Is Jesus's "this generation will certainly not pass" valid grounds for scepticism?

Olmstead said:
Define hesitation. At some point in my life I went through all sorts of mental gymnastics to make free will work, probably to stave off some sort of existential dread. But that was a long time ago. And the mental gymnastics didn't make sense. It's impossible to make free will work on any level. Once I accepted that, there were no more mental gymnastics, no more struggle to make anything work, because everything made perfect sense. The only problem were the implications, but life is what it is, and nothing can be done about it.

As for accepting it in daily life, it doesn't really work like that. Most of us, me included, live our lives in the delusion that there is free will. I can deduce it rationally, but ironically my body won't let me truly accept it, because it goes against everything billions of years of evolution have been striving towards. Life needs things to matter, especially one's own actions and decisions, even though it is all a lie. At best, I can force myself to see certain situations from that point of view for short amounts of time, or keep that idea at the back of my head, but I never really had any choice in the matter either.

The only other option would be a sort of enlightenment where one accepts everything, especially one's own death and suffering, with absolute detachment, without horror, blame, or the desire for something better. There might have been people throughout history who approached that state of being, but it's hard to tell, and it's not something a person can actually make themselves into. If it happens, it just happens.
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Do you remember whether it was Darwinism (ie Neo-Darwinism) that debunked the Bible and led to what you written above - or was it purely that the Bible made no sense? You wrote:
Olmstead said:
I don't really know any other way of belief in God. When I was really young, I believed because adults told me, as one does. When I was a little older, I wanted to believe. Then suddenly I didn't. It makes me wonder if all believers feel that way, but it would be useless to ask. No one in that state is ready to admit it.
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Darat said:
Do you mean lurkers? You can't mean the participants who have posted as there isn't one that would agree with your statement.
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Perhaps I should have been clearer:

"....and which many here would point to as proof that God predestined all from the beginning...and would therefore reject God."
 
steenkh said:
Why would that become a problem for atheists? Not believing in gods does not mean that we necessarily must have a free will.

As for the seismic implications, I can only say that even if our will is in fact non-existent, there are so many billions of factors that influence our actions that an illusion of free will is a good approximation to predict people’s actions. And yet, we know that certain pheromones can make us start flirting, other pheromones makes us more susceptible to buying stuff in shops, brain damage can make us change personality, and so on. Free will is only useful for some purposes, but not for others.

Those people that think that if they don’t have a free will, they can do whatever they please, will usually find that their surroundings are not falling for it.
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I can fully understand the argument that their is no such thing as free will. There is absolutely no doubt that every human being is a product of their circumstances. But I see no reasonable argument that I don't have choices however limited by those circumstances.
 
Poem said:
Perhaps I should have been clearer:

"....and which many here would point to as proof that God predestined all from the beginning...and would therefore reject God."
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We all may just be molecules in motion whose actions and reactions are predictable. That does not mean it's because of some guy in the sky.
 
arthwollipot said:
This is basically it. The Catholics invented something called Purgatory which is like a halfway house between death and eternal life, but that's not OG.
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That was really a holdover of their not quite acceptance of what happens to the soul in some of the forms of Judaism that were prevalent during the origins of the Christian religions.
 
acbytesla said:
I can fully understand the argument that their is no such thing as free will. There is absolutely no doubt that every human being is a product of their circumstances. But I see no reasonable argument that I don't have choices however limited by those circumstances.
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If the universe is deterministic in the sense say Issacc Newton believed it was then it works like clockwork, there is no freewill as event b always follows event a and that can't be changed, b will always follow a. (One interesting note although Newton was a Christian - he said he was - he held some quite "heretical" views that would not have gone down well with either the CofE or the RCC.)

We now know the universe does not work like clockwork, we know that at the smallest scales the universe is not deterministic in the old sense of the world, and since for instance a receptor in your eye can be triggered by a single photon humans aren't deterministic, but sadly that does not give us a gap we can shove "free will" into, all it means is that there is some fundamental randomness in the universe, even at macro scales.
 
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Darat said:
If the universe is deterministic in the sense say Issacc Newton believed it was than it works like clockwork, there is no freewill as event b always follows event a and that can't be changed, b will always follow a. (One interesting note although Newton was a Christian - he said he was - he held some quite "heretical" views that would not have gone down well with either the CofE or the RCC.)

We now know the universe does not work like clockwork, we know that at the smallest scales the universe is not deterministic in the old sense of the world, and since for instance a receptor in your eye can be triggered by a single photon humans aren't deterministic, but sadly that does not give us a gap we can shove "free will" into, all it means is that there is some fundamental randomness in the universe, even at macro scales.
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I am not convinced. Even the randomness is as I understand, predictable. See chaos theory.
 
acbytesla said:
I am not convinced. Even the randomness is as I understand, predictable. See chaos theory.
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The current understanding is that randomness is "built into" reality at the quantum scale, that randomness is not predictable - if it was it wouldn't be randomness! The randomness at the quantum level is "smeared out" as you move up in scale. So you can't predict when a single atom of U-232 will decay, but we can predict the half-life of a sample of U-232.
 
