Showing posts sorted by relevance for query free will. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query free will. Sort by date Show all posts

Born Free

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The concept of Free Will is used in defending Gods lack of intervention in many human events. That God esteems Free Will, elevating it to a position in which it must be preserved at all costs. But can Christianity stay consistent in defending Free Will, both practically and pragmatically?


Why would God have put that horrendous tree in the Garden of Eden in the first place? If but a small act would unleash death, sin, and destruction upon the world to such an extent that God Himself would have to die, and even then only abate a portion of the effects, it was self-defeating to allow this travesty to occur.

The most common response is “free will.” However one chooses to philosophically debate and define it, there is some broad concept out there under this cloak—free will—by which God determined it was necessary to provide humans with a choice between morality and immorality. Reflect on what an awesome usurpation of reality this free will is.

We see pictures of the genocides of the past century, and what humans can do to do to other humans, and are physically repulsed by these events. Yet somehow God determined that free will makes such atrocities necessary. We watch events unfold as nature destroys homes, and cities, and countries, and pour our sympathy to the people affected. Yet somehow, there is hierarchy in God’s domain that requires these calamities to cause devastation in order to preserve this essential Free Will. Many Christians believe regardless how one lives their life on earth, for a mere 100 years, if they fail to get it right, God will punish them for billions and billions and billions of years by eternal torment. And the reason for this endless punishment? The exercise of Free will is of greater import than horrendous pain inflicted upon humans.

Over and over we see this idea thrown back as a defense to the reality provided by the Christian God.

Why let the snake and Tree in the Garden? Free Will.
Why eternal punishment? Free Will.
Why the Problem of Evil? Free Will
Why can’t God show Himself? It would impair Free Will.
Why allow sin in the first place? Free Will.

Very Well. If the theist desires this idea to be the all-encompassing defense to these varied problems, then it is high-time to give it the proper place of propriety. Obviously Free Will is of greater concern, and more important to God than the exercise of immorality itself!

But wait a minute. God does not hesitate to impair, reduce and even eliminate Free Will. Starting right at the Garden. God did not limit the snake from being in the world, even though He certainly could have. Humans must have Free Will. God did not limit the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, even though he certainly could have. Humans must have Free will.

Yet, after the exercise of Free Will, God steps in, and declares that Humans must no longer have free choice to eat from the Tree of Life. And places a barrier in the shape of a sword to that Tree. (Gen. 3:22-24) What happened to “Free Will”? Does God only grant Free Will to humans when it harms them, and not when it is beneficial? Why couldn’t humans exercise Free Will to eliminate sickness and death?

Or the Tower of Babel. Humans exercised their Free Will to gather together in a social community, and avoid being separated across the face of the earth. They mutually entered into production, and engaged in a peaceful cooperation. Everything we wished humans could do today. God reviewed it, and intervened in their Free Will. He confused the languages. (Gen. 11:5-8) Again, we wonder why God superceded Free Will at the moment it was beneficial to humanity.

“God, God, Adam is about to introduce sin, cancer, plague, earthquakes and death into the world”
“Sorry. Nothing I can do. Must allow Free Will.”

“God, God, Humankind is working together in peace and harmony. They do not want to be separated from each other. They have peace.”
“Whoops. Can’t have that! Time to invade Free Will.”

Of course, the most famous individual incident of God impairing Free Will is Pharaoh. God gives Moses the heads-up that He will be interfering with Pharaoh’s Free Will. Even when Pharaoh wants to let the Hebrews leave, God will harden Pharaoh’s heart. (Ex. 4:21, 7:3, 9:12) In fact, God determined to impair Free Will so that God could perform signs and wonders. (Odd that God then erased every trace of these Plagues from happening, but that can be discussed another time.) Again and Again, God hardens not only Pharaoh’s heart, so they no longer have Free Will, but God also hardens Pharaoh’s servants and army’s heart as well. (Ex. 10:1, 10:20, 10:27, 11:10, 14:4, 14:8, 14:17)

Throughout the Tanakh, God steps in and moves events, places people in situations, provides insights, prods and pushes situations, all of which are designed to affect Free Will. In the New Testament, God is directly interfacing, performing miracles, teaching, ridiculing, and appearing in visions, all molding and shaping Free Will. “Inspiration” itself involves some impact on Free Will.

We are left with this conundrum of, on the one hand, God holding the Free Will of Humans in such high regard that He must allow sin, sickness, and death into the world at immeasurable rates (even His own death will not extinguish the effects), but on the other, interfering without apparent rhyme or reason with Free Will. Yet another aspect of God in which we have no parameters to gauge when God will or will not act. Yet another problem left unresolved by the mysterious God.

Frankly, it looks more like an excuse, rather than a defense. As if the Christian sees the problems presented by the issues, the Problem of Evil, the Tree, the perpetual punishment, and whips out what appears to be a convenient excuse at the moment—that God holds Free will in such esteem it must not be interfered with on these specific occasions. But there is no reasoning behind that. No demonstration as to why God can’t interfere with Free Will. Especially in light of how many times God does anyway. Even more especially in light of how much the Christian asks God to do it!

How many prayers are requests for God to step in and intrude on Free Will? One of the most common is prayer for employment. Are they asking that God encroach upon the hiring individual’s complete freedom of choice, and give the Christian the “nudge”? Or are they asking God to become involved in the Christian’s own Free Will and “give them the right things to say”? Either way, it is God involving Himself in Free Will.

Christians have no problem with God meddling in Free will when it comes to a pay raise. But meddling when billions will suffer for trillions of years? How brash to make such a request!

Another common prayer is for healing. King Hezekiah was assured by God he was going to die. One prayer, God intervenes, and he lives for another 15 years. 2 Kings. 20:1-6. James states that prayers will heal the sick. James 5:15. Thousands of times, I have heard, “God, give the doctors wisdom and guidance in this surgery…” Whoa! Isn’t that imposing on their Free Will? Shouldn’t God let their hand slip, if it chooses to do so, or let their mind forget, if they are having an off-moment?

Think of the irony of a child dying with leukemia. The only reason the child has this horrible disease (according to the Free Will Defense to the Problem of Evil) is that God holds Free Will as of more value, of more important than the unfortunate effects of disease. God may not like the disease, but its existence is necessary, due to the allowing of Free Will. And the Christian by the bedside prays that God provides insight, a flash of brilliance, an imposition on the medical team’s free will to develop a cure. Sure, the disease was necessary for some “ultimate” God-sized Free Will problem. Just not for one individual situation. Why isn’t the Christian thankful for the demonstration of how God holds Free Will in such high regard? Because that is merely a defense to an observed problem, not a reality to the Christian.

In every stadium, one-half are praying that the God will involve Himself on the Free Will of the Home team, and the other half are praying that God will involve Himself on the Free Will of the away team. People pray for monetary assistance, for mental assistance, for love, for physical help, for spiritual help. All of which requires God to interact. Many situations, requiring God to manipulate Free Will.

Jesus said that whatever you ask in pray, believing you will receive. (Mt. 21:22) He had no problem with impinging on Free Will at request. He said to pray that one’s Faith would not fail. (Lk. 22:32)

Fascinating that Jesus prayed God would keep “those who you gave me” from the evil one. John 17:15. Now why wouldn’t Jesus have prayed that for Adam? Certainly Jesus has enough faith to believe, and what He asks would come true! Jesus is watching the events unfold in the Garden of Eden. He knows that eventually he can only save a few that he will be asking God to keep away from the evil one. If it is acceptable for God to impose and “keep” people away, what was the problem in the Garden?

Paul prays that the Corinthians “do no evil.” 2 Cor. 13:7. Is this a request? If a petition to God, how is God supposed to put it into effect? Remove temptation? How much interaction can God do before it is too much? That the same Free Will that could not be violated in the Garden of Eden appears?

And what of those of us that voluntarily requested God to suspend our Free Will, and provide some proof of His existence? Odd that for us ex-Christians God could not impede our Free Will when we asked him to show some proof, but Christians find God giving a person the “right things to say” perfectly acceptable. We asked for wisdom, (James 1:5) but that would be infringing on our Free Will. Why, then, couldn’t we ask? Oh, I know the claim we were “doubting” so God didn’t have to give wisdom. We were to ask “in faith.” Clever defense. God only provides answers to those that already know the answers. If you don’t know the answers, God won’t give you them.

