It must be a progressive thing. It sounds an awful lot like Barack Obama's recent declaration to Americans: "You didn't build that!!"
Anyway, I don't buy it. I like Raymond Smullyan's approach to the problem in "Is God a Taoist?", a dialogue between God and a mortal which opens with:
Mortal:
And therefore, O God, I pray thee, if thou hast one ounce of mercy for this thy suffering creature, absolve me of having to have free will!
God:
You reject the greatest gift I have given thee?
..And concludes with:
..
Mortal:
You said a short while ago that our whole discussion was based on a monstrous fallacy. You still have not told me what this fallacy is.
God:See also, Barbara and Jonathan Kay's reponses to Harris.
Why, the idea that I could possibly have created you without free will! You acted as if this were a genuine possibility, and wondered why I did not choose it! It never occurred to you that a sentient being without free will is no more conceivable than a physical object which exerts no gravitational attraction. (There is, incidentally, more analogy than you realize between a physical object exerting gravitational attraction and a sentient being exerting free will!) Can you honestly even imagine a conscious being without free will? What on earth could it be like? I think that one thing in your life that has so misled you is your having been told that I gave man the gift of free will. As if I first created man, and then as an afterthought endowed him with the extra property of free will. Maybe you think I have some sort of "paint brush" with which I daub some creatures with free will and not others. No, free will is not an "extra"; it is part and parcel of the very essence of consciousness. A conscious being without free will is simply a metaphysical absurdity.
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5 comments:
Gee, it sounds pretty much the same as the old excuse that the devil made me do it, so don't blame me or hold me responsible.
I had so little free will that I decided to go back to school when I was thirty nine years old.
Must have been pre-destined.
No, it wasn't.
Most of the people that I worked with had it in their heads that they were at their apex and they could shit on me daily.
And I had it in my head that they weren't going to shit on me anymore.
I had to go back to school, lose three years of salary and hope that when I got out that somehow I would make it back.
Then, I had to move to a different city, work there for a few years, and get laid off so I could start again again when I moved back home.
To hell with those people.
I'm starting to believe that the root of all modern problems is progressive atheism. It's a line of thinking that is toxic to true progress and liberty.
The irony of Sam Harris' new book is that it actually makes a better case against atheism than for it. And, of course, Sam Harris has not investigated all human beings, past and present, to determine whether his theory is true. On a deeper level it gets worse because Harris is operating on the assumption that nature is uniform (which is actually a true assumption) but given his atheism, he can't justify his assumption that nature is uniform since he is limited to his own experience and the experience of some other people -- which people are not omniscient so as to know that all reality is uniform. But anyways... I could go on but I won't.
Interesting points, anon.
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