Is there a God?

[Blasted]

Some Judeochristian religions specifically assert both omniscience and free will

FTFY
Roman Catholocism does, as do most Protestants, if you ask them*. Not many Protestant creeds do, though. They tend to side with Luther and Calvin on that. (There is an interesting aside on how Lutheranism split from Luther on that, but that's for another time).

*I think most people want free will to exist, even if it only applies to them. Which is where the disconnect from stated belief and actual belief comes from.

[Psychic Robot]

That'd be more insulting if, any of the times you'd said it, you could follow it with a response that isn't ass. Or any response at all. If you just want to troll, do us both a favor and shut up.

lol if I wanted to troll I would use intentional logical fallacies, feign ignorance, and quibble over nothing. though I'm certain you're quite familiar with this sort of debate strategy given that you implement it frequently enough. not that I blame you; I understand things can be difficult given your condition.

[DSMatticus]

Some Judeochristian religions specifically assert both omniscience and free will

FTFY
Roman Catholocism does, as do most Protestants, if you ask them*. Not many Protestant creeds do, though. They tend to side with Luther and Calvin on that. (There is an interesting aside on how Lutheranism split from Luther on that, but that's for another time).

*I think most people want free will to exist, even if it only applies to them. Which is where the disconnect from stated belief and actual belief comes from.

Frank put this best: that's a difference between actual and sophisticated theologies.

If you tell most people "god made you the way you are with the predestination in mind that you would go to hell, and you are merely living out the life he made for you culminating in the damnation he foretold and enacted," they would think that was bullshit. If people got up and preached that today, their religion would fall apart because we understand that that makes no god damn moral sense.

The admittance that there is no free will and that hell exists contradicts omnibenevolence; and if you just admit there isn't omnibenevolence, your sermons are "our god is a dick. Sorry, just do what we say. Maybe you're one of the lucky ones." That won't be very popular either, so that's not what they actually teach people to believe.

[Grek]

So... yeah. I've gotta say again; what's your point here?

My point is that this right here:

4) If the outcome of your life is decided before you even exist, you cannot affect it.

is straight up false.

When we talk about people having "free will" and "choosing" to do something, we don't (or at least shouldn't) start out at the abstract with words like "free will" and "choice" and then apply those abstract concepts to people. We start out looking at people and then make up abstract concepts to fit them. Insofar as "choice" means anything, it means whatever it is that people do when they choose to do something. More specifically, we mean something like "whatever it is that people do to affect outcomes for their lives". And since people are deterministic things in a deterministic world, the things they do are deterministic themselves. And that means, naturally, that choice is deterministic. There's no contradiction there.

I mean, you certainly appear to accept the idea that you can affect the outcome of your life. You can choose to have a ham sandwich or a turkey sandwich, and so far as that is a meaningful choice, you make it and the world is different for it. You can even made big choices, like where to go to college. And you can see other people making similar choices, affecting outcomes, causing the future to be what it will be. Free will is obviously something real.

You also appear to accept determinism, that things will fall when dropped as predicted by the law of gravitation, that light will move in a line as mediated by photons and that the world will continue from one instant to the next, always obeying the same laws. Determinism is also obviously something real.

The apparent contradiction is from taking theologicians and old-timey philosophers at their word and assuming that their muddled musings on what "free will" "really means" are at all important or relevant to the real world. Philosophy is a confused, diseased discipline full of people that sit down to write a paper, starting with beautiful and abstract terms and then get their brains bent out of shape when the world doesn't match up with the abstract concepts they've put to pen. It isn't that they're stupid, it takes a lot of smarts to get a degree in philosophy after all, it's just that they've lost touch with what people actually mean by words.

If you're refering to any real thing at all, anything that describes how people actually are like, by "free will" and don't just go by wooly-headed philosophical definitions of the term, than free will and determinism do not a contradiction make.

[Username17]

The entire Matrix 2 was about how Free Will and Determinism are opposites. That was a bad movie, but it was a bad movie because it provided no viewpoint on that argument, not because that argument is not real. When people say "Free Will", they mean that you have the ability to change your fate. If fate cannot be changed, you don't have free will.

Now, it's a fucking unanswerable question until we develop time travel. Because we only have one past and we can't see the future. So Regardless of whether there exist many potential fates for us to choose from now, by the time we get to them there will be only one. And that's compatible with either the choice doctrine or the fate doctrine.

Quantum Mechanics comes to the rescue of free will to a degree, in that in several interpretations there actually are multiple available fates and that knowing which will occur is literally impossible. There are others where the past is literally not immutable, and you could actually replay events and see different events unfold.