Why—would it infringe on Free Will?

God imposed Himself on Free Will all the time. With little hesitation. There is no reason He could not have equally imposed in the Garden of Eden. “Free Will” is a handy defense, brought out to convince other Christians there must be some reason why God allows travesty, and then quickly discarded when faced with life’s troubles personally.

Review of: "Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will" by Robert M. Sapolsky

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Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert M. Sapolsky
Penguin Publishing Group | 2023 | ISBN: 9780525560982, 052556098X | Page count: 528 | Wikipedia article | Goodreads entry and quotations from the book | Google Books entry with preview | Amazon link

Determined is Robert M. Sapolsky's skeptical take on the topic of free will. The topic is relevant to this blog since conceptions of free will have a long (and contentious) history in Christianity and other religions. In the religion debate, the issue of free will is likely to come up at some point, given that religious conceptions of free will tend to be pretty far from the scientific picture. See for example: As Sapolsky's book demonstrates at great length, free will is nowhere to be found in a scientific study of the human organism. Now, maybe some future scientific discovery will rescue free will, and therefore breathe some life into religious talking points that assume free will, but the trend so far is not encouraging for those who chain their theistic wagons to it.

Determined is a fairly high-profile book in its niche, and has attracted its share of comment. Rather than rewrite everything in the existing commentary, I'll link to some of it. If anything in the rest of my review seems hard to follow, consider coming back here to read some or all of these:

The Free Will Excuse

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When Christians are asked why their all-powerful, loving god does not intervene when people are carrying out acts of horrendous cruelty and violence, they have an answer.  Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they have an emergency exit.  This mental escape hatch allows them to stop wrestling with the implications of a god who stands idly by and allows psychopaths to carry out their cruelties, unopposed.
Long ago, Epicurus pointed out that a god’s inaction in the face evil calls into question its power and goodness:

The Nature and Value of Free Will

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[Written by John W. Loftus] There is a horrendous amount of suffering caused by humans. This is known as Moral Evil; suffering as the result of the choices of moral agents.

Here are some examples: The holocaust, molesting, torture, beatings, and kidnappings. Drunk drivers across America regularly slam their vehicles into other cars instantly killing whole families. There are witchdoctors in Africa who tell men who have AIDS to have sex with a baby in order to be cured, and as a result many female babies are being taken from their mother’s arms and gang-raped even as I write this. Is this not horrendous? In sub-Saharan Africa nearly four million people die from AIDS each year! Just watching a re-enactment of the holocaust as depicted in Spielberg’s movie, Schindler’s List, is enough to keep Christians up late at night wondering why God doesn’t do much to help us in this life. Nearly 40,000 people, mostly children, die every day around the world, due to hunger. Then there was Joseph Mengele, who tortured concentration camp prisoners; atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Soviet gulags, 9/11 twin tower terrorist attacks, Cambodian children stepping on land mines, Columbine shootings, Jeffery Dahlmer, Ted Bundy, gang rapes, and brutal slavery. The list of atrocities done by people to each other could literally fill up a library full of books. Additionally, many theists believe there will be “many” compared to the “few” who suffer in hell.

According to A.N. Weisberger, “The free will defender must assume that free will is of such superior value that any evils which result from its use are justified.” Since this is so, “the free will defender is compelled to say why free will is of such supreme value. Instead, the free will defender merely assumes that such an assessment of free will as especially valuable is unanimous and offers little, if anything, in way of reasons for this assessment.” [Suffering Belief: Evil and the Anglo-American Defense of Theism (Peter Lang, 1999, p. 164)].

When we take into consideration the sheer massive weight of suffering in this life and the next life for the “many”, it seems entirely rational to conclude that the value of having free moral agents does not outweigh the pain and suffering caused by these free moral agents to others and to themselves.

When placed on a scale, God must think that it's “better” that human creatures have free will than if they didn’t. But when we consider the word “better” here, we must ask, “better” for whom? If someone lives a short miserable life and then dies and is sent to hell, it surely isn’t better for that person to have been born at all. Since this is the case with so many people, surely they would wish never to be born at all. Surely; no question about it!

Is being born better for the saints who end up in heaven? Who knows how to properly evaluate this, since if they were never born in the first place they wouldn’t know the difference? Still, given the two choices they would be glad to be in heaven. But this reward, according to Christianity, merely represents the minority of people who were born. So there is more suffering for human beings as the direct result of God’s decision to create this world than if he didn’t. God’s decision to create this world caused much more suffering to the people he decided to create, than if he didn’t create any of us at all. Why did he do so, then? He did so for his own pleasure? Many many millions of people have suffered and will suffer because of what he wanted! Isn’t that what we call selfishness? Is that a recognized virtue? Can God be selfish and yet still call selfishness a virtue because he’s God? Why? I simply don't see how, even if an act is done by God. It's still called selfishness, and better known as self-gratification no matter who does it.

Why is it more valuable to a good God that he create free moral creatures when the results have been horrific for millions upon millions and probably billions of people down through the centuries? The Christian answer is that God wants creatures who freely choose to love and obey him, and that this justifies why he purportedly created us with free will. That is, what God wanted is more important than the fact that people will suffer. But as I just argued this sounds exactly like God is more concerned with his wants than with our wants. He wants people to freely love and obey him no matter what the consequences are for most of the people who are born into this world. And if this is true, then how can God’s love be called agape, or self-giving love? God’s wants are placed above our wants, because we do not like to experience such intense suffering in this world, or in the next one.

There are many problems with this Christian viewpoint. It does absolutely no good at all to have free will and not also have the ability to exercise it. Most women do not have the upper body strength needed to stop a would-be attacker, while some people don’t have the rational capacity needed to spot a con-artist. I could not be a world-class athlete even if I wanted to, for instance. Our free will is limited by our age, race, gender, mental capacity, financial ability, geographical placement, and historical location to do what we want. Both our genes and our social environment restrict what choices are available for us to make. We do not have as much free will as people think. Just think of the slaves in the South. They didn't have choices to do much of anything that they would've liked to do.

I dare say that if God exists and created a different soul inside my mother’s womb at the precise moment I was conceived, and if that organism experienced everything I did and learned the exact same lessons throughout life in the same order that I did at the same intensity, then the resulting person would be me, even given free will. And if you won’t go that far, the limits of our choices are still set by our genetic material and our social environment. All of us have a very limited range of free choices, if we have any at all.

If free will explains some of the suffering in this world when we already have limited choices anyway, then there should be no objection to God further limiting our choices when we seek to cause intense suffering in this world. Theists should have no objection to God intervening when someone chooses to do horrible deeds, especially since theists also believe God can restrict our choices just like he purportedly hardened Pharaoh’s heart against Moses. I’ve suggested some reasonable ways God had at his disposal, if we concede for the moment the existence of this present world: One childhood fatal disease or a heart attack could have killed Hitler and prevented WWII. Timothy McVeigh could have had a flat tire or engine failure while driving to Oklahoma City with that truck bomb. Several of the militants who were going to fly planes into the Twin Towers on 9/11 could’ve been robbed and beaten by New York thugs (there’s utilitarianism at its best). A poisonous snakebite could’ve sent Saddam Hussein to an early grave averting the Iraq war before it happened. The poison that Saddam Hussein threw on the Kurds, and the Zyklon-B pellets dropped down into the Auschwitz gas chambers could have simply “malfunctioned” by being miraculously neutralized (just like Jesus supposedly turned water into wine). Sure, it would puzzle them, but there are a great many things that take place in our world that are not explainable. Even if they concluded God performed a miracle here, what’s the harm? Doesn’t God want us to believe in him?

