Not sure if I’m technically Christian anymore, but for the sake of the discussion let’s just pretend that I am. I still believe in a soul and a god in any case. I’ve been reading about determinism, and it really disturbs me. The idea that everything we do is determined solely by a chain of external factors that have happened to us, and we have no hypothetical ability to make any other choice than the one we do.
I see mostly pysicalist atheists argueing for this, but I fail to see how it changes much even if God is in the picture. This means that feeling proud of people, feeling disappointed in people, choosing to be better or to stagnate, being encouraged by people with good hearts or discouraged by people who ‘choose’ to do evil, and most importantly moral culpability…it’s all an illusion. A practically useful one in our day to day, but an illusion. Courage, justice, choice, compassion, creativity, freedom, all of these concepts that make us human are paper-thin under this framework. We are incapable of choosing our own paths, and we always have been. We were never capable of making different choices. Autonomy isn’t real.
Now I don’t want this to be true. I want there to be, ultimately, some cohesive self that is capable of making free (not uninfluenced, but free) decisions of whether or not we act in ways that are good or evil, by some complex and unknowable system. But even with the existence of God and a soul taken into account, I can’t understand how that could be. Physics or the existence of the spiritual aside, it just becomes a logic problem at a certain point. Either everything we do has a reason, which ultimately has to be external, or the things we do are entirely random.
Which feels pretty bleak. No one can claim ownership of any of their ‘decisions,’ good or evil. No one can claim they chose to rise above themselves and no one can claim anyone else could have chosen differently when they do something wrong. There is no such thing as responsibility. Who we are is entirely governed by chance. ‘Humanity’ is mechanical. Does it have to be this way, even under the Christian view? Am I thinking in too severe black and white?
Your past actions dictates your future no matter what God you believe in. Plus…who are we to decide what’s right or wrong…what’s good or evil…?
The very existence of an omniscient being negates the possibility of free will.
If someone or something knows for certain every single thing you will do in advance, you’re not making choices, your brain is following a predetermined pattern.
Don’t you also run progressive Islam?
I think these are unmarked Reddit re-posts from both the r/OpenChristian and r/progressive_islam community. Teknevra runs both and they mainly copy the posts from a few hours earlier to Lemmy.
It’s be addressed we seek to have original content as much as possible sorry about the Reddit repost
Thank you very much. I mean I don’t have an issue with Teknevra or kickstarting things. Just be straightforward and stick to honesty. And I really prefer original content and genuine conversation in the comments over quantity of posts, but that’s just my opinion. So thanks again.
I thought Teknevra had claimed to be both Christian and Muslim in posts but if these are Reddit reposts then that makes a lot of sense.
@[email protected] Would you please be so kind and attribute your posts correctly? Other people here do it as well, and I think it’s disingenuous to not do it. One line “cross-posted from …” or “by … on r/…” attached to each post will do.
Correct
@[email protected] I used to, in a different community, but then Lemmy users would get angry at me for it.
Yeah, but now you’re not transparent any more and I’m getting angry at you 😑 I mean not on a personal level, I just ponder how to deal with it, so I can make a choice to engage with genuine and direct questions only and OP is actually going to read the response and reply to me.
Yeah, why?
Dunno, I get they are both Abrahamic religions, but can you be both at the same time?
I’m a compatiblist: I don’t see a deterministic universe as precluding free will. I view myself as a decision-making process. I’m not my body, and I’m not my mind, I am the ethical soul that takes the inputs my body and and mind give me and returns decisions as outputs, which my body and mind then imperfectly execute into the world.
And let’s be honest, a lot of what we do is automatic; the body flinches away from pain and relaxes into pleasure. The mind rejects dissonance and seeks patterns, even when they’re not there. You can’t trust them, coming or going. All you can do is decide, based on the information you have. And the more you know about moral truth, the better you’re able to make moral decisions. Maybe with perfect understanding, we’d all make the same decision in the same circumstance, I don’t know.
