Why would it matter what I say? You're just going to ignore everything I say because you already have a predetermined bias that you must attack anything that is associated with religion. I am merely just pointing out what someone who is religious would say to those things. Does that mean that I'm overly religious and will defend it at all cost with a general lack of rationality? No. Nor do I respect when I'm assaulted for having a certain belief; have I personally done anything to you? Hell, not even on these forums do you "know" me. I don't attack the sciences or whatever; I personally think that religious theories regarding the universe/observable world are just a bunch of shit. Hell, I even thought about become a physicist as a career. So I have no clue why you vehemently attack me, as to prove some point that what you believe is right and no one else is correct.
I didn't attack you at all, though. I attacked free will. What you've said, I've seen countless times and the questions I ask I have never seen answered in a satisfactory manner. Your post was a good starting point to ask them since it seemed to offer free will as an explanation to evil as if it didn't need to be justified - but it could have been any other similar post from any other user. Your reaction is both disproportionate and confusing. If you believe that it does not matter what you say, then by any means, save yourself the trouble and don't say anything at all. Anyone can respond to my post, I don't care if it's you or not. And really, if you aren't going to make an effort then I'd rather it not be you.
And to your other part: no, I am no expert on the free will. You can not pick someone out of a crowd and clearly say that this person has free will or not. It's dependent on the decisions he or she makes.
So then, given a history of the behavior of someone, how do you tell whether that person has free will or not? If there is no way to tell, then where is the worth in the concept of free will?
According to the biblical theory best to my theory (I AM NOT AN EXPERT ON THIS SO SOMEONE WHO KNOWS MORE THAN ME CAN CORRECT ME AS I WILL BE FLAMED EITHER WAY)
Look can you chillax a little? Nobody's flaming you. I think free will is bullshit, I want to incit a rational discussion about it and that's all there is to it. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
God forbid the eating of the apple, but gave Adam and Eve free will. Eve was tempted, and despite the rule, ate the apple. God punished Adam and Eve by throwing them out of Eden, but nothing more. As such, all people are descendant of Adam and Eve, so they aren't allowed to be in Eden either. Do I agree with this? No.
Cool. Some people do. But I'm glad you don't, really!
I believe in evolution. Free will isn't evil, but gives people the ability to do "evil" things or associate with "evil", which is why the world is so screwed up right now. The higher classes have a tendency to gravitate towards this "evilness," and must do more to overcome this natural sin. Once again, I am not an expert, so don't flame me that I'm trying to be one.
So if I told you that natural disasters hardly seem to have anything to do with free will despite the great harm they do to many people and I called you out on higher classes having a tendency to gravitate towards "evilness" (do they?), I would be flaming you? If you are not enough of an "expert" to answer these, it seems that the right way to go about this would be to withdraw your arguments and accept mine.
Free will is desirable because you can choose what to do, not someone else. Not having free will shapes your life around rules and laws. We have rules and laws today in modern society, but those attempt to "protect" the common man; however, we still have the ability to break these laws.
Ok so once again, given that by your own admission you are not an expert, if I made a compelling case that free will, nonwithstanding the fact that it is essentially unintelligible, does not necessarily entail the possibility of evil, would you listen? Read the following as my attempt to
amiably convince you that free will, should it exist, would be no excuse for evil to exist and thus that God would
still be to blame for this whole mess:
Let's say that we meet. I would have many choices as to what to do once we meet:
1) I could choose a game for us to play (good)
2) I could choose a topic of conversation (good)
3) I could choose a weapon to bludgeon you to death with (evil)
4) I could choose a witty insult to ridicule you with (evil)
As free will only entails the ability to "choose what to do", it stands to reason that even if I could not do anything evil, I would still have free will. Indeed, I would still have many choices available from 1) and 2). I could still choose what to study, where I want to work. I could choose what I want to eat for dinner. I could do no evil, but that hardly matters because I would still have many, many important choices to make. If I could give up the ability to do evil while keeping the free will to do anything I want as long as it is good, I would do so in a heartbeat. Wouldn't you? I can understand the value you see in free will, but I simply cannot understand the value you see in the freedom to do evil acts. There's already plenty of freedom in good acts and evil acts are punished and deterred as much as possible. So what's the point of allowing them?
