(no subject)

[nameandnature]

Stuff I found on the web, probably on andrewducker's del.icio.us feed or something.

Psychology Today on ex-Christian ex-ministers and on magical thinking

Psychology Today has a couple of interesting articles, one on ministers who lose their faith, and another on magical thinking. Quoteable quote:

"We tend to ignore how much cognitive effort is required to maintain extreme religious beliefs, which have no supporting evidence whatsoever," says the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. He likens the process to a cell trying to maintain its osmotic pressure. "You're trying to pump out the mainstream influences all the time. You're trying to maintain this wall, and keep your beliefs inside, and all these other beliefs outside. That's hard work." In some ways, then, at least for fundamentalists, "growing out of it is the easiest thing in the world."

That sounds sort of familiar. I'm not sure I'd consider myself an ex-fundamentalist, but I did find that giving up removed the constant pressure to keep baling.

The stuff about moral contagion in the magical thinking article reminded me of Haggai 2:10-14, where it's clear that cleanness (in the Bible's sense of moral and ceremonial acceptability, rather then lack of dirt) is less contagious than uncleanness. There's possibly a link here to the tendency of some religions to sharply divide the world into non-believers and believers, and to be careful about how much you expose yourself to the non-believing world (q.v. the unequally yoked teaching you get in the more extreme variants of a lot of religions).

Old interview with Philip Pullman

Third Way interviewed Pullman years ago. It's the origin of one of his statements on whether he's an agnostic or an atheist, which I rather like:

Can I elucidate my own position as far as atheism is concerned? I don’t know whether I’m an atheist or an agnostic. I’m both, depending on where the standpoint is.

The totality of what I know is no more than the tiniest pinprick of light in an enormous encircling darkness of all the things I don’t know – which includes the number of atoms in the Atlantic Ocean, the thoughts going through the mind of my next-door neighbour at this moment and what is happening two miles above the surface of the planet Mars. In this illimitable darkness there may be God and I don’t know, because I don’t know.

But if we look at this pinprick of light and come closer to it, like a camera zooming in, so that it gradually expands until here we are, sitting in this room, surrounded by all the things we do know – such as what the time is and how to drive to London and all the other things that we know, what we’ve read about history and what we can find out about science – nowhere in this knowledge that’s available to me do I see the slightest evidence for God.

So, within this tiny circle of light I’m a convinced atheist; but when I step back I can see that the totality of what I know is very small compared to the totality of what I don’t know. So, that’s my position.

This isn't really a surprising statement, but, like Ruth Gledhill's discovery that Richard Dawkins is a liberal Anglican, some people seem surprised that atheists aren't ruling out things which some people would regard as gods. The point is that there's no decent evidence that anyone has met one. Deism is a respectable position, I think (although I'm not sure why you'd bother with it), but religions which claim God has spoken to them are implausible because of God's inability to keep his story straight.

The walls have Google

The thing about blogging is that you never know who's reading. Someone called Voyou makes a post ending with an aside which is critical of A.C. Grayling's response to Terry Eagleton's review of The God Delusion. Grayling turns up in the comments to argue with them.

(I keep turning up more conversations about the Eagleton review: see my bookmarks for the best of them).

"Compact of hypocrisy and secret vice"

Yellow wonders whether or not he should sign the UCCF doctrinal basis in this post and the followup. Signs point to "not". Si Hollett reminds me of myself in my foolish youth.

Comments

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

the bigger the carrot and stick offered to encourage choice A over choice B, the less meaningful it is to say that you get to choose freely between A and B
No, I know that isn't right. There was a point in my life where I believed in hell, and a fairly good appreciation of how bad it would be. Yet I decided that I was making a choice to reject God that would (I thought) lead to hell. I had no less free choice then than I have today, or that I have had at any point.

[gjm11.livejournal.com]

Oh, sure, there's *some* real choice still available. Just as you have *some* real choice what to do if a lunatic threatens you at gunpoint and also offers you untold riches if you do what he says. But it's a pretty attenuated sort of freedom, it seems to me, which makes nonsense of the claim that All The Trouble In The World is there for the sake of our precious freedom. If a supremely powerful god really cared as much about our freedom as would be needed to make the "free will defence" work, then I think we'd be entitled to expect more freedom than we have.

(There are two separate and kinda-opposite freedom deficits at work here. On the one hand, if I know that some choice of mine means the difference between eternal bliss and eternal torment, then that greatly reduces my ability to make a meaningful choice, just as being told to do something at gunpoint does only infinitely more so. On the other hand, if that's true but I don't know it, then my choice might be nicely free but you don't get to claim that I freely chose damnation. That last claim isn't one that anyone's making a big deal of in this particular discussion, I think, but it's commonly made when people start asking whether it's reasonable to condemn people to hell for their very finite sins. )

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

Sorry, putting asterisks around 'some' does not nullify my point - which is that to deny that people have a free choice if they believe this stuff is true is wrong - I can say that with certainty as I was such a person and it was a choice I freely made.

