All the problems with Christianity

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Then why did He not lift His omnipotent eye brow and stopped Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Hirohito from being so evil? Does God hold the free will of the agents of genocide in higher regard than the free will of their victims?

Because that would be destroying free will. If we view this as God valuing free will as much as anything else, then it can make sense (though you may still not like it).
The things you mentioned all have one significant aspect in common; they all destroyed or impeded an enormous amount of free will. I'm guessing you intuitively know that that's evil. If God is in a position of absolutely valuing free will, then he won't interfere in any free will. The only way to do this is basically to not interfere in anyone's free will, even if they're suppressing or destroying other people's free will. God won't stoop to their level, I guess you could say.

Except the problem is that the reason isn't really the reason why that action was taken. You can state it, but it's not the real variable else you would not be able to choose otherwise.


Err.... sure? Assigning responsibility will deter/encourage others from taking the same path, and it will encourage the person who has done the deed to change in the way that is desired. This is actually pretty well-known.


Assigning responsibility causes additional changes that deterrence will not.

That being said, I think the set of human psychological frameworks is actually slightly absurd and an imperfect fit for the reality that we face. So human thinking is often centered on conscious thought, but most of our cognition is unconscious. Human thinking focuses on free will, but the sort of free will we suppose is very implausible in light of the science and rather questionable even philosophically. Human thinking on time holds that there is an objective difference between the past, present, and future but this may not really hold: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity . Human thinking on time ends up finding either direction we take on the matter absurd, as both a first moment of time and an infinite past seem implausible to many.(The beginning of time was described by Kant as an antinomy of reason due to this aspect) Human moral thinking has a tendency to both seek to only blame people for matters under their control(Kant's Principle of Control) AND to blame people for matters outside of their control.(Moral Luck) Human moral thinking tends to portray evil in grand metaphysical terms but further examination suggests evil is banal(Hannah Arrendt's description of Eichmann), and that the kind of evil people are primed to seek is a myth.(Roy Baumeister) Human beings are naturally primed to seek essences to the world, but the world does not tend to work in an essentialist way so much as a statistical way, and human essentialism about disgust is likely at the root of a # of odd reactions, such as how people often find it gross to swallow saliva they spit into a cup.

I mean, sure one data point may seem odd, but the sheer number of data points of human absurdity where human processes seem like crude kludges to solve a problem, but ones that are fundamentally wrong, like disgust intuitions vs germ theory and toxicology, ultimately becomes impressive over time.

Thank you. I unfortunately have to admit that I don't really understand a lot of what you've said in this thread... but I appreciate your comments and participation nonetheless

Evil exists mind Only One Exists

Cats Bite cats Man IS Same

ALL Nature IS livE
...

Judge
Not
One

Do you think people can really be blamed though? Or is it just a sort of psychological message we put out there to try to deter people from doing bad things? Do you personally feel like a serial killer is responsible for their actions, in so far as they could have possibly chosen to never kill? Or were they merely reacting to cause and effect that they couldn't have broken themselves?

In relation to this, I'm also wondering whether you would consider your personal beliefs to fall along the lines of physicalism/materialism?

Except that what they DO choose is really the best way to understand how choosing ACTUALLY works. And the weightings of what they will and will not choose are VERY relevant. If we had a world where evil was about the same as boring a hole in your skull with a hand-drill, where it's only a hypothetical choice for most people and one that requires a lot of intermediate steps would still have free will, but it would not have moral evil.

If we model free will as a probability cluster of different human actions, the problem that emerges is why did God design an entity that would commit evil with such high probability instead of one that would do it with a lower probability?


No, I am thinking of it from a process perspective. Linear time or no doesn't actually matter, and as I pointed out earlier, there are reasons to suspect that the workings of time in this universe aren't actually linear.

Even further, your example is contradictory. So, this set of facts just won't work:
At time X bitoku will turn right
At time X bitoku will turn left
Turning right and turning left are mutually exclusive acts

Now note, nothing about that phrasing seems wrong. I didn't focus on linearity, only upon time existing as a dimension. Now, the issue is that if you deny that something like "time X" exists, even as a proper phrase, you're going to have to reinvent a lot of language, a lot more language than I think is worth talking about in this case. (Also, if you want to criticize "time X" in light of simultaneity, we could describe it at "space-time point X" and the same logic will be sustained.)

