----- Original Message ----- From: "William T Goodall" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Killer Bs Discussion" <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, January 05, 2007 10:30 AM Subject: Re: The Conversion of John C Wright
> > On 5 Jan 2007, at 14:34, Robert Seeberger wrote: >> Indeed, for the entire faith thing to work God must always be >> unprovable and that is the crux of the determinism/freewill duality >> that is so essential to faith. > > There are religions that have a deterministic view and secularists > who argue for free will and vice versa. I'm not sure what your point > is. > Dan could probably answer that much better than I, but I will have a go at it. And this applies mostly for Christianity and only maybe for others. There is Prophecy, which is a sort of precognitive clairvoyant vision in some cases and a gift of data in others, but is almost always deterministic in nature. "One of you will betray/deny me" "The world will end" "A savior will come" "I saw a beast with 7 heads......" It is generally taken as a given that these events will/did occur (and I have read arguments that they occur as a result of freewill, but take that as an aside because I'm not about to attempt to defend it.<G>) More importantly I think is the concept of "Sin". Sin is the result of the exercise of free will where an individual's actions cause harm to another or offend the deity in some way. If the deity is omnipotent and omniscient then all sin is predestined, but if the deity also exists outside of time then sin exists inside a matrix of choice that encompasses all possible choices by individuals thereby giving meaning to both the concept of freewill and to determinism. (At least in a limited sense.) Free Will is a very important concept with regard to sin. How can an act be evil/sinful if one has no choice in the matter? I know that religious writers have struggled with these concepts and written extensively about them. The subject has come up on the list a few times and people have quoted some of these writers when the context was......providential<G>. Elsewhere, I am involved in a very similar discussion with regard to time travel and precognitive clairvoyance WRT the TV show Heroes. There is a guy there who claims to be a physicist, to have worked with Carl Sagan on time travel, and who knows 19 languages. He absolutely believes everything is deterministic. I sooooo wish I could sic a real physicist on him, just to see if he knows anything. (He doesn't seem like it to me) So the subjects of free will and determinism seem to be cropping up in my part of the universe lately. xponent Local And Indeterministic Maru rob _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
