From: Randy
Hello Steve, This is in reference to your ebook on religion and God and just so you know, I am a 68-year-old retiree and not presently a believer. At my age, I am just taking a second hard look at my rejection of Christianity from many years earlier. I just happened to stumble on your stuff online through an online reference from another website. In chapter 1 about 3/4 of the way down the electronic page, you try to prove that if God is all-knowing and therefore knows the future, is never wrong and foresees that you will do "x" action on day "y", that you are somehow forced to do that action and that you, therefore, have no choice to do otherwise and thus no free-will. There seems to me to be a huge flaw in that logic. Just because God (if he exists) can see the future does not, in fact, imply that God forced you to make the decision you made. It simply indicates that he saw the choice that you in the exercise of your free-will will make in that future scenario, nothing more. You can see how this flaw in the logic is carried further below that explanation where it says "you cannot choose to take a different action than one foreseen by God" "Therefore, you have no free-will. The earlier flaw puts that last statement in considerable doubt, does it not? Also, while I am thinking of it, the earlier premise that just because a God is "all good" that he or she will necessarily take actions at all times or even at any time to remedy sickness and wars does not seem to follow logically either. For God to take such actions would put him in the position of grossly interfering in the affairs of man on Earth and would seemingly violate the entire principle of granting man the right of free-will and all the attendant consequences that come with it. I mean, if man has free-will but is not allowed to experience the full range of consequences of his own free-will choices and actions then that rather begs the question of why even give him free-will in the first place, does it not? I eagerly await your comments and will dig further into your narrative in the interim.
Hi Randy,
Thanks for writing and sharing your thoughts.
BTW, I'm also retired and in my 60's.
A lot of people have trouble understanding my thought on this topic, so I'm probably not expressing it very well.
An alternate way I've explained this is to think of a VHS tape. Think of someone with a camcorder recording a VHS tape: a documentary (or "reality TV show") where they see someone freely choosing an action. Then they rewind the tape and let it play. Let the recording represent God foreseeing the future, and the playing of the tape represent real-time. Now the person on the tape cannot possibly act differently than they did when it was recorded. So, they have no freewill.
If it is in any way possible for me or God or Fate or anyone or anything to infallibly see the future, then we are not free to act otherwise. Then we have no freewill. Freewill includes the ability to change our minds at the last moment, no matter what anyone may have foreseen. In order for there to be true freewill we must not be bound in any way to what has been foreseen. Otherwise, we are inescapably tied down to God's foresight; it has all already "been written" what we will do, and that sad fact would not be altered by changing the phrase to "what we will freely do." It merely renders it ironic.
To the other point: if God is all powerful and all good, why does he not take action to alleviate suffering? You say this would interfere with freewill. If you were a believer I could argue that the Bible shows him interfering with freewill all over the place at his whim. Since you're not a believer, I will say that I would regard "good" as more important than freewill, so that it sometimes trumps freewill. If a child molester is attacking a child, I don't worry about interfering with his freewill when I stop him. To argue that God would value the freewill of a molester above his victim's welfare would, to me, be an argument against God's goodness, and a strong argument against his lack of judgement. Just change the molester to a soldier attacking a village of women and children if you want to stick with the war scenario.
As for sickness: here is something that no one has chosen with their freewill, so alleviating sickness would not in any way violate freewill. One could say the same of natural disasters.
And when that church roof collapsed and killed a nine-year old worshiper, holding back those beams wouldn't have violated anyone's freewill.
--Steve
From: Randy
Steve, first off, thanks for the prompt reply.
As to the answer to the first issue about free-will, I find your second example even less convincing than the initial one given in your book. It is not that I had trouble understanding your thought. It was simply that there was a failure in the logic.
The act of a supernatural being seeing ahead of time what happens in the future in no way even suggests that free-will is being tampered with or violated in any way whatsoever. It is simply a case of a God seeing the actual final choice you do make in your future. It is not that this God somehow interfered and influenced you to make that certain choice and somehow kept you from making some other choice you really wanted to make. All he saw was the final decision that you did make. The entire process remained up to you. Yes, you could wait until the very last second before making your final choice, but that is what God is seeing and I don't see how that in any way changes his ability to see it. You have offered zero proof that God's "seeing" the future has in any way altered the final choice you are going to make in that future moment in time.