You can't argue that free will is the ability to make
any choice, including evil, for the simple reason that right now, we don't have the ability to make any choice. I cannot choose to fly, though that might be contrived. A better example would be the ability to multiply numbers with hundreds of digits mentally. Some people can. Most (including myself) cannot. So technically speaking the people who can do it have more choices than I do. So why is it that a neat, useful ability such as the one I described is unaccessible to most, whereas a harmful ability such as doing evil is so widespread? What is so "special" about evil that we should be able to do it? Why not give everybody all talents minus that of even conceiving of evil acts? Everybody would have free will. Evil would not exist. Why can't we have that?
And that's not all. I just talked about how free will could be preserved while vanquishing evil in a situation where doing evil is physically possible. But as it stands, it's not clear why evil should even be physically possible. Consider the act of punching someone. Punching someone (usually) doesn't kill him and that is in no way an argument against free will - you can choose to punch someone, but it won't kill him. Fair enough. Now imagine that every human became bulletproof overnight. That would be irrelevant to free will - we just have harder skin, that's all, and now even guns can't kill us. Now imagine that every human on Earth becomes downright invincible - impossible to harm or kill. Free will would remain, yet all evil related to harming people would be rendered irrelevant simply because it would be impossible to harm people. Furthermore, imagine that we are granted a way to
enforce property rights absolutely in such a way that theft is rendered impossible. That has absolutely nothing to do with free will, yet now the evil of theft stops existing. Should everybody come with built-in lie detectors, lying would be rendered irrelevant. I guess that this leaves things like being a jerk. Regardless, you can remove an incredible amount of evil from the world without sacrificing free will in the slightest.
So right there I just gave you two loopholes which God could very easily use to have his cake and eat it too, i.e. have free will in a world where evil does not exist. The first loophole is that he could manipulate the set of choices that humans have access to. The second loophole is to make evil physically impossible. Either works. So this shifts the free will defense to trying to explain why these loopholes shouldn't be used - which looks like it would be pretty hard because I see no downside to them.
And why a perfect human has to suffer because of the free will of "flawed" humans, it is because of free will that these flawed humans have become "powerful," and able to rule with an iron fist. Religiously, God doesn't punish in the mortal world, only after we have died and gone into the afterlife. Non-religiously, it's easy to get people to suffer if you have the guns and the brutish people willing to get your dirty work done for you. Fear is an awe-inspiring tool.
As stated previously, free will does not entail, at all, the possibility for people to become that powerful. Free will doesn't allow me to fly, why would it allow me to kill people? I dare you to find anyone who would rather be able to kill people than fly.
Of course, you'll probably just ignore anything I said because you probably associate me with some crazy ultra conservative branch of Christianity/Judaism and find somewhere in my post where you can rip it to shreds and humiliate me for some flawed logic.
Why would I associate you with some crazy ultra conservative branch of Christianity/Judaism for supporting free will? That doesn't make any sense. I mean, fuck, I could find non-theists that believe in free will.
Nor does that mean I agree with everything in my religion or this concept of "free will." It sucks that people have to suffer today because of it. I would just prefer to live life by rules and laws; I like order in my life. Free will is a double edged sword. And for your information (and for everyone in general), the place of worship that I go to, when I go there, accepts ALL people, regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation. I have no true prejudices in my life, which is why I haven't attacked any of y'all.
That's not what I see. What I see is that I attacked the idea of free will using one of your posts, which is fair. In return... you attacked
me. You did answer some of the questions, though, so it's all cool.
Tangerine said:
We are perfect, or as perfect as we can be with free will.
See this post for my arguments as to how we could be more perfect with free will. It is very, very possible to have free will without evil and it is not rocket science either.
Or maybe you're just crying because we have the ability to decipher information and make our own decisions based on it? And somehow argue that this is a flaw? No, this is the trait that defines mankind. It's hilarious that you call it a flaw.
The ability to decipher information and make our own decisions based on it does not, in any shape or form, entail the possibility of evil nor any flaws whatsoever. This is a red herring.
