Searching for GOD...

[torridon]

But the probability that that Homo sapiens are unique in their attributes of perceived free will and self awareness would indicate that they have been singled out as something special, and are not just a chance outcome but have been nurtured by a creative source beyond our imaginaton.  It is not just wishful thinking to believe we are special.  It is reality.

Notwithstanding the fact that free-will is really just an element of your belief system rather than an actuality and notwithstanding the fact self-awareness is not unique to Sapiens, there is no substantive reason to suppose that our qualities are unique in the universe; we just don't know.  And the fact that we are currently unique on this planet is down to well understood processes in evolutionary biology whereby closely related rival species end up eliminating each other or merging with the result that now there is only one extant upright hominid and most of those individuals including me and you probably are really Neanderthal/Sapiens hybrids.  As far as I know, our minds, our bodies, and our genes all bear testament in their own ways to the characteristic messy heritage you get with classic Darwinian principles.  If there were some guiding hand at work in our evolution it seems to have done a sterling job at hiding its traces.

[Alan Burns]

Notwithstanding the fact that free-will is really just an element of your belief system rather than an actuality and notwithstanding the fact self-awareness is not unique to Sapiens, there is no substantive reason to suppose that our qualities are unique in the universe; we just don't know.  And the fact that we are currently unique on this planet is down to well understood processes in evolutionary biology whereby closely related rival species end up eliminating each other or merging with the result that now there is only one extant upright hominid and most of those individuals including me and you probably are really Neanderthal/Sapiens hybrids.  As far as I know, our minds, our bodies, and our genes all bear testament in their own ways to the characteristic messy heritage you get with classic Darwinian principles.  If there were some guiding hand at work in our evolution it seems to have done a sterling job at hiding its traces.

You seem to see things so much differently to myself.
Once you can accept that acts of free will can interact with our physical universe, I see the obvious hand of God bringing about all the beneficial mutations needed to create the wonderful diversity of life on this planet.  We can't assume that God would do it any differently because we can't presume to know how God works.

But what sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom is the power of free thinking which allows us to believe (or disbelieve) in God.  What is belief?  Is it the inevitable chemical reactions in our brain which produce external reactions, or is it the inner conviction experienced within the human soul?

[Outrider]

You seem to see things so much differently to myself.

You don't say? 

Once you can accept that acts of free will can interact with our physical universe, I see the obvious hand of God bringing about all the beneficial mutations needed to create the wonderful diversity of life on this planet.

Firstly, why would anyone accept the idea of free will when it's nonsensical? Secondly, even if you accept we have free will, why would that automatically lead to 'therefore a god', and even if you accepted the idea of a god, why accept 'God'?

We can't assume that God would do it any differently because we can't presume to know how God works.

We have no reason to presume THAT God works.

But what sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom is the power of free thinking which allows us to believe (or disbelieve) in God.

I think it's more that it allows us to construct an internal and external system of meaning which allows abstracts - God is, of course, one of these, but so (and more importantly) are concepts like numbers, justice, fairness, honesty, love.

What is belief?  Is it the inevitable chemical reactions in our brain which produce external reactions, or is it the inner conviction experienced within the human soul?

It's a particular pattern of activity in the chemical reactions in the brain, not the chemical reactions themselves, in much the same way that a sea view is not the water, or the light, but the pattern of the reflected light as it reaches the eye.

As to the soul... what soul?

O.

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

Once you can accept that acts of free will can interact with our physical universe...

But how can anyone "accept" your understanding of free will when you've yet to demonstrate that it exists at all?

I see the obvious hand of God bringing about all the beneficial mutations needed to create the wonderful diversity of life on this planet.

I explained why this is wrong back in Reply 5178. You're just looking after the event and assuming that there was a plan to produce this particular outcome rather than any other.

We can't assume that God would do it any differently because we can't presume to know how God works.

"We can't assume God" is all that's needed there.

But what sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom is the power of free thinking which allows us to believe (or disbelieve) in God.What is belief?  Is it the inevitable chemical reactions in our brain which produce external reactions, or is it the inner conviction experienced within the human soul?

Occam's razor - the latter has the additional assumption of a "soul", so in the absence of any evidence for it opt for the former. 

[Gonnagle]

Dear Clueless, ( no not you, me )

Einstein Credo.

There is supposed to a written copy and a recording.

"It is a special blessing to belong among those who can and may devote their best energies to the contemplation and exploration of objective and timeless things. How happy and grateful I am for having been granted this blessing, which bestows upon one a large measure of independence from one's personal fate and from the attitude of one's contemporaries. Yet this independence must not inure us to the awareness of the duties that constantly bind us to the past, present and future of humankind at large.

Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here, involuntarily and uninvited, for a short stay, without knowing the why and the wherefore. In our daily lives we feel only that man is here for the sake of others, for those whom we love and for many other beings whose fate is connected with our own.

I am often troubled by the thought that my life is based to such a large extent on the work of my fellow human beings, and I am aware of my great indebtedness to them.

I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer's words: 'Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills,' accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from losing my temper.

I have never coveted affluence and luxury and even despise them a good deal. My passion for social justice has often brought me into conflict with people, as has my aversion to any obligation and dependence I did not regard as absolutely necessary.

