(urth) Theism Supports Free Will Better than Materialism Does

[Marc Aramini]

I've for the most part stayed out of this, but I wanted to bring up some
Wolfe stuff here.  It seems there are several points where nature and free
will are vital to his narratives, and Book of the New Sun has  in some way
created the deterministic exegesis of Wright in Attending Dedalus, which I
think is fundamentally opposed to Wolfe's world view.

Wolfe's Pirate Freedom is the most direct exploration of Free Will in his
work. You have a Catholic priest engaging in naturalistic philosophy and
casuistry, justifying his actions through environment (you would have done
the same thing if you were there ...)
.  That's an extremely complicated moral element to the narrative that is
easy to misread: sympathize with Fr. Chris too much and you are denying his
freedom of choice.

I am sure Wolfe believes in free will and the ability to make meaningfully
good and meaninfully evil decisions. Fr. Chris might achieve less
absolution than Typhon in the grand scheme of things if he holds onto the
idea that he never had a choice.

On Sat, Oct 11, 2014 at 10:35 AM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
wrote:

>
> On 10/10/2014 10:39 PM, Jeffery Wilson clueland.com wrote:
>
>> On 10/10/2014 8:27 AM, Norwood, Frederick Hudson wrote:
>>
>>> Of course God has free will.  But not Moses, as far as I can tell.
>>>
>>
>> I believe this is somewhat backwards. God's omnipotent, omniscient, and
>> eternal character exclude any process of decision or choice-making on His
>> part. He is changeless and perfect, so there is no change of mind possible
>> or necessary, and being eternal this is always the case.
>>
>> Ironically, this also means that people *do* have free will, as my friend
>> Bill Stoddard explains it:
>>
>> "Now, if physical reality is essentially deterministic—if each
>> fundamental physical entity, based on its nature, state, and relationships,
>> is capable of only one specific next state and one specific action—then
>> human mental processes are deterministic too, and we don't have free will.
>> But if physical reality is essentially indeterministic—if there are
>> occasions when an entity can enter one of two or more next states, or
>> perform one of two or more actions, and which comes next is not merely
>> unpredictable but truly random—then that doesn't give us any more free
>> will, either. Having our actions changed from time to time by the throw of
>> a set of cosmic dice does not equate to our being free to choose among
>> different actions, or to determine our own destiny; it amounts to our being
>> at the mercy of chance. So in a physicalistic view, genuine free will
>> doesn't seem to make much sense. It's hard even to describe what it would
>> consist in.
>>
>
> Interesting, but crude. Human decisions are not always either
> deterministic or random. I suppose you could make a case for either if you
> limit the decisions under study to either crucial moral problems (will I
> kill my wife in a fit of rage? No, because I'm not insane; yes, because I'm
> insane) or routine, habitual decisions (should I eat that bag of potato
> chips at lunch? 40% gleefully; 40% guiltily; 20% no). But you'd need a
> general theory to predict it, and no such theory exists. However, I happily
> concede that 100% free will as philosophy frames it is a pernicious myth,
> and biology presents all sorts of arguments against it.
>
>
>> "In theism, on the other hand, we have a model where God knows all of our
>> actions, past, present, and future, in a single timeless instant of
>> comprehension. In effect, the entire history of the cosmos is a vast
>> simulation model that God is running—except that God has infinite
>> computational capacity and does not need time to run the simulation. But
>> God is also able to interpret the thoughts and feelings and choices that
>> the simulated particles constitute, and thus to simultaneously know the
>> cosmos as a story. And as an author, God can enter into the story and
>> identify with its characters. The capacity to do so is, in Christian terms,
>> the Holy Spirit. But every author has the experience of characters saying,
>> 'No, I wouldn't do that thing, I would do the other thing.' And God, having
>> complete control over the whole narrative, can rewrite it instantaneously
>> to conform to our saying that—rewrite it not on the basis of physical
>> determinism, but on the basis of the content of our thoughts and feelings
>> and desires. God can, if necessary, look back to the big bang and adjust
>> the place where one specific quark appears to give rise to a cosmic history
>> in which we choose salvation or damnation; or, if you prefer indeterminism,
>> God can decide which random particle motions will occur in our brains
>> instant to instant for the same purpose. What we want miraculously but
>> subtly changes the whole cosmos to enable us to be more fully the
>> characters we are. Free will is the gift of the Holy Spirit."
>>
>> Not only is this not an argument for free will---rather, it argues for
> supernatural puppetry and goes to bizarre lengths to do so---it completely
> ignores biology (see above). Unless we're to believe God automatically
> adjusts that too.
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