The discussion is largely academic as from the standpoint of not having a tachyon communicator or a many worlds bridging device we are still stuck in that boring Newtonian world where there is only one past we remember and no future we can see. But it's very important for moral discussions about theory of justice. Because a "punishment" based theory of justice, where people have things inflicted on them because of what they deserve, is wholly incompatible with a deterministic universe. And since Christianity and Islam double down on exactly that, it is very important to them to maintain the idea of choices changing fates. If your theory of justice was based around encouraging better behavior from people in the future, then you honestly wouldn't care whether there is one possible fate or many.

-Username17

[DSMatticus]

So... yeah. I've gotta say again; what's your point here?

My point is that this right here:

4) If the outcome of your life is decided before you even exist, you cannot affect it.

is straight up false.

A lightswitch 'affects' a lightbulb, but this isn't meaningful and it's not what I meant by affect, because a lightswitch definitely doesn't have free will. Affect in this case means something more, and I admit it's hazy and handwavey but you're leading in this right direction towards something more rigorous with this choice thing coming up.

More specifically, we mean something like "whatever it is that people do to affect outcomes for their lives". And since people are deterministic things in a deterministic world, the things they do are deterministic themselves. And that means, naturally, that choice is deterministic. There's no contradiction there.

And here we are. And here's the problem: if choice is deterministic, in what sense is it choice?
1) You can choose to eat the sandwich.
2) You can choose not to eat the sandwich.
3) The world is deterministic and you will choose to eat the sandwich.
4) If you will choose to eat the sandwich, you cannot choose not to eat the sandwich.
5) Contradiction.
Something has to give. What you've done is define free will as choice, but choice is equally incompatible with determinism.

I mean, you certainly appear to accept the idea that you can affect the outcome of your life. You can choose to have a ham sandwich or a turkey sandwich, and so far as that is a meaningful choice, you make it and the world is different for it. You can even made big choices, like where to go to college. And you can see other people making similar choices, affecting outcomes, causing the future to be what it will be. Free will is obviously something real.

Why do I accept that? Because I'm not curled up in a sobbing ball of nihilism-induced depression? I get by. Super depressing as it is, have you considered that choice is an illusion caused by being a super-complicated yet deterministic decision machine, and that you have exactly as much choice as a lightswitch?

Free will and determinism leads to two possibilities: either free will doesn't exist, or it's something meaningless like the free will to follow a script line by line without variation, which is something a rock does and it's not a satisfying position to say "we have free will! ... Just like rocks."

[Lago PARANOIA]

Unfortunate hijack. I do beg your pardon and I'll try to tie it onto the point of this thread:

The entire Matrix 2 was about how Free Will and Determinism are opposites. That was a bad movie, but it was a bad movie because it provided no viewpoint on that argument, not because that argument is not real.

You said something similar to this about why Matrix 1 succeeded, but I have sort of a hard time believing this. I thought it succeeded because of the special effects, stylishness, and the noir-ish claustrophobic atmosphere of the movie. I mean the 'brain in a jar' argument elevated it from pop cultural fluff to something with some staying power, but I doubt that's what made it popular.


But anyway, going back to free will. Is it even possible for human beings or anything really to have cognition that ultimately doesn't boil down to a set of inputs either done now or some point in the past (education, genetics, experiences, etc.)? I mean in a non-deterministic universe you could tease different reactions to stimuli out of people, but how would that be different from not having free will? The only way you'd be able to break this pattern is if there was something in the thought process that was non-deterministic--but then again, how is that 'free will' any more than Professor Xavier unknowingly sending psionic pulses from across the city that mess up your 'normal' thought processes?

I mean free will implies being able not to follow some kind of script imposed on you by fate/your environment/your internal processes, but if you're not following those scripts then which ones are you following?

[Fuchs]

Weren't there studies that showed that some actions were started to be taken before the brain had received the information?

[DSMatticus]

Is it even possible for human beings or anything really to have cognition that ultimately doesn't boil down to a set of inputs either done now or some point in the past

Not really.

If you're deterministic, you can't make choices because you're only capable of producing one option you can actually end up taking. Choosing one of one things is not a choice.

If you aren't deterministic, it just means you're producing multiple options or have multiple intermediate pathing options, and an RNG decides which one you end up taking. Deterministically producing a set of options with weights and then having an RNG select one is not choice, either.

The act of choosing does not actually exist.

[erik]

Quantum Mechanics comes to the rescue of free will to a degree, in that in several interpretations there actually are multiple available fates and that knowing which will occur is literally impossible. There are others where the past is literally not immutable, and you could actually replay events and see different events unfold.