Theistic scholar William P. Alston argues that “for all we know, God does sometimes intervene to prevent human agents from doing wicked things they would otherwise have done.” [Evidential Argument From Evil, p. 113]. My response: 1) This is unfalsifiable. 2) It’s implausible God has done this at all, since there are obvious cases of senseless suffering in this world he could alleviate. 3) This is known as the fallacy of the beard. To ask us to draw a line here is like asking us to pluck out whiskers until we can say which whisker when plucked, no longer makes it a beard. Hence, we might not be able to specify how much God should intervene but we know that with all of the intense suffering caused by free will choices that God doesn't intervene enough, even if he does sometimes. Likewise, according to Bruce Russell, “We can know that some penalty (say, a fine of $1) is not an effective deterrent to armed robbery even if there is no sharp cut-off point between penalties that are effective deterrents and those that are not.” [The Evidential Argument From Evil, p. 205].4) Such an objection doesn’t say anything about this particular world and the suffering in it. This is the world we are looking at, and there simply isn't any evidence that God has intervened. The question that needs to be asked is whether or not we would expect a good God to avert the Holocaust, and the answer is that morality requires it. 5) If there was no intense suffering or there was an adequate explanation for suffering, my whole argument would fail.

William P. Alston again: But if God were to act to intervene in every case of incipient wrongdoing…“Human agents would no longer have a real choice between good and evil.” [The Evidential Argument From Evil, p. 113]. Eliminating intense cases of suffering would still allow humans with significant real choices. I’m not asking for an all or nothing proposition here. I’m arguing God should disallow those choices that cause intense suffering in our world as the result of free choices. Besides, there’s a difference between having a real choice, and being able to actualize our choices. For all we know God could turn bullets into butter and baseball bats into a rolls of tissue paper whenever they are to cause harm, for God can surely judge us by our intentions to do wrong alone.

If God gave us more freedom than we can be responsible for, then he’s mainly responsible for the horrible deeds we do. J.L. Mackie asks, “Why would a wholly good and omnipotent god give to human beings—and also, perhaps, to angels—the freedom which they have misused?” [The Miracle of Theism (Oxford, 1982), p. 155)] Pierre Bayle exposes this difficulty [in “Paulicians” in his Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697)]. “It is in the essence of a benefactor to refrain from giving any gift which he knows would be the ruin of the recipient.” “Free agency is not a good gift after all, for it has caused the ruin of the human race in Adam’s sin, the eternal damnation for the greater part of his descendants, and created a world of a dreadful deluge of moral and physical evils.” Paul Draper wrote, “we would expect God would behave like a good parent, giving humans great responsibility only when we are worthy of it.” [Evidential Argument From Evil, p. 24]. Andrea Weisberger wrote, “We do not normally hold freedom to be intrinsically valuable, as evidenced in the willingness we show to limit our freedom to achieve goods, and especially when such freedom gives rise to suffering.” “The prevention of heinous crimes, even if such prevention limits another’s exercise of free will, improves the world.” [Suffering Belief, p, 167, 171].

Giving us free will is like giving a razor blade to a two-year old child. Razor blades can be used for good purposes by people who know how to use them, like scraping off a sticker from a window, or in shaving. That’s because adults know how to use them properly. We could give an adult a razor blade. We cannot give a 2 year old one, for if we did we would be blamed if that child hurts himself. Just like a younger child should not be given a license to drive, or just like a younger child should not be left unattended at the mall, so also if God gives us responsibilities before we can handle them then he is to be blamed for giving them to us, as in the case of free will.

Christian Theists say free will is important for building character, or ‘soul-making,’ which is a higher good.” This does not explain the sufferings of animals, and it’s difficult to see how this explains senseless evils. Nonetheless, theistic scholars such as Kelly James Clark, Eleonore Stump [“Providence and the Problem of Evil,” in Christian Philosophy, ed. Thomas P. Flint (Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1990, 51-91)] and others argue that “a perfectly good God would not wholly sacrifice the welfare of one of his intelligent creatures simply in order to achieve a good for others, or for himself. This would be incompatible with his concern for the welfare of each of his creatures.” [William P. Alston in The Evidential Argument From Evil, p. 111]. Therefore, the theist has the difficult task of showing how the very people who suffered and died in the Nazi concentration camps were better off for having suffered, since the hindsight lessons we’ve learned from the Holocaust cannot be used to justify the sufferings of the people involved. It’s implausible that their sufferings did more to teach them the virtues of character and cooperation than from banding together to win an athletic contest, or in helping someone to build a house. And it's implausible that any moral lessons learned as the result of pain and suffering are relevant in an eternal bliss. If this world is to teach us the virtues of courage, patience, and generosity in the face of suffering, then most all of those virtues are irrelevant in a heavenly bliss where there is no suffering or pain.

These same theists would say that “Evil is necessary as a means to good.” Even if this is so, God could’ve created a world with far fewer evils, which is my point. Such a solution assumes a good God initially created the world with the proper balance of suffering. If so, the question becomes whether or not we should try to alleviate suffering. On the one hand, a theist is the first one to say we should alleviate suffering wherever we can, even though God is not obligated to do the same. But if we do, then aren’t we also reducing the total good created by God, since suffering is good for us? Maybe we should rue the day that someone found a vaccine for Tuberculosis, or Polio? Maybe our real duty would be to increase human suffering, since it molds character? On the other hand, if suffering can be alleviated by modern medicine without making it worse off for us as a whole, then those very evils we eliminated were not necessary for our good in the first place. Can the theist have it both ways? [This is a point that H.L. McCloskey, makes in “God and Evil,” in Readings in the Philosophy of Religion, ed., Baruch A. Brody (Prentice-Hall, 1974), pp. 168-186].

Theists will say everything will be made right in an eternal bliss for the saints. But what about the possibility of free will and rebellion in heaven? Paul Copan offers three possibilities with regard to free will in heaven [in That’s Just Your Interpretation, pp. 106-108]. 1) That through our truly libertarian free actions on earth we gain access to heaven where we no longer have this freedom to sin. But if heaven is a place where we longer have the freedom to sin, then God could’ve bypassed our earthly existence altogether. If there is no free will in heaven then why not just create us all in heaven, as I’ve argued? What does it matter what we did or didn’t do on earth? Furthermore, why reward someone by taking away their free will? If free will can be taken away without a loss of goodness, then why create us with it in the first place? 2) That God foreknows that no one who enters heaven will freely choose to sin. But if God has that kind of foreknowledge then again, what is the purpose of creating this particular world? It appears to be a cruel game of hide and seek, where God hides and we must find him, and only the few who find him will be rewarded while the many who don’t are punished when they die. If God has foreknowledge then why didn’t he just foreknow who would find him even before creating them, and simply place them in heaven in the first place?...then there’d be no one punished for not finding him. 3) That those who enter heaven will be in the "unmediated presence of God" such that "not sinning will be a ‘no brainer’—even though it remains a possibility.” But if this is the case, then as I’ve already argued, why do Christians think the Devil rebelled against God, since he was supposedly in the direct unmediated presence of God?

And there is the additional problem of free will in hell. Theists typically claim that people in hell continue in their rebellion against God and so the "doors of hell are locked from the inside." Those who are saved are rewarded for their tortures here on earth by the removal of their free will to make moral choices, but those who are damned keep their free will. Why this difference? If God just took away the free will of those who are damned, then they too could've been brought up to heaven. If free will is such a good thing, then why isn't it such a good thing in the end? Those who are damned keep it, but those who go to heaven lose it. If this is the case then moral freedom isn't as important as Christian theists claim. And if that's the case then why bother creating anyone...anyone...with moral freedom, especially when doing so has produced such suffering that we experience in this life and the next?

David Wood now claims that before Satan sinned in heaven there was moral choice-making in heaven. There was some "epistemic distance" between him and God so that Satan was ignorant about God’s absolute love and power, and as a result could make moral choices unhindered by the direct presence of God. At the consummation of the ages, however, God will allow the saints in his direct unmediated presence, and as a result there will be no moral choices in heaven, even if there is free will. By being in God’s direct unmediated presence there will be no reason or motivation to sin against God, since the saints would see his love for what it truly is, and they’d also realize it would be futile to sin or rebel against him. But why didn't God start out this way, by allowing Satan into his direct unmediated presence in the first place, thus avoiding the sufferings of a fallen universe? For David, it's because of the value of moral freedom. This is where incoherence sets in, for if moral choices are such a good thing, then why take them away as a reward in the end?

