Free Will and Theism

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Prof. Dennett, one of the acclaimed Four Horsemen of Atheism, had a particularly perfect YouTube lecture on Freewill, “not the Freewill people usually mean, which doesn’t exist, but the kind of Freewill a person needs to be morally accountable”.

His discussion points were so clear he convinced me that the kind of freewill that doesnt exist could exist in a universe provided meaning by means of the existence of a universal conscious and moral agency.

I did not believe this until the very day i heard his lecture! Im sure he would have been surprised to hear this!

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Can you link the lecture here? I don’t see how the existence of libertarian free will would be any more possible in a theistic universe than an atheistic one.

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It wouldn’t. It’s logically incoherent.

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Sometimes humans can, AND SHOULD, choose the incoherent!:

QUORA LINK [Mod note: the following is a story taken from an answer on Quora.]

Originally Answered: Atheists, your five year-old daughter is on her deathbed and asks, “Will I go to Heaven when I die,” how do you reply?

Let me take this out of your hypothetical nonsense, and make it real. During the 1990’s I was a professional clown. I did birthday parties, wedding receptions, school shows, store promotions, holiday parties, company picnics - you name it, my professional clown persona, Violet P. Lavender, was there.

I had several client families, where I would come celebrate the same child’s birthday three or four years in a row.

In one of those client families, there was an adorable little girl (I’ll call her Emily for this story). I met her at a cousin’s birthday party, and then was at her 4th birthday. I was happy to be at her 5th birthday as well. Because she lived in an area where Violet was very popular, Emily saw me as Violet four or five times during the year, in addition to her own birthday. That particular cluster of families really kept me on my toes, because I had to constantly rework my show, since all the kids saw me so often!

One day, I got a call asking me to come visit Emily, it was months too early for her 6th birthday - and to please come to the Children’s Hospital. I had a habit of visiting the hospital whenever I had free time between shows. This was the first time I was asked to come for a specific child.

When Violet arrived, Emily had been put into a private room. I was met in the hall, and warned that she was very weak and was quite fragile. They told me she did not know she was dying.

So, into that antiseptic, mostly white room filled with machines sailed “Violet P Lavender, A totally Purple Person”, with balloons and magic and fun! Emily smiled and clapped and used her precious energy to laugh. Only two visitors were allowed in the room at a time, so it was just me, Emily and her mother, with everyone else watching through the glass wall.

I stayed for only about 20 minutes. While I was saying goodbye, she took my hand and asked the hardest question… “Violet, will I ever see you again?”

I did what anyone in that position would do - I lied. I smiled at her and said “Of course you will! I’m going to be at your 6th Birthday Party!” That beautiful child shook her head sadly and gently told me, “Violet, I’m sorry. I’m not going to have any more birthday parties. I meant, will I see you again, in heaven?”

So much for her not knowing! Her mother bolted from the room, leaving me ‘alone’ to face that horrible truth with her.

So what does the atheist in a clown suit say to a child who wants to talk about heaven, as she lay dying?

I asked her “What do you think heaven is like?” She didn’t know, but she was scared that she would be all alone “up there” in a big house, with no one to talk to ever again.

Now, why would she think that? It seems some well meaning idiot had told her that God had prepared a Mansion just for her, in Heaven, and that she would be going there soon. And a Mansion was described to her as “a big house” … just for her! She was scared by the idea, and she did not want to go, but she couldn’t ask her mommy or daddy about it because (and she whispered this) “they don’t know I’m dying.”

So I laughed and told Emily that of COURSE she was not going to be alone! Her house was going to be on a street with lots of other kids, and right next to her street is the street where all the CLOWNS LIVE! And right past that is a big park where all the puppies and kittens play! (That made her smile.)

“Will you be there too, Violet?” Stubborn child! She wasn’t going to let it go! I told her I wouldn’t be there for a long time, but I had friends there, and she could tell them she knows me. Also, in her house there is a magic TV that she can use to watch over her friends and family who are still alive, while she is waiting for us to all join her. So she could watch me and her Mom and Dad and anybody else she wanted, any time she felt like!

She was relieved. She said she wasn’t scared anymore. Then reminded me not to say anything to her parents, because they are already so worried about her being sick, she didn’t want them to get sad about her dying.

I made it out of the room and into a nurse’s station before I started crying.

Violet did attend her next ‘party’ … I made sure her parents were ok with it, and Violet came to the funeral with a huge bunch of bright balloons, to say goodbye.

So the answer to your silly hypothetical question is - in REAL LIFE, you tell that child whatever you can so that they are not afraid and give them comfort.

ANY OTHER ANSWER regardless of your personal belief in an invisible guy building fancy houses in the sky is wrong.

The emotional well being of a dying child is more important than any religious or philosophical argument you could make.

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@misterme987

Give me some time to work on my thought processes that dat. Dennett was the inspiration, but I had to carry the water!

