TGGD

[nameandnature]

In the comments on a recent posting of mine, there are several discussions on the subjects of consciousness, Hell, whether a choice is free if the chooser is subject to threats, and a whole bunch of other stuff. robhu is speaking for the "we sinners all deserve to burn, but God is so super that he saves some people" side, gjm11 for the opposition. I've been busy all day so haven't had much chance to contribute. I think it's shaping up to be the post of mine with the most comments. Have fun.

Comments

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

whether a choice is free if the chooser is subject to threats
So you consider a potential criminal to not have a free choice because he is aware of the 'threat' of punishment for his crime?

[andrewducker]

Yup.

It's not _free_ choice unless there are no external influences.

Of course, you can still consider it partially free will, depending on how large the threats are.

If I asked you to bark like a dog, you'd say no. This would be a free choice. If I told you to bark like a dog, or I'd punch you in the face, that would be a less free choice. If I told you to bark like a dog, or I'd torture you to death, that's an even less free choice.

Not that I believe in free will as a basic thing, but it's a handy referent on the human social level.

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

These distinctions seem really odd to me. Criminals that steal do it because they choose to. The fact that they know there is a consequence for stealing doesn't mean they are not choosing to steal, of course they are.

I also know that I choose to do bad things. I choose to do them, I'm not obligated to do them. The impression I'm getting (perhaps wrongly) is that people don't think they choose to do bad things, and I just find this totally bizarre as it is so incredibly out of kilter with my own experience.

[andrewducker]

If a person chose to do something because otherwise they'd be tortured, then that's a choice. But it's not a very free one.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Well, that's what we would *like* to happen now, isn't it? However the 'threat' of punishment is clearly too waffly and uncertain in this case.

If I held a knife to your throat and said "say 'dog' or I will kill you" you'd probably say 'dog'... I read somewhere that the CIA thinks no-one can hold out indefinitely under torture. What pain you are willing to go through to avoid doing something is clearly a personal boundary - contingent on how much you want to avoid doing the thing and how much paid you can take.

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

I think the action (in this case torture) is distinct from the threat of an action, they're related but they're not the same.

I also think that "God will judge people for their actions" is more like the actions of a judge in the legal system than it is the act of a torturer trying to make people say dog. If you look at stuff like the ten commandments (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments#Text_of_the_Ten_Commandments) most of it is stuff we'd more or less agree with today (don't murder, steal, honour your parents, don't commit adultery, etc) - God was telling them that they ought to be nice to each other, and that if they do stuff like murder then that is bad.

I find these 'You don't have a choice if you're told there are consequences' arguments a bit crazy - we live in a world where there are consequences for our actions that we're aware of and yet we (the human race) do bad stuff anyway. I don't know about anyone else, but when I do bad things it is very definitely because I choose to. Perhaps I'm really unusual in that - no one AFAICT has said that they actually choose to do bad things, everyone is busy saying it's all God's fault (assuming God exists and created us 'in this way' etc).

[naath.livejournal.com]

Actually I disagree with most of the 10 commandments.

Certainly the stuff about not blaspheming and not working on Sundays. Honouring your parents is OK, but in real life sometimes parents turn out to be evil shits and you need to not get stuck into obeying them all the time. Adultery is bad, but I don't define it the way the bible does - so I don't think I agree with that bit either. I dislike thought-crimes like "coveting". I do agree on "don't steal" and "don't kill" but that's hardly original; and besides God (if you believe the bible) kills lots of people and steals lots of land for the Israelites... so I'm not sure quite what that commandment is meant to mean.

We do have choices - but the choice in the face of consequences is "Do X and risk the consequences of X or not-X and risk the consequences of not-X". We factor into our decision the likely outcomes of our choice (if there is no difference in outcome then there's not really a choice to make), and part of that is taking into account possible punishment meted out by our society, our friends and possibly our God also. If I do a "bad" thing then I've probably chosen to do it - presumably because I think that that thing will give me a better outcome than the alternative "good" thing.