And of course, these kinds of concerns come in ALL OF THE TIME, when we start having to really think that God is involved in prophecy. They come in ALL OF THE TIME when we start talking about a divine plan. For God to divinely plan out things, and to have prophecies that will actually come true, he has to know control the counter-factuals and prevent certain freely chosen acts from occurring. That's an issue, because if God exercises full control over the course of history, then as a matter of agency, we won't really have independent agency from God's plan.

It's a psychological message. The actions of a serial killer precede them, they precede their own consciousness of the decision, and they generally are going to be the results of either a broken brain or a broken situation.


I'm a physicalist/materialist. There is no reason at this point to presume that any neuron has a ghost trailing it and guiding it. And if these neurons do have these ghosts then there are so many physical realities that should create utterly confusing spiritual realities.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFJPtVRlI64[/youtube]
So, in the case of this split brain patient, did their soul split allowing them to make different choices? I mean, the problem that emerges is that we start having to create some really absurd theory about spiritual beings to accommodate this well-established empirical reality.

How about in this case:
http://psych.utoronto.ca/users/peterson ... 201996.pdf

Is the soul damaged because these people can no longer actually change their minds in response to new evidence?

I mean, the problem that emerges in both cases(and many more) is that we have these realities that are not well explained spiritually, but where the physical reality and neuroscience all adds up. If I'm not willing to go along with a ghost in the machine, and that this ghost say splits with a split brain patient or something else, then I should reject any theory of the world that requires this kind of ghost.

What probability do you think people have of committing evil?


But for God it might not. Therefore, while your points are valid from a human time-based perspective, they might not really be relevant to God's perspective. And God might not have the inaccurate one. As you yourself have admitted, human time perspective seems questionable. So we might actually be faulty for even using "At time X".


It would still be relevant from a human perspective of time to use the term, because that's how we see things. But I'm suggesting it might not make sense when talking about God's perspective.


Personally I'm not really sure I believe that God's control over the universe is as precise as you're suggesting. I think it's best to think that God set things in motion, and many physicalist things still happen according to how he set them up ("His Plan"), but that the human aspect of free will allows us to affect how some things will progress as well.

What it mainly shows is that our free will can be impeded by a malformed or damaged brain. This is something I already mentioned many posts ago though. And I think it makes sense if we consider our brain to sort of be a necessary "conduit" between the physical universe and something non-physical (a "spirit", "soul", "essence", or whatever). It would easily explain why we can't interact with the physical world without our brain being operational. It would also explain why people can't be resurrected, which personally I think should be theoretically easier in a physicalist universe than a non-physicalist one.

It's not our free will, though. It's the free will of that entity that's dreaming you and me and everyone here. Trust me on this.

Isn't that the Islamic view of free will?

Words
Express
Universe

flows

both
Ways

LIVE
IS
ALL
IS
LIVE

Words
Express
Universe

flows

both
Ways

Silly
bees
dreams
silly dreams
Hive EvIL One

LIve IS
ALL

Silly
men
dreams
silly dreams
Hurricane Evil One

Change IS ALL

Good and Evil
Construct
Human
Mind

Dealing
Fear

LIVE
IS
ALL
IS
LIVE

Words
Express
Universe

flows

both
Ways

Last edited by aghogday on 22 Jul 2013, 4:24 pm, edited 5 times in total.

Maybe, but my point was to show him just how absurd it is to brush away the simplest explanation that fits the evidence very well and replace with a crap argument.

I don't quite agree with your premise given that I don't think that willful evil explains very much at all, but within Christian assumptions(where willful evil is much more important) it seems MUCH MUCH higher than the probability they will drill a hole in their head with a hand drill.


No, no it doesn't matter. I already gave you that even admitting the problems of simultaneity an external world can still have facts about it. That's really what the question is about, and the external world cannot have contradictory facts about it, because contradictory things cannot be facts.

So, "God's perspective" still can't translate into facts about reality that have contradictions, period.


Yes, and your point is utterly absurd. You may as well try to suspend the laws of logic over it.


Well, it has to be for prophecy to work though. Because any prophecy can be thrown off by the figurative flappings of a butterfly.

I apologize, but.... the "impeded model" does not work for the split brain patient. The split brain patient seems to make decisions, it's just that the decisions between the two halves of the body can vary. It's also an ad hoc model when we have to deal with other sorts of strange neurological behavior. I also don't think it makes sense, as the "conduit" idea is an ad hoc speculation to maintain a metaphysical dogma that does not hold up in light of any data or support any data.

..... errr, what? People can't be resurrected in a physicalist universe for very obvious reasons. I don't know what kind of world you live in where non-resurrection is something that has to be explained.

Last edited by Awesomelyglorious on 22 Jul 2013, 4:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.