Richard Dawkins advocates blind faith.
Famous Atheist Shoots Down Atheism
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10 Responses
This new format you are using is very hard to read for older eyes. I hope you choose to revert back to the former way of posting. I had such a great time with your humor on the MWS Alaskan Cruise 2014.
On Mon, May 4, 2015 at 4:49 AM, The Comedy Sojourn wrote:
> John Branyan posted: “Richard Dawkins advocates blind faith. Related > articles The Pseudoscience of Richard Dawkins Why do we let New Atheists > and religious zealots dominate the conversation about religion? – Salon.com > “
I use CTL + (plus sign) to make the text larger. CTL – (minus sign) makes it smaller. I’m 69.
This line: “…perhaps a theoretical omniscient being or the guys wife, might predict his choice…” is the best thing anyone has said to me in weeks. I’m looking forward to more of your wit. 🙂
– “Because here we are, thinking and choosing.”
It doesn’t answer the question to just say, ‘because it exists, the universe must be inevitable.’ It’s like me saying, “It was inevitable that I would marry a girl from Indiana, buy a yellow house and have 4 children because that’s exactly what I did.”
– “…The only places we seem to find it is in biological organisms with sufficient neurological evolution to produce minds that think and imagine and experiment and evaluate and choose…”
That doesn’t answer my question. Is it impossible for the universe to exist without free will?
– “And it is never chemistry or molecules that make a choice. It is us, as living organisms, that are actually, in fact, choosing for ourselves what we will do next. And it happens within a physical universe with the aid of reliable cause and effect (determinism).”
This is a helpful encapsulation of your ideology. I think I understand where you’re coming from. And I need to ask some more questions.
—–
Living organisms are made of the same molecules as inert matter, are they not? How can it be that ‘it is never chemistry or molecules that make a choice’ when that’s all that exists in a determined universe? How are you differentiating between ‘us’ and mere molecules?
In our physical universe, what are thoughts, ideas and ‘choices’ made of?
If our thoughts are chemical or electrical impulses, are they not subject to the same laws of physics and chemistry as the rest of the physical universe?
“That doesn’t answer my question. Is it impossible for the universe to exist without free will?”
Prior to the existence of biological organisms, I believe the universe existed without free will.
Free will, the ability to choose for oneself what one will do, only exists in the context of a “being” having purpose (“will”) and the ability to satisfy that will more perfectly or less perfectly by “choosing” between two or more alternative actions, and then having the ability to make that choice for itself (“free” from the compulsion of some other purposeful will).
Now, if we presuppose that beings exist independent of the physical universe, have we escaped this definition? I don’t think so. To have “purpose” or “will” is to have your choices “caused” by that purpose.
So we may say that determinism (the belief in the reliability of cause and effect) is not so much a characteristic of the physical world as it is of the “rational” world.
If there be “God”, and if he be “rational”, then his will is precisely as “free” and precisely as “determined” as our own.
So metaphysics may escape physical laws (gravity et cetera) but not laws of rationality (reasons as causes).
“Living organisms are made of the same molecules as inert matter, are they not? How can it be that ‘it is never chemistry or molecules that make a choice’ when that’s all that exists in a determined universe? How are you differentiating between ‘us’ and mere molecules?”
‘Us’ are the forest. A molecule of chlorophyll whose sole purpose is to convert CO2 into sugar and oxygen along with thousands of other similar molecules in one leaf of one tree in the forest is not quite ‘us’. The leaf may be eaten by a caterpillar, yet the tree persists. The tree may be taken down by a beaver, but the forest persists.
It’s a matter of perspective again, but this time between a microscopic and a macroscopic focus. Chemical reactions take place within us all the time, but they are not us. A single memory stored in hundreds of neural connections is a part of us, but it is not us. Those neural connection could be destroyed by accident or disease and we’d lose that specific memory, but we would still essentially be us.
We are the whole person. And our choices serve the purposes of the whole person. The whole person needs something we call “food”. A single cell requires oxygen and sugar to produce energy to support what that single cell does and what it contributes to the whole that is us.
The whole person has vision and smell to detect the presence of “food” and a biological hunger to obtain food. And it has a mind capable of assessing the environment for possible ways to find food for the person, to evaluate the appropriateness of the means to achieve it (right or wrong means), and to choose a way to achieve it that both satisfies the needs of the body and the conditions of the current environment.
All of this thought is happening within the physical body of the person. He talks it over with himself, probably by using subvocalization and auditory speech interpretation in a short loop, plus conscious dreaming (imagination) using parts of the visual cortex, et cetera.
“If our thoughts are chemical or electrical impulses, are they not subject to the same laws of physics and chemistry as the rest of the physical universe?”
Of course. And if our thoughts are not chemical or electrical, are they not still subject to the laws of rationality and whatever metaphysical purposes might exist?
Right. Free to make choices for themselves without being forced to choose the will of another. We agree on the definition.
