Whether free will is barred by determinism depends on what free will IS,
doesn't it? I don't think they are incompatible at all. Why should they be
incompatible?
> However I thought
> Christians were supposedly free to choose God or reject him, to choose
good
> or evil. It is difficult for me to understand a god who urges people to
> follow a certain course, but then leaves them no choice about the
decision.
> (I do not in any way intend this as a criticism, merely a failure on my
part
> to understand.)
>
> As an agnostic, my acceptance of free will and design have nothing to do
with
> god. It merely seems the most obvious. To decide what appears to be
reality
> is really an illusion seems tortious reasoning to me. The universe looks
> designed to me (as well as to Dawkins)
CC
I don't think Dawkins said that the UNIVERSE looked designed, but only that
living organisms look designed -- and devoted a whole book to showing why
the conclusion that they ARE designed is objectively unfounded.
> and I have no desire to wonder if it
> is an illusion or speculate about the nature of any designer. I
personally
> experience free will, and not being constrained by materialism, have no
> reason to decide it is an illusion.
Actually, whether you have free will (even in your sense of free will) is
independent of materialism, since, regardless of whether the mind is
matter-based or based on something else, the same questions arise as to how
it functions. If there actually exists something that is non-matter in the
sense of being neither dependent on matter nor on whatever basic substance
matter is based on or made of, then, it, too, must exhibit the same basic
causal laws as does anything else: What it IS logically specifies what it
DOES, because, ultimately, what it does simply IS what it is.
> In fact, I see no reason to deny that the
> most primitive life forms have some small measure of free will. How can
we
> possibly know what goes into determining whether a paramecium turns right
or
> left?
In principle, this is easy: Examine it's molecular structure down to a
sufficient level of detail. Or disable various molecular mechanisms and see
which way it turns both with and with out them. Start from the act of
turning right or left and back up from there, gradually eliminating things
that don't cause it to turn the way it turns.
> Whether an organism fights or flees? Whether a mammal stays put, or
> explores and tries some new behavior? For that matter, how can we know
what
> determines when a particle leaves the nucleus of an atom?
Again, in principle, we would do this by positing possibilities eliminating
everything else except the right one(s). Right now, of course, we don't have
the means (YET) to examine the nucleus and its environment closely enough.
> All we know is
> that follows some pattern which allows a large collection of similar atoms
to
> do so at a predictable rate. To me, it seems simplistic and premature to
> decide some of the relationships of nature which we have discovered in the
> year 2000 are "ultimate truths". (No desire to convert anyone, but you
DID
> ask.)
>
> Bertvan
>