As to the second issue of a God being "all good" or "all compassionate", why do you or I or any other human being assume that we have the necessary intellect, understanding and experience appropriate to telling a God when he or she should step in and take action on things or not? Where would any of us draw the line and how would we have any real idea if we were truly right or wrong in our limited assessments and judgments in that regard? Should God do this and not that? Why? Because we mere mortals have decided it appropriate? Are we not cognizant that in making such assertions that we are placing our own intellect, understanding and experience well above that of the supposed creator of not only ourselves but the entire Universe and everything in it? When did we humans become quite so arrogant? Even at our own limited level, we have considerable experience with the oftentimes unintended consequences of making a given decision. Why do we totally discount that idea and assume we know best, even far better than a creator of the Universe? It rather sounds like the epitome of arrogance and foolishness. Admittedly, that only holds true in the case of the actual existence of such a creator, but it should be sufficient to give any human being serious pause for thought when considering such issues.
How is it that we seem so comfortable in putting our own reasoning ahead of that of a being that may have created us and all that exists and how is it that we often feel so righteous in our arguments against the reality of such a being with the limited intelligence and life experience we currently possess? Has that never bothered you the way it has bothered me? I have personally fallen into that trap numerous times over my 68 years.
I mean, if we assume at least for the moment, that this God is in existence and did actually create the entire universe on his own don't you think he is perhaps one helluva lot smarter than we are and that he knows an unbelievably tremendous amount more about how things really work than we are even conscious of? Also, if we assume for the moment that he is not necessarily bound by the various laws that our own individual little world is subject to, isn't it at least possible and perhaps even highly probable that he has some pretty important reasons for doing or not doing certain things that we cannot yet even fathom at our current level of intelligence and experience?
I constantly tried to use my own limited intellect, understanding, and experience as the appropriate standard by which to measure something completely outside of my own reality, a God and his behaviors or lack thereof, until I eventually realized that the knowledge and life experience I was using to measure him by was woefully insufficient and simply not up to the actual task at hand.
Yes, if the Bible is to be believed in its entirety as inerrant or totally accurate (something that only the most devout evangelicals accept), then this God did, in fact, involve himself in the affairs of men from day one, including stacking the deck in favor of getting Adam and Eve to disobey his command not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and thereby bringing into creation the concept of Original Sin. Also, if the Old Testament is to be accepted verbatim then he also engaged in many, many acts that appear to characterize him to be angry, evil, and murderous beyond belief. At least, that is what crossed my own mind when I first examined the Old Testament in relation to the New. I admittedly back then applied my own beliefs of right and wrong, good and bad, moral and immoral and I did so proudly and perhaps more than a bit arrogantly at the time, feeling absolutely astounded that any professed "born again" Christian could not see the obvious total dichotomy of what I saw between the apparently angry, evil and murderous God of the Old Testament versus this supposedly new all loving, all compassionate God of the New Testament. I had tons of questions for my Christian friends and got back what I considered at the time to be very unsatisfactory answers.
Without going too much further off on some tangent, I think one of the things I found most infuriating at the time was the comment "it is not for us to question God's ways". At first, I thought that was one of the most idiotic statements I had ever heard. But over the years as I matured and got a lot more experience of life under my belt, I did begin to find it rather disturbing to note that the more I thought I knew about life, the more I realized how very little I really knew. These days I find that I am amused by the fact that I used to measure a God's actions (should he even exist) by my paltry knowledge of my own little world and how I thought it all worked.
We have both lived long enough now to have been proven wrong in many of our early beliefs and assumptions about the world and everything in it. I, for one, no longer profess to know what a universe creator should do or how he or she should behave. Heck, I have enough issues just dealing with old age and retirement, which as I have learned first-hand, is definitely not for sissies!
Am I saying that the blind faith of Christians is really the way to go? No, not at all. But, as you probably already well know, they do not consider it "blind" faith and they believe they are well justified in their beliefs, despite using the Bible itself to prove things claimed in the Bible! If you push them hard they will tell you there are over 1,000 prophecies in the Bible and how most of them have already come true and about the absolutely astronomical odds of even a few of them having come true. Never mind of course that almost none of said prophecies even meet the most meager requirements to qualify as a real prophecy. But never mind, I am getting terribly far afield of our earlier two points.