If there was a metaphorical gun being held to my head (which I presume is the threat of hell), and untold riches on offer for doing what the gunman wants (which I presume is heaven, cute Christian girls, and so on). Then I very definitely had a completely free choice to choose what I wanted, and I chose to be shot (in your analogy).

Arguing that people have no choice here just doesn't stand up.

[gjm11.livejournal.com]

Um, whatever gives you the idea that putting asterisks around "some" is meant to nullify anything? I agree with you: even at gunpoint, or even at hell-point, it's possible to make a genuine choice. I can't speak for Paul but I'm guessing he'd agree: all he says is that the threat of hell "limits my ability to choose".

Are you trying to say that actually the threat of infinite harm, versus the offer of infinite benefit, *doesn't* constitute a limit to one's ability to choose the other way? Do you never say things like "I can't do that, it's against the law" or "I can't go that way, there's a 100-foot cliff and I might die" or "I can't do that, I'd lose my job" or whatever?

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

Because I said I had a real choice, then you responded by saying I had *some* real choice. I presumed (maybe wrongly) that the contrast was meant to show that my choice was not as fully real as I thought it was, hence the asterisk emphasis on some.

I can't speak for Paul but I'm guessing he'd agree: all he says is that the threat of hell "limits my ability to choose".
But it doesn't. My ability to choose in just the situation we're talking about wasn't limited. I made a choice, the choice that you're saying was limited. Yet it can't be limited because I made it.

Are you trying to say that actually the threat of infinite harm, versus the offer of infinite benefit, *doesn't* constitute a limit to one's ability to choose the other way?
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.

Do you never say things like "I can't do that, it's against the law" or "I can't go that way, there's a 100-foot cliff and I might die" or "I can't do that, I'd lose my job" or whatever?
Yes I do. I do that because language is imprecise and when making offhand remarks like that I inevitably use imprecise and incorrect language. I would try to avoid doing that in a discussion like this of course.

A more accurate rendering of the things you portray would be: "I don't want to do that, it's against the law, and because of the consequences of breaking the law I'm choosing to not do it". The point being that the fact that there are consequences doesn't limit my ability to choose at all. It influences the decision I might make, but that's not a limitation.

If knowing that sin is so serious that we're going to burn in hell for an eternity (not the only possible reading of the Bible I think, but certainly the most stark one (and the one I think most likely, I'll add before you think I'm trying to wiggle out of things here)) makes us stop and consider if that's what we really want, then I'm really glad it influences our choices. If a criminal (or potential criminal) decision as to whether to commit a crime is influenced by the knowledge that he will be punished for committing the crime, then that's a great thing! That doesn't mean he has no choice (otherwise we wouldn't have any crime).

[gjm11.livejournal.com]

I think a person making a choice with a big threat hanging over them is (1) potentially still making a real choice but (2) less able to make a real choice than someone without the big threat attached to their decision. It may or may not feel like there's less choice, on any given occasion.

Apparently you disagree; correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like your position is that any given choice-like-thing either is or isn't a real choice, with no scope for different degrees of real-choice-ness. That seems very odd to me; perhaps the oddness will be clearer if we consider some different sorts of context where choice might be impaired: habit, addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, hypnosis, starvation.

I agree (of course!) that if sin inevitably means damnation, then it's good for the prospect of damnation to influence our choices. The points at issue are (1) whether it's reasonable for an allegedly supremely good and powerful god to set things up that way, (2) whether it's plausible that actually God didn't really have any choice but to set things up that way (there is a certain sort of recursive irony around about here...), (3) whether, given his decision to set things up that way, it would in fact have been better for us not to have the option of making the choices that would land us in eternal damnation, and perhaps (4) whether, given the decision to set things up that way and our option to make the choice either way, we ought to have been better informed about the consequences of our choices. My own best-guess answers are: no, no, dunno, yes.

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

Apparently you disagree; correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like your position is that any given choice-like-thing either is or isn't a real choice, with no scope for different degrees of real-choice-ness.
I'm not really sure what a not real choice would look like. I've only ever encountered real choices (should I follow God or not?, shall I kiss this nice Christian girl?, etc). I suppose you could say some things that happen are not-real choices (Shall I choose to obey gravity? Erk, yes I have to), but that would be a category mistake.

That seems very odd to me; perhaps the oddness will be clearer if we consider some different sorts of context where choice might be impaired: habit, addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, hypnosis, starvation.
I think if you want to properly compare it then you ought to compare it with a crime where the criminal knows he may be (or perhaps will) be judged for the act. That's the closest analogy I think.

(1) whether it's reasonable for an allegedly supremely good and powerful god to set things up that way
Which I think resolves down to the question of whether an eternal conscious torment in hell is a reasonable punishment (assuming it is eternal etc). There are other angles to look at it from - some people interpret things as people making a choice as to whether they want God in their life, and if they choose no then ultimately they get exactly what they want, with absence of God (who is the source of all good things) being the worst thing that there could possibly be (i.e. hell). Personally I don't buy in to that all that much, but I don't want to completely write these things off because of my lack of understanding of them.