What Mr. Wood proposes is that God wanted creatures in heaven who truly loved him and obeyed him, and that the existence of this world is the best way for God to have done this. Consider the motivations for God wanting this state of affairs. What is the value of this to God? Why does he want anything? A want is not exactly like a need, but to want something, anything, implies a lack of something. What did God lack? Apparently God lacked people who freely choose to love him. Why is this so important to him that he would knowingly creat a world where most humans must suffer so much? What is there about people who freely love him that is different than people who simply love him, which, in the end, are the people who end up in heaven anyway? After all, just because people made moral choices that showed they loved God on earth doesn't mean they would always love him in heaven, does it?--especially if they had the same epistemic distance in heaven they had on earth. Why does God want anyone to love him in the first place? Why does he care? Does he need stroked, appreciated, needed? Look at all of the carnage of wasted human and animal lives that required this result. Is this truly a loving God?

In light of this consider what Ivan Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s character, said: “Tell me yourself—I challenge you: let’s assume that you were called upon to build the edifice of destiny so that men would finally be happy and would find peace and tranquility. If you knew that, in order to attain this, you would have to torture just one single creature, let’s say a little girl who beat her chest so desperately in the outhouse, and that on her unavenged tears you could build that edifice, would you agree to do it? Tell me and don’t lie!” [in The Brothers Karamazov]. But the Christian God did exactly this!

Theists claim that God needs to keep a correct “epistemic distance” from us so he can know for sure we truly love him and that he isn’t forcing himself on us with the power and love of his direct presence. This is one of the reasons offered for the perceived “hiddenness of God.” He hides himself in the bushes, so to speak, to see if we really want to love and obey him. But think about this. If I did that with my wife what would be the result? If I didn’t let her see the real me...if I hide my real goodness from her and watched to see if she really loved me, then it would be a false test of her love. I would be wondering whether she loved a caricature of me and not me. Let’s say I didn’t show her my tender side, or my true compassionate nature. Would I expect that she should love me the same as if I did show her my true self? No! Why should God think that it’s any different when it comes to loving him? We see plenty of suffering in this world and so we ask whether or not God is good and deserving to be worshipped. If we conclude he isn’t a good God and reject him because of this epistemic distance, then he should know we have not rejected who he really is. We have merely rejected what he revealed himself to be in his creation, and if that’s the case, he shouldn’t be upset at us when we do reject his love. Why? Because he doesn’t show us his true love. There is little by way of our experience that leads us to think he loves us, or that he exists. And if that's the case, then why should he even be surprised at our reactions? Why?

According to Weisberger, "The real problem with epistemic distance is in showing how humans can ever do right or discover the will of God intelligently in the apparent absence of God...it is impossible for anyone to intentionally do what is required when it is not known, for how can we be expected to fulfill God’s commandments if there is true epistemic distance?” So “it seems absurd for a wholly good God to force humanity into a position of ignorance regarding correct moral choice and then hold people accountable for such a choice." [Suffering Belief, p. 135-6].

Christians respond that since God is omniscient he knows the proper distance needed to test our love and that he’s clearly revealed himself enough for us to love and obey him in the appropriate degrees, proportionate to this distance. When Christians respond like this they are reverting to a prior held faith statement that is outside the bounds of the questions I am asking. I’m looking at what I see and I’m questioning the goodness of God and this so-called needed "epistemic distance." I’m wondering why this world was created, if it was. I’m questioning whether this God even exists based upon what I see. Christians respond that God knows what he’s doing without giving reasonable answers to my questions. If God exists, then why did he do what he did? Punting to mystery doesn't answer my questions. I question his motivations. I doubt his plans. I reject the purportedly good results from the creation of this world. These questions must be answered before I can accept that he knows the proper distance and he can judge us fairly. Of course, if an omniscient God exists it is possible he has created the correct epistemic distance between him and us to know whether we love him. But in so doing he also created so much human and animal carnage that I cannot accept his supposed good wisdom in doing so.

Speaking of heaven...

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... here follows an except from my book The Little Book Of Unholy Questions. Heaven is such a commonplace idea, even cornerstone, of Christian thinking. In the opening to this section, I talk about how the concept of heaven is stolen by late Jews just before the Christian period. This evolution of ideas undercuts the notion that it can be a cornerstone of Judeo-Christian ideology. If heaven and hell did not exist in the ideology of early Jews, and it is that crucial a set of principles, if it does not exist in the early tracts of the Bible, then something needs explaining! Anyway, here goes :

The Free Will Fumble: Why Christians Treat it Just Like They do With Unanswered Prayer

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Christians have developed so many ways to escape the force of the evidence that it’s frustrating to those of us who are trying to reason with them. I’ve written about several of them before. There is the big one I call The Omniscience Escape Clause. Another one I haven’t quite developed yet I call The Faith Trump Card, which is leaping beyond the actual probabilities of the evidence itself. No reasonable person can leap beyond what the evidence calls for. If Christians conclude it’s 51% probable Jesus arose from the dead then they simply cannot conclude they know he did. That’s an unjustified leap. If I thought it’s 51% probable the Colts will play in the Super Bowl and win it this year (fat chance) I would be ignorant to say I know this will happen, especially enough to bet all my meager life savings on it (which is zilch).

Jonathan Pearce's New Book on Free Will

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I have not read it yet to recommend it. Here is Jonathan Pearce's Amazon Profile Page. Here is a link to his book: Free Will?: An investigation into whether we have free will, or whether I was always going to write this book. The following is what he emailed to me about it:

Why Didn't God Create Us in Heaven in the First Place?

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I argue that God could've created us in a perfect existence in the first place...in heaven. Christians must counter-argue that God could not have done so, given the amount of suffering that resulted from his decision to create us in a fleshly world here on earth. Let me explain with the problem of free will, as I've done before. If there isn't free will in heaven for the "saints" when they die, then why did God need to test us with it on earth, since without it in heaven we'd all obey God anyway? If there is no free will in heaven for the "saints" when they die, then why did God purportedly grant free will to Satan in heaven from which he purportedly rebelled? If free will is so valuable, then why would God reward the "saints" in heaven by taking it away from them, but punish "sinners" in hell by letting them (us) keep it and rebel forever? If, however, there is free will in heaven for the "saints" when they die, then there would also be the possibility of another rebellion in heaven in the future. Besides, would someone please explain to me why anyone in the direct unmediated presence of God would ever attempt to rebel against an omnipotent Being who loves them with a perfect love? Anyone who would even think of rebelling would have to be pure evil itself, and dumber than a box of rocks. But since I don't believe any person can ever be pure evil or that dumb, I claim it's extremely implausible to believe any person did attempt to do this, or that anyone with free will in heaven would ever try.
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Edited for Calvinists. If there is no libertarian free will at all then what is the point of creating human beings at all? If God did not create us with free will, then Calvinistic theology must justify why our particular world brings God more glory than a different world where he decrees from eternity that his creatures all perfectly obey him. If humans do not have free will, then there can be no rational justification for the suffering that we experience in this world. Such a God as that is only worthy of our disgust, since our world could so easily have been different if he merely pulled our strings to do good and not evil and made us feel as if we were freely choosing what we do.

My Rambling Thoughts On Free Will, Determinism, and Making Choices

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I had a nice discussion on metaphysical free will, determinism, and making choices that matter. What follows are my rambling thoughts because it was a discussion, and I was finding different ways to communicate. I just don't want to clear up the repetition. It begins with this quote which I dispute:
My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t. The reality isn’t important: what’s important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others
Since we’re alive we must make choices, even if they are determined ones. So why not make those choices good ones, even though those choices are determined ones? At the time we choose we don’t know which ones are determined to be. So the fact that they are determined doesn’t affect which choices we make. Live then, as if it’s all up to us, knowing it’s not up to us. It doesn’t change how we should live by knowing that our choices are determined.

In other words, an action is not yet determined until we choose to do it. We must choose to act throughout our days. Therefore, we are participants in which actions take place. I don’t know in advance which actions I will choose throughout my days. So I am learning as I choose which actions were determined beforehand for me to make. It’s a discovery we make by making our choices.