I simply am unable to provide you any good answer as to why a God would involve himself so directly and so often with his creations (especially with those we now refer to as the Jews) in prior centuries yet somehow abstain from active involvement today (if in fact, he does exist and has so abstained).
One of my best friends is a dyed-in-the-wool evangelical Christian who lives with his wife down in Texas and believe me, at times it is not always easy to be his friend. He is most definitely not one of the sharpest tools in the shed yet he is also one of the nicest and warmest souls you might ever have the good fortune to meet.
Yes, I agree with you that I always thought (at least in my younger days anyway) that if God really was great and all loving and all powerful that he should demonstrate it and end at least some of the worst suffering on this planet, whether that be starvation or disease or wars but then I could never seem to reconcile that with the idea of free-will, living with consequences of our own decisions, etc.
Religion remains entrenched in our cultures because of man's fervent desire that there be something more after this life, something better, something for us all to look forward to as we approach the end of this life. Many people also want a crutch of sorts to help them get through life and to give them hope. I understand those desires and am not against it, even though I don't feel up to accepting that their beliefs are supported by evidence, which I consider greatly lacking. Of course, having snuck in the idea of never-ending punishment and torment should one make the wrong decision, has proven to be a strong motivation for many to simply turn their eyes and ears away from counter arguments and simply move forward with acceptance of much that they simply do not understand. Fear is highly motivating and has been effectively applied by religions and governments since the beginning of civilization.
Unfortunately, I still think we have been sold a bill of goods by the church and by those in power throughout the ages who wished to control us and keep us in line. When Christians say to me, why do you think that so many of the other world religions fell by the wayside while Christianity stood the test of time and grew more powerful? I know they are attempting to use that idea as proof that it is the one true religion compared to the approximate 10,000 or so others that still remain out there. Frankly, I always felt that if the Romans hadn't adopted Christianity and co-opted it in order to better control their far-flung empire, then Christianity too would have fallen by the wayside.
I apologize for having gone off point a good bit there. I will endeavor not to do that again.
Randy
Hi Randy,
It doesn't matter if it's a god or a "psychic" or a computer program seeing the future. If the future can be seen, then it is predetermined. If it is predetermined then we have no freewill. Bringing "God" into the picture cannot change that fact. I fail to see any flaw in the logic, though I understand where you're coming from, as this is what I was also taught as a child, and believed until I really thought about it.
I think that you are assuming much more about God than I am, in assuming that he would always know the right thing to do even when it's obviously wrong by any human criteria (such as letting a little girl die while worshiping him by not holding back the church roof for a few minutes.) It takes just as much arrogance (if not more) to say "God is good and loving" as it does to say "the existence of suffering negates the idea of an all-good all-powerful God." The former is a slap in the face to anyone who has lost a child to Leukemia, while the latter, at worst, would be a slap in the face of a god who, by definition, couldn't be hurt by it.
Your stance would excuse any and all actions of a cruel sadistic god on the basis that "he knows best, and how dare we mere mortals question his wisdom!" But the statement "he knows best" is assuming much more than the statement "it is not good that children should suffer or die." So Occam's razor cuts the first statement out, and leaves us with the second.
If you're going to say that God is "all good" then we have to have some common understanding of the word "good." If "good" just means "whatever God does" then the statement "God is good" is a tautology which is essentially meaningless. So "good" must be some agreed-upon standard before we can apply it to God. The only standard we as humans can have is a human standard.
A creator wouldn't necessarily be good to his creation. It's just as likely that he wouldn't care about it, would neglect it, and move on to other things. So we have to examine the evidence. Does the evidence show that there's a loving creator watching over us, and seeking the ultimate good for all? You know the answer to that one as well as I do, at least from a human perspective (which, as I've argued, is the only one we can have.)
"How is it that we seem so comfortable in putting our own reasoning ahead of that of a being that may have created us and all that exists"?
Well, all we have is our own reasoning. If God exists and gave us reasoning, I don't think you should feel guilty about using it. We are 100% justified in using it. If God doesn't like it then he shouldn't have created us this way, with inherent empathy. But, of course, an omnipotent omniscient being would never create something other than exactly the way he wanted it. [Another arrogant statement lol!]
