Comments on: The Shadow of Faith

By: LP

LP — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 00:09:38 +0000

Austen wrote:

“I doubt what you say would be much solace to those who don’t believe but yearn to believe in free will, in some robust sense…”

I take Julian’s post, and the whole problem generally, in a different way: This is one of those happy areas where everyone is free (haha) to believe whatever they prefer to believe — all the metaphysics and cognitive science in the world will never provide a meaningful answer, because there’s something the matter with the question. Plus, there’s some nice Pascalian reasoning here about the risk-benefit analysis: If you ‘choose’ to believe in determinism and are wrong, then you lose out on the most crucial experience of being human. But if you choose to believe in free will and are wrong, then you didn’t ‘choose’ in the first place, so there’s no sense in worrying about it. And, a belief in free will has the advantage of allowing you to live in harmony with your actual day-to-day experiences of making choices. (For a good time, ask an existentialist whether it’s possible to reject choice.)

By: Austen

Austen — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 01:51:00 +0000

I don’t know, I doubt what you say would be much solace to those who don’t believe but yearn to believe in free will, in some robust sense of ‘free will’. If determinism is disturbing when applied to human agency–even, say, when determinism is understood in a modern way that accounts for complex decision making, the inner experience of choice, etc, (‘cus ultimately we’re still just meaty robots)–then it’s disturbing regardless of whether the theories we take to be competitor theories are any better, or make coherent sense. The failure of ‘non-determinisms’ does nothing to make determinism less unsettling.

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 00:29:22 +0000

I will need to think about this before posting a detailed response (and don’t get your hopes up, because I am neither as smart or as well read in philosophy as my co-blogger over on The Bellman). However, my initial reaction is that you are presenting a false dichotomy between determinism and an indeterminism where our actions are random.

It seems to me that you are leaving out the (ridiculous to atheists and highly improbable to me) possibility of what I will call the “soul.” The idea that there is a part of us that has agency and responsibility (even if we have a hand tremor that we cannot control) is pretty basic to enlightenment thought, and, I still think, wiped out by hard determinism.

By: Grant Gould

Grant Gould — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 23:53:21 +0000

It's reasons like this that I call myself an "apostate" rather than an atheist or an agnostic. Of course the self-designation is absurd -- apostasy is only a meaningful term when uttered by the religious -- but it's convenient. My views are sufficiently informed by my religious upbringing and training that they color my atheism.

For the worries about hell, though, I fall back to my old friend, the Euthyphro. If God is not the ultimate moral arbiter, then for moral questions you should be indifferent to divine commands whether they are real or not. That you might or might not suffer eternally in Hell is of no consequence -- to act wrongly in fear of damnation is simply to have been blackmailed into moral error.

I find that I no longer care whether or not God exists -- I am not an atheist as such, nor really an agnostic, but apathetic. If there turns out to be a god, well, that's Its lookout, not mine.