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This is the
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This is the
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not sure if this helps but i see free will as the ability to choose whatever you desire whether it is good or bad.
i think you may be searching deeper into the question. i've never really thought about free will beyond what i stated above. perhaps now that you see where i am coming from you could better explain your question.
May God bless us and give us the words to express our ideas in a creative and civil manner, while providing us an ear that we may truly hear each other, and a voice to clearly project our thoughts.
Free will is, as far as I am aware, an illusion.
I believe in it for solely practical purposes (i.e. to prevent insanity from setting in), but when it isn't boiling down to beating the existential angst, then I'm pretty much a total determinist.
Dictionary.com defines free will as "the power of making free choices that are unconstrained by external circumstances or by an agency such as fate or divine will".
I would agree with this definition..!
Free will is what lets me eat ice cream or pie or both at once.
But the circumstances that led up to your decision to eat ice cream or pie were all entirely out of your control.
The whole idea to eat one or the other popped into your head without you consciously trying to invoke it. Even when presented with the choice between both, you will probably reference what you "feel like" eating. How is that a conscious decision? Did you decide to feel like one or the other?
If you actually weigh other factors in making the choice, well, the other factors are in charge of the decision, aren't they? If you weren't trying to lose weight, you would have had the ice cream. If you hadn't seen a bad movie years ago while eating ice cream, you wouldn't have the subconscious drive to prefer pie.
Our choices and decisions simply cannot be detached from the chains of circumstance that create them. Therefore, there is no free will.
Lazy is a word we use when someone isn't doing what we want them to do.
- Dr. Joy Brown
I don't understand your comment that the circumstances that led up to my eating the ice cream were entirely out of my control.
It's a Saturday afternoon and I'm enjoying a Red Sox - Yankees baseball game on TV (the Red Sox are thumping the Yankees in this example).
I suddenly develop a craving for some ice cream - I MUST have some Cherry Garcia. So I put on my shoes, walk to the local store, buy some ice cream, walk home, scoop out some ice cream into a bowl, sit down in front of the TV again and enjoy my ice cream and ball game.
EXACTLY what part of this above scenario was entirely out of my control...???!!!
The craving for the ice cream.
This is like the argument about the glass being half empty or half full. While listening to the argument, I'll pick up the glass and drink. The argument is over and I'm the only one that isn't still thirsty.
Free will is like omniscience or omnipotence. The more you define it the less coherent it becomes.
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I'm sorry - I just don't get it.
In my example, I felt like some ice cream - I had two choices - i could either act on it or I could ignore it. I chose to act on it.
Right now, I feel like looking at a Ferrari in my driveway, but I think I'll pass on going out to the dealership to buy one.
In both instances, I chose how to act - I exercised free will - I have no idea what part was beyond my control.
No need to respond, these "navel gazing" discussions get very silly very quickly.
I don't believe that evil is a prerequisite for one's will to be free. I don't know of any theists that would say that, actually.
I think what you *might* hear is that in order for a person's will to be free, they necessarily must be *able* to choose evil. IOW, the *ability* to make an evil choice is a prerequisite of a "free will".
And for what it is worth, your discussion about Heaven is a great one. If people in Heaven have a free will, and a free will means the ability to sin, then people in Heaven must have the ability to sin. Whether they ever will is another question, of course, but that only leads to the next question - if they can, why wouldn't they?
i wonder if it is still free will when it conflicts another's free will?
I'll go ahead and respond anyway, but feel free to ignore me. Your desire to have a Ferrari is not a strong as your desire to not spend the money it would cost to buy one. However, you can't choose to want to pay for a Ferrari. With the ice cream, your desire to get the ice cream is greater than your desire to avoid paying for the ice cream. In either case (the Ferrari, or the ice cream), the forces steering your decision are not within your control.
Only if you are an incompatibilist...
"What right have you to condemn a murderer if you assume him necessary to "God's plan"? What logic can command the return of stolen property, or the branding of a thief, if the Almighty decreed it?"
-- The Economic Tendency of Freethought
What makes one (i.e. allows one to be) a compatabilist is that they don't subscribe to the common conception of a free will.
I suppose this was a borderline fallacy of equivocation on my part, and I apologize. My problem was that I was saying having the ability to sin is the same as sinning; that's where my proof was going, anyway. For the record, I know at least three people who believe evil is a necessary prerequisite for free will; not just the ability to choose it.
