or leave it.

-Kevin

"God is the measure of all things" (Kevin)

Kantian

Kevin said "God is the measure of all things."
Kevin knows what the measure is and it is God.
Kevin knows what, which, and whose God (is).
Kevin is God.
Kevin is the measure of all things.
Therefore, Man is the measure of all things.

~transcendentalist~

Wackyboy

You'll notice that when I speak of God I am willing to stipulate that my opinions about God are beliefs, not knowledge. I could be wrong. I don't think that I am, but I'm not so arrogant as to admit that I might be mistaken. I would have to have claimed to know all that there is to know about God for your syllogism to be correct.

-Kevin

Kantian

Wrong.

It's simple, really. Knowledge is a collection of true justified beliefs. You believe you know exactly what God is and you equate him as the "measure of all things."

Either you know who, or what, or which God (is), or you do not. If you are admitting a grey area, that you do not have knowledge, then you do not have a true justified belief, but an opinion, and we can safely discount opinions.

If you do have a true justified belief, then you are playing at God for the rest of us, who do not share the same knowledge, i.e. have the same idential beliefs. It is you who is serving as a vorstellung for "God."

God is necessary and must exist.
But God cannot and does not exist.
Therefore you are God.

Since you claim knowledge (true justified belief) that God is the measure of all things, then it is you who decided what is the measure of all things.

There's no distinction whatsoever between Protagoras' maxim and your "gloss."

~transcendentalist~

Philip Osborne

Well, for every decision D, it's either 100% determined (necessitated), 0% determined (random), or somewhere in between, right? It seems as if all decisions will be some proportion of the two, and I don't see where there's any room for anything other than antecedent causes or random chance.

There is an alternative to these two, although at present I am unaware of how reasonable of an alternative it is. We could choose to define the notion of "free will" as a primitive; that is, trying to define "free will" is like trying to define the notion of a point in mathematics. There are no further concepts which a point is reducible to. The same may be true of free will.

I know of no philosopher who holds this position; many try to define libertarian free will in terms of "agent causation," but to say "Agent A caused that A do X" only pushes back the question of why A caused that A do X rather than A causing A to do not-X. The notion of free will as a primitive does seem to provide, however, a preferable alternative to asserting all of our actions to be purely the result of various combinations of chance and necessitation. It also seems consistent with our intuition that we have some sort of control over our actions, and our inability to quantify what that control really is.

-Philip

[ December 06, 2002: Message edited by: Philip Osborne ]</p>

Taffy Lewis

Philip Osborne,

Opponents of libertarian free will (or metaphysical freedom) propose a false dichotomy. I am aware in experience of alternative courses of action and when I choose it seems to me that I am responsible for causing the resulting event. If necessity and chance exhaust the ways events occur in the world then this experience must be an illusion. If such a pervasive aspect of our mental lives is illusory then we should doubt our cognitive faculties in general.

The philosopher Gregory Boyd seems to accept that free will is unanalyzable. On the discussion forum of his webpage, he says:

Here is the link:

<a href="http://www.gregboyd.org/gbfront/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1462" target="_blank">A philosophical problem with metaphysical freedom</a>

Your quote above presents a demand for a contrastive explanation (ie. why did he choose A rather than not-A). Maybe it can be argued that such explanations presuppose a mechanistic account of things. So a demand for such an explanation may not make sense when asked of metaphysically free choices.

Lastly, it's my own belief that we cannot explain or fully understand the nature of metaphysical freedom. I agree with Peter van Inwagen and Colin McGinn that freedom, among other things, is cognitively closed to us. We are not biologically equipped to understand it. But being able to understand how something can happen is not a prerequisite for believing that such things happen.

Here's a good paper by van Inwagen on the issue:

<a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwvanInwagen1.htm" target="_blank">The Mystery of Metaphysical Freedom</a>

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by Philip Osborne:

"We could choose to define the notion of 'free will' as a primitive; that is, trying to define 'free will' is like trying to define the notion of a point..."

This is an interesting position. For now, I'll have to say that I consider a good "theory of the universe" to require as few "axioms" as possible, although to call free will primitive seems to square with our very strong metaphysical intuitions that we do indeed have such alternatives. I agree that agent-causation doesn't seem to provide any lasting relief from the problem.

Yet I think there is a difference between saying that humans have primitive free will, and saying that some phenomenon doesn't preclude our free will. Perhaps "primitive free will" is a necessary condition for the freedom of humanity, but most people would say that there still needs to be an absence of some limiting factors. One of these limiting factors might still be a person's deep (or even necessary) moral character. If this is so, a person with a weak and shifting moral character would have a greater degree of freedom than a person with a very strong and unyielding moral character.

So I think to call free will primitive might save libertarian free will from the "Every decision is caused or it isn't" dilemma, but we're only half way to a solution, because there still seems to be a strong influencing factor in the form of a being's moral character, and whether a person is influenced by antecedent factors does indeed enter into the determination of whether she has free will.

Philip Osborne

Interesting essays. Compatibalism has always been a somewhat confusing idea to understand, but Van Inwagen lays it out with clarity.

So far, the idea of freedom as a primitive seems to be the most promising solution for the Libertarian (or perhaps, "agent causation" as a primitive). I agree that the fewer of such "primitives" we have, the better, but only if we can avoid them without having to make statements which run contradictory to our experience.

Certainly, our moral character and our past influences greatly influence the choices we make. I think that a reasonable free will thesis might maintain that our choices are not 100% necessitated, and that if a choice is influenced X% by necessitating factors, the remaining percent (100%-X%) is not attributable to chance but to an instance of the primitive"free will" concept.

-Philip

[ December 07, 2002: Message edited by: Philip Osborne ]</p>