Disturbing Passage from The Bible

01/05/2007 06:21:38 AM · #326

Originally posted by jhonan:

We cannot assume that the creator intended to create us - that would be very arrogant. We could be the unintended consequences; the infestation of life spoiling his otherwise perfect creation.

omniscient, omnipotent, but capable of making mistakes (and incapable of "fixing" them)???

Nikon AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 ED

01/05/2007 06:23:04 AM · #327

Originally posted by jhonan:

We cannot assume that the creator intended to create us

But all arguments on the improbability of us existing rest on precisely this point - it is improbable only if we are intentionally created.

Apple iPhone 5

01/05/2007 06:25:00 AM · #328

Originally posted by legalbeagle:

Originally posted by jhonan:
We cannot assume that the creator intended to create us - that would be very arrogant. We could be the unintended consequences; the infestation of life spoiling his otherwise perfect creation.

omniscient, omnipotent, but capable of making mistakes (and incapable of "fixing" them)???

And unknowable.

Right, that's it then. Might as well lock the thread. English breakfast tea, wasn't it? ;)

Apple iPhone 5

Nikon AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 ED

01/05/2007 06:32:36 AM · #329

Originally posted by legalbeagle:

Originally posted by jhonan:
We cannot assume that the creator intended to create us

But all arguments on the improbability of us existing rest on precisely this point - it is improbable only if we are intentionally created.

Let's say the creator's motive for creating the Universe is curiosity. To see what would happen. I mean, he's pretty bored, he's been sitting around in nothingness for infinity.

So, at the precise moment of the big bang he defines his recipe. He doesn't want it to implode after 1 millisecond. He wants something to happen. So the laws of physics are set in motion. He knows that atoms form a certain way (he could have tried his little experiment a few billion times previously) and he knows that if he makes the atoms bond in a certain way that other chemicals are formed. And he also knows that certain chemicals when bonded the right way form DNA, which leads to these nice green things that sprout out of the ground, and these funny furry animals that he liked the look of the last time he tried this.

So, he sets everything up for the big explosion, lets it rip, and sits back to watch the action. Why would he want to fix anything? Why would he even be really concerned that on a speck of a rock there are a few semi-intelligent creatures trying to figure out what they're doing there?

Nikon AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 ED

01/05/2007 07:12:51 AM · #330

Originally posted by jhonan:

Why would he even be really concerned that on a speck of a rock there are a few semi-intelligent creatures trying to figure out what they're doing there?

You appear still to be arguing solely about what force was responsible for the creation of the universe: as I have said, if it has no continuing involvement in that universe, it is pointless to discuss. It would not be "god" in any major religion. All existing religions would be pointless (no matter what we do, say or believe, it would be irrelevant to the uninvolved god).

If this is the god you believe in, why would you bother, say, praying (he is not "listening"), believing (it makes no difference to him - he plays no active role), attrribute moral values to his intention (he has never proposed a human morality)? This "god" you posit is utterly pointless to us.

I make no assumption about what such a force might look at, other than to note that detailed and complex descriptions of a god-like prime mover force are more likely to be wrong than broad, generic suggestions.

Apple iPhone 5

01/05/2007 07:52:21 AM · #331

Originally posted by legalbeagle:

Originally posted by jhonan:
Why would he even be really concerned that on a speck of a rock there are a few semi-intelligent creatures trying to figure out what they're doing there?

You appear still to be arguing solely about what force was responsible for the creation of the universe: as I have said, if it has no continuing involvement in that universe, it is pointless to discuss. It would not be "god" in any major religion. All existing religions would be pointless (no matter what we do, say or believe, it would be irrelevant to the uninvolved god).

Okay, now take my hypothesis of the 'curious but uninvolved' creator, but this time the creator's motive was not one of curiosity, but one of love (as we understand it) - He created the Universe in the knowledge that life would result (he played the odds, he knew that the atoms, chemicals, and DNA would eventually create life) - And because his Universe was so massive eventually one or more of these creations would evolve into an intelligent being capable of questioning his existence. And of these intelligent beings a sub-set would recognise there was possibly a creator and so decide to believe in him and love him.