However *I* don't believe in your God - and your God is supposed to be omni-everything... which leads to some well known sources of confusion.

[(Anonymous)]

Has anyone made a post making the distinction between moral freedom and physical freedom? That's how most coherent model (used by the likes of Jonathan Edwards and John Piper) I've come across to work through free will discussions. If no one else has made comments along those lines I'll try to post something.

Am reading (and criting) the Karen Armstrong book. Her use of footnotes greatly irritates me: so she'll use them profusely, till she makes her most bizarre claims (e.g. 1,2 Timothy + Titus weren't written by Paul, but where written as posthumously fan fic) for which she offers no justification or reference at all, she'll just state it. This is strange as she footnotes other things so well, so I can only suspect that is because such claims have a less sound basis than her statement would suggest.

nlj21

PS. Welcome back Rob! I would post to your blog, but anonymous comments are denied

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

PS. Welcome back Rob! I would post to your blog, but anonymous comments are denied
Are you sure? I thought I had anonymous comments allowed. (why not create a LJ account?)

[andrewducker]

Or, indeed, use OpenID.

[nameandnature]

Have LJ finally separated out OpenID from anonymous comments? It used to treat the as the same, so if you barred anonymous comments you couldn't get OpenID comments either.

[(Anonymous)]

Oops. Yes, looks like they are just screened not blocked.

I'm avoiding recreating my LJ account to avoid getting drawn into long on-line debates as my experience is they tend not to actually go anywhere, much better do thrash such things out in real life IMHO.

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

That sounds wise. I wish I had such self restraint ;-)

[nameandnature]

Armstrong is right to say that a majority of NT scholars think that Paul didn't write the pastoral epistles. I'd heard about that when I was an evangelical. I thought it was wrong, obviously, but not bizarre.

Wikipedia's article on the subject has plenty of footnotes, although I agree that some reference in Armstrong's work would be nice. My own is Ehrman in Misquoting Jesus, where he argues that the Pauline letters differ from the Pastorals in their teaching on the role of women. He writes that "Scholars today are by and large convinced that 1 Timothy was not written by Paul but by one of his later, second-generation followers" (Chapter 7, p. 182).

[andrewducker]

To be honest, the idea of free will doesn't interest me that much any more, once I realised there was no real definition for it.

The argument at the top about consciousness was interesting to watch, especially as it seemed to boil down to "I feel like there is an X, therefore there is an X, therefore any explanation that doesn't involve X must be untrue."

Of course, that used to be my opinion too, back in ye olden days :->

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

Is X consciousness / qualia?

When I was studying the philosophy of the mind at university (I did some wacky AI stuff at uni) there was a mood in philosophy influenced by science that argued that the experience of consciousness (i.e. the internal stuff about us, where we introspect) couldn't be fitted in to the scientific / physicalist model of the world, so the neatest thing to do was to say that it wasn't there at all. I find that deeply unsatisfactory.

[andrewducker]

Oh, I believe in the experience of consciousness. And I believe in qualia/feeling.

But there doesn't seem to be anything magical about them that they couldn't be recreated by any neural network that was complex enough to contain models of itself.

[simont]

whether a choice is free if the chooser is subject to threats

In all the discussion so far, I've had the strong suspicion that people are simply talking past each other on the matter of what exactly they mean by "free will" / "free choice". The concepts of "choice uncoerced by threats" and "choice unconstrained by determinism" are distinct, and it looks to me as if there has been a certain amount of confusion between the one and the other. (From some posters, at least; others seem to understand the distinction and are merely disagreeing about which is more important and relevant.)

"Choice uncoerced by threats" is a useful concept for determining questions of moral or legal responsibility between peers. If I commit a criminal act, it makes a difference to my liability whether I was being held at gunpoint, because if I was then the real responsibility for the crime having been committed lies with the person who coerced me into doing it, since we don't generally condemn people for obeying their survival instinct. (To some extent this is culturally determined: one can imagine a hyper-dutiful bushido-crazed samurai culture expecting me to die rather than betray my master, and holding me culpable if I don't.)