Do We Have Free Will? Part 3: Divine Foreknowledge

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So far, I’ve written about two arguments for determinism which, though not completely conclusive, present serious challenges to belief in free will. The same cannot be said of this next type of determinism. There actually is no reason for accepting it, since there is no reason for believing its premises. Nevertheless, it is a serious internal problem for Christianity. It shows that the beliefs of most Christians aren’t — as shocking as this may seem — entirely coherent.

The Resurrection and Prayer

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On August 6, 1945 the United States Air Force detonated a nuclear weapon over the city of Hiroshima. 140,000 people died in the blast, many of whom were immediately vaporized into their constituent atoms, leaving no remains at all. Yet a majority of Christians in the US believe that those victims of the bombing will one day be made whole and stand in judgment before God. A majority of Christian Americans believe in a God so powerful he can reconstruct the exact DNA and protein sequences of each of those bodies, in exactly the form they were in at the moment before they died in that blast.

Yet a sizable number of commenters on this blog seem to believe this powerful God, who is keeping track of the DNA sequences of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the certainty of a future resurrection at some date uncertain, is unwilling to heal a girl of diabetes, or meningitis. They believe he can't even make the common cold go away, or clear up a horrendous case of warts. This incongruity is rarely pointed out, and making it more explicit is what I will try to do in this post.

Christianity is based on the belief that a man, Jesus, lived and died. Christians to some degree or another also believe that this man was divine, most believing that he was the God of the universe in human flesh. In addition, most Christians further argue that this man's life was sinless, and that by his death, Christians can escape the consequences of their sin. Most also assert that his resurrection is the evidence for a future resurrection of all mankind. Thus, most Christians believe that God will, at some point, bring all the dead humans who have ever existed back to life.

Thus, when we discuss issues about prayer and healing, the assertion that God can do nothing about sickness, suffering and pain on earth is a perfectly reasonable assertion to make if there were no future resurrection. For instance, a Deist can hold to this position with no logical contortions. Certain Jews such as the Sadducees could reasonably hold to this, since again, they do not believe the human exists again after his death.

For the bulk of believers though, and here I mean those who accept Jesus' resurrection as a historical fact and those who believe in a future resurrection, the inaction of God in the face of suffering has to be deliberate. For Christian believers, the argument that God is somehow hamstrung from acting to heal the sick flies directly in the face of the miracles of Jesus. Even after Jesus' death, the Bible is full of stories of wondrous healings on the part of the apostles, none of whom felt it was necessary to hold back from helping the sick because it would leave them without free will.

The modern concept of free will is not mentioned in the Bible. It's an ex post facto justification for the modern finding that faith healing doesn't happen. Even medieval Christians firmly believed God healed the sick. The relic of the "one true cross" was determined to be such because it had the power to heal the sick when it touched them. There was no begging for the wonders of free will to be manifest in the lives of those supposedly healed by it. In France, the touch of the king was believed to heal scrofula, and this was due to the king's proximity to the deity, yet nobody in France complained that the king was violating the free will of those who were healed.

No. This free will defense is weak tea, the only leftovers of a warmed-up, thrice picked-over last meal. But again, think of the victims of Hiroshima. They are spread throughout the ecosystem now after they were thrown up into the atmosphere by the cloud of gas that flew up from the city. Yet their free will had nothing to do with their vaporization. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. My explanation for the facts is simple: the victims of Hiroshima, and all other people who ever died, are dead now, and will remain so. My explanation fits all available facts.

Some Christians may adopt the idea that the resurrection will not be one of bodies, but only one of spirit. I applaud them for this, but then the conundrum of Christianity grows even deeper. For if the resurrection of the dead does not entail the reconstruction of their bodies, why was it necessary for Jesus to be resurrected at all? After all, sacrifices given by the Israelites prior to Jesus were of animals, and God did not need to resurrect those sacrificed animals for the deaths to be atoning. In fact, the bodily resurrection of Jesus makes the atonement suspect, for all Jesus really did was experience the absence of cellular activity for something like 36 hours. Is this really such torture?

To hold the position that the cessation of cellular activity in a man-god for 36 hours is an adequate recompense for all the evil mankind has done over roughly 150,000 years of history -- including Hiroshima, the Holocaust, the pogroms of the medieval era, the countless genocides, petty violences, rapes, murders, infanticides and slavery of human existence -- is one of the silliest beliefs I've ever heard. It sits up there with flat-earthism, phrenology and young earth creationism.

So the Christian believer is presented with a quandary and I suspect their lack of unanimity in the face of this quandary is the single best evidence for the essential vacuum at the core of this system of belief. For if there were a cogent explanation, one that was satisfactory to all, Christianity would at least be unanimous in accepting it. This suggests to me that if I ask questions of Christians, their answers to these questions should be the same, since the same divinity that remembers the exact sequence of DNA in the victims of Hiroshima could certainly make the followers of his One True Religion aware of the truth of it. Yet the answers to the following questions are probably as varied as the answers to questions about taste in food, clothes, or film, but I will ask them anyway:

1. Is it the position of Christians that all humans will be resurrected bodily at some future time by God?

2. Is it their position that God has the power to do this phenomenal act of healing, but cannot heal the children who are dying because their parents are praying for their life, or rid someone of a crippling, deforming disease because to do so would harm their free will?

3. If so, why were Jesus and the apostles, the "one true cross" relic and the king of France able to heal without violating free will? If not, why do we have no evidence that God does any healing at all?

4. Finally, if Jesus' death were necessary for the atonement of man's sin, what purpose was his bodily resurrection? Specifically why was it necessary for his atonement to include a resurrection when sacrificial animals, who were sacrificed under the rules God gave to the Israelites, were not resurrected but were eaten?

Paul Copan and Free Will in Heaven

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One comment below asked the question about free will in heaven and whether or not the saved will have it. It's a good question, and Christian philosopher Paul Copan has dealt with it. Here's my response:

Paul Copan offers three possibilities with regard to free will in heaven [in “That’s Just Your Interpretation”, (Baker Books, 2001), pp. 106-108].

1) That through our truly libertarian free actions on earth we gain access to heaven where we no longer have this freedom to sin. But if heaven is a place where we longer have the freedom to sin, then God could’ve bypassed our earthly existence altogether. If there is no free will in heaven then why not just create us all in heaven? What does it matter what we did or didn’t do on earth? Furthermore, why reward someone by taking away their free will? If free will can be taken away without a loss of goodness, then why create us with it in the first place?

2) That God foreknows that no one who enters heaven will freely choose to sin. But if God has that kind of foreknowledge then again, what is the purpose of creating this particular world? It appears to be a cruel game of hide and seek, where God hides and we must find him, and only the few who find him will be rewarded while the many who don’t are punished when they die. If God has foreknowledge then why didn’t he just foreknow who would find him even before creating them, and simply place them in heaven in the first place?...then there’d be no one punished for not finding him. If heaven is a reward, then “it seems absurd for a wholly good God to force humanity into a position of ignorance regarding correct moral choice and then hold people accountable for such a choice.” [Suffering Belief, Weisberger, p. 136]. Furthermore, if this world is to teach us the virtues of courage, patience, and generosity in the face of suffering, then most all of those virtues are irrelevant in a heavenly bliss where there is no suffering or pain.

3) That those who enter heaven will be in “the unmediated presence of God” such that “not sinning will be a ‘no brainer’—even though it remains a possibility.” But if this is the case, then why do Christians think the Devil rebelled against God, since he was supposedly in the direct unmediated presence of God? How was it possible for the traditional Devil to have such an experience of absolute goodness and absolute power and still rebel against God?

Is this the Best Possible World and does God have Free Will?

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Let us assume the triple properties of the classical approach to God: that he is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. In terms of the classic Problem of Evil argument, if there is too much evil in the world, God knows what to do about it, is powerful enough to do it, and is loving enough to want to do something about it. This argument has been around since the days of Epicurus and still remains one of the most hotly debated theological issues in modern times, causing many believers to leave the fold due to its evidential power.

