Actually, you still have the choice to drink boiling acid. Perfection gives god no choice, therefore, no free will.
A free will curveball
- Thread starter Bozo Erectus
- Start date
Here's a couple:
1 John 1:5
Numbers 23:19
What if perfection still allows God a choice, he just chooses correctly every time?
Che Guava
The Juicy Revolutionary
Hardly a complete definition...after all, if God is the personification of good, but created a universe filled with evil and misdeeds, how can that be? FOr that matter, why doesn't your definition include his motivation for creating the universe, or letting it exist for this long?
Your definition significantly lacks a claim of monotheism, or a claim of omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, or eternality of the being in question.
Common attributes in the definition by theologians.It is the definition of a perfect joke. The fact that you find no humor in it means that you lack Perfection in your heart.
The thread is asking for it.
pboily
fingerlickinmathematickin
A wise man once said: "the illusion of free will is so complete as to be indistinguishable from the real thing."
Hard to see how it wouldn't apply to (a) God as well.
Hard to see how it wouldn't apply to (a) God as well.
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
Maybe there are two equally perfect paths to take?
Actually, quantum physics would prevent that.. nevermind, you are right.
Nah. Quantum Mechanics prevent there from being a single path for a particle, so it would be just the opposite. An electron passes through both slits in a double slit experiment if you view it as a particle, not a wave. More explicitly, Quantum Mechanics would deny the fact that there was a path in the first place, and that the concept of a path is only a classical approximation to reality.
Of course, the problem here is that it's still an equivilzation fallacy - physical path != path of thought. With that said, I need to stop talking before I look stupid.
aneeshm
Deity
God CANNOT have desire, will, or anything of that nature. In fact, he cannot be a personal being AT ALL, if he is to have perfection or even existence, given the constraints we have put on him.
Desire implies that there is a delay, a small gap, a discontinuity, between the wanting of a thing and its attainment. It also implies a lack of perfect control over oneself and a lack of omnipotence and omniscience. If God is perfect and perfectly omnipotent, this cannot happen. However, if God does not desire, and creation happened anyway, this means that God is a monolith (like the ones in Clarke's novels), like a machine, for only a machine is capable of action without desire. This means that God is not a conscious being at all.
We have constrained our God to the point where he is, and can only be, a soulless creature.
That's very strange. If god actually has a choice, but he just chooses correctly every time, then it sounds like no matter what choice god makes, it's automatically deemed the correct one. So, god doesn't choose to do the right thing, but the right thing is right because god chose it. I know that's not what you're saying, but I just felt like throwing that in there.
Let's look at it this way: if god always makes the right choice, it's the equivalent of having no free will. He never makes a mistake, which means never making the wrong choice, so it's effectively the same as being incapable of it.
I'm glad a theist agrees with me.
My arguments in this thread have all been just for fun, since the notion of perfection is a complete impossibility in an intelligent creature. It's as impossible as backwards time travel. It simply doesn't exist.
I'm with puglover (except for my small disagreement over whether or not God actually exists ).
I'd rather think that free will simply means not facing restraints, like someone putting a gun to your head. Note that this is external, as any restraint is. The whole notion of something internal (not to mention great) like perfection being a "restraint" is absurd, as is the corollary that complete freedom lies in having no internal characteristics and being some sort of empty ghost.
).Just like puglover will always choose pudding over acid. So apparently puglover has no free will, because he has a personal preference. Apparently, according to you, free will means having no decision-making capability and running around drinking vats of acid.
I'd rather think that free will simply means not facing restraints, like someone putting a gun to your head. Note that this is external, as any restraint is. The whole notion of something internal (not to mention great) like perfection being a "restraint" is absurd, as is the corollary that complete freedom lies in having no internal characteristics and being some sort of empty ghost.
Since when was Bozo Erectus a wise man?
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
I don't see claims of perfection there anywhere.
That's like saying: you have a choice.. you can pick the red pill or the green pill.. but if you pick the green pill we will take it away from you and stuff the red pill down the throat.
Not much of a choice, is it?