Sure, he was powerful enough that he could have fashioned his very own intelligent beings directly from atoms. But that would be like going out and buying a love doll instead of a real girlfriend.

Keith Maniac

Canon EOS-350D Rebel XT

Sigma 30mm f/1.4 EX DC HSM for Canon

01/05/2007 08:07:15 AM · #332

Originally posted by legalbeagle:

Originally posted by RonB:
To me it's quite simple, really. If there is no God, then there is no free-will - the EXACT movement of EVERY proton, electron, neutron, quark, etc. was dictated at the moment of the Big Bang.

I think that this is a really good argument - it has been at times a real thorn in my side.

I don't think that this is a good argument at all. In this thread, one group of people are arguing that God exists, and the other group of people are arguing that the universe is just a cold, indifferent series of chemical reactions.

Surely there is a huge middle ground between these two extremes.

Even without the existence of a personal God, there could be such a thing as a human soul, or some other mystical aspect to our existence that gives rise to free will. Just because we have free will, that does not mean that there must be a personal God.

Message edited by author 2007-01-05 08:58:59.

01/05/2007 09:10:00 AM · #333

Originally posted by Keith Maniac:

Surely there is a huge middle ground between these two extremes.

I agree - it is unpalatable that we should not have free will (although perhaps less unpalatable than the idea of every person who was unaware of Jesus and therefore unabsolved for their original sin being damned for eternity).

It is possibly the case that we don't have free will (although we do have the semblance of it).

The alternative explanation I gave was that we are in a cold, unthinking universe in which random decisions are possible - there is some justification for this, as I previously explained. That would free us from the yoke of an mystical and arbitrary creator god without requiring a purely mechanical outcome.

As for spirit/mysticism etc: if there is something that bends the rules of the universe just for us, then it ought to be detectable. So far, there is no evidence for it, and there is no significant hypothesis for it existing within our current rational understanding of the universe.

Edit to add: the existence of free will is not evidence for the existence of any god.

Message edited by author 2007-01-05 09:18:38.

01/05/2007 09:20:52 AM · #334

Originally posted by EducatedSavage:

Originally posted by scalvert:
Thus, the odds of the overall sequence of chance events are irrelevant to the results.

Only so long as you have the required number of attempts to assure it would happen. When you have a finite number of attempts, the sureness of this occurence becomes severely limited.

You're STILL talking about the likelihood of a series of random events leading to the particular results we see. I've been saying that a series of random events must lead to SOME result, and whatever world we see is it.

A lottery is a series of random events on a much smaller scale. Whatever numbers pop up are simply the ones that did. You can jump up and down all you want to about how unlikely it is that those particular numbers would appear, but SOME numbers had to, and whatever result you see represents the ones that did. If we're looking at the end result of a long series of random events, the long odds only matter if you're claiming that the particular result was predicted or intended.

Originally posted by RonB:

So, if there is no God, it is impossible for any of us to exercise free will since, being composed of mere atomic structures, our every thought and action was immutably set in the first millionth of a second of the Big Bang.

You're referring to the origin of free will (as opposed to the origin of life). Why must God be necessary for living things to make choices? The laws of physics may be set in stone, but the Big Bang does not dictate a series of random events (if they're predictable, they're not random). When a plant turns toward the sun, that's not a conscious decision, but it demonstrates a living organism doing something to improve its chances of survival. As organisms evolved the ability to sense (a nervous system) and later to think (a brain), it seems inevitable that they would also evolve the ability to make decisions. I mean, if you have the ability to move, sense favorable and unfavorable conditions, and a brain to process that information, then it makes sense that you could eventually make a choice to do something about it. Good choices confer a survival advantage, so the more variables you can process and act upon, the more likely your particular form will survive, and the tendency would be toward more sophisticated brains.