(2) whether it's plausible that actually God didn't really have any choice but to set things up that way (there is a certain sort of recursive irony around about here...)
I suspect that is unknowable. Or if it is knowable (which I doubt) we're going to have to wait around for a long time for the philosophers to work it out (and even then, who knows, philosophy is quite the fuzzy thing).

(3) whether, given his decision to set things up that way, it would in fact have been better for us not to have the option of making the choices that would land us in eternal damnation
Not having the option of making the choices that land us in eternal damnation essentially means that we wouldn't have free will, as it is by free choice we choose to sin (or at least I do). So it doesn't make sense to say that it might be better for me to not have the option of making the choices that would land me in eternal damnation because to do so would mean robbing me of my free will, and without free will I do not think I would be a robhu anymore because free will is a required property of robhuness.

(4) whether, given the decision to set things up that way and our option to make the choice either way, we ought to have been better informed about the consequences of our choices
So essentially, are we culpable for our actions if the consequences are not explicitly spelled out?

Imagine that the consequences are never spelled out at all. Imagine that someone (for some reason) is completely unaware that there are police and that there is a system of law. If that person went out and raped someone, would it be a reasonable defence to say that they did not know there would be a consequence on them for their action?

[gjm11.livejournal.com]

An entirely not-real choice would be one where your decision was not made freely. For instance, that might happen as a result of hypnosis or brain damage or something. But perhaps your position is actually that everything that looks like a choice is a real choice, which is certainly simpler than what I'd thought it was :-).

The point of suggesting thinking about things like hypnosis is that they seem to me to give further reasons for thinking that any sort of free will we have comes in degrees: some choices are free-er than others.

Question 1 isn't just about whether eternal torment is a reasonable punishment for how we actually behave, because even if it is God might have had the option of arranging for us to behave differently, so that eternal torment wasn't necessary.

I agree that questions like "could a god such as Christians believe in have arranged things in such-and-such a hypothetical manner?" are going to be ... tough to resolve definitively :-). But we might reasonably hope for probable answers. (Could a god such as Christians believe in have arranged for lightning to strike my house last night? It's hard to see how the answer could be no, at least if by "Christians" you mean "most Christians" rather than "some unusually liberal Christians". Could such a god have arranged that triangles have four sides? It's hard to see how the answer could be yes; changing the meaning of "triangle" doesn't count, btw.)

Yes, making us unable to land ourselves in hell by our choices would mean radical curtailment of our free will. Not necessarily complete abolition, though; for instance, if it's true that becoming (genuinely, sincerely, etc.) a Christian reliably saves you from hell then God would only need to do enough free-will-overriding to make everyone become a Christian. It seems to me (assuming arguendo that he's actually there, that Christianity is right, etc.) that by providing better evidence he could probably make almost everyone freely become a Christian, so the amount of will-overriding required might be very small. (Perhaps becoming a Christian is no use for salvation if it happens in response to compelling evidence? But I think that's going to be a very difficult position to maintain...)

No, the point of my question 4 wasn't to suggest that we wouldn't be culpable if the consequences of our actions weren't spelled out for us. (Consider, again, stupidity as a sort of parallel to wickedness. Wrong calculations are wrong even if you don't know your bridge is going to fall down; but someone who cares about the people on the bridge, and knows that the calculations are wrong and can point that out, would surely do so to prevent the bridge from falling down. Similarly, if some decision of mine is going to land me in hell then someone who cares about my welfare might be expected to make sure I know before I have to make the decision; not to make me culpable or make me not culpable, but to make me less likely to land in hell.)

To repeat: I am *not* saying that culpability for an action is dependent on knowing the consequences. Especially, I'm not saying that culpability for an action that affects other people is dependent on knowing how you might get punished for it. I thought I'd been quite careful to avoid giving the impression of saying anything so stupid, but apparently I wasn't careful enough :-).

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

But perhaps your position is actually that everything that looks like a choice is a real choice, which is certainly simpler than what I'd thought it was :-).
Oh, I choose to be a very simple man ;-) That may be an oversimplification, but it works for me AFAICT.

I agree that questions like "could a god such as Christians believe in have arranged things in such-and-such a hypothetical manner?" are going to be ... tough to resolve definitively :-). But we might reasonably hope for probable answers.
I agree completely, it's going to be tough to resolve. I don't think I can prove to you that I'm right, but I do think that where we are now in the discussion shows that even the 'hardline conservative evangelical' position (which I guess is how people would classify my understanding of the Bible) stands up to quite a lot of scrutiny and stress testing.

Yes, making us unable to land ourselves in hell by our choices would mean radical curtailment of our free will. Not necessarily complete abolition, though;
I think, if we crudely say that the fair punishment for sin is hell, and define sin as choosing to disobey God / what is right - then to avoid us deserving hell we'd have to lack the ability to choose whether to do good or evil / obey or disobey God. It's hard to imagine how I could be me anymore if you stripped that much away. How great it is (I think) that God does not strip those things away, I'm certainly very glad I have those choices available to me.