I think even being generous enough to grant that it comes to the rescue to a degree is a bit much. If you have an infinite number of possible outcomes, it still doesn't matter. A person is reading off a series of numbers- it matters not whether they are fed random or ordered numbers, they're still reading them off. Changing inputs doesn't change the process.

If my action is based upon another input, it doesn't matter how random that input is, I'm still locked on deterministic rails. Randomness offers no avenue to escape the reality that nobody has any means to act outside of their environment's influence.

Weren't there studies that showed that some actions were started to be taken before the brain had received the information?

Not quite. As I recall, it was that a persons brain could be detected as selecting an answer before the person was able to verbalize or even realize they had selected it. Which is exactly how it must work. You cannot realize or verbalize it *before* you have selected it. Still, it is eerie to see a computer display what you were thinking before you realized you were thinking it.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Hell, is it even possible for anything with cognition to not have to delegate most of its decision-making/activities to the unconsciousness?

It sounds like it'd end up like Napoleon trying to micromanage his troops down to how many times they chewed their food or how much they exhaled with each step. Unless you had incredible patience it'd be maddening really quickly. And unless you had some incredible computational power you'd move slower than GW updating the canon.

Maybe our robotic descendants from Neo-Urth 2229 would be up to the task of having every decision made being put through what we call 'the consciousness', at the cost of preoccupying them with stupid shit such as 'hmm, which combination of 1 trillion words in the dictionary should I use to give my 200-character report on the solar farms'.

[DSMatticus]

There's no reason to think the consciousness isn't deterministic, despite sensations otherwise.

[Grek]

A lightswitch 'affects' a lightbulb, but this isn't meaningful and it's not what I meant by affect, because a lightswitch definitely doesn't have free will. Affect in this case means something more, and I admit it's hazy and handwavey but you're leading in this right direction towards something more rigorous with this choice thing coming up.

A lightswitch fails to have "free will" because it fails on the "will" part of "free will". It doesn't evaluate options, make choices or decide anything. Humans do that, which is people ask about what a person's will is and whether that will is "free" or not. If you have a more rigorous definition of "affect" you want to use, I'm willing to use it, conditional on that definition being not-retarded.

And here we are. And here's the problem: if choice is deterministic, in what sense is it choice?

A choice is any decision you make between two options that you "could" pick. Note that "could" is in scare quotes because the meaning of words like "could" and "should" and "would" are non-obvious in a deterministic world. Could, in this case, means something like "physically capable, but conditional upon a decision to do so". You are physically capable of eating a sandwich, but your actual eating of the sandwich is conditional on you deciding to do so. You're also physically capable of not eating the sandwich, iff you decide not to do so.

Choices are mental things, and only physically exist in terms of neurons firing in your brain. Since we only live each instant once, we only ever choose one of the possible options we could have chosen. However, your brain does not model things that way. Instead, your brain models what "would" (note the scare quotes again!) happen for each option, compares the outcomes and then chooses the best outcome. Therein lies the "will" part of "free will", the thing that goes on in your head where it models counterfactual universes that don't exist, compares those possible universes to its preferences, determines which it wants best and then takes action based on the product of those preferences and expected outcomes.

Wanting to define "choice" as being able to make decisions that you didn't/don't/won't/wouldn't make is just retarded. That's the opposite of choice, that's like if you decided that you wanted to eat the sandwich but then your body refused to obey due to your will being usurped by the cock of the almighty calvanist sky-wizard. It goes against the physical reality of cognative science and is absolutely as wrong as a definition can be.

Why do I accept that? Because I'm not curled up in a sobbing ball of nihilism-induced depression? I get by. Super depressing as it is, have you considered that choice is an illusion caused by being a super-complicated yet deterministic decision machine, and that you have exactly as much choice as a lightswitch?

I said that you seem to except free will because you talk about people making decisions to do things. Perhaps "anticipate" free will would have been a better choice. Or maybe "expect" free will. You act as if other people make choices and do things that they decide, and NOT as if you thought something other than their choices were responsible for their behaviors.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

The admittance that there is no free will and that hell exists contradicts omnibenevolence; and if you just admit there isn't omnibenevolence, your sermons are "our god is a dick. Sorry, just do what we say. Maybe you're one of the lucky ones." That won't be very popular either, so that's not what they actually teach people to believe.

It worked for pretty much all the pre-Christian European religions, I'm just sayin'.

[sabs]

Also, There's actually three things going on.

Determinism
Free Will
Natural Selection

There could be no God, and you still might not have free will.
It's been said that we make decisions about people within the first 3 seconds. The Human mind is built to take in available stimuli and make decisions way before you've had chance to think about them, or choose. Our Nature drives what we do. I'm not sure Humans have Free Will.. we are the sum of our bioelectrical impulses. But that doesn't mean there's some micromanaging dick God.