Once you can make decisions, the question of free will arises. Do you HAVE to choose a particular course of action? I think it should be self-evident that any animal with a decent brain has free will. Claiming otherwise implies that a squirrel has no choice but to run out into a freeway to be smacked by a Volkswagen.

01/05/2007 10:04:44 AM · #335

Originally posted by Keith Maniac:

Surely there is a huge middle ground between these two extremes.

There are lots of middle grounds. There are even a whole load of grounds that dispute that those two extremes are even the extremes. Never one to like appeals to Wikipedia for truth, but it is at least a good summary or jumping off point for other views on Free Will But if you are interested, I'd read some of the actual sources, not the Wikipedia simple summaries.

David Hume in particular is worth a read, but I'm culturally biased ;)

01/05/2007 10:11:22 AM · #336

Originally posted by scalvert:

Claiming otherwise implies that a squirrel has no choice but to run out into a freeway to be smacked by a Volkswagen.

So you think they choose to do it ? That there are armies of suicidal squirrels all over the planet, just searching for Bugs to be squashed by ?

Do ants have free will ? Dogs ? Chimps ? Dolphins ? Humans ? Squirrels ?

When does the magic skyhook reach into the brain and bootstrap the free well ? Or is it just the perception that 'I could have done things differently' when the reality is, you do what you do, you're the sum of the experiences you've received, and you couldn't make any different choice in a given situation - someone else could, a different person, with different motivations could, but the decisions we make are the decisions we make. We might think at the time we could do differently, but then when you look back at them, you realise that that's the decision you made. You might even lament that it wasn't different - but you did what you did. You do what you do.

I've done enough things in my life that I wished I hadn't, often before I did them, that caused pain to myself, to others I cared about. Why would I do those things, if I didn't have to ? Or is there some ghost in the machine that's just trying to make me suffer for the sake of it. That's either pablum to make you feel better or an indication of something a fair bit more vindictive. I find either option harder to swallow.

Or maybe I'm just going to burn in hell.

01/05/2007 10:28:20 AM · #337

Originally posted by Gordon:

Originally posted by scalvert:
Claiming otherwise implies that a squirrel has no choice but to run out into a freeway to be smacked by a Volkswagen.

So you think they choose to do it?

Correct. They choose to run left or right. The choice made is not always a wise decision, but it's still the animal's choice (unless of course some great puppet master forced the squirrel out there against his will). Human children get smacked by cars too, ya know.

Originally posted by Gordon:

Do ants have free will ? Dogs ? Chimps ? Dolphins ? Humans ? Squirrels ?

I'm not sure if the brains of ants are sophisticated enough since their actions appear to be direct responses to chemical signals, but the rest of those animals, sure. Ask any animal trainer. Some days the animal will choose to cooperate and other days it won't. Do you think a dog picks up a ball and brings it to your chair with tail wagging because he has no choice or because he wants to play?

Message edited by author 2007-01-05 10:32:01.

01/05/2007 10:36:17 AM · #338

Originally posted by scalvert:

Originally posted by Gordon:
Do ants have free will ? Dogs ? Chimps ? Dolphins ? Humans ? Squirrels ?

I'm not sure if the brains of ants are sophisticated enough since their actions appear to be direct responses to chemical signals, but the rest of those animals, sure. Ask any animal trainer. Some days the animal will choose to cooperate and other days it won't. Do you think a dog picks up a ball and brings it to your chair with tail wagging because he has no choice or because he wants to play?

Or you could write it as

Some days the animal will cooperate and other days it won't. You've decided up front that there is a choice being made, rather than the influence of external factors (received eventually as electro-chemical signals in the brain) triggering specific behaviors and reactions.

So where does the magic smoke get put in to make the difference between an ant and a dog ? Or is it perhaps just that the stimulus response path becomes that much harder to just see and predict ? I spend hours every day trying to decipher and predict the unexpected responses of ridiculously complex circuits. Every time they do things we don't expect or don't behave the way we'd thought they would (or did yesterday) But I don't assume they are choosing to do it. But at least I have the advantage of complete visibility into how each reaction is triggered and can trace it all back to the root causes.