While I'm sure what IOW means
, I agree with your belief here more than the one I listed above, which is what a few Christians I know believe. It had stunned me to hear what they said, enough to not even question their idiocy. Your explanation is much better. However, it still falls very slightly short: Free will can exist without being able to choose to do evil. That is, free will in the typical sense, anyway. You could just have to choose between two "good" things! You could choose to eat ice cream or choose to eat pie, or both. Barring any extreme circumstances, I don't think evil played any part there. At least, you can imagine circumstances where it didn't play any part.
Thanks! It's worth a lot to me. Your post opened up my eyes quite a bit, actually, and I appreciate the complement. Part of the problem with Heaven is that if we assume that people have free will but NEVER choose evil, that is no different from saying that people have free will but cannot choose evil (that is, it cannot be determined. Even if they say they thought about it but didn't, which is again broken up by the God of the Bible who listens in on thoughts). Again, according to my Christian friends, it is the temptation provided by "original sin" which makes people ever give in. The people who are in heaven don't have original sin, I thought, so they don't even have the option to sin. This is what I've thought all along, anyway. But this probably doesn't remove their free will. It does, however, contradict these other people's definition of free will. I think.
That was a pretty good post. I appreciate it. That goes for everyone who responded! Thanks a lot for your inputs everyone.
On a related subject, Job's post is really making my mind fly. I just realized that if Adam and Eve ever existed, then they did not have free will (if we accept that the ability to choose evil came only after eating the Apple). My wife just pointed out that they must have been able to choose evil before and that the Apple just represents them actually disobeying God. Hmm, I'll have to think about this more. Thanks again everyone.
"Jesus -- the other white Moses" - Me.
The fact of the matter, is that "evil" is not necessary for "free will" to exist. We could have been created to have free will without evil ever entering the picture. For example, let us look at the analogy of a trampoline. I have the "free will" to choose to jump on the trampoline or not to jump on the trampoline. However, if the trampoline did not exist, it would not remove my "free will" to do anything else, it would merely remove the opportunity to jump on the trampoline.
That "evil" exists as an optional result of free will means that God created it. He could have made there to be more than just "good" and "evil." He could have simply removed "evil" from the whole equation. But he stuck it in there, and therefore he must have had a purpose in doing so. Why would God create "evil", knowing full well that it would bring about the doom of man? Why put the trampoline before me if he knew that my jumping on it would lead to serious injury on my part? Either he did not create "evil," meaning that "evil" does not exist, and we are all jumping on an imaginary trampoline, or God himself is "evil."
Not that I believe in any of that trash anyway.
There are several suggested forms of free will. I hold to libertarian free will. This is the assertion that free will is the power to choose otherwise.
God may be said to have free will but his nature is such that it limits what he in fact will do. Evil is simply a privation of good. It is a lesser or secondary principle. It requires good for its existence. God's nature is fundamentally good therefore he will never commit evil. He may in fact have the power to do so but he never will.
Free will is being able to choose between two or more options. No free will would mean there is no choice.
If you believe there is no free will, it is up to you to prove that
Something to chew on, most people who think there is no free will seem to think that everything can be predicted, maybe by science. Ok, what about with nonlinear systems? Ever hear about chaos? Nonlinear time variant equations can be unpredictable, and not only that, but it can come into a state in more then one way.
Chaos is not synonymous with random. Mathematical chaos is deterministic. It's a butterfly effect, not randomness. Chaos is difficult, not impossible, to predict.
The sentence below is false.
The sentence above is true.
This sentence doesn't care.
I wasn't plaing on going into detail about nonlinear physics, but yes, it can become impossible to predict. Yes, the butterfly effect is one part of things, (there will always be error though, so you can't get around it) basicly, you can't predict anything to 100% certianty. Thats the deal.
Similar in quantum physics, you can only predict the probablities of a partical being in different states, you can't predict exactly what will happen. So you could theoretically predict all paths, and all states of a object, but you will never know which ones it will take.
Since it is all based on statistical physics, you always only get probablities. I wasn't making a case for randomness. It isn't impossable to predict all the possiblities a person may choose from, but it is impossable to absolutely know the exact path (everything that will happen in their life and all the choices they will make) they will choose. If we can't predict that kind of thing for a particle, I doubt we can for a person.
From wikipedia
"In quantum physics, the outcome of even an ideal measurement of a system is not deterministic, but instead is characterized by a probability distribution, and the larger the associated standard deviation is, the more "uncertain" we might say that that characteristic is for the system."
That is some pretty basic stuff and you can look it up in any basic quantum physics textbook.