[RadiantPhoenix]

So, here's a thought:

"I don't think I mind determinism quite so much if the determinism happens on the same level as my consciousness."

i.e. "It's okay if I'm deterministic, it's not okay if I'm riding a deterministic body."

[tzor]

See, unlike the Christian God, String Theory might be real. Probably isn't, but it might be. It's not logically impossible and is consistent with our measurements. So are an infinite number of other interpretations, but it is a possible solution.

Omnipotence and Omniscience are contradictory, and thus a God who possesses those traits is not a possible answer to anything.

First and foremost, Omnipotence and Omniscience as properly understood is contrained by the laws of math and logic. Most (if not all) of the arguments against them are in fact aginst the laws of math at the first order of infinity.

Second and equally important, Omnipotence and Omniscience are not required defining concepts in support of the Christian God (they are in fact feel good statements at best) and finding any logical error to your current definition du jour doesn't prove the non existance of the Christian God any more than finding a flaw in the current theory of String Theory disproves String Theory in general.

Last and least, (and this is one of those no honestly) I can't see how any role player can ever find a hard time understanding that the DM is all powerful and all knowing. It's his universe, after all.

[sabs]

Wait since when is God Not, "The All Seeing All Knowing, All Powerful God?"

Omniscience, Omnipotence, and Benevolence are core teachings of most Christian Sects (Including Catholicism)

As for the DM being All Powerful and All Knowing.
I don't really have a problem with that, but we also know that the DM is a self-serving dick and about as Benevolent as a Monkey.

[Guyr Adamantine]

Quite interesting, as MCs tend to get an over-inflated sense of importance, and take fun in torturing the main characters of the world.

[tzor]

While Jesus may not have explicitly said cheeseburgers were on the menu, God does say so pretty explicitly in Acts.

Fun fact, cheesburgers are technically allowed under the Torah. The actual prohibition is not to boil a kid in his mother's milk. The complete isolation of milk and dairy from being consumed at the same time comes from the oral tradition which is designed to place a wall around the law so that the faithful observer would not cross across the law by accident.

Acts allowed for the Christian Pig Roast. Paul bitterly complained to Peter for not attending the community pig roast dinners especially after he had made such a fuss about the matter in the first place.

[sabs]

You weren't going to convert a single Western European if you told them they couldn't eat Pork. Pork is /the/ staple meat of Western Europe. Pigs are easy to raise, easy to breed, and one of the most perfect food sources in terms of waste/product ratio. You can almost literally use every ounce of a pig. Basically the only parts you can't use are the Lungs, and you have to wash out the intestines/stomach content before you eat them.

[tzor]

bonus points: if God is omniscient and knows everything, then He has always known exactly what He will do. and if He has always known His actions in advance, He cannot do anything other than what He knows he will do. therefore, God lacks free will. prove me wrong.

Now that's a good one. Does God's all knowing extend to knowledge of self? From a strict definition, that's not really implied at all in any manner whatsoever, since it is implied that God has all knowledge of the universe and God is by definition outside of the universe.

The second is does God have free will. That's way too deep for this forum. Let me tell you what, you take this bucket and try to empty the ocean with it. Let me know how you are doing after a year or so, because you are really going deep with that one.

[tzor]

The entire Matrix 2 was about how Free Will and Determinism are opposites. That was a bad movie, but it was a bad movie because it provided no viewpoint on that argument, not because that argument is not real. When people say "Free Will", they mean that you have the ability to change your fate. If fate cannot be changed, you don't have free will.

"Free will is the ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints." (the ability to choose between alternative possibilities in such a way that the choice and action are to some extent creatively determined by the conscious subject at the time)

Now in a couple of minutes I am going to invoke an act of free will. I will enter a cafeteria and I will determine from a random menu of stuff which food I will order. The choice will be freely made and determined by the conscious subject at the time. That's free will, don't think about it too hard.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Does God's all knowing extend to knowledge of self? From a strict definition, that's not really implied at all in any manner whatsoever, since it is implied that God has all knowledge of the universe and God is by definition outside of the universe.

First, omniscience by definition includes everything. Not some of everything, all of everything. If God exists outside the universe, and doesn't know about things outside the universe, then he is not omniscient by definition.

Second, are you not familiar with the doctrines of Omnipresence and Immanence? God totally exists inside the universe, it's how he talks to people and incarnates as a person and so on.

[Kaelik]

"Free will is the ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints."

And is the definition of apple "A fruit that has certain qualities"?

If you don't lay out what kinds of constraints are the certain kinds, then your definition is meaningless.