Then there's the classic response that what God really wants is people that love him and love one another. If (as I think I said earlier.. this conversation has got a bit fragmented) love must be volitional then free will is a pre-requisite for things that love. Again, I'm really glad I can love.

then God would only need to do enough free-will-overriding to make everyone become a Christian
Sure. We're back to the earlier thing about mechanics though. If you can do that, then it isn't a choice it's just a universal thing that everyone is saved because of Jesus' death. ISTM God either doesn't do things that way for some reason, or he can't (because the nature of the escape route is that it must be chosen).

It seems to me (assuming arguendo that he's actually there, that Christianity is right, etc.) that by providing better evidence he could probably make almost everyone freely become a Christian, so the amount of will-overriding required might be very small.
I wish there were better evidence available to people. I think that's why God wants people like me to stay up in to the early hours of the morning arguing about it. I'd prefer trumpets (well, not loud ones, as I want to go to sleep) as they'd make my life a lot easier. I think provision of the better evidence to people that don't have it is something he has largely left up to us.

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

(continued)


Wrong calculations are wrong even if you don't know your bridge is going to fall down; but someone who cares about the people on the bridge, and knows that the calculations are wrong and can point that out, would surely do so to prevent the bridge from falling down. Similarly, if some decision of mine is going to land me in hell then someone who cares about my welfare might be expected to make sure I know before I have to make the decision; not to make me culpable or make me not culpable, but to make me less likely to land in hell.)
So the issue is why God doesn't make all this stuff absolutely clear to everyone given that (presumably) he doesn't want everyone to go to hell. I think he did quite a lot to get people to know, it's not like he stood by on the sidelines doing nothing. We wouldn't even be having this conversation if it was like that. He sent his son in to the world to warn people, the son who we killed. The cost for saving us was enormous. Could he have done more? Should there be trumpets? I'd like there to be more trumpets, but I think the reasons there aren't so many are complex. The complexities unlock other questions for which there seem to be no answers (e.g. it's clear the world is not as God wants, and that there are demons as there are angels, and the demons are opposed to and work against God's plans, how can this be if God is omnipotent?). I don't have all the answers - I don't think God has provided all the answers to these questions. I think he has provided enough answers that we can be sure he is exists, is loving, and is worthy of our worship. In other words I'm never going to understand it all, but I understand enough that I'm very confident that it's right.

[gjm11.livejournal.com]

The cost was enormous, eh? Seems to me that the cost God allegedly paid was considerably less -- infinitely less, indeed -- than the cost every single non-saved human being is going to be paying, and God (more or less by definition) is much better able to pay that cost. However, never mind that; I don't think anything much depends on how much it "cost" God to do whatever he did; actions don't become more meritorious just because you make them needlessly painful.

Once again, it appears that standing up to scrutiny means avoiding the difficult questions. Billions of people are suffering eternal torment. It seems that God could avoid this, at least for most of them, by providing better information more clearly. So why doesn't he? Oh, um, well, I don't know, it's all a mystery, but that's OK because there are also *other* problematic questions with similarly unknown answers, like "why does God leave his world in such a mess even though he supposedly cares for its inhabitants and can do anything he wants?". (Obviously a belief is better supported when it has two fatal objections than when it has only one.)

But, apparently, God has "provided enough answers that we can be sure he exists, is loving, and is worthy of our worship". That seems to me rather like saying "I know my spouse is openly sleeping with a dozen other people, insults me in front of my friends, and only talks to me once a year. But I've got ample reasons for believing that s/he loves me beyond description and is perfectly faithful to me." Or "I know my new theory of physics appears to predict that the planets will fall into the sun instead of orbiting it, and that protons decay with a half-life of one nanosecond, and that there's no such thing as light. But it gives enough good answers that I'm sure it's correct."

Could you provide at least a brief sketch of what these answers are that God has provided and how they outweigh the obvious facts of (e.g.) living in a world full of evil and, according to you, billions of people suffering eternal torment?

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

Seems to me that the cost God allegedly paid was considerably less -- infinitely less, indeed -- than the cost every single non-saved human being is going to be paying
I don't know why you think that.

and God (more or less by definition) is much better able to pay that cost
I don't think it's like being fined where people who have lots of money are less affected by the fine, I think it's more like enduring pain or torture or something where there is little or no variation in how reduced the effect is. Given that the separation from God the father on the cross was total (the why have you forsaken me stuff) I'm inclined to conclude that it was less costly for God.

However, never mind that; I don't think anything much depends on how much it "cost" God to do whatever he did; actions don't become more meritorious just because you make them needlessly painful.
I don't think God did make it 'needlessly painful'. I don't understand the mechanics of it all (I admitted that a while ago), but my lack of understanding of things as complex and external to my everyday experience is something I just wouldn't expect to understand.

I think we're going in circles here. You seem to think God is obligated to save people, and if he doesn't he is bad, whereas I think we are rightly judged for our actions and if God chooses to save any of us that's an amazing thing. I'm not sure this bit of the thread is really going anywhere.

"I know my spouse is openly sleeping with a dozen other people, insults me in front of my friends, and only talks to me once a year. But I've got ample reasons for believing that s/he loves me beyond description and is perfectly faithful to me."
It's not like that because I don't consider God's actions to be immoral. I don't think there is good contradictory information as you are suggesting here.