Message edited by author 2007-01-05 10:40:24.

01/05/2007 10:45:24 AM · #339

Originally posted by Gordon:

You've decided up front that there is a choice being made, rather than the influence of external factors (received eventually as electro-chemical signals in the brain) triggering specific behaviors and reactions.

You're assuming that our perception of free will is something OTHER than that. ;-)

You're also asking why a particular choice is made, not whether the animal is free to make it.

Message edited by author 2007-01-05 10:48:07.

01/05/2007 10:55:02 AM · #340

Originally posted by scalvert:

Originally posted by Gordon:
You've decided up front that there is a choice being made, rather than the influence of external factors (received eventually as electro-chemical signals in the brain) triggering specific behaviors and reactions.

You're assuming that our perception of free will is something OTHER than that. ;-)

You're also asking why a particular choice is made, not whether the animal is free to make it.

True enough. Choices are made. Decisions are made. Actions are taken. But could others be made ?

01/05/2007 11:01:48 AM · #341

Originally posted by RonB:

But guess what? I don't buy into any of that. I believe that there is a God, that He created the Universe and everything in it, that we DO have the ability to change our inertial state thru the exercise of free will, and that He still takes part in "tweaking" that which He created.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Or I suppose, your god could have set up that universal ping pong game and rigged it to make you think that you have choices that you freely make, then set it all in motion.

Just saying. There's a jump in the middle, so that the start 'is there a god or not' and the end 'can I do what I like or not' aren't really related. Same with determinism and free will. Hence the whole compatibilism/ incompatibilism schism.

01/05/2007 11:20:07 AM · #342

Originally posted by Gordon:

Choices are made. Decisions are made. Actions are taken. But could others be made ?

Yep. That's the point. A squirrel faced with an oncoming car could choose to run left or right just as a human could. The squirrel might be predisposed to run in a particular direction based on past experience, a sore knee or other perceived variables (maybe there's a safer-looking tree on the other side), but it's still a personal choice. If animals weren't capable of making their own individual decisions, then these little guys would have been pigs in a blanket. ;-)

LOL... looks like I picked a poor example. Upon further investigation, the "orphan" story behind those pigs turns out to be a hoax, but the photo itself is genuine, and instances of cross-species adoption are known. If anybody cares, here's another one.

Message edited by author 2007-01-05 11:57:57.

RonB

Canon EOS-300D Rebel

01/05/2007 11:36:05 AM · #343

Originally posted by Gordon:

Originally posted by RonB:

But guess what? I don't buy into any of that. I believe that there is a God, that He created the Universe and everything in it, that we DO have the ability to change our inertial state thru the exercise of free will, and that He still takes part in "tweaking" that which He created.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Or I suppose, your god could have set up that universal ping pong game and rigged it to make you think that you have choices that you freely make, then set it all in motion.

And if that were true, then He must also have rigged it so that I would think that I exercised free will in believing that He exists as well.

Originally posted by Gordon:

Just saying. There's a jump in the middle, so that the start 'is there a god or not' and the end 'can I do what I like or not' aren't really related. Same with determinism and free will. Hence the whole compatibilism/ incompatibilism schism.

The arguments about determinism caused consternation among Einstein and his peers, including Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg ( the author of the "uncertainty principle" ). His ( Einstein's ) conclusion, shared by Planck, was that causal determinism was a reality, but predictive determinism was unachievable ( due, in no small part, to that pesky "uncertainty princlple" ). That is, one can not use an absolute knowledge of the position and movement of all objects at a point in time to predict future positions and movements of those objects, but that the current positions and movements of all objects are due to the cumulative causes that affected them all the way back to the Big Bang, and that they are what they are whether measurable or not. He "explained" his belief in causal determinism by saying that "God doesn't play dice".
Hawkings, on the other hand, based on his conclusions about the randomness of particle motion at the black hole's "event horizon" ( referred to earlier in this thread ), countered Einstein by saying, "God not only plays dice, he sometimes throws them were they can't be seen".

