If God Has A Plan For Everyone, Then Why Is It Planned For Some People To Be Non-Believers?

The point is that, as a practical matter, it makes no real difference to me or most people who use the term "free will'. Neither I, nor you, nor Sam Harris know where our thoughts come from, but not knowing that doesn't mean that free will is an illusion. First of all, the "I" that has thoughts is part of an organism that includes my stomach, nervous system an brain, which has conscious and unconscious components. Much of our behavior is autonomic. When I get hungry, we could say that my stomach is sending messages to my brain that it's time to eat, just as when my bowels or bladder are full my brain gets messages of that as well. If I'm doing something important, I have the dilemma of continuing that or holding off at some risk of unpleasant consequences. I face those dilemmas quite frequently, and my subjective interpretation is that I'm making a choice. Harris asks:"Where is the freedom when one of these opposing desires inexplicably triumphs over the other." I don't regard my decisions on these matters to be "inexplicable". They re the result of making choices after a process of benefit-cost analysis. And I even have some control over prior events. I can eat beforehand or visit the men's room to minimize the risk. Sometimes I do that. Sometimes I take a chance. And often the tradeoffs produce outcomes that I find less than desirable. In the words of Mick Jagger, "You can't always get what you want." Free will doesn't guarantee that you do. In the context of this thread free will means our ability to make decisions God doesn't want us to make (assuming for purposes of the argument that there is such an Entity. What the sources of our thoughts are is irrelevant in answering that question.

 

The purpose of quoting other people's works is to put you and other forum members in touch with a literature on the subject that provides a context for my remarks, to offer references to people who say it better than I possibly could, to make it clear that it's not just some wildass view I concocted on my own, to give credit to the thought of others, and in this case, to make clear that, contrary to the impression given by your initial post, the matter isn't cut and dried and settled by scholarship and "science". I find your failure to do that irritating. You make a dogmatic assertion that science supports the view that free will is an illusion, without giving the reader any hint that there are people with impressive credentials who disagree, and without letting us know that Sam Harris uses very similar arguments to arrive at a very similar conclusion. Earlier, you admitted that you hadn't given us evidence for your views, and when pressed, you told us to consult the neuroscience journals. I think it would be helpful to be more specific, considering that your thesis is controversial and in need of compelling support.

 

why would god want us to have free will?

 

Since God, if (S)he exists is ineffable, that would be a hard question for anyone to answer. Possibly for the same reason I'd rather be married to a real woman than a Stepford wife. One of the problems with this thread is that it starts off with a question-begging hypothesis: If God has a Plan for everyone... This assumes that there is a God with a possible designer Plan for each individual--something that I, for one, think is dubious. And then why did God plan for some to be non-believers? I don't know that (S)he did, and if (S)he did, why that would be so. It's all speculation, best done in a late night bull session with the aid of some beer or other mind-altering substance. My guess, though, is that God didn't make atheists and agnostics but gave them the free will to make themselves. There are probably as many motivating factors for being or becoming a non-believer as there are motivating factors for becoming a Buddhist, Shinto, Muslim, Lutheran, or Methodist. Free will came up in this discussion as an alternative to predestination. If I were an omnipotent, omniscient God faced with the prospect of eternity, I could see why I might create somebody else to make it more interesting, or to share my love with.

I think we need to distinguish between determinism (the idea that our thoughts and actions are caused) and pre-determinism (the idea that the entire past and future was predestined at or before the beginning of time. The OP set us up to debate pre-determinism, which is a metaphysical concept answerable, if at all, by speculation or faith.

 

sucks that (s)hes lonely.

 

Faced with the choice of picking off the low hanging fruit in your latest replies or getting back to the source, I chose the latter. Let's start with your opening sentence. Your statement that "evidence overwhelmingly suggests" the illusory quality of free will is problematic. Next to your phenomenological ruminations about where your thoughts come from, which relate to a model of free will that most people who believe in the concept don't accept, you refer vaguely to the neuroscience journals, as though they are chuck full of research supporting your position. They aren't. Sam Harris at least gives us studies by Libet et al , upon which he relies heavily. Libet's brain-motor studies using EEG and fMRI monitoring of participants' decsions to perfom a simple motor activity: flicking their wrist (subsequent studies by other researchers involved deciding which hand to use, etc. The pre-motor cortex registered activity before the subjects reported awareness of the decision to act, suggesting that the decision was made first at the subconscious level. Harris takes these findings and runs with them, generalizing that all human behavior must be similarly caused. Dennett, however, takes Harris to task for not reporting the limitations and criticisms of the studies: the fact that Libet himself doesn't think it discredited free will, the problems of generalizing from a laboratory study of a simple motor task, unreliability of the participants' subjective estimations of their awareness to move, etc., not to mention the fact that compatibilists like me regard subconscious mental activity as part of the "I" that makes my decisions. A more comprehensive study review of the literature by Bauumeister,et al in Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 62:331-361 concludes: "The evidence of conscious causation of behavior is profound, extensive, adaptive, multifaceted and empirically strong. However, conscious causation is often indirect and delayed, and it depends on the interplay with unconscious processing. So the empirical support for Harris' thesis in the literature is scant. Undaunted, he boldly predicts that scientists equipped with brain monitoring devices will be able to predict every person's next action. When we're predicting scientific advances that haven't happened yet on the basis of scant studies, we've moved from science into the realm of scientism and faith. Sam himself is technically a neuroscientist, in the sense that he has a Ph.D. in the field. But his publications include only a single co-authored article--hardly sufficient basis for grand pronouncements about free will. Next to the existence of God and the nature vs. nurture controversy, the debate on free will versus determinism is one of the oldest running issues in the history of thought and is far from settled. So it's reasonable to expect a strong body of evidence to support bold assertions that free will is illusory. So far, the evidence isn't there.

