Jeremy Christian's Take on Free Will

Could you explain how you found it helpful?

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Sure. Essentially one poster brought up the “rollback objection”, which says that even indeterminism is incompatible with free will. So he says even if we were to know the probabilities that someone makes a choice then that would still not work with having free will. The other responders replied by saying that 1) the probabilities are not determining his choices, just showing the distribution of his free choices 2) free will is neither probabilistic nor determined, and 3) that free will may very well be sui generis

A good summary quote would be:

“one of the problems with Peter van Inwagen’s original presentation of the rollback argument is that he assumes the probabilities will converge as the number of rollbacks approaches infinity. The only reason to suppose this, however, is if you assume that the events in question are probabilistic, and this is the very thing which is at issue.”

It only takes about 5 minutes to read

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As has been pointed out, these criteria are imprecise (for example, because one may freely do God’s will, because free will is not strictly the opposite of determinism, and is even compatible with it, potentially, at either the physical or spiritual level, and the criteria sit loose to considered views on human choice both secular and theological).

However, if one allows leeway, the list still produces big problems in the response of Jeremy to my Hump post, which mentioned contemporary tribes like the Huaorani, whom he said lack free will in the same way as the non-Adamites did (making them, I suppose, non-Adamites).

Yet people from such tribes can and do:

  1. Make their own decisions.
  2. Have the ability to offend their own tribal mores, or God’s law (there are those, after all, who become Christians and fall short in their behaviour).
  3. Can oppose God (to take an oversimplified but clear case, by accepting or refusing the gospel when it is explained to them).
  4. Act to all appearances as “indeterminately” as the rest of us.

To add an extra criterion Jeremy made in response to my post - the ability to change the way things are significantly - that too is apparent in primitive tribes, especially those who, like many South American tribes, chose to revert to hunter-gatherer ways when their agricultural civilizations collapsed centuries ago.

All that said, it is a theological commonplace that mankind has a power of moral choice significantly different from those of the beasts, which is why people are capable of being sinners in need of redemption and Josh’s dog (and mine, come to that) are not.

My problem comes with making that the distinguishing feature of Adamic man, identified with civilization, and non-Adamic man, associated not only with “those outside the garden” in Genesis, but with supposedly non-civilised people today.

As Augustine pointed out so long ago, angels too have free will, but only a minority sinned; and also redemption is not to do with doing away with the freedom of the will, but releasing it from its bondage to sin. Augustine put this is terms of Adam being innocent, but able to sin; modern humans being sinful and unable to act righteously; and the resurrected saints being righteous and unable to sin - yet still free.

That seems to me to make a theological anthropology based entirely free-will - even when more carefully define - a muddy way to proceed.

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Isn’t that largely because of the extent to which we are a social species, with a way of life that depends on cooperation with others in our group?

All life makes decisions. Free will isn’t just the ability to make your own decisions.

I don’t want to speculate about individual tribal member behavior. The difference I want to stress is the dramatic shift in behavior of one group while the others continue to live as humans had for tens of thousands of years.

The natural world, the animal kingdom, all life behaves consistently in harmony with their environment. Humans, starting from a specific time and place, began living as we see ourselves now, altering and bending the environment to work according to our will.

This is more to identify patterns and shifts in behavior. I’m sure to stick my foot squarely in my mouth if I attempt to speculate behavior in more individual cases.

Arguable, but in this context it doesn’t matter: we are what we are, and display a unique attitude to behaviour.

@Jeremy_Christian,

Firstly, there is every reason to honor the humans of Gen 1 as possessing the image of God (it explicitly states it )… which almost certainly includes possessing freewill.

Secondly, what seems to ser the Adamites apart from other hominems is “moral agency”, or more particularly, “Flawed Moral Agency”!

Wait a second Jeremy, you’re saying that before they ate the fruit Adam and Eve didn’t have free will right?

No, free will was required to be able to eat the fruit. Actually eating the fruit was an “unnatural” act in that it was contrary to God’s will, in effect decoupling Adam/Eve from God and the natural world around them.

It means that you made a “willful choice” to respond to his post. You could have chosen to remain silent.

That’s just nonsense. Humans all over the world have altered and bent their environments to work according to their wills and have been doing so long before the Near Eastern civilizations arose. Fire has been a common tool for this, and Australian aborigines, lacking agriculture, used it to great effect. Agriculture, invented many times worldwide, is another tool. This change you think you see is imaginary.

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You can’t define a term simply by restating the term. Do better.

The rollback objection seems pointless, for the reason that probabilities tell you nothing about the mechanism producing them, which some of the readers more or less point out. It seems an unusually indirect way to try to get at the fundamental incoherence of free will, that in order to be free it must be both uncaused and non-random. And the criticisms of rollback don’t get at that fundamental feature either.

What does that mean?

Maybe not describing it well, but certainly not imagining it …

Genesis 11:5-6 - But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them."

“The thousand years or so immediately preceding 3000 BC were perhaps more fertile in inventions and discoveries than any period in human history prior to the sixteenth century AD.” - Archaeologist and Philologist V. Gordon Childe

“a tremendous explosion of knowledge took place as writing, mathematics, and astronomy were discovered. It was as if the human mind had suddenly revealed a new dimension to itself.” - Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess

Genesis 6:11-12 - Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence. God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways.

“the prevailing view is still that male dominance, along with private property and slavery, were all by products of the agrarian revolution… despite the evidence that, on the contrary, equality between the sexes - and among all people - was the general norm of the Neolithic.” - Riane Eisler, American Scholar, Cultural Historian

“For the first ninety-five thousand years after the Homo sapiens Stone Age began (until 4000 BCE), there is no evidence that man engaged in war on any level, let alone on a level requiring organized group violence. There is little evidence of any killing at all.” - Anthropologist Richard Gabriel

What your little quotes are talking about isn’t at all what you had been saying before. Also, I don’t count quotes from here and there as evidence. Particularly quotes from Genesis. One might as well prove that winter results from the earth weeping over Baldur’s death.

Yes it is. It’s a dramatic alteration in human behavior from how they had been for tens of thousands of years. These are quotes from experts in their respective fields speaking about that specific span of time I’m referring to. The quotes from Genesis are to show the correlation between that timeframe and what the story is describing in parallel to show the relation.

Perhaps, but not in the way you had previously claimed, which was altering and bending their environments, which as I pointed out had been going on for thousands of years previously. Millions of years if you count beavers, termites, and such.

The difference I’m trying to point out is the difference between indigenous cultures who live in harmony with nature just as all living things do, and the way we people of civilizations operate. That divergence in behavior started right where/when the stories of Genesis are set.

Did you read the user Miguel’s second post in the thread?

Sui generis is Latin for “of its own kind/category”

This idea of living “in harmony with nature” is itself a fallacy. Some systems are stable, others aren’t. The ones that aren’t change into something else. There is no divergence in behavior, just a divergence in technology and population density. And you have yet to make any connection between this and the idea of free will.