Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Free Will

- If you don't believe in god you cannot believe you have free will.
- I think I have free will because I am forced to believe I have it.
- Because you cannot act with sense and meaning without believing you have freedom?
- God grants you freedom. It is dependent on god's gift. Therefore being dependent you are not free.
- You are arguing that if free will requires a certain arrangement of things in the world in order to arise, the world must be completely arranged. That if god, or something else has arranged things so that we must act as if we have freedom, the arrangement of things must mean everything is arranged. But we have no evidence for thinking that a certain amount of order in the world demands the world be completely ordered in every place and at every moment. In fact, we cannot even imagine any shared order, a set of parts in common, between the experience of love, and the world we see around us. We can only make predictions about how the two differently experienced worlds follow each other in time. We must think we have free will to act with meaning, and nothing we know about the world of laws is inconsistent with our truly having the freedom we think we have. The necessity built into foundations of our nature does not restrict what we freely build on those foundations.
- If we must think we have free will we don't have free will.
- It may be true that we have to think we have free will, if we are to feel we have meaning, while at the same time it might in fact, as it happens, be true we do have free will. The necessity of thinking we have free will does not determine the question whether in fact we have it! We may have no freedom to think we don't have free will, if we want to have a meaningful life, and still have an infinite number of other freedoms of action and thought.