 

The problem is that you are confusing divine free will with realistic free will.

In reality, the one in which we exist where there is no god, I do have the free will to choose to either do something or not do something.

In the divine make believe world where god exists free will is non-existent because of his omniscience. If he has devised a plan for each of us whereby he already knows what is going to happen to us, then there is obviously no semblance of free will.

 

It seems you're confusing yourself.

You still depend on a concept you claim to refute. Why base your reality on the antithesis of what can be considered a lie? How does that make anything any more true?


I'm quite bizarre, but that's just schizophrenic.

 

Yes, exactly. There is real natural free will. Simply because the universe is not perfect and determinism requires absolute perfection. Nothing would exist at all without imperfections in the fabric of space-time.

 

I think OkieFreak's last post and your post here are both quality... I tend to look at 'rare' or uncommon phenomena in human experience to sort of settle what I view as stalemates regarding discussions/arguments that supposedly have an objective truth. When I do this, The first things that come to my mind are retardation and 'feral' children. These examples definitely tilt the scale towards your deterministic arguments being more accurate imo.

Unless we are to assume free will is somehow relative, I can't really think of a compelling rebuttal to examples such as those.

 

Your theory of determinism is held by a habit of thought that is derived from Euclidian space - that determinism = linearity. I think you're correct in your thoughts about the imperfection, however I would say a more accurate description would be irregular. Since space is a product of both expansiveness and, for lack of a better word, "conclusiveness", we dwell in a space governed, in a sense, by an organic determinism however I'm partial to the idea that we have a say in where we direct the results of our processing.



You can choose where to park your turds, but they're coming out either way.



The fact that there is a latency within our conscious experience still holds up a big red card though.

https://youtu.be/ph7LcupAENw

This is the basis of my interest in McKenna's Gaian Mind and Abraham's Chaotic Attractor... very interesting.


Edit: y veedios no be embedded?!

YT's share link used to work, as did the normal URL link, but now nothing

 

^ Link above

http://youtu.be/ph7LcupAENw

 

First thought: why wouldn't He? Probably because God isn't in it for the mind control.
Second thought: because we're made in his image (creators with a creative mind). Why did God do that? Hmm well maybe God cares a lot about that. Or about us. Maybe free will is a gift of love.

 

Even in the "divine make believe world" we may have free will. The idea that God ,if (S)he exists, is omnipotent and omniscient is a theological mistake. God is theoretically able to self-limit those properties. If (S)he has a plan for us,we can say No to it.

 

I'm confused?
thread starts off talking about the Biblical concept of "free will" and then jumps into discussions of physics and stuff?

You need to differentiate between the Biblical concept of "free will" which is different than what you guys are going on about.
The Biblical concept of free will is that it is a function unique to humans relative to other creatures.
As such I very strongly feel that the Biblical concept is referring to the fact that we are not bound by instinct as is the rest of the animal kingdom, but have the capacity for self reflection and the ability to choose between following instinct or not.
Sometimes you guys forget that the Bible actually is kinda narrow in it's focus and does not attempt to address everything.
Biblical free will really is a very basic thing and not all the stuff you guys are venturing off into.

 

you guys are also forgetting about time.
Making a choice and acting on it requires the passage of time.

If God is independent of time, then from God's time perspective all our choices have yet to be made, are being made, and have already been made simultaneously and hence God knows the outcome while at the same time observing the choice as it is being made.


gotta accept the unresolved paradox's in your consideration of this crap or you will always be bewildered.

 

I agree.But now that the science has been brought up, I feel compelled to exercise my free will to deal with it.

 

It's a good thing some psychological researchers were interested enough in the "speculations of ancient peoples" to use them as a basis for developing MBSR. But without the focus on Enlightenment, the therapy becomes another feel good stress reliever for patients whose self-absorption was getting in the way. "Illusion" in the Buddhist sense has to do with the false importance that we give to ego and attachments.

 

"Overwhelming evidence"? I'm a big fan of meditative and MBSR techniques, but the evidence is mainly of their therapeutic efficacy. Surely a hard-boiled empiricist like you doesn't thin that the subjective perception of selflessness on the part of the practitioners is evidence of the reality that self is an illusion. The research to date that I know about is directed toward EEG and fMRI monitoring of changes in brain activity during meditation and mindfulness exercises. The findings suggest that meditation and mindfulness produce signficant changes in increased self-regulation and attentiveness. In his excellent book on this research, Bodhisatva's Brain, Dr. Owen Flanagan discusses these promising findings, but notes that the mechanism of how these effects are produced is still clouded. Again, I think you may be reading too much Sam Harris, this time his book Waking Up. He has come to the same conclusion you have, not so much on the basis of his own research but on his experiences with drug experimentation and meditation while "dharma bumming" it through the Orient and studying for awhile under various gurus. While Sam draws the conclusion that the self is an illusion, the self-congratulatory tone of this and his other books makes me doubt that he has really attained nirvana.

 

whether you are talking about buddha, or christ, or yourself, we are still talking about concepts, that we as humans, have ourselves invented.

if there's one god or many or none, that's fine. but no one has ever known the will of any, nor anything else about them.

whatever books may have been written, or anything else to claim otherwise.