Challenge for Atheists: Define God

No, I don't need a method of control. No matter how it happens, the known choice is never changed. EVER. Or the omniscience is gone.
Why would it be something else besides knowing your choice, that will never ever change?

 

The problem with counterfactuals is that one of them presumably has to be the "real" one, the one that is actually chosen. And we are back to the dilemma again.

 

I think we are back to the dilemma again because in that scenario the decision to do something in each equally valid reality is inevitable since all possible outcomes are represented.

 

It sounds like you're blaming me for lack of clarity, instead of yourself. Just because you lack clarity with God and defining Him, I am to blame for it? I admit that not everybody will receive answers. Doesn't that mean we're looking in the wrong places, asking the wrong people, asking the wrong questions? I've done my homework too.

 

Interesting point about omniscience.

If God can't see our future decisions, he must not be omniscient!

 

Why do you believe that prayer does not "move" nature? That is your big hangup, the pivotal reason for your rejection of God???

 

I have seen no evidence that prayer changes anything but the person doing the praying. I wouldn't call it a hang up, nor would I consider it the pivotal reason for my atheist perspective.

 

Okay I got to thinking about this free will subject a bit more, I guess because I'm being forced to deal with a family member who is addicted. Listening to this person cam be frustrating because she often has the fits of accusation in which she is blaming others for her addiction. "This person did me wrong and it causes me to drink," she says. "That person upsets me and it makes want to do drugs" she argues. It is true that this person has put up with some **** and it would tend to make a body upset for sure. But why live in the state of constantly being a victim to outward events?

So in essence you have a person who points to past causes as reasons why she must do what she does today. What I think is the difference between her and someone who is self-actuating is that some people will set a goal for themselves and attempt to accomplish that goal. They are not blindly pushed about by merciless causes. They make a choice about what they want and they take steps to get to that goal. A determinist may argue that something caused this person to make these goals and it is partially true but in light of this topic determinism vs free will I think we can all think if a person who is blown around like a leaf inthe wind always blaming everything around them for mis fortune rather than just choosing to make something happen.

So is free will something we attain by exercise? Do we learn to become self-actuating over time? Does educating ourselves about the best way to accomplish something increase our ability to choose our own path?

 

I believe you mentioned Sartre in an earlier post, the section on Bad Faith (a discussion of self-deception as it relates to responsibility and choice) in Being and Nothingness is an interesting discussion here. What you describe here as self-actuating is what Sartre would call authenticity - or self-recovery - it requires a certain stand in relation to oneself and Otherness. To lie to oneself, and either believe the lie or take the lie as truth, is to live inauthentically and to abdicate responsibility for that choice (okay this is a gross simplification - but getting technical about Sartre's argument would be perhaps to go to far afield). The point is that freedom for Sartre entails personal anguish, to live as a "being-in-itself" is a difficult prospect and one in which is avoided by escape from "being what one is" - which is for him a negation of one's own true consciousness (it also involves taking the perspective of the Other, which can be seen in the importance of why one justifies to another what one is doing - how the Other's gaze impacts self-consciousness is a fascinating discussion - of which Simone de Beauvior made much of in her construction of feminist philosophy).

For another perspective written around the same time (but with more political ramifications) see Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom (where he argues that Western Industrial societies tend toward authoritarianism precisely because a life that is free from interference/influence necessarily entails an appreciation of one's own fragile and relatively powerless predicament (in light of large social forces) and as such is extraordinarily difficult and unsettling; hence one turns to authority to help overcome one's sense of fear and insecurity. But Fromm highlights freedom in a different way than Sartre - it's not just in doing what one wants or being free from someone or something's influence (negative freedom), but freedom in the sense of achieving one's humanity, which entails the need for creativity - freedom becomes manifest in the self-actualization of myself as a creative rational being (I'm only free in so far as I am a rational being - shades of Aristotle here - but this can only be fully achieved in the context of acting rationally (which requires certain social and political structures in order to achieve self-actualization).