A Review of Antony Flew’s “Divine Omnipotence and Human Freewill”

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Antony Flew shows the Freewill Defense theodicy fails since it is the case that existence of compatibilist free will is not a logical impossibility relative to what is generally thought of as Omnipotence in his essay “Divine Omnipotence and Human Freewill” featured in Peter Angeles' anthology, “Critiques of God”.


Flew begins by wrongfully, but inconsequentially so since many falsely think the following to be from Augustine’s “Confessions”, quoting [1] St Augustine : "Either God cannot abolish evil, or he will not; if he cannot, then he is not all-powerful; if he will not, then he is not all good." [2] An elegant summation nonetheless, Flew rightly pigeon holed the saying by noting that this is “Perhaps the most powerful of all skeptical arguments, this has appealed especially to the clearest and most direct minds, striking straight and decisively to the heart of the matter.” Actual EVIL, existing in contradistinction to actual moral goodness, is the substantive core of the question at issue. How can the God of classical theism exist when the world, and even more so the Universe (ie: all existence), is saturated with a cold indifference to life? Not only does observed empirical existence reveal man’s inhumanity to man, but the unimaginable sickening horror from natural disasters evidenced by an ever growing list of causalities dimly echoes within a grand canyon of animal suffering. The predator-prey and parasite-host relationships in a brutally uncaring, mechanistic, evolutionary context screams “Humans are not the point.”

In large measure, the history of human civilization has been recorded in step with efforts to understand our existence. By crafting myths, we encode ways we try to reconcile seeming contradictions between life and brutal reality. Such is the case of the world's oldest story. When Gilgamesh, the king, sends the woman Shamhat, a temple prostitute, to Enkidu, the wild-man, their sexual liaison civilizes Enkidu. After six days and seven nights of love making, he is no longer a wild beast who lives with animals. [3] Upon visiting the water hole, the animals flee from the sight of Enkidu, puzzled he asks Shamhat what it means. She wisely informs the anti-hero, “Behold Enkidu, you are become wise like unto a god.” [4] As the knowledge of sexual procreation transformed the wild Enkidu, we ordinary mortals, when we become aware of the absolute nature of existence and its identity, become transformed by recognizing that objective good arises from objective existence while evils anticipates a dearth of goodness. While these ethical qualities share a relationship like up and down or big and small, good and evil are nonetheless objective. And, even though, mutually required to make sense of the other, they can be understood in light of what is meant by values and why they are important to living beings. The Objectivist philosophers offer clear and cogent definitions.

“In ethics, one must begin by asking: What are values? Why does man need them?” Wrote Ayn Rand, and she continued: “Value” is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The concept “value” is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible.

I quote from Galt’s speech: “There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or nonexistence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.” [5]

Even so, the broad scope of animal suffering, a vast ocean of pain and terror, is like the Great Barrier Reef of objective evil, for if anything diminishes the “process of self-sustaining and self-generated action”, it is the pain, suffering, and terror of being eaten or burned alive. “Suppose in some distant forest lightning strikes a dead tree,” wrote William L. Rowe in describing the problem of evil: “resulting in a forest fire. In the fire a fawn is trapped, horribly burned, and lies in terrible agony for several days before death relieves its suffering. So far as we can see, the fawn's suffering is pointless. For there does not appear to be any greater good such that the prevention of the fawn's suffering would require either the loss of that good or the occurrence of an evil equally bad or worse. Nor does there seem to be any equally bad or worse evil so connected to the fawn's suffering that it would have had to occur had the fawn;s suffering been prevented. Could an omnipotent, omniscient being have prevented the fawn's apparently pointless suffering? The answer is obvious, as even the theist will insist, An omnipotent, omniscient being could have easily prevented the fawn from being horribly burned, or, given the burning, could have spared the fawn the intense suffering by quickly ending its life, rather that allowing the fawn to lie in terrible agony for several days. Since the fawn's intense suffering was preventable and so far as we can see, pointless, doesn't it appear that premise one (See note 6.) of the argument is true, that there do exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse? [6]

There is a problem of evil, and we recognize it concurrently with our awareness of objective morality from absolute existence. Perhaps that may be why Flew found it useful to cite John S. Mill’s posthumously published “Three Essays on Religion” to further refine the problem and challenge theology by noting Mill did not imagine “the impossible problem of reconciling infinite benevolence and justice with infinite power in the Creator of such a world as this. The attempt to do so not only involves absolute contradiction in an intellectual point of view but exhibits to excess the revolting spectacle of a jesuitical defense of moral enormities.” [7] Amen! Mill’s bold words are, however, not conclusive, for the Christian believer has faith that ways to reconcile the existence of objective evil with their God’s omni-loving, omni-compassion attributes can be found.

For that purpose theodicies have been devised. Flew notes that: “Several determined efforts have been made to escape from the dilemma. One favorite – which might be dubbed the ‘Freewill Defense’ – runs like this. The first move is to point out ,via citing Thomas Aquinas, “Nothing which implies contradiction falls under the omnipotence of God.” [8] Flew elucidates, “even God cannot do what is logically impossible; that is, if you make up a self-contradictory, a nonsense sentence it won’t miraculously become sense just because you have put the word God as its subject.” Flew follows up on this by predicating that theologians find the third formulation superior because it pinpoints the essential quality of logical impossibility as being no restriction upon the Omnipotence of God. Antony rightly disagrees with Aquinas, however, that God’s Omnipotence is indeed limited by logical impossibility. Flew could have pointed out that the forth and fifth century superstars of Christian Theology, St. Augustine, [9] and St. Jerome [10] both disagreed with Aquinas and implicitly asserted that God being all powerful means God can do anything without regard to logic. How or why the Christian view of Omnipotence evolved in the centuries between Jerome and Aquinas Flew does not ask, but it would be an interesting study.

He could have followed that thread down a rabbit hole. Instead, and to his credit, he continued to state the position he argues against. “The second move in this defense is to claim, “God gave men free will”; and that this necessarily implies the possibility of doing evil as well as good, that is to say, that there would be a contradiction speaking, it would be nonsense to speak of creatures with freedom to choose good or evil but not able to choose evil. (Which, no blame to him, is what his creatures, men have done.)” [11] Generally, Christians will not seek to specify the nature of free will and will equivocate by assuming it is understood that they mean contra-causal libertarian free will.

Antony could have, but did not, include the scriptural proof texts Christians predicate as a basis for their contra-causal and libertarian view of free will. It is interesting that the Johannine writer’s midrash in John 10:34-35 “Jesus answered them, "Is it not written in your law, 'I said, you are gods'? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came (and scripture cannot be broken),” refers back to Psa 82:6 where is read: “I say, "You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you;” . In the later passage, Elohiym is in the council of the elohiym and is exhorting his fellow gods to do justice and righteousness; and then in a fit of hissy, Elohiym condemns his fellow gods to mortality. Elohiym, in 82:6, is very clearly addressing his fellows in the council of the gods. The Johannine midrash tortures the text to make it apply to human beings (ie: the Jews). A truly brilliant man, Richard Carrier, explains what this means to Christianity. “...the Libertarian notion of free will assumes that one's own desires (among other things, like one's own reason and knowledge) also constrain one's will, rendering it unfree. In other words, our personality, knowledge, wishes, are themselves chains that bind our will. But your proximate, causing desire is your will. It therefore cannot be considered as something “outside” of the will that constrains it – your strongest desire and your will are one and the same.” [12] Later, as we will see, Flew’s argument hinges on the fact that human free will is not Libertarian.

The third premise of the free will defense listed by Flew is: “…certain good things, namely, certain virtues, logically presuppose not merely beings with freedom of choice (which alone are capable of either virtue or vice), and consequently the possibility of evil, but also the actual occurrence of certain evils. That what we might call the second-order goods of sympathetic feeling and action logically could not occur with out (at least the appearance of) the first-order evils of suffering or misfortune. And the moral good of forgiveness presupposes the prior occurrence of (at least the appearance of) some lower-order moral evil to be forgiven.” [13] Flew goes on to elaborate and explain this premise by noting the subjective nature of good and evil assumed by the F.W.D. Certain moral virtues “logically presuppose the possibility of correlative evils” [14] This leads to the conclusion that it “makes no sense to suppose that God “might have chosen to achieve these goods without the possibility in the one case, the actuality in the other of the correlative and presupposed evils.” [15] Flew's acceptance of subjective definitions of good and evil is contrary to Objectivism; that notwithstanding, his argument still has value to those humans who seek to live and thus make a conscious choice not to lie down and die. (It is beyond the scope to this brief essay, however, to show how Flew and Objectivism can be harmonized.)