Could you provide at least a brief sketch of what these answers are that God has provided and how they outweigh the obvious facts of (e.g.) living in a world full of evil and, according to you, billions of people suffering eternal torment?
I can give it a go, and will do in the coming weeks on my blog.

[gjm11.livejournal.com]

I agree that discussion of who got hurt more is neither central nor very productive, so let's drop that.

Please imagine that the person talking about his/her spouse adds "I'm sure there's a good reason why it's right for her/him to be sleeping with all those other people and so on; I'm sure it's the best thing for me somehow". I'm sure *you* don't consider the things you predicate of God to be immoral. Fair enough; I neither can nor wish to tell you what moral values you have to have. All I'm saying is that the way you say God behaves seems to me to be monstrously immoral, and that my understanding of the values most deeply embedded in Christianity (which may differ from yours, and may be wrong) has them condemning the behaviour you ascribe to God too.

[gjm11.livejournal.com]

If by "stands up to scrutiny" you mean "can be maintained by saying 'dunno' to the hardest questions" then sure, just about anything stands up to scrutiny :-). I don't think you've given any reason to think it's reasonable to suppose that human sins justify eternal torment.

Clearly Christians continue to disobey God (by which I mean: do things that are against what they consider, and what most people would consider if they took Christianity as premise and went from there, to be the will of God). So if you hope to escape hell then hell can't be a necessary consequence of disobeying God. So saving everyone from hell wouldn't require God to force everyone never to disobey him. So it doesn't seem like keeping everyone out of hell would require a total negation of human freedom.

I agree that it could still be true that getting out of hell requires (e.g.) that one make *at least one* genuinely unforced choice, which God couldn't interfere with without making it not work any more. (Though I have never yet heard any really coherent account of why that should be. It's easy to argue that your position is sound when you're allowed to invent constraints that supposedly apply even to God, without any actual evidence that he is under any such constraints or any good reason to think he should be...)

If, as appears to be the case, you agree with me that (assuming, as before, that Christianity is right) providing really good evidence would suffice to make the great majority of people become Christians of their own free will, then it seems to me that it's not enough just to say "oh, well, God's left it up to people like me to provide that evidence". Because, as you may have noticed, People Like You are *not* providing anything like enough evidence to make the great majority of people become Christians. (Even in places where the great majority of people *are* Christians, this appears to be mostly because people follow their parents' religion, not because of the weight of evidence they're provided with. And globally, the majority of people are not Christians.) I'm not blaming you for this (because, e.g., you can't provide evidence you don't have). But it seems to me that God, if God there be, ought to be doing something more effective.

Imagine that there is a global epidemic of a terrible disease, and that you are a phenomenally rich and phenomenally clever person who has just discovered a simple cure for it. You could make use of your tremendous wealth to set up manufacturing facilities everywhere, hire lots of people to provide the curative agent to everyone, provide demonstrations so that people can tell your cure really does cure, keep an eye on the operations to make sure they're actually working, etc. Instead, you pick a few not-specially-reliable people and say "Go and hand out the stuff". It turns out that they do a rather lousy job of this and billions of people are dying because they aren't doing it well; but you don't switch to a better way of getting the job done. I would not be greatly impressed by the depth of your concern or by your competence in this situation. I would not take "Oh, well, you see, I chose to leave it up to them" as a good explanation of why you weren't doing better.

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

If by "stands up to scrutiny" you mean "can be maintained by saying 'dunno' to the hardest questions" then sure, just about anything stands up to scrutiny :-). I don't think you've given any reason to think it's reasonable to suppose that human sins justify eternal torment.
That's not what I mean by stands up to scrutiny. I don't think Christians have complete answers to some questions, but that doesn't mean they're wrong. What I find more telling is that when people say things like "Hell is clearly wrong because I feel like it's wrong" they're relying on 'common sense' which I don't think is reliable when applied to things this far removed from our common experience, or when they say "Hell is clearly wrong because it is an infinite punishment for a finite crime" you find that when you open that up a bit it becomes clear that we have such a sketchy view of all of these things that you can't state that dogmaticly - how can we tell from our vantage point how bad sin is or what the correct way of determining a punishment for it would be?

From the perspective of God not being real all this stuff is not going to be convincing. I don't think it should be. I don't expect to argue a really strong positive cas about hell just from hell. I think if you come Christianity from other angles, become convinced that God is real, then it is reasonable to say "I don't entirely understand this, but I trust that God who is much greater than me has got it right".

Clearly Christians continue to disobey God (by which I mean: do things that are against what they consider, and what most people would consider if they took Christianity as premise and went from there, to be the will of God). So if you hope to escape hell then hell can't be a necessary consequence of disobeying God.
Hold on - this doesn't make sense. The argument Christians make is two stage. First that our sin means we deserve punishment. Then that because of Jesus' death on the cross this escape route is open to us if we choose to accept it. Your argument is locked in stage 1, but that's not what Christians believe.