But it stops being the whole story when one of the moral agents in question created the other and had input into its moral nature. If I write an AI program whose nature is such that it commits a criminal act because it feels like it, then the fact that it was uncoerced by threats (and hence, one argues, morally to blame) isn't sufficient to absolve me of blame for its actions. In fact for practical purposes I'd say that both it and I are to blame: certainly punishing it might persuade it to modify its behaviour, and punishing me might persuade me to write more conscientious AIs in future.

And if I write a program whose nature is to want to choose one way, and then attempt to coerce it by threats into choosing the other way? Well, that's anyone's guess :-)

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

when one of the moral agents in question created the other and had input into its moral nature. If I write an AI program whose nature is such that it commits a criminal act because it feels like it, then the fact that it was uncoerced by threats (and hence, one argues, morally to blame) isn't sufficient to absolve me of blame for its actions. In fact for practical purposes I'd say that both it and I are to blame: certainly punishing it might persuade it to modify its behaviour, and punishing me might persuade me to write more conscientious AIs in future.
The creation account in the Bible (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=1&chapter=1&version=31) (the relevant bit of which continues up to the end of chapter 3) portrays the Adam and Eve as having a choice as to whether to obey God or not, in fact only one thing is specifically forbidden (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%202:16-17;&version=31;). Then the snake comes along (as Ricky Gervais says (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_EXqdJ4L7I) the snake looks like a bit of a mistake) in chapter 3 (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=1&chapter=3&version=31), questions God's word (v 1) and feeds them misinformation (v 4). Eve listens to this and decides it's better to do what the snake is saying than what God is saying, and so they eat of the fruit. The way it is portrayed is that man was created with enormous freedom of stuff that he was allowed to do, and a tiny bit that he wasn't allowed to do - yet he chose to do the bad thing anyway (and, interestingly, Adam's reaction to God is to blame God for making Eve (v 12), while Eve blames the serpent (v 13)).

Anyway - my point being that the account seems to say that (at least for Adam and Eve) their nature was not to incline them to choose to do bad things, although that was an option that they had.

The snake obviously complicates things - why was there a snake there at all? Also wouldn't it be better if there was no forbidden tree at all? (so I guess - if there were no choices possible for us to make that would be sinful) I don't know the answers to those questions - the garden of Eden account is so abstract and short that I just don't know. I wonder though if the capability of free will to not do what someone wants you to do is required for you doing stuff for them (or loving them or whatever) to be meaningful. I suspect it is.

[simont]

I'm not sure where Adam and Eve came into this; I was thinking of the predispositions of the current human race in general, not the single misdeed of their alleged ultimate ancestors. Did I miss an entire branch of the thread somewhere?

Though, that said, the way you tell it here is a nice microcosm of what actually (allegedly) happens in modern life: Eve is faced with conflicting statements of the situation from God and the snake and doesn't find God's claims obviously more convincing, so she makes her best judgment on the information she has and is comprehensively zotted when it turns out she guessed wrong. Now as then, God's pronouncements are not obviously more convincing than the other mutually contradictory worldviews available to us, and yet we are told there is an unimaginably large penalty waiting for us if we back the wrong horse.

If you create a race of sentient beings because you want to play hide and seek with them, you shouldn't blame them for losing a lot of the time if you've also arranged that they're nowhere near as good at it as you are!

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

Adam and Eve come in to it in that the general discussion is about whether the claims Christianity make about people's intent / freewill / etc are true or not, so it seemed prudent to bring in an actual example of what Christianity says. How much the Adam and Eve are meant to represent us today is open to debate of course.

I agree that the account of Adam and Eve mirrors what happens in modern life, but I don't think she finds the claims of the snake more convincing (it's hard to see it that could be given that she knew God who had created everything was less likely to be telling the truth than one of the created beings) - she finds it more enticing - the desire (in verse 5 in particular) was to be like God rather than being subservient to God.