But it would still be US making the decisions, even if God already knows, from outside of time, what we’ll decide; even if there’s no other way we could’ve decided, it’s us who make the decision.
I’m sorry, again a non-Christian here. But wouldn’t you just fill that space with faith? I mean it’s a question concerned with philosophy and science. And Christian belief regularly has little to offer concerning those topics. The Bible or the Christian faith doesn’t teach you a lot about mibrobiology and bacteria, astronomy… And in the same way it doesn’t teach you about the inner workings of the human brain. I think this is just an “out of scope” question. So either you stick to what’s written in scripture and its explanation on how and why people are the way they are. Or you use tools and methods outside of religion if you’re concerned with logic and the scientific truth of existence.
Wikipedia has some more background information on different (religuous) perspectives: Free will in theology
I have my faith for my own reasons, and I’m very much interested in science. They address different aspects of my same self and I’m okay with that. I do feel that religion falls under the philosophy heading, for me personally, and I’m fine with that too. I’m aware others may or not agree, and I’m ok with that too. It’s been a long time since I read Erich Fromm, but from what I remember, I still agree with him having said there’s no reason religious and non-religious can’t get along.
@[email protected] I didn’t know I was engaging with copy/paste, and I don’t like it either. Are our replies being pasted back to Reddit?
No, the answers aren’t fed back to Reddit. Here is the matching post and it doesn’t have them underneath. And if OP posted something back, they’d have to do it using their own username.
I fail to have science and religion side to side. I mean we long have a better understanding of how we came to be and that replaces pretty much the entire origin story of mankind as laid out in the Old Testament. Philosophy teaches me to use reason to arrive at some morals and ethics and not just adopt them from some old book. So I’m mainly left with the teachings of Jesus. I just have to strip the claims about supernatural events, or it’d make the science part meaningless. And that’s my perspective. I’m definitely inspired by things including religion, but the faith part is just missing for me and I read it like other stories. I know however it’s not like that for many other people. What you write is also what some friends tell me, and yeah multiple clever people wrote books about it.
I’m of the opinion everyone, religious or not, has their own path. It’s not for me to convince anyone, other than living a life with kindness and integrity. I largely stick to Jesus words, and definitely fall short. Evolution is slow, messy, and sometimes painful. In life’s journey, we start where we are, not where we’re going.
Uh sorry, I recently joined this community and I wasn’t aware these are unmarked Reddit re-posts only. I think I’m going to unsubscribe again, feel free to engage in a genuine conversation with me. But this isn’t my thing.
I certainly understand, and wish you the best.
I can’t even pretend to be Christian, but I also have an interest in the morality/ethics of free will in a seemingly deterministic universe. For the sake of conversation, I’ll try to articulate where my head is at.
The basic idea of determinism might be flawed. We don’t have a grand unified theory of physics at the moment, but the last Stephen Hawking book I read (The Grand Design) gave me the impression - carefully putting no words in his mouth - that every possible universe may in fact exist on some level.
In light of that, it kind of makes a sapient being something extremely privileged - to apprehend the present moment, to make choices between this or that, to see oneself within the larger context and make tenuous connections with others - we are like quasi-divine beings of chaos at the infinite centre of creation.
The universe is determinish. We can apprehend macroscopic forces, trends, material conditions and apply our understanding of natural laws to say X must follow W under prescribed conditions. The universe may be on some deep level completely deterministic on every scale, in ways that elude our ability to comprehend (or even balk at) quantum mechanics. But the question was never whether our fates are bound to good or ill, but what we chose to do with the small amount of insight we have been afforded.
One of the best things I ever heard was that “art is the study of choice”, and I think that there is certainly an art to life. To study ones own choices and make more meaningful choices in light of what we do know about ourselves and the world is the only meaningful sense in which we can have free will, whether the future is set in stone or no.
Am I thinking in too severe black and white?
😉