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Well, I would say that anything, no matter how preposterous, is “more possible” in a universe that includes an omnipotent being than in a universe like ours. I don’t know what someone would mean by “a universal conscious and moral agency,” since that’s incoherent English to start with. But I will always remind believers that a “theistic universe”, to whatever extent the god is unconstrained, is a place where anything can happen.

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I agree to a point, but as @Rumraket pointed out, libertarian free will is a logical impossibility. Very few theists would claim that God can create logical impossibilities.

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There’s the rub. Can God make a square triangle? Can he do things that are logically impossible? Because libertarian free will is a logical contradiction.

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Can someone explain why? I can’t find any credible source that would argue this.

My assumption is that both you and @misterme987 are saying that libertarian free will is a logical impossibility in a universe that is governed by a god like the one invented by Christianity. I might be wrong about that assumption, but if I’m right then you’re both talking about a very specific kind of universe, whereas I’m making the assertion that omnipotent beings can make it work if they want to. If the argument is that the mere presence of an omnipotent being makes libertarian free will impossible, then… okay but what a boring conversation then.

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The “free” part of “(libertarian) free will” doesn’t mean much of anything, if it is not referring to a freedom from any and all influence. However, the “will” part of “(libertarian) free will” implies some amount of deliberate-ness, something that is clearly under the impact of an agent and what ever thoughts and feelings they arrived at when it came up. A will, something willful, is inherently a consequence, fundamentally subject to influences. To be willful means to not be free. To be free (in that sense) means to not be wilful so much as it would entail to be rather indistinguishable from random.

This is why compatibilists like Dan Dennett tend to define free will differently. It’s not about trying to argue for its existence by avoiding a face-value interpretation of the label, but rather it’s trying to re-frame the discussion (for better or for worse) to be about something that can actually have practical meaning as opposed to the incoherent mess that is libertarian free will, namely the question of causal attribution and ethical / moral responsibility associated with matters we colloquially associate with willfulness.

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You typed this quote: “not the Freewill people usually mean, which doesn’t exist, but the kind of Freewill a person needs to be morally accountable” and put it in bold. Where did it come from? If it’s a quote, it must be easy to find, no?

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Imagine being directly asked for a link to an online resource you opened the thread with referencing, only to quote the query and reply with “Give me time to do something other than trying to address the query”.
George, you are a delight. Never change.

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My understanding is that it simply means that determinism is not true. That is to say, the actions of an agent with free will are not completely determined by all other events that have preceded the action that the agent will take. In which case, libertarian free will is not incoherent, even if it is not true.

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It is incoherent, because libertarian free will not only includes indeterminism (the idea that one’s choice is not decided until it’s made), but also the idea that the result of one’s choice must be under one’s volitional control. But if the event is indeterministic, the result is random, not under anyone’s volitional control. There’s no middle ground between determinism and indeterminist that allows for LFW. This is known as the “luck problem” in philosophy.

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Personally, I struggle to see a difference, even if the phrasing may be technically more often one way than the other. In practice, an agent who is less than completely determined is an agent whose actions are - to that extent, anyway - non-determined. One can at that point already ask how to distinguished between chance-based indeterminacy and will-generated indeterminacy. The coherency problems, in my opinion, come with the question of what on earth will-generated indeterminacy is even supposed to be. Will, in this classification of movers, would seem to be both subject in at least some part to influence from past events (as otherwise the chance category already takes care of its role), and also subject in no part to influence from past events (as otherwise the deterministic category already takes care of its role).

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Agent causation, I believe, is sometimes suggested as such a middle ground. Here, an “agent” is considered to be a substance that can itself initiate events, without those events being otherwise determined by previous events or causes.

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So, just like randomness, then. Completely undetermined by any previous events or causes. Without memory, presumably without foresight. But also with memory, and with being to some extent influenced by past events and causes, because it’s a third category that is both A and non-A in the same respect, somehow.

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It might seem so, but this leads to the same issue as other views of libertarian free will. To quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Consider Leo. At a certain moment he agent-causes a decision to tell the truth, and until he does there remains a chance that he will instead, at that moment, agent-cause a decision to lie. There is, then, a possible world that is exactly like the actual world up until the time at which Leo agent-causes his decision but in which, at that moment, Leo agent-causes a decision to lie. Nothing about the world prior to the moment of the agent-causing accounts for the difference between Leo’s causing one decision and his causing the other. This difference, then, is just a matter of luck. And if this difference is just a matter of luck, Leo cannot be responsible for his decision.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-theories/

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I searched the quote on Google, but the only result was George’s own message.

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No, I’m saying (and I assume @misterme987 is too) that libertarian free will is a logical impossibility, period. Why? Because it’s incoherent. We’re talking about choices that are neither caused nor capricious. What is this third thing that results in choice? Nobody has ever been able to say.

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