Free Will Is An Illusion

[ccmnxc]

Well, I’m not particularly interested in wading through 15 pages before responding, so I’ll just start here:

“Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.” (source: “Free Will” by Sam Harris)

Boy, nothing like not-so-subtly smuggling in materialism as a starting assumption. All this assumes that our wills are caused to act through psycho-cognitive processes. If the intellect is at least in part immaterial, as James Ross has argued (www3.nd.edu/~afreddos/courses/43151/ross-immateriality.pdf), then we need not assume that they are subject to the same assumptions (one might bring up the dispute between guys like Molina and Banez as to whether God actualizing our will and the like, but that would basically cede the entire point).

Further, since free-will is supposedly an illusion, one cannot give assent to the argument, thus since you do not give assent to the argument, I don’t see why I should either.

Finally, if we are not responsible for our action, but only forces that have no interest in us are, I don’t see why people don’t happily gouge their eyes out with a spoon at breakfast or jump out the window. Unless you want to invoke teleology (which I would have no problem with), I don’t see how one can account for our individual survival as well as the survival of the species if all that guides our actions are brute forces without any interest for our well-being.

 

[venerablejohn]

This is arguable and appears to be contrary to Matthew 25:31-46

That is true, I run a Childrens Liturgy class, and I spoke about Matthew 25 with them last week. However, Paul says in Ephesians 2:8-10:-

“For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is a gift from God - not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.”

Our good works measured at the end of time are the outward sign of our faith in Christ Jesus, not the other way round.

 

[hangnail]

Boy, nothing like not-so-subtly smuggling in materialism as a starting assumption. All this assumes that our wills are caused to act through psycho-cognitive processes. If the intellect is at least in part immaterial, as James Ross has argued (www3.nd.edu/~afreddos/courses/43151/ross-immateriality.pdf), then we need not assume that they are subject to the same assumptions (one might bring up the dispute between guys like Molina and Banez as to whether God actualizing our will and the like, but that would basically cede the entire point).

How exactly am I smuggling in materialism as a starting assumption?

Further, since free-will is supposedly an illusion, one cannot give assent to the argument, thus since you do not give assent to the argument, I don’t see why I should either.

My assent was either predetermined by the powers that be or reducible to some element of chance.

Finally, if we are not responsible for our action, but only forces that have no interest in us are, I don’t see why people don’t happily gouge their eyes out with a spoon at breakfast or jump out the window. Unless you want to invoke teleology (which I would have no problem with), I don’t see how one can account for our individual survival as well as the survival of the species if all that guides our actions are brute forces without any interest for our well-being.

Darwinian evolution (which is based on the principles of random[variation and natural selction) can account for our survival. No agency required.*

 

[Peter_Plato]

My assent was either predetermined by the powers that be or reducible to some element of chance.

One of those “powers that be” may, in fact, BE your free will. Ergo, your assent was freely “determined” by your free will.

Merely because you look back on the finalized assent as having been “determined” does not prove that your will is not free to, itself, “determine” the outcome, unless, of course, by the fallacy of retrospective determinism you insist that it “logically” must be.

Repeating it a million times will be not magically make it true, unless you subscribe to the notion that incantations of this sort are effectual.

 

[CHRISTINE77]

Darwinian evolution (which is based on the principles of random[variation and natural selction*) can account for our survival. No agency required.

This may be true for a psychopath, but how do you explain remorse and atonement? Actions that at one time we thought profitable or pleasurable to our existence, in hindsight are an affront to our Creator and our fellow man. If I did things randomly in my youth with no thought of God or my fellow man, or if God determined my actions and I had no free will to choose what was right or wrong, why would I later realize that I had done wrong and ask for the forgiveness of God?

 

[Peter_Plato]

Darwinian evolution (which is based on the principles of random[variation and natural selction*) can account for our survival. No agency required.

Darwinian evolution does not account for survival unless you assent to the idea that survival - including the capacity to generate an almost infinite variety of permutations which allow survival - is the kind of capacity that random variation has the power to create “at random.”

Would “random” variation - whatever THAT means besides “we’re not sure why” - have any creative power at all if the potential for variation didn’t exist in the “material” it acts on to begin with? Where did that potential in the genetic carrier of those “variations” come from? A question Darwinian evolution does not attempt to answer and, in fact, begs in the way in which it offers its “overwhelmingly compelling” theory.

It also completely ignores that natural selection, in order to function at all, requires an environment tuned towards shaping survivability as a phenomenon in the first place. This, again, begs the question by assuming that evolution is simply the way things happen for no reason except, well, that’s what is happening. At that point, there is no need to explain anything when you can, simply, take things for granted.