I agree that it could still be true that getting out of hell requires (e.g.) that one make *at least one* genuinely unforced choice, which God couldn't interfere with without making it not work any more. (Though I have never yet heard any really coherent account of why that should be. It's easy to argue that your position is sound when you're allowed to invent constraints that supposedly apply even to God, without any actual evidence that he is under any such constraints or any good reason to think he should be...)
... and it's easy to argue that God is wrong when you presume to understand the mechanics of how salvation must work and how God could have better designed the world without any actual evidence of these things.

If, as appears to be the case, you agree with me that (assuming, as before, that Christianity is right) providing really good evidence would suffice to make the great majority of people become Christians of their own free will
Err, no, I don't think that :-) It might be the case, but I don't think so.

Anyway, as I said - I don't think God is obligated to provide us with salvation or knowledge of salvation. We're rightly judged guilty even if we choose to do things that we know are wrong but don't know we're going to be punished for them. As I said in my example of the criminal who does not know of the existence of police or a legal system. That God made any effort to save any of us is breathtakingly amazing and loving, it is not something we deserve.

[gjm11.livejournal.com]

There's a difference between not having answers to questions like "so, according to your theory, what should the ratio between the masses of the proton and the electron be?" and not having answers to questions like "so, according to your theory, the proton and the electron should have the same mass". Let's call them puzzles and problems, respectively.

For Christians, I think "who exactly ends up saved?" is a puzzle. It doesn't matter much if you don't know the answer. But "how come your supposedly loving god has made the universe such that billions of people -- almost certainly the majority of people, and perhaps a large majority -- end up suffering eternal torment?" -- that's a problem, not a puzzle. On the face of it, it indicates something badly wrong. Sure, it might turn out that there's some subtle or surprising reason why it turns out not to, and you're entitled to point that out, but that doesn't really help very much. There *might* be some way for a mediaeval-style cosmology to produce the results we observe, but it sure looks like there isn't. So we reject the mediaeval-style cosmology. There *might* be some way for a supremely loving and powerful god to make a world most of whose allegedly-loved inhabitants end up in eternal torment, but it sure looks like there isn't. So I reject Christianity-with-hell.

I don't think I'm arguing from the perspective that God isn't real; I'm saying "let's suppose for the sake of argument that Christianity is basically right; now, what about hell?".

I don't understand your claim that I'm "locked in stage 1". I do understand that Christians who believe in hell believe (1) that our sins deserve eternal punishment in hell and (2) that God has provided a way out by means of What Jesus Did, open to anyone who chooses to accept it. (Some Christians would delete that last clause. I don't think you're one of them.) So far as I'm aware, nothing I've said has ignored either half, or failed to take either half seriously. Could you explain a bit more explicitly?

I don't "presume to understand the mechanics of how salvation must work". I have not at any point made any claim about the mechanics of how salvation must work.

I admit (as I have already admitted) that I don't know for sure what options might have been open to a supremely good and powerful god when setting up our world. If you take that to mean that no argument is legitimate that involves saying "well, you say God did X, but it seems like he could have done something along the lines of Y, which would surely have been better because P, Q, and R" ... then congratulations, you've made your belief in the goodness of God entirely inaccessible to rational criticism, and thereby (I think) entirely meaningless.

I've made no claims about what God (if God there be) is *obliged* to do. I doubt that obligation is a concept one can apply to God, should he exist. I've made claims about what a being who is as good and as powerful as God is alleged to be should be expected to do, and about how that matches up with how the world actually appears to be. If you present me with a chess game in which white gets mated on move 15 after making several elementary blunders and tell me it was played by Garry Kasparov at the height of his powers, against another grandmaster, then I'm going to be skeptical -- not because I think Kasparov was obliged to play good moves, but because I think he quite reliably did. If you show me the first 14 moves, I'll be a bit less skeptical -- I'm no Kasparov, so maybe all those weird moves by white are much better than they look -- but still (rightly, I claim) very skeptical. (He's lost his queen, his king is being attacked, his pawns are a mess; sure, *maybe* there's some amazingly clever way out, but it really doesn't look like it.) And if instead you present me with a world full of evil and stupidity and suffering and tell me a supremely good and powerful god made it that way (yeah, I know, that's a simplification; this comment is too long already) then again I'm going to be skeptical. "It looks like this could all have been done much, much better" isn't *proof*, but it most certainly is *evidence* if anything is evidence at all.

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

I'm going to have to apologise and say I don't have the time right now to continue this discussion. Maybe I will in the near future, but more likely you'll pop in on the posts I'll be making and we can argue again there ;-)

I'm also not sure any progress is being made here. Perhaps that it is because I'm not particularly clear in putting my point across.

I may pop in here and there and say bit's and pieces if I'm terribly bored at work ;-)

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

I think a person making a choice with a big threat hanging over them is (1) potentially still making a real choice but (2) less able to make a real choice than someone without the big threat attached to their decision.

So do you think that choices are least free when they have significant consequences, and most free when they're inconsequential?