"...highly probable that he has some pretty important reasons for doing or not doing certain things that we cannot yet even fathom at our current level of intelligence and experience?"
Well, there are lots of flaws in the "creation." We know how it could've been better designed in some instances. Again, if we've been given reason and emotional intelligence [or snatched it from a tree] to tell right from wrong ("being like God" in this respect according to the Bible account) then we need to use that to judge what is right and wrong. If letting children suffer with Leukemia or at the hands of an abuser is "right" on some level, then I want nothing to do with such a level or with its creator. You can argue that it's okay for God to lack empathy (or to have some "grand plan" that is more important to him than the suffering of children) but what does that have to do with you and me? We are humans, and we MUST say "this is wrong," and we MUST say that "Anyone who can excuse or permit such suffering is WRONG." That is our humanity, which religion can have a tendency to erode, with dire consequences.
--Steve
From: Randy
Hmm, it looks like our discussion is failing to make much headway, but I shall try one more time.
I agree with you. You fail to see the flaw in your own logic. This will not be an ideal example, but humor me just a bit if you will. If we are about to watch a movie about a person's life story, a story that we do not already know, and I happen to have early access to the movie and I speed ahead and find out something that is going to happen toward the end of the movie that you are still totally blissfully unaware of, does my action have any deterministic effect on any of that person's decisions? Not at all. I am simply "seeing" the results of that person's later life decisions, not influencing or pre-determining them. Of course, as I said at the beginning, this is not the best example, as the movie itself is a capture of what is now already in the past as the average human being understands space/time in our world. I have simply glimpsed a future section of the movie near the end rather than taking in the entire movie from start to finish. Neither of us was there holding a gun to the head of the person the movie is about making sure he made the decisions we wanted him to make or that God wanted him to make nor is there any evidence in the movie itself that indicates God or any agent of his was there influencing that person's decisions as they were being made. He was free to make his own decisions at each point in time that resulted in whatever happened at the time. The fact that I raced ahead of time and saw it beforehand does not change or impact his decision or actions in any way whatsoever.
What happened in the past, what happens right now or what happens in the future is not understood to be dependent on what might somehow be seen ahead of time by any one entity or another. If there were any evidence of that being the case, I assure you I would go right along with you on this point. We are simply using that power to glimpse the consequences of the decisions and actions that person will take in the future without involving ourselves in how the decision is made or what action the decider takes based upon his own decisions whether he made them right away or at the very last second. Still, he will make his decision and we will have simply seen the consequences ahead of time. If you continue to maintain that we are somehow influencing and thus pre-determining that person's decisions as though they know we are peeking in as they make them, and somehow subverting their free-will then that is an extraordinary claim and it requires extraordinary proof.
In quantum theory, there is at least the idea that the actual linear real-time observation of something may have some effect on what is actually being observed. However, even our best scientists are still woefully unable to explain the amount of impact, how it is caused, whether or not it can be avoided, etc. so we are ages away I suspect from any idea at all that "future" viewing of an event that has not yet come to pass in linear time has any observable or measurable impact on the event itself and we are nowhere even close to proving it is in any way deterministic as the whole concept is still well beyond our present scientific capabilities. To my knowledge we do not yet have nor are we even reasonably close to having a time machine or method of folding space/time in order to observe a future event. The idea that such a future observation determines how that event unfolds is presently not even a postulated theory as yet.
If I wanted to see the life activities of someone else, whose life is still early in the process and is still far away from being made into a movie, and I somehow had the unusual ability to see how it turns out ahead of time, then I would know something about the future at that point but I would not have created it nor managed the individual in question to make any of his decisions in any way. I may not even have a clue as to what is going to drive him to make the decisions he will make in that future, I only know what he finally decided and what resulted therefrom. My glimpsing how his decisions turned out does not make them happen that way or change them from how that person was deciding or acting upon them. As you well realize, all of this is conjecture as no human being has ever been to the future and returned to tell us about it, at least to my personal knowledge anyway.