It's also fair to say that the snake (who is considered to be Satan) was working to corrupt what God had said to them (note the corruption of what God said in 2:16-17 compared with the snake's version in 3:3) was there tempting them, but having someone around tempting you to do something even if they're trying to mislead you means you're no longer responsible for your actions.

I think the response of Adam and Eve is interesting. Rather than owning up to what they had done and asking for forgiveness they blamed everyone else they could. There is no hint in what they say that they are responsible for their own actions. That bit matches up quite closely with what people think today.

In terms of God's pronouncements today not being more convincing than the other worldviews around us I'd say that the vast majority of people have not properly investigated the claims of Christianity, so I don't think most people really know that to be the case. Clearly some have and have reached different conclusions (like pw201 and gjm11, I'm not ignoring that.

Now as then, God's pronouncements are not obviously more convincing than the other mutually contradictory worldviews available to us, and yet we are told there is an unimaginably large penalty waiting for us if we back the wrong horse.
The Christian account is not that if you back the wrong religion you're doomed. It's that everyone ought to be held accountable for their actions (which is justice), but that God has provided an escape route for you (which is love). The results may be the same as what you've said (if you don't choose Christianity the you're doomed), but the reason why that is the case is different which (well, I think so anyway) to put the whole thing in a different light.

If you create a race of sentient beings because you want to play hide and seek with them, you shouldn't blame them for losing a lot of the time if you've also arranged that they're nowhere near as good at it as you are!
I'm a bit confused by this, how does it fit in to everything else you've said? In the account of the garden of Eden God wasn't hidden at all. Arguably now God is hard to find - but there is no moral obligation on him to be easy to find. The only moral obligation is on us not to do bad things.

The discussion about trumpets in the other post was interesting. No one can claim that God makes no effort to be known - I think all that can be said is that he doesn't make enough effort. I'd argue he doesn't have to make any effort so we shouldn't be pointing the finger at him, but it does fairly raise the question of why a God who claims to love us and want us to find him does not use supernatural trumpets.

One classic Christian response is to say that God doesn't make it as easy as it could possibly be because he wants to test whether people really want to find him (so you have to put some effort in to looking) which kinda works in a 'Christian' country like ours where there are churches everywhere, but is harder to reconcile with countries which have no Christians there to tell people about God. The other response is to point out that God is not obligated to save everyone. If he didn't save anyone he would be perfectly good and just, that if he saves any we should be ecstatically happy, and then go on to say that God is glorified when he punishes some, as he is fulfilling the justice part of his character. Obviously the second response is out of vogue in today's fluffy society / church.

[tifferrobinson.livejournal.com]

Free will/free choice in the theological world is much misunderstood, as some have mentioned above. Just to add that the concept of free will is that we only have free choice as far as God allows. When Peter was asked who Jesus was by Jesus he replied with an answer given not by himself but from the Father (through the Holy Spirit). He still chose the answer, but it was only because the Spirit had given him the answer that he was free to choose it. A case can be made that since Pentecost (the Spirit being given to all) all people are open to the 'inspiration' of the Holy Spirit, and therefore can choose. I don't know where I am on this, all I know is that seekers tend to get this inspiration at a higher rate than non seekers, although I know of seekers who don't and non seekers who do, usually quite impressively.

The original point I made stands, theologically speaking, if we choose to sin, we actually aren't excercising free will, but we are doing the default. When we choose to do what is right, namely worship God, we are excercising free will by the Spirit.

baileys and coffee

[pizza.maircrosoft.com (from livejournal.com)]

you should have disabled comments on /this/ post so that people had to leave comments on that one. now you will have the comments split across two posts, diluting the statistics.

Re: baileys and coffee

[nameandnature]

Yep: by the time I thought of that people had already commented here too, alas.

Re: baileys and coffee

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

The toothycats inform me that the one to beat (in terms of comments) is the toothypocalypse post.