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
Puglover doesn't claim to be perfect (as far as I know). Therein lies the difference.
aneeshm
Deity
I don't know whether the word "theist" is really applicable to an Advaitist Brahmavadin, but for the purposes of this discussion, I think it's close enough.
All these paradoxes don't come into the picture if you begin with consciousness as a starting point.
The simplest chain I can give here:
The material world is bound by rules.
The material world is also not conscious.
However, consciousness exists.
Therefore, consciousness is different from the material world.
However, if this is so, then consciousness and the world cannot interact.
This means that consciousness and the material world are not actually different.
As the material world cannot produce consciousness, we are forced to conclude that it is consciousness that produces the material world.
Therefore, it is consciousness that is ultimately real, and the material world is also real, but real only so far as it is the product of the absolute standard of reality, which is consciousness.
Therefore, the world is only relatively real.
Also, consciousness is absolutely real.
How is the material world produced by consciousness?
We know that if consciousness is the ultimate and only fully absolute reality, then it is the only thing which always existed.
Therefore, the material world did not exist at one time.
That is, in the beginning, only consciousness existed.
This consciousness is called "Brahman".
In the beginning, only Brahman was.
It then sought to perceive itself.
Out of this perception attempt was born the relatively real material world, and Isvara.
As products of this consciousness and this material world, it is therefore concluded that our atman, soul, or consciousness itself is Brahman, for no other possibility exists without contradiction.
In this whole scenario, it is only Atman who has free will, because he is the only one who is in a context where free will has any relevance. Isvara, who is the closest analogue to the monotheist God, is a sort of mechanical rule-keeper of the relatively real world, born of the necessity of maintaining the rules of that world, with no free will.
You make a good point, but the part that causes a problem is when people commit suicide. Some people willfully injest things which kill them. puglover is physically capable of doing such a thing. Is god physically or mentally capable of committing an imperfect action?I'm with puglover (except for my small disagreement over whether or not God actually exists
Just like puglover will always choose pudding over acid. So apparently puglover has no free will, because he has a personal preference. Apparently, according to you, free will means having no decision-making capability and running around drinking vats of acid.
No, it's like saying you won't choose the green pill because there's no reason to, and you're intelligent enough to realize it.
Do you agree that puglover will always choose pudding over acid?
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
Not if it's LSD and he's in college. All bets are off, then!
Yes, he is physically capable of doing so; if he wants to randomly kill a bunch of people, he certainly has the power to do so. The key is that he does not want to, and that is why he doesn't do so. This, of course, does not mean he lacks free will, just as the fact that I am not about to commit suicide (even though I physically can) because I do not want to does not mean that I lack free will.
Nonsense, puglover's a good poy!
*ruffles puglover's hair*
Now, um, I'm not exactly sure how to continue this debate.... If your post was a serious one, then let's assume the acid we're talking about is sulfuric acid.
This was the first thread I made at OT. Nice to see everything moving in circles.I think the gist of the argument made against me then was that God doesn't act at all, in the sense that we usually take. Since he's outside time, and since "act" as we understand it depends on acting in time, it's not a relevant term in God's case. Of course, if you believe in Scripture (or even prayer), God clearly does act, or at least appears to. However, the contradiction may be resolved if you think of his "actions" rather as projections of his being into the universe. As an analogy, consider how a 3-D object appears in 2-D: you only see a cross-section of it. The underside of a table, as viewed by a two-dimensional observer, would look like four distinct circles-- the intersection of its legs with his plane. (And if the plane were at an angle, they'd look like ovals, and so on.) If God can look like anything, and he's also outside of time, then his "appearance," to beings who are inside time, could very well resemble action-- just as a table that intersected with the time dimension might look like a single leg in 500 BC, all four legs in AD 1200, and a polished board in 2007. So God can "act" in the universe and still be perfectly realised, without action, in his own frame of reference. We perceive his being, or rather a part of it, in terms of action, because we ourselves are active. This solution preserves God's omnipotence, since he can "do" anything in the universe, and it also preserves his free will in the sense that he chooses both what he is and what real form his perfection takes.
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