Antony assesses the argument as disconcerting to the skeptic, and yet he excuses the usual counter arguments as lacking simplicity or a decisive presence compared to the original dilemma in that they allow the believer room to counter argue. Having set up a dissonance, in dialectical fashion, he then offers a penetrating foil towards coherent synthesis. His attack is directed at the central idea of the F.W.D.; it would be fatal to the notion of the Christian God that if it were not the case that a contradiction obtains such that God could not create a free will where people always choose to do the good. If it is logically possible for God to make a free will that is truly free and also determined so that people always freely choose to do good, then Omnipotence could have “made a world inhabited by wholly virtuous people.”[16] Then the F.W.D. collapses, and the problem of evil destroys any reasoned basis for God belief.

This idea is reinforced by Raymond D. Bradley, who argued from international criminal law: “according to the moral principles concerning Command Responsibility as recognized by Ping Fa around 500 B.C.E., principles that were eventually enshrined in the Hague Conventions of 1907, the Geneva Conventions of 1948, and the Nuremberg Charter of 1950 (Principles III and VI of which explicitly assign responsibility to Heads of State who have "planned" and "initiated" crimes against humanity). And, quoting from Article 7 (3) of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, they pointed out that the fact that a subordinate committed crimes does not relieve his superior of criminal responsibility if he knew or had reason to know that the subordinate was about to commit such acts or had done so and the superior failed to take the necessary and reasonable measures to prevent such acts. This principle, they observed, is a particular instance of the more general moral truth:

If a person knows that evil of any kind (natural or moral) will occur or continue to occur unless they prevent it from occurring, and has the ability to prevent it from occurring, then that person is morally culpable for the occurrence of that evil. By virtue of his omnipotence and omniscience, God was found to be an accessory, before, during, and after, the fact of all evils.” [17]

This sets the stage for Flew's blitzkrieg. The first pincer entails defining what it means to act freely. He asks what is meant by “being free to choose”? His insight is that being free to choose does not necessarily mean the choice is unpredictable or uncaused. Paradigmatically, he spins a touching tale about two young lovers with nothing better to do than get married. Murdo exercised his freedom by asking his love, Mairi. Being madly in love with Murdo, she gladly acquiesced. Murdo's and Mairi's actions were not uncaused or in principle unpredictable, nor were they compelled. Yet even if in an all too near future, it becomes a predictable norm that such pairings or nascent behaviors are completely predictable , still Homo Sapiens will be able to choose to do what they want. They will still be able to choose between alternatives that are most appealing. Flew argues that “Unless they (advocates of hard determinism) produce evidence that there was obstruction or pressure or an absence of alternatives, their discoveries will not even be relevant to questions about his freedom of choice, much less a decisive disproof of the manifest fact that sometimes he has complete, sometimes restricted, and sometimes no freedom.” [18]

When we use expressions that characterize an action as either freely chosen or compelled in some fashion, we are not saying that what was done was in theory unpredictable and neither are we asserting that the action was contra-casual. But we are saying that there were viable alternatives. Pivoting on the phrase “could have helped it”, Flew explains that by examining simple “paradigm” cases where writers freely choose from a variety of lexical tools to craft their missives, we can find a wealth of examples of free actions. And if not, then they'll do till the real thing comes along.

Flew's prophecy was fulfilled. Behold - brilliance. “Even if my choices are entirely determined in advance,” expounded Dr. Richard Carrier regarding what free will actually means: “I still make decisions, and my decisions are still caused by who I am and what I know – my thoughts and desires and personality - just as they must be if I am to be “free” in any sense that matters. And because I am still their cause, I can still be praised or blamed for them. This is why compatibilism makes more sense: free will is doing what you want – nothing more, nothing less. And being responsible is being the cause - nothing more, nothing less.”[19]]

Plop-plop-fizz-fizz goes the cathode! After such crafty word smithy, for Flew to just pour his premise like Alka-Seltzer is almost anti-climatic, yet soothing. “...there is no contradiction involved in saying that a particular action or choice was: both free, and could have been helped, and so on; and predictable, or even foreknown, and explicable in terms of caused causes.” He admits that he cannot here demonstrate the premise sound, but he does note that Hume, Hobbes and even Aristotle took a similar line of reasoning. Meanwhile back at the anode, the Catholic Church predicates that it's God has foreknowledge that is not incompatible with human freedom. Raising the bet, he turns the kicker and amusingly observes that, if compatibilism is error, then human free will hitch hikes on God of the Gaps arguments and like God hides in human ignorance. Flew's spartan rhetorical question polishes the first pincer. “... if it is wrong, then it is hard to see what meaning those expressions (“could have helped it”) have and how if at all they could ever be taught, understood, or correctly used.”

Having saved his Panzer divisions, he now deploys them into the other pincer and closes on the salient. “... not only is there no necessary conflict between acting freely and behaving predictably and/or as a result of caused causes; but also Omnipotence might have, could without contradiction be said to have, created only people who would have already as a matter of fact freely have chosen to do the right thing.” [20] Observing that a person's endocrine glands are not the same as a person, and that whatever physiological cause may be accorded responsible for a person's action, it is not contradictory to say that if people can sometimes help doing what they do, they still act freely. He argues against the objection that physiological causes of actions exclude the possibility of doing what is desired. Emphasizing that the absence of proposed physiological causation would imply absence of effect, he contra-distinguishes mental motives to accent a disconnect between the two. By way of analogy he points out that “... if I think as I do because of such and such physiological causes or because of such and such motives; then it cannot also be the case that there are, and I have sufficient reasons, arguments, grounds for thinking as I do.” This hinges on how “because” equivocates multiple ambiguities. There are many explanations which do not exclude one another.

Carrier speaks to the fallacy here identified by Flew when he argues in defense of compatibilism against J.P. Moreland. “Moreland says, for example, that on compatibilism “a reason for acting turns out to be a certain type of state in the agent, a belief-desire state, that is a real efficient cause of the action”. He (Moreland) argues this excludes the possibility of final causes. But since a belief-desire state is an intention, and an intention is a final cause, it follows that final causes can and do exist under compatibilism. A final cause is simply a thought process: a prior calculation form ends to means, which in turn participates in the causal chain that ends in acting. The visualized 'end' is caused by a desire (“I want the second ball to land in the corner pocket”), and the conceptualization of the 'means' is caused by an application of reason and knowledge to that desired end (“If I collide the first ball into the second just so, then I will achieve what I want”). That is all a final cause is, a thought process, and that's an efficient cause: without the final cause (the desired end) there would be no act. So Moreland is attempting to state a tautology (A is B) as if it were a distinction (A is not B), a fundamental violation of basic logic.” [21] The same fallacy was committed by those determinists Flew argued against who claimed physiological causes precluded mental motives. If it is objected that Murdo and Mairi were influence by their glands, again it is pointed out that glands are not people. Murdo and Mairi made their own decision. Despite this it is also true that we can do what we want but that we cannot want whatever we want.