[Part 2]
I have a high regard for the individual and an insuperable distaste for violence and fanaticism. All these motives have made me a passionate pacifist and antimilitarist. I am against any chauvinism, even in the guise of mere patriotism.

Privileges based on position and property have always seemed to me unjust and pernicious, as does any exaggerated personality cult. I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I know well the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual have always seemed to me the important communal aims of the state.

Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice keeps me from feeling isolated.

The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all there is."

Einstein signature, 1932

Now!! I think along the same lines as Leonardjames, we both struggle with this idea of freewill.

[Gonnagle]

Dear forum,

Sorry folks, pressed the wrong button.

To continue.

We then have this guy, Michio Kaku.

Big Think: Newtonian Determinism says that the universe is a clock, a gigantic clock that’s wound up in the beginning of time and has been ticking ever since according to Newton’s laws of motion. So what you’re going to eat 10 years from now on January 1st has already been fixed. It’s already known using Newton’s laws of motion. Einstein believed in that. Einstein was a determinist.

Does that mean that a murderer, this horrible mass murderer isn’t really guilty of his works because he was already preordained billions of years ago? Einstein said well yeah, in some sense that’s true that even mass murderers were predetermined, but he said, they should still be placed in jail.

Heisenberg then comes along and proposes the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and says: ”Nonsense. There is uncertainty. You don’t know where the electron is. It could be here, here or many places simultaneously.” This of course Einstein hated because he said God doesn’t play dice with the universe. Well hey, get used to it. Einstein was wrong. God does play dice. Every time we look at an electron it moves. There is uncertainty with regards to the position of the electron.

So what does that mean for free will? It means in some sense we do have some kind of free will. No one can determine your future events given your past history. There is always the wildcard. There is always the possibility of uncertainty in whatever we do.

So when I look at myself in a mirror I say to myself what I'm looking at is not really me. It looks like me, but it’s not really me at all. It’s not me today now. It’s me a billionth of a second ago because it takes a billionth of a second for light to go from me to the mirror and back.

Is this Kaku talking nonsense, or should I find out more

Just looking for a little feedback from the forum.

Gonnagle.

[Outrider]

Big Think: Newtonian Determinism says that the universe is a clock, a gigantic clock that’s wound up in the beginning of time and has been ticking ever since according to Newton’s laws of motion. So what you’re going to eat 10 years from now on January 1st has already been fixed. It’s already known using Newton’s laws of motion. Einstein believed in that. Einstein was a determinist.

Does that mean that a murderer, this horrible mass murderer isn’t really guilty of his works because he was already preordained billions of years ago? Einstein said well yeah, in some sense that’s true that even mass murderers were predetermined, but he said, they should still be placed in jail.

That really rather depends on what you think jail is for. If it's a punishment, then no you shouldn't put them in jail, they're not responsible. On the other hand, if you think jail is for rehabilitiation, then yes you should.

Heisenberg then comes along and proposes the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and says: ”Nonsense. There is uncertainty. You don’t know where the electron is. It could be here, here or many places simultaneously.” This of course Einstein hated because he said God doesn’t play dice with the universe. Well hey, get used to it. Einstein was wrong. God does play dice. Every time we look at an electron it moves. There is uncertainty with regards to the position of the electron.

That uncertainty is in our knowledge - we don't know where it is, definitively. It may be that it's not definitively in a particular place or a particular state, and at the moment with the way quantum mechanics is modelled but not understand the odds of a particular event are fairly predictable. To some this means that there is uncertainty between options but it's limited, to others this means there's a deterministic mechanism that we've not fully understood yet.

So what does that mean for free will? It means in some sense we do have some kind of free will. No one can determine your future events given your past history. There is always the wildcard. There is always the possibility of uncertainty in whatever we do.

Free will, ultimately, is untenable, not because of physics per se, but because of logic. At the level at which thought works, biochemical brain reactions the universe is deterministic - if we will something it's the result of previous inputs. If something bypasses that cause and effect system in order to be free - be it quantum effects, some sort of 'soul' input - then that freedom precludes it being will any longer. Any given decision is either will, or it's free, but it can't be both.

So when I look at myself in a mirror I say to myself what I'm looking at is not really me. It looks like me, but it’s not really me at all. It’s not me today now. It’s me a billionth of a second ago because it takes a billionth of a second for light to go from me to the mirror and back.

Doesn't the universe just turn your head inside out, sometimes? Of course, this calls into question the very notion of time - if what I'm seeing is no longer there, does it still exist? Is there only a constant now, or is time  a dimension stretching away beyond our capacity to detect forward and backward... that latter only increases the likelihood of predetermination, of course.

Is this Kaku talking nonsense, or should I find out more

Just looking for a little feedback from the forum.

I think Kaku is talking nonsense, but only as much as any of us are. We're into the realms where our systems of knowledge no longer serve us well, everything can only be depicted mathematically because the physical rules we have evolved to work with don't interact in the same way at the scales we're talking about. We're all stumbling about in the dark on this, and nobody has a torch, but some people are aware of exactly how dark it is and others aren't.

O.

[Gonnagle]

Dear Outrider,

This whole freewill thing is a troubled road for me ( old Nearlysanes fault )

Anyway I am no further forward

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/proceed-your-own-risk/201311/do-we-have-free-will

So is Alan Burns wrong with his stance on freewill.

Or should I