 

[Peter_Plato]

If I did things randomly in my youth with no thought of God or my fellow man, or if God determined my actions and I had no free will to choose what was right or wrong, why would I later realize that I had done wrong and ask for the forgiveness of God?

Well, you see, according to the atheist/Darwinian paradigm, you wouldn’t need to realize anything nor seek forgiveness because your random actions would have sorted themselves out and would either have resulted in your demise or your survival.

Apparently, you have survived.

Does that mean thinking of your fellow man or God was “good?” Well, no because those may not help you survive beyond tomorrow. So determining what is “good” or not is postponed until the great sieve of evolution has its final say in the final outcome. And if materialism is true then the “final say” means that the inflation of the universe will mean nothing of enduring significance will come from your actions, nor any actions of evolution itself, anyway, since all will end in oblivion.

In the end, it’s all a meaningless exercise even to speak of “evolution” as being “evolutionary” in any sense of the word. Given that, Pascal’s Wager might be applied as a kind of “you are better off not consistently purchasing the logic of Darwinian evolution/eliminative materialism” since it renders everything you do meaningless, amoral and insignificant.

Now the objection might still be raised as to whether it is true. The answer to that is we have no reason to believe it to be AND no compelling reason to care if it were.

 

[ccmnxc]

How exactly am I smuggling in materialism as a starting assumption?

Well, I guess I was referring more to Harris, but I think that this statement is only obviously true (as in, one could work around it given a proper understand of God and the soul) if we assume our choices are purely contingent upon the particles and physics that underlay the motion of said particles.

My assent was either predetermined by the powers that be or reducible to some element of chance.

I’m not sure we are using assent to mean the same thing here. That way I am using it necessarily includes free-will since having your choice to assent made for you isn’t really assent at all. You did not assent to it so much as the physics and brain chemistry that pertain to you were either determined from creation or fall under chance. Neither of these is going to be set up for selecting truth-makers.

Darwinian evolution (which is based on the principles of random[variation and natural selction*) can account for our survival. No agency required.

Darwinism quite literally becomes meaningless under the strict determinism/indeterminism dichotomy you have offered. If determinism is true, then they way organisms develop and “evolve” would have been determined from the moment of the Big Bang. But unless you want to invoke some divine intelligence that set the parameters just right so that creatures would be able to exist without significant detriment to their existence, there is no way to account for them acquiring traits that benefit them for survival since their survival wasn’t in mind at the initial state of the universe.
With indeterminism, if it comes down to chance and random happenstance, there seems to be no reason why we would again attain traits that help in our survival. These traits are not being “selected” for survival by anything other than the initial state of the universe + the chance and chaos introduced to it afterwards. Thus the mechanism for Darwinism cannot simply be “natural selection,” since it would all be based upon a system of physics that is unpredictable and in no way set up for survival (unless, as I said before, you want to invoke a divine intelligence).

But as a final point, how would we evolve (and so quickly too) so as to have our bodies somehow control and harness physics so as to still be able to survive given determinism or indeterminism? What would have to happen (to our brains on your view, I am guessing) so that we could somehow go from a state where we have a system of physics that controls us and doesn’t care about our survival to a state where our species can thrive and not kill themselves off. You’re not trying to posit a soul, or something, are you?
I guess in short, “Because Darwinian Evolution” doesn’t seem to be a particularly satisfying answer to my question, not only for the first problem I outlined above, but also because it doesn’t really explain anything but just magically invokes evolution to solve any and all problems that might come up.

 

[TarkanAttila]

Hangnail, I do appreciate you’ve hung around this long, and may yet return. That’s rather brave for an atheist to be on a primarily Catholic server and do that. I don’t think I have the willpower or the courage to do such a thing.

However, if I may make one observation: mightn’t you and this Sam Harris fellow be playing crypto-Calvinism a bit too well? If Free-will is an illusion, John Calvin is something of an allusion. You both basically believe the same things regarding this question: that, whatever you do, you are not morally culpable for (i.e, good and evil are not something we can be blamed or praised for, really). People are really only the instruments of God (or in your case… well, what are we determined by in your humble opinion?).

And we’ve already refuted Calvin, long ago. (And he was not even a materialist!) You probably would want to refute his system of theology, too - if you did not stand on it…

Speaking of blind chance: what makes blind chance a more probable cause for the existence of the Universe than an intelligent, non-material Being?