01/05/2007 11:43:27 AM · #344

Originally posted by RonB:

Originally posted by Gordon:

Or I suppose, your god could have set up that universal ping pong game and rigged it to make you think that you have choices that you freely make, then set it all in motion.

And if that were true, then He must also have rigged it so that I would think that I exercised free will in believing that He exists as well.

Of course. But then, how would you know ? ( or not )

Originally posted by RonB:

It starts sounding a lot like Godel too, that you can't know what's going as part of the system. Only outwith the frame of reference can you really understand.

Message edited by author 2007-01-05 11:51:03.

01/05/2007 11:46:26 AM · #345

Originally posted by RonB:

Einstein ... "explained" his belief in causal determinism by saying that "God doesn't play dice".
Hawkings, ... countered Einstein by saying, "God not only plays dice, he sometimes throws them were they can't be seen".

To ensure clarity, I would note that "god" is not being used here in any religious or literal sense.

RonB

Canon EOS-300D Rebel

01/05/2007 11:53:19 AM · #346

Originally posted by legalbeagle:

Originally posted by RonB:
Einstein ... "explained" his belief in causal determinism by saying that "God doesn't play dice".
Hawkings, ... countered Einstein by saying, "God not only plays dice, he sometimes throws them were they can't be seen".

To ensure clarity, I would note that "god" is not being used here in any religious or literal sense.

True. But neither Einstein nor Hawkings professed to being atheists, either.

DrAchoo

Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5

01/05/2007 12:05:52 PM · #347

Materialism (there is nothing apart from the physical universe) and Determinism go hand in hand. Given two experiments with the exact same settings (each atom is in the same place, etc), the exact same outcome will occur. There is action and reaction and the first dictates the second.

Dualism, on the other hand, says there is something apart from the physical universe that interacts with it. However, it is unseen. Therefore two experiments with the exact same settings may come out differently because of this unseen force.

One would think that Materialism has the upper hand. It seems simpler and does not rely on the idea of an "unseen" force (we've seen already that atheists hate those). However, the sticking point comes with Free Will. Each of us believes that we have Free Will. We could choose to do multiple things at any given moment. I could raise my hand now (just did). I could not. The important point is that it obviously appears that we have the ability to choose our destiny through our actions.

The atheist can counter that this is an illusion. In reality we really are just very complicated machines and if we were smart enough to know the state of all the parts, we would know what will happen in the future. This is a logical possibility. However, now we are stuck with an epistemological (the nature of knowledge) dilemma:

On the deepest level it appears I have Free Will.
Materialism dictates Free Will cannot exist.
If my deepest sense of even myself is an illusion, how can I trust any of my other senses to accurately portray the universe?

01/05/2007 12:08:25 PM · #348

Originally posted by RonB:

Originally posted by legalbeagle:

Originally posted by RonB:
Einstein ... "explained" his belief in causal determinism by saying that "God doesn't play dice".
Hawkings, ... countered Einstein by saying, "God not only plays dice, he sometimes throws them were they can't be seen".

To ensure clarity, I would note that "god" is not being used here in any religious or literal sense.

True. But neither Einstein nor Hawkings professed to being atheists, either.

Hawking is quite vocal in being not an atheist. But he doesn't appear to believe in a Christian God either. I think mostly his throwing unseen comment is a dig/joke on Einstein's comment rather than a proof in his belief in God. He seems more of a deist or agnostic in his writings.

From what I remember the distribution of religious beliefs in scientists with PhDs is just about the same as the general population of whatever country they happen to live in.

Message edited by author 2007-01-05 12:08:48.

01/05/2007 12:11:35 PM · #349

Originally posted by DrAchoo:

I could raise my hand now (just did). I could not.

But did you ever actually not ? You think you could have not done it, but could you ? I could - but could you - then ? Given that you are trying to make that point (though I'm sure you could have lied too) You presuppose a linear view of time, which again, might just be your perception of it, not the reality.