It also has nothing to do with anything I was taught as a child. That person is still going to make their own decisions based on their own merits, totally unaware of me and my new ability to have seen ahead of time what they end up doing. In that way, it is little different than scanning ahead in a movie I have in my hot little hands before either of us decides to sit down and watch the entire thing from start to finish. I see no evidence whatsoever of someone pre-determining the future simply by virtue of glimpsing part of it. I would not have been a participant in that person's life nor would I have had any influence on the decisions he made just because I saw how they turned out.
Let's assume for the moment that a God does exist and he can see everything that is going to happen in the future. So here we have young Hitler in Germany. God knows that Hitler is going to come to power and do a number of things that most people consider absolutely horrendous. Yet did God make people vote for Hitler? No. Did he cause them to stand behind Hitler and support him through some pretty terrible stuff? No, he did not. Nor did God likely influence Hitler himself to slaughter Jews or any of the other bad things he may have done. So, because God could see how it would turn out, does that mean he was determinate in those decisions? Not at all. The German people, the various leaders of Germany as well as the American and other International bankers of the world paved the way for it and allowed for it to happen. They all made decisions to vote or not vote, to act or not act, to be soldiers or not, to stay in the country or leave, to lend money to the cause or not, etc. and they did so within the exercise of their own free-will at the time. If you are instead saying that God influenced the events such that he predetermined the outcome then you would need to prove that with evidence that logically leads to that conclusion. You would need to show that God (assuming he exists) took some action that overcame the free-will of all of those people and determined a different outcome than the one they decided and supported.
Saying that nobody has ever chosen sickness as an exercise of their free-will is preposterous. Of course, they have. Do they not often decide to eat poorly, stuffing their faces with junk food, eating loads of sugar, drinking alcohol which poisons the body, etc. sometimes for years on end? Do they not make conscious free-will decisions to stay up late night after night, burning the candle at both ends as we say and getting far too little sleep to maintain decent health? Do they not sometimes engage in risky behaviors that could cause them to contract a disease or two? Of course, they do. People do all of those things and more. I am not suggesting they simply stand up and volunteer willingly for the disease itself, but they do continue to make horrible lifestyle decisions on a regular basis that forcibly volunteer them as an ideal and willing candidate for many diseases.
I am not saying that holds true in all cases, not by a longshot. There are obviously diseases of some types that people supposedly inherit by means of genetics. There may also be other diseases people come across not through genetics but seemingly through no readily apparent fault of their own. I am sure such situations do exist. But there are also definitely tons of people damaging their health on a day in day out basis through the bad decisions they knowingly make as though they are simply impervious to such conditions when in fact, they are not. What am I saying here? I am saying that a good majority of people seldom ever accept any responsibility for the bad things that happen to them, including various disease conditions, but are more than Johnny on the spot to assume sole responsibility for most if not all of the good things that come their way.
Hi Randy,
It is the very fact that you (or God) CAN see what will happen that makes what will happen predetermined. I'm not saying that you (or God) are coercing events. I'm saying that if the future is a knowable thing, then we have no freewill, because it can be known exactly what we will do. As long as someone or something can thus determine what we are going to do in the future, then it is predetermined by definition, and if it's predetermined then no one can change it. The logic appears pretty iron-clad to me. But I've said this before, and you've said your piece before, so you're right: we're getting nowhere and must agree to disagree.
I prefer to believe that the future is unknowable than to resign myself to the fatalism of predestination. Since there is no evidence that the future can be known, I feel that I'm on reasonably safe ground with this belief. If you believe that the future can be known, then I think that you are the one that needs to provide the "extraordinary evidence."
Yes, some people make unhealthy decisions and pay the price in poor health. They are not choosing disease, but choosing to be lazy. That, of course, in no way explains how a baby is born with cancer, or a tornado kills a family, or a church roof crushes the body of a young girl, or a million other real-life events which give hard evidence that is incompatible with the notion of an all-good all-powerful being who gives a rat's ass about us. Please don't blame the victims in order to save appearances for a concept of a god.
If people wanted Hitler (just as some today wanted Trump) and you say God couldn't interfere with the freewill of the majority, fine. But what GOOD is a god who sits by and placidly watches a Nazi soldier (or an American soldier in Guantanamo) torturing people -- first watching it as a future event, and then again as a re-run in real-time? Such a god is no earthly good! That means that an all-knowing all-powerful being cannot be good [as we humans define "good"], and a future-seeing God would be even worse, morally speaking.
--Steve
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