Wrong on every point.
If a god's only interaction is through the actions of men, then its actions are necessarily restricted to what men can demonstrate.
"The numbers do not demonstrate anything."
- Thread starter garbonzo
- Start date
Wrong on every point.
If a god's only interaction is through the actions of men, then its actions are necessarily restricted to what men can demonstrate.
What I've suggested may imply pantheism or deism, at most.
I will simply state that religion and 'science' (whatever your definition is) occur in revolutions: what religion once explained is now explained by 'science', and religion will one day replace science to become 'dominant' again, only to once again be overcome by 'science'...etc...
So you prefer an arbitrarily intervening god to one that operates within the causal confines we are restricted to? Seems unreasonable.
@Syne --
Personally I prefer no god, just us fleshy organics. However what I prefer doesn't matter one whit to reality. If I were stuck with a god I would prefer one whose existence were readily apparent and not hidden behind either it's uselessness as an explanation or because it's evil and/or apathetic. Is it unreasonable? No more unreasonable than positing a god(of any kind) in the first place.
A god like you describe would be indistinguishable from the universe and thus is irrelevant, the universe itself is all we need to explain the phenomena we see, no reason at all to bring a needless and unfalsifiable concept into play. Ockham's Razor works wonderfully here.
Personally I prefer no god, just us fleshy organics. However what I prefer doesn't matter one whit to reality. If I were stuck with a god I would prefer one whose existence were readily apparent and not hidden behind either it's uselessness as an explanation or because it's evil and/or apathetic. Is it unreasonable? No more unreasonable than positing a god(of any kind) in the first place.
A god like you describe would be indistinguishable from the universe and thus is irrelevant, the universe itself is all we need to explain the phenomena we see, no reason at all to bring a needless and unfalsifiable concept into play. Ockham's Razor works wonderfully here.
@Syne --
Who said we have free will? Right now the evidence is leaning against free will, though it far from enough to draw any conclusions.
Appeal to consequences much? Come on, you're better than this fallacy.
And I have to disagree with you, we can hold people accountable on the grounds of survival. Humans are social creatures and we all stand a better chance of surviving if we work together, this can only happen if we agree to live by certain rules(such as don't murder, don't steal, and don't bear false witness, rules like that). People who break the rules not only risk their place in the society but can bring harm to the society itself and thereby threaten the survival of the rest of us. Therefore it behooves all humans to punish those who do not act in accord with society's rules(within reason obviously).
Could said people have chosen differently? Nobody knows, but that's not the question that really needs to be asked. The proper question is "does it matter if they could choose differently?" And my answer is no, it doesn't really matter.
Who said we have free will? Right now the evidence is leaning against free will, though it far from enough to draw any conclusions.
Appeal to consequences much? Come on, you're better than this fallacy.
And I have to disagree with you, we can hold people accountable on the grounds of survival. Humans are social creatures and we all stand a better chance of surviving if we work together, this can only happen if we agree to live by certain rules(such as don't murder, don't steal, and don't bear false witness, rules like that). People who break the rules not only risk their place in the society but can bring harm to the society itself and thereby threaten the survival of the rest of us. Therefore it behooves all humans to punish those who do not act in accord with society's rules(within reason obviously).
Could said people have chosen differently? Nobody knows, but that's not the question that really needs to be asked. The proper question is "does it matter if they could choose differently?" And my answer is no, it doesn't really matter.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17835-free-will-is-not-an-illusion-after-all.html
All evidence against free will relies on asking the subject to determine something at random, whether a choice, timing, or both. People will be more prone to use subconscious/environmental cues for determining things they have no personal stake in.
Mentalists exploit this tendency all the time, to great effect.
I'm not appealing to consequences at all. In lieu of, at best, inconclusive tests of free will, I simply opt for the one that leaves other things necessary to civilization intact.
Without free will we cannot hold people personally responsible. The best we could say is that we are penalizing solely on arbitrary societal beliefs. But then those beliefs have a proven impact on actions.
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/were-only-human/a-sobering-message-about-free-will.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17835-free-will-is-not-an-illusion-after-all.html
And these belief have an impact on physiology, which BTW is what experiments claiming to disprove free will claim we are solely subject to.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580438,00.html
Quite aside from all this, if free will did not exist then no amount of risk could moderate behavior, as there's no personal capacity to act otherwise on any assessment of such risk. Doesn't a lack of free will make it inhumane to treat any criminal as other than mentally ill? If the aberrant behavior is not volitional, then all penal measures are completely unjustified.
What exactly is free will?
Capacity to do otherwise.
That appears to be an incomplete statement. Capacity to do otherwise instead of <what>? Do you mean the capacity to choose?
Yes.
Last edited:
Why?
The capacity to choose requires the mental capacity to model multiple outcomes. An inability to mentally model multiple outcomes explicitly requires an inability to model a single outcome. Your original statement can be restated as follows:
"Without the mental capacity to model an outcome, we cannot hold people personally responsible."
I would completely agree with this statement; although, I suspect not for the reasons you are expecting. If a person is unable to mentally model an outcome then that person will not be able to learn, think, or even remember the last moment. They will die shortly after birth and dead babies absolutely cannot hold people personally responsible.
If we restate what you said to Arioch earlier:
"You cannot logically have both the mental capacity to model an outcome and a violation of causation"
I see a potentially non-sequiteur statement; however, I first have to ask what you mean by violation of causation?