What I don’t understand is how you can claim that free will is ‘inevitable’ in a deterministic universe. How do you know it’s inevitable? Is it impossible for the universe to exist without free will?
And if free will is inevitable, then it’s determined. The reasoning is circular.
I differ from Dawkins in that I believe free will actually exists. He claims that there is no reality apart from the natural universe but admits that we ‘must live with’ the inconsistencies determinism demands. Why? Why should we reject what our instincts tell us is true?
It ‘feels’ like we have free will because we do. It ‘feels’ like Dawkins wrote a book because he DID write a book. He could have chosen NOT to write the book and that’s where we cross over into the realm of the metaphysical. Free will is REAL but it’s not material. It doesn’t reduce to molecules and chemistry. That’s what makes Dawkins squeamish.
“How do you know it’s inevitable?”
Because here we are, thinking and choosing.
“Is it impossible for the universe to exist without free will?”
The only places we seem to find it is in biological organisms with sufficient neurological evolution to produce minds that think and imagine and experiment and evaluate and choose. One might say, though, that living organisms generally have a “biological will” that animates them to find food, et cetera. But a conscious mind that can see several ways to solve a problem and choose between them is more free than the instinctual drives.
“And if free will is inevitable, then it’s determined. The reasoning is circular.”
Not circular. Parallel. It’s like looking at the same thing through two different perspectives. When a person is making a decision he’s engaged in the process from the inside, as the decider. When a scientist is observing the process, they are looking at it from the outside, as an observer.
The decider starts with uncertainty (otherwise there is no actual decision being made). At the beginning he can honestly say, “I may choose option A or option B. But I don’t know yet which one I will choose.”
Someone with total knowledge of both the situation and the decider, perhaps a theoretical omniscient being or the guys wife, might predict his choice even before he makes it. But there is no way the decider can confirm the correct answer until he actually goes through the mental process of deliberation for himself.
As the decider goes through that process, one of the two options begins to appear more and more inevitable. After he finishes and makes his choice, then he may realize that only one of his options was truly inevitable. (Or he may still have significant uncertainty about his choice).
Both causal determinism and freely choosing are happening at the same time in the same event. It is only one thing going on, but viewed from more than one perspective, for more than one purpose. The scientist wants to be able to predict. The decider wants to choose his own destiny.
The decider is in fact choosing his own destiny, but his choices are “in theory” predictable. (I say in theory, because people are often unpredictable “in practice”).
“It ‘feels’ like we have free will because we do. It ‘feels’ like Dawkins wrote a book because he DID write a book. He could have chosen NOT to write the book and that’s where we cross over into the realm of the metaphysical. Free will is REAL but it’s not material. It doesn’t reduce to molecules and chemistry. That’s what makes Dawkins squeamish.”
Of course we have free will. We are in fact going through that mental process of choosing. And from my perspective as a humanist, there is no illusion and nothing metaphysical about the process. It is actually happening in our minds, and our minds are actually happening within our brains. Illusions are immaterial things that you can walk through. But you can actually pick up a brain.
And it is never chemistry or molecules that make a choice. It is us, as living organisms, that are actually, in fact, choosing for ourselves what we will do next. And it happens within a physical universe with the aid of reliable cause and effect (determinism).
It’s really pathetic that so many atheists seem bent on attacking free will. Whoever started that nonsense needs to have his butt kicked. Free will exists quite nicely in a deterministic universe.
Atheists attack free will because the existence of free will implies something that transcends the material universe. Morality, ethics and ‘choices’ are the product of chemical reactions which were brought about by previous chemical reactions going all the way back to the Big Bang. The ‘nonsense’ wasn’t started by any particular individual, it’s the logical conclusion of determinism ideology.
Not all atheists attack free will. Ayn Rand (a prominent atheist) holds that people have consciousness and free will, and that these are naturally occurring phenomena.
John, you seem to think that free will is some kind of metaphysical concept. Ordinary free will is nothing more than our ability to choose for ourselves what we will do next. It is perfectly consistent with determinism. In fact, the physical, deterministic universe is what created biological organism with the brain power needed to image, plan, experiment, learn, evaluate, and, of course, to choose. So one may say that free will is an inevitable product of the deterministic universe.
A person’s will is said to be free if he is allowed to make choices for himself, without being forced against his will to accept someone else’s choice instead. It is the same sense in which we say that the person placed in prison is no longer free, but the prisoner released back into society is once more free.
Any other definition must prove itself useful or be discarded as irrelevant. For example, to suggest that free will means the will is free from causation would be irrational. If there is no causation then how can the will effect its choice? Another fruitless requirement is the definition that suggests the will must be somehow free of all the internal and external influences that have shaped the person over time. To be free from that is to be someone else other than one’s own self. And that “will” would no longer even be your own, much less free.
So, no. It is irrational to suggest the will must be free of causality or free of the person whose will it is.
All that is necessary for a meaningful definition is the freedom of the person to make their own choices for themselves, without before forced to choose according to the will of another.