Darat said:
The current understanding is that randomness is "built into" reality at the quantum scale, that randomness is not predictable - if it was it wouldn't be randomness! The randomness at the quantum level is "smeared out" as you move up in scale. So you can't predict when a single atom of U-232 will decay, but we can predict the half-life of a sample of U-232.
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Maybe I misunderstand quantum mechanics. But as weird as it is, it is also insanely predictable. And this is why we are now building quantum computers.
 
I want to go back to the Francis Collins question.

Why did Collins believe?

So, this information is pretty well known and can be found easily on-line (I have heard it), but I'd like to ask the poster who asked the question: you tell us why Collins is a believer? Do you know it? Do you consider it to be rational?

HINT: I certainly don't

And Isaac Newton was a theist, but also believed in alchemy and numerology. Such magic was a common belief at that time, but that doesn't mean much to me.
 
Poem said:
Do you remember whether it was Darwinism (ie Neo-Darwinism) that debunked the Bible and led to what you written above - or was it purely that the Bible made no sense? You wrote:
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First off, I had already been an atheist for a while when I accepted that there is no free will. Neither religion nor Darwin really had much to do with it, apart from the fact that I was perhaps more likely to follow a line of though to its most sensible conclusion, rather than blindly accept a comforting lie. I guess if I were Christian I could just say that God magically makes the illogical free will happen, and it's beyond our understanding, but that really isn't an answer.

As for what debunked the Bible for me, I don't think I ever truly believed in the Bible as such. I believed in God, and the Bible was sort of God's word, but also sort of wasn't, and the stuff in it sort of happened, but also sort of didn't. By the time I could have seriously analysed and questioned the Bible, I already questioned the concept of God itself: there was no sensible reason to believe in God, so I stopped.

The Bible didn't really stop me from believing, it just didn't stop me from abandoning my belief. It's one of the final stupid answers that comes up on the journey to lose one's faith. How do I know there's a God? Because the Bible says so. It's another statement that doesn't really answer anything.

Technically no book could have reasonably prevented the loss of faith, unless it pulled some seriously weird supernatural stuff, but it does help that the Bible is so stupid. It probably needed to be stupid. You can't really make a cult out of some "god concept" dreamed up by a philosopher.
 
acbytesla said:
I can fully understand the argument that their is no such thing as free will. There is absolutely no doubt that every human being is a product of their circumstances. But I see no reasonable argument that I don't have choices however limited by those circumstances.
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The argument isn't that you are somewhat limited by circumstances, you are completely limited by them. You are a cluster of arbitrary genes shaped by arbitrary experiences, and every decision you make is completely determined by those two things.
 
Olmstead said:
The argument isn't that you are somewhat limited by circumstances, you are completely limited by them. You are a cluster of arbitrary genes shaped by arbitrary experiences, and every decision you make is completely determined by those two things.
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I guess I don't know what you mean by that. Or how it is any different than what I think about it. Or that what we think about it matters. I can only stare at my navel for so long. I think we have free will. We don't have a choice not to.
 
Poem said:
not even past the prelude.
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Poem, honest to god, I can't even figure out what you are arguing here. As others said, your base approach is perfectly consistent with a Christian trying to subtlely back-door Christianity into acceptance. But as the forum's reigning King on coming across entirely the wrong way, I'm allowing that this is a misreading of your intent.
 
The biggest problem with determining whether we have free will or not is, how could you tell?

How can you tell the difference between actual free will and apparent free will? Kind of by definition, apparent free will looks like free will, even if it isn't.

You can't determine free will by actions. And heck, free will does not even mean the ability to make decisions. Watch a robot, it constantly makes decisions. How can you tell that those decisions are programmed or not just by watching? You certainly can't. And when it comes to your own decisions, how can you tell whether they are really free? You can feel like you have a choice, but in the end, whatever you choose, was there really an option to choose? How can you tell?

I would never say we don't have free will, but I can also confidently say we don't and can't know if we do. So any attempt to use free will to try to explain something is ultimately lacks a foundation.

"Why does God allow evil?"
"Because we have free will."
"How do you know we have free will?"
"Because if we didn't, then God would be bad for allowing evil. Since God is good, we must have free will...."
 
Thermal said:
Poem, honest to god, I can't even figure out what you are arguing here. As others said, your base approach is perfectly consistent with a Christian trying to subtlely back-door Christianity into acceptance. But as the forum's reigning King on coming across entirely the wrong way, I'm allowing that this is a misreading of your intent.
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Yes, that is a misreading. The OP and other issues (I posted on Romans 9), in my opinion, remain good reasons to doubt.

I'm jut not as decided and anti as many on here are. Yours is quite a moderate position too.
 
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