I disagree; I think, if anything, it's closer to the opposite. An inconsequential decision like what to have for lunch is probably fairly deterministic, based on how hungry I am and what else I've eaten recently and how nicely the food is presented. I don't put much effort or thought into choosing. But if I'm making an important decision, where a lot is riding on it, then I'm actively choosing, as a conscious, decision-making agent. I can tell you the thought processes I went through in order to make my decision.

Also, think about fiction: often the most compelling moment in a story is when the hero has to make a decision that has huge consequences. It wouldn't be compelling if we didn't believe (within the fictional universe, obviously) that he was making a free choice - that he could choose either way - that a different hero in the same set of external circumstances may well have chosen differently.

All choices have some consequences, even if those consequences are extremely trivial. You are always choosing between competing pressures, deciding which of them is more important to you. I don't see how enlarging the consequences makes the choice less free.

[gjm11.livejournal.com]

No, I don't quite think that choices are least free when they have most consequences. I think they are least free when the pressure on the person choosing to choose one way or the other is greatest. Actually, even that isn't quite right. Let me make a mathematical analogy, since you're a mathmo :-). Suppose you flip a biased coin. The entropy of the result -- the average amount of information in it -- is - p log p - (1-p) log (1-p), which is biggest when p = 1/2 and tiny when p is very close to 0 or 1. But if the coin actually comes up the unexpected way, the amount of information in *that* result is very large. Similarly: a choice made under strong pressure is, on average, not very free; if you actually manage to make the "unexpected" choice then it's a more-than-averagely free choice, but usually you don't and on balance it ends up being less free. I actually think the analogy with entropy is quite close, but I'm prepared to be persuaded that there's a major problem with it :-).

Large consequences aren't quite the same thing as high pressure. Firstly, because we care more about some consequences than others. In those compelling fictional moments of choice, the usual setup is that the hero has a lot of pressure on him (it's usually him rather than her) to choose the "wrong" way. So he ends up choosing the right way despite the pressure, which is why it feels like a particularly big and genuinely-chosen choice. Secondly, because there are other forms of pressure; for instance, force of habit (can our hero resist the urge for another cigarette when the smoke may be seen by the enemy?), social norms (can our hero work together with a member of the tribe he's been brought up to hate?), moral constraints (can our hero kill an innocent child in cold blood when it's the only way to save the galaxy?), bodily demands (can our hero keep going despite the tiredness and hunger? can he resist the seductions of the voluptuous enemy agent?), and so on.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Your entropy analogy is good - it helps disambiguate between choosing in accordance with strong pressure (what you're saying is wrong with the Christian message) and choosing against strong pressure (our fictional hero fighting against the odds). I think my post may have conflated these slightly.

Can I clarify what you're saying: are you saying that, for a given unbalanced choice (i.e. one with strong pressure in one direction), we can't know a priori how free it is until the decision has been made, and then if the person chose the "difficult" option they did so freely, but if they chose the "easy" option they did so much less freely? Or are you saying that, if the choice is known to be unbalanced, we can say a priori that it's not very free, because most people will choose the easy option and that will average out with the few who choose the difficult option?

(The answer may be obvious if I were more familiar with the maths in the entropy analogy, but I hadn't actually met that formula before.)

I think there are logical difficulties with the former. Suppose you have a smoker trying to quit. Clearly it's more difficult for him to resist a cigarette than it is for a lifelong non-smoker. But if he successfully resists and you congratulate him on his free choice against the odds, you can't also say, if he gives in, "It was inevitable, he wasn't free, he couldn't have chosen any differently." Surely both possible outcomes have to be as free or unfree as each other? (I don't think free/unfree is the same thing as easy/difficult.)

If it's the latter, that makes sense, but I think it's a statistical statement which relies on there being multiple instances of the choice. (You can encode 1000 flips of your biased coin in fewer than 1000 bits, but you still need 1 bit to encode 1 flip, regardless of whether it came up the expected way or the other way.) So it depends whether you think every choice that every person has to make is unique. I think the case is arguable either way, but if they do turn out to be unique then I don't think the statistical principles can be applied, in the same way that you can't use gas-diffusion laws to predict the motion of a single particle.

[gjm11.livejournal.com]

What I think I'd say (though I'm not entirely sure it's right) is: (1) as you say, we can't know in advance how freely the person will choose, (2) more people will make the much-easier choice (that's almost what "much easier" means), (3) in some sense the right way to think about how much freedom that choice itself introduces to the world is to look at the average -- it might help to imagine millions of people making similar choices, so that most of them make the easier decision, etc. -- and (4) the average works out so that a more-pressured decision introduces less freedom to the world.

I'd say about the smoker either "coo, well done, that was a really difficult choice" or "ah well, it was almost inevitable; try again". (It wouldn't be "it was inevitable, he wasn't free" unless there was really no possibility of choosing to resist.)

On reflection, I think I dislike some terminology I've used here. The quantity that's different in the two cases isn't exactly "freedom", it's something more like "decision". Freedom is (at least according to my analogy) expected quantity of decision.

I don't think the free-ness of a decision can really be affected by whether or not there happen to be lots of other people making very similar decisions, so I'm happy saying "this is how it is in the many-instances case, so that's also how it is in the single-instance case". And since I'm strongly inclined towards the "many worlds" view of QM, maybe there are in effect *always* many instances, with many of them going each possible way...

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

On reflection, I think I dislike some terminology I've used here. The quantity that's different in the two cases isn't exactly "freedom", it's something more like "decision". Freedom is (at least according to my analogy) expected quantity of decision.

So what are we actually discussing: freedom/unfreedom, in the sense of how much an individual is able to exercise their free will at the point of decision; or ease/difficulty; or some kind of information-theoretic metric?

Freedom/unfreedom seems to be the only one with any bearing on the wider discussion.

The information-theoretic quantity is intellectually interesting, but unless it corresponds to how much the individual gets to exercise their free will it's not relevant to the discussion about whether Christianity is true and whether it's reasonable for God to expect people to choose him. (Phrases like "how much freedom that choice itself introduces to the world" make me think you're conceptualising it as an abstract informational quantity very similar to entropy, rather than something the individual making the decision experiences.)

And if it's ease/difficulty, then your complaint would boil down to "God makes it too easy for people to choose him", which is the opposite of what you're saying in the last paragraph of this post.

[gjm11.livejournal.com]

I'm suggesting that the three notions are closely related, or perhaps even identical. Free will is notoriously difficult to give a satisfactory definition of, but freedom seems to be (at least) closely related to lack of constraint, and I think it's clear that constraint comes in degrees, and I think following those ideas through leads fairly inevitably to something like what I'm suggesting. (I expect the logarithms are optional.)

I'm open to being shown other ways to deal with the question, though. How would you go about evaluating how much freedom someone has in a given situation?

The choice is experienced and made by the individual. I could equally have written "how much freedom the agent gains by having that choice to make in those circumstances" or something.

As for ease versus difficulty of choosing God: yes, there are two separate issues that pull opposite ways. If we pretend that God has actually told us about our situation (our situation, that is, as described by believers in eternal torment) then we don't get much of a choice because it's like being threatened at gunpoint only much worse. (Of course sometimes people *do* manage to make a clearly-genuine choice despite such threats, as Rob says he did with hell.) But if we drop that pretence, there's a different problem, which is the one I'm whingeing about in the paragraph you cite.

One might hope that these problems cancel out somehow, but it doesn't seem to me that they do. It's a bit like the old ethical puzzle: A, B and C are travelling through the desert; A (who hates C) puts poison in his water bottle, and then B (who also hates C, but doesn't know what A has done) puts a hole in his water bottle so that it all runs out before he ever gets to drink it; so who killed A? I'm not sure that question has an answer, but C isn't any better off for being killed in two "opposite" ways. And we aren't any better off for being mistreated by God in two "opposite" ways, namely (1) being required to do certain things on pain of eternal torment and (2) not being told about #1.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

but freedom seems to be (at least) closely related to lack of constraint
Do you mean constraint as in determinism, or as in coercion, or as in pressure from a conflicting value/drive/appetite in an individual's make-up? They have to be distinguished, otherwise "But I really really wanted to" would be a valid defence in law.

How would you go about evaluating how much freedom someone has in a given situation?
I think - tentatively - I would say all decisions not actually forced by determinism are equally free, but not equally easy. Someone coerced by a gun to their head is still totally free to make either decision (if not, there would be no martyrs); it's just that we don't blame them (legally or morally) if they make the self-preserving decision, because we recognise that the alternative would have been extremely difficult and perhaps pointless.

As for ease versus difficulty of choosing God: yes, there are two separate issues that pull opposite ways. ...One might hope that these problems cancel out somehow, but it doesn't seem to me that they do.... we aren't any better off for being mistreated by God in two "opposite" ways, namely (1) being required to do certain things on pain of eternal torment and (2) not being told about #1.
OK, I see what you mean. Fair point.
About "being required to do certain things on pain of eternal torment", I'd like to repeat some comments I made to someone else on this thread:
"It's not punishment for not believing, it's punishment for our sins. Your comment sounds as though the default is heaven and then God goes round finding all the non-believers and chucking them out, whereas the default is hell and then God goes round finding the believers and rescuing them because they've accepted his gift of salvation. It's like saying medical science kills people who refuse to take their medication, when actually medical science saves people who do take their medication (not 100% of the time, but it's only an analogy)."

I'll try to address the "not being told" bit on the other branch of the thread.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Complete tangent:
who killed [C]? I'm not sure that question has an answer

It seems to me that B did (assuming the cause of C's death was thirst), although A is guilty of attempted murder. I think the situation is equivalent to A and B each trying to shoot C, and A missing and B succeeding. (Which seems more straightforward.) A's poisoning attempt was thwarted by forces outside his control, but the victim was killed by someone else.

I think the objection "but if B hadn't acted, C would still have died" is a red herring. In the shooting example, maybe A wouldn't have missed if B hadn't appeared and startled C, causing him to leap out of the way; but I don't think that changes the charges of attempted murder and murder respectively.