At this point in his essay, Flew serves the 800 pound Gorilla. What becomes of the keystone of the Freewill Defense, if there does not exist a contradiction in thinking that God could have arranged things so that human beings always freely choose the good? If it really is possible for a person's action to be freely chosen and fully determined by caused causes, then doesn't the theodicy collapse? All goods of whatever order presuppose not only corresponding lower order evils but also freedom. Even virtues like honesty and intellectual integrity while not parasitic upon antecedent evils are still contingent to freedom. If there is no contradiction, then there is no need for any soul making theodicy either. The resultant people, no matter the challenge, would always choose the right without the evils of those who choose damnation or that required for higher order goods and virtues. The deity could have evolved humans trustworthy in all situations without need for acquiring trustworthiness via fortitude, suffering, or pain. However, in that case it would be senseless to suggest that God would still be required to forgive or display fortitude.
Nonetheless, subtly reworded versions of Predestination or Determinism could be hurled at the argument. “...but that there is not contradiction in speaking of a world in which there are always antecedent conditions of all human action sufficient to ensure that agents always will as a matter of fact freely chose the right.” [22] The distinction turns on crucial differences in the character of the deity. If the former is asserted, then God's character would be that of a quasi-personal being that has fixed everything that everyone will do, choose, and suffer. If the latter, then the deity is not thought of a puppet master or master hypnotist, rather it just happens to be the case that antecedent conditions predisposing humans to act in a particular, instead of some other, fashion always have, do, and will always obtain. The counter thesis would specify that determinism is perhaps compatible with human freedom and responsibility, but that predestination is assuredly not.

The error here is that predestination alleviates all human responsibility no matter what. Flew wrote: “The first reaction to the idea of God, the Great Hypnotist, is that this would mean that no one ever was or had been or would be really responsible, that none of the people who we should otherwise have been certain could have helped doing things really could. ... But this is very misleading. Certainly it would be monstrous to suggest that anyone, however truly responsible to and in the eyes of men, could fairly be called to account and be punished by the 'God who had rigged his every move. All the bitter words which have ever been written against the wickedness of the God of predestinationism – especially when he is also thought of as filling Hell with all but the elect – are amply justified.” [23] By reminding the reader that the paradigmatic cases defining key phrases exemplifying human liberty are impervious to the predestination doctrine as no theological information can alter their meaning, Flew counters the objection.

Refining the position: “...there is no contradiction in speaking of God as so arranging the laws of nature that all men always as a matter of fact freely choose to do the right.” What infuriates is still the idea that providence punishes anyone for freely choosing the wrong in the case that omnipotence had arraigned the antecedent conditions so that his victim would so act. Flew concludes: “...the Calvinist picture – the Great Hypnotist – is appropriate in its appreciation of the implications of Omnipotence; it is morally obnoxious insofar as it presents human creatures justly accountable to that Omnipotence.” [24]

Flew couldn't resist his sense of symmetry. Although his free choice was likely determined, still he wrote what he wanted, and that's compatibilist free will. As it was in the beginning, so he closes. "Either God cannot abolish evil, or he will not; if he cannot, then he is not all-powerful; if he will not, then he is not all good."

[1] Anthony Flew, ‘Divine Omnipotence and Human Freedom’, p.227, in “Critiques of God: A major statement of the case against belief in God”, edited by Peter Angeles, copyright 1976.

[2] Flew acknowledged his error in wrongly attributing the given quotation to St. Augustine, and he thanked Dr. John Burnaby of St. John’s College for pointing out that St. Augustine did not write the line. The author of the present essay was unsuccessful in finding the actual source of the quote.

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh

[4] Dr. Robert Price makes this point in his Bilbegeek Genesis #2 podcast.

[5] Ayn Rand, 'The Objectivist Ethics,' p.15, in “The Virtue of Selfishness”

[6] William L. Rowe, 'The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism', p.253, in “The Improbability of God”, edited by Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier

(Premise 1. “There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.”

Premise 2. “An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.”) - quoted from Rowe, ibid., p.251

[7] John S. Mill, “Three Essays on Religion”, p.186-87 as quoted by Flew, ibid. p.228

[8] Flew, ibid. p.228 citing Aquinas from “Summa Theologica”, IA XXV, Art. 4.

[9] St. Augustine, “…for certainly He is called Almighty only because He is mighty to do all He will…”; “City of God”, Book XXI, p.458, “NPNF1-02. St. Augustin's City of God and Christian Doctrine” - http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf102/Page_458.html

[10] St. Jerome, “But I do not presume to limit God's omnipotence…”; “EPISTLE 58: TO PAULINUS”, Art. 3, - http://www.voskrese.info/spl/jerome058.html

[11] Flew, ibid. p.228

[12] Richard Carrier, “Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism”, p.109

[13] Flew, ibid. p.228

[14] ibid. p.229

[15] ibid. p.229

[16] ibid. p.229

[17] http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/raymond_bradley/fwd-refuted.html#failure

[18] Flew, ibid. p.230

[19] Carrier, ibid., p.109

[20] Flew, ibid., p.231

[21] Carrier, ibid., p.107

[22] Flew, ibid., p.233

[23] ibid., p.235; “The recognition, for example, of the object of highest worship in a being who could make a Hell; and who could create countless generations of human being with the certain foreknowledge that he was creating them for this fate ... Any other of the outrages to the most ordinary justice and humanity involved in the common Christian conception of the moral character of God sinks into insignificance beside this dreadful idealization of wickedness.” (quoted from Mills, “Three Essays On Religion”, p.113-14)

[24] ibid., p.235

"I SEEK TO PROVE -- FREE WILL IS IMPOSSIBLE AND IMMORAL"

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I have known the author of the piece below for many years. Both he and I are most interested in what you think of its strongest and weakest parts, so please comment. The content in this essay deserves the utmost serious consideration.

 --John W. Loftus.  

 SOMETHING NEW AND DECISIVE ABOUT FREE WILL

LETHAL TO THE NEED FOR SAVIOR JESUS

WHY ARE YOU WHO YOU ARE?

COMPARE THE EFFECTS -- ONLY YOU KNOW – OF THE FACTORS MAKING YOU

AND IMPOSED NOT CHOSEN – CAN ANYONE HAVE FREE WILL?

By Stanley W. Ayre -- March 2023

Do We Have Free Will? Part 4: Neither Caused nor Random

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So far, we have looked at three arguments against the existence of free will, each one based on a different type of determinism. But there is another reason for denying freedom of the will: the concept itself appears to make no sense. In this fourth and final part, I explain why.

Some New Arguments Against Religion

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There is no shortage of arguments against religion. Some are practical in nature, others are philosophical. Some aim to discredit theism in general, others target specific propositions of Christianity, Islam, and so on. These arguments come from a huge variety of fields, including textual criticism, historical criticism, archaeology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, cosmology, sociology, logic, the philosophy of mind, and epistemology. Many are by themselves sufficient to render religious belief unreasonable, but together they constitute an overwhelming case against faith-based beliefs in “truths” privately revealed by supernatural agents to human prophets.

While working on a forthcoming book, a few arguments occurred to me that I either couldn’t find in the literature, or don’t think are represented the way they should be, given their strength. Two of these arguments are, as far as I can tell, new. I’d be very interested to know what readers think.

So, here goes:

God Almighty, and AWOL

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The system “goes to pieces”


The Bible itself sets Christianity up for failure; there is no way that its concept(s) of God can be sustained. The intensive, invasive personal theism advanced by these ancient documents reflects a control-freak deity, as Christopher Hitchens has pointed out:

“Religion is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep, who can subject you to total surveillance around the clock every waking and sleeping minute of your life, before you're born and, even worse and where the real fun begins, after you're dead. A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true?”

This, indeed, is God as portrayed in the New Testament:

Neuroscience is Destroying the Notions of Free Will, Sin and Salvation by Faith

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Neuroscience is making it extremely difficult for believers to still claim that by freely choosing to believe we are saved (or condemned), that we freely choose to sin, or that there is a wrathful God who will judge us on the last day. Case in point, girls and boys, are the following two essays, the last of which I will quote from. The first is Grandma’s Experiences Leave a Mark on Your Genes. Now for the second one, "The Brain on Trial." [Be sure to read this essay at least as far as the highlighted money quote in red!].

Do We Have Free Will? Part 1: Physical Determinism

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The most common Christian view holds that human beings are free in the usual libertarian sense of the term — meaning that we can choose from among different courses of action (this is what I’ll mean here by “free will”). Eve and Adam chose to eat the fruit, but they could have chosen to obey Yahweh instead; you chose to read at least this far, but could have stopped after the first sentence; and so on. There are serious problems with such a view, however, and I thought it might be interesting to cover the main ones in a brief series of posts. (Plus, I don’t think I could have chosen otherwise anyway!)