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How dare you bring logic into god’s house!
Yup.
The teachings of Christianity don’t make any fucking sense. (Unless you’re willing to gaslight yourself for a lifetime.)
That’s the point of religion. Trick the brain into thinking everything is going according to plan so that it gives out the happy time drugs instead of the “you need to wake the fuck up and do something about this” drugs. The religion pushers get their cut, and everyone thinks their happy.
Now now, don’t discount free reign to also gaslight others for a lifetime as well. And judge and shame others too. It’s great for complete assholes.
I think that’s part of the appeal: the ingrained superiority Christians feel.
No matter how well you point out the paradox (if God knows everything that will happen, free will doesn’t exist, because everything is predetermined, just like a fully written book), a significant portion of christians will simply ignore and keep circling between “but God gave us free will” and “God knows everything”
I think you can have this same dilemma as an atheist as well. I’m personally agnostic as I don’t have the knowledge to make a decision.
If we are all just atoms moving/reacting, surely everything we’d ever do would be predetermined by the initial reactions/vectors/forces at the big bang. I know there’s quantum randomness and stuff, but it’s possible that’s all calculable and we simply don’t have the means to calculate it. If that’s the case, IMO we still have freewill because we can’t predict the future, and it’s still worthwhile to move forward doing our best to be good people.
I don’t think we know enough about the universe yet to be sure that cause/effect is 100% the be all end all. It sure seems like it is from where we’re standing now though, that’s for sure.
My take is that there is no free will, but that this fact is irrelevant and we’re all better off just behaving as though we do.
Or in other words, “free will” is a macroscopic effect arising from the fundamental laws of the universe. Like most everything else we deal with.
Like… temperature doesn’t really exist, it’s really just an average of kinetic energy of particles. But that doesn’t stop it from being a useful concept!
At least here in the US, a person’s zip code of birth is a huge indicator of their success and life trajectory. That, to me, would seem to indicate that free will is bullshit.
Robert Sapolsky wrote a whole book on this based on this called Determined. I really enjoyed it and pretty much agree
Why are we better off behaving that way? Under that outlook, it seems like free will is a trap to hold people accountable for things they wouldn’t actually be responsible for.
It’s also very often used as an argument against rehabilitation in prisons:
If free will exists, then crime is a choice. If you choose crime, you are a bad person, and punishment is the only way forward.
If you commit the crime again, it’s because the punishment didn’t work, and/or because the person is simply bad, so a longer punishment is needed, and infinitum.
It’s also used to justify the death penalty, which would not make any sense in a deterministic universe.
That’s not a dilemma for atheists because atheists aren’t the ones claiming there’s an omnipotent being guiding everything.
Also, you can be both an atheist and an agnostic. They cover different things. I’m fairly certain you’d consider yourself an atheist in regards to the sun god Ra.
I’m mostly agnostic to it almost all of it. For all I know, the ancient Egyptians were spot on.
I’m convinced it’s impossible for us to determine whether there are two gods or not.
I’m a diagnostic.
Damnit, I just finished watching Alien Romulus and that’s a dad joke worthy for the android in it.
That’s not how predetermination works. Just because there is an explosion does not mean that every particle has a preset location it must reach to enact a grander outcome of the combustion. Atheists don’t suffer from a need to have decisions rendered by an omnipotent being or a universe that is some stand-in for that being. There is no grand plan. The Big Bang was not some kick off for a well thought out schematic.
I think you can have this same dilemma as an atheist as well.
I’d like to hear your opinions on how you think so (truly). The way I see things, Atheism is only the answer to a single question: do you believe in any gods? If “yes,” you’re a theist or deist. If “no; I don’t know; not currently; maybe one day,” then you’re an atheist. It’s not a philosophy or a comprehensive worldview, and it can’t possibly answer deeper questions.
What you’re referring to in the latter half is Determinism and Compatibilism (Determinism + free will). Science is currently leaning pretty strongly towards Determinism, but since Compatibilism doesn’t add much more to the idea, it’s also still a candidate possibility.
It’s very likely you could calculate every chain reaction from the Big Stretch up until now and maybe even into the future. Whether we have the ability to affect or disrupt those chains might be a matter of philosophy.
But did you choose which atoms make up you? I think there is no free will because we’re don’t choose out of all options what atoms we get, we are just thrown into a random atom combination.
What shits me is Christians (and Jews and Muslims, but it’s mainly Christians who do this) who just handwave away the problem of evil. Like fine, I can accept that some evils might arise as a result of human decisions and free will. Things like wars and genocides are done by people. It’s difficult to swallow even that much with the idea of a god who supposedly knows all, is capable of doing anything, and is “all good”, but fine, maybe free will ultimately supplants all that.
But what I absolutely cannot accept is any claim that tries to square the idea of a god with the triple-omnis with the fact that natural disasters happen. That children die of cancer. You try telling the parents of a child slowly dying of a painful incurable disease that someone could fix it if they wanted, and they completely know about it, but that they won’t. And then try telling them that person is “all good”. See how they react.
I find religious people who believe in the three omnis after having given it any amount of serious consideration to be absolutely disgusting and immoral people.
Yep years ago I was in a bible study, well on my way to being an agnostic already. They were going over a difficult passage and the conclusion was ‘god works in mysterious ways’. Not that I hadn’t heard that nonsense before but for some reason hearing it in that scenario was the last straw and I never went back.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you here, but thought I’d provide a counter argument.
A group of children are dying of a horrible, deadly disease that can only be cured with the bark from a specific tree. So we go into the forest and chop this tree down to save the children from an excruciating disease.
A squirrel had built its entire home in that tree. That tree was everything to the squirrel. Now the squirrel has nothing and will suffer because we chopped down its home.
How do we explain this to the squirrel? Well, we can’t. No matter how hard we try, we can’t explain why we needed to destroy its home. The squirrel is physically incapable of understanding.
Playing devils advocate here, perhaps the reason for the need for human suffering is so beyond our understanding and comprehension that we are just physically incapable of understanding. Maybe we’re just squirrels, and human suffering needs to happen for some greater purpose unbeknownst to us.
That is an interesting thought experiment in general but I don’t think it really squares with Christian theology and the central role humanity has in it.
That argument lands you in the “we can’t know which religion is true” category, because if we can’t know the plans of god, we also can’t know which god is real.
So, while it absolves the believer from having to answer the problem of evil, it simultaneously robs them of any certainty about the truth of their religion.
But only if they think about it.
Any “evil” suffered in current life will be compensated with reward in afterlife.
The concept tends to fall apart with modern Christianity where everyone just goes to heaven and hell is written out.
The concept tends to fall apart with modern Christianity where everyone just goes to heaven and hell is written out.
Huh? From what I can tell Christians are more fixated on hell than ever now. Listen to them talk about gay/trans people, Palestinians, women who get abortions, or literally anyone who isn’t Christian, and it’s clear that they’re really excited about the idea that their god will torture those peolel for all eternity while they get to watch from heaven. You’ll even get catholics and protestants both thinking they’re the only ones going to heaven and the “wrong” kind of Christian goes to hell because of technicalities like whether you go to confession or not or whether praying to Mary is idolatry. Some outright say that it’s okay to kill gay/trans people, Palestinians, etc, because they’re damned anyway and god doesn’t give a shit about them.
“I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.’ And I did, and then God would tell me, ‘George go and end the tyranny in Iraq,’ and I did.”
- George W Bush
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bush-god-told-me-to-invade-iraq-6262644.html
He sounds like Elwood from The Blues Brothers. “We’re on a mission from God.”
I’m tempted to give the actual theological answer here but I have a feeling it will not be well received lol
Try us. I’m curious! The theological answers I know don’t really fundamentally solve the issue, just reword and skirt around it
Satan: Hey, i only do Black Metal bands and orgies, all other things are with the other bloke
I stand with Satan
There’s actually a specific christian worldview called Calvinism where the view is that god wanted Adam and Eve to eat the apple and God was the snake on the tree which means god wanted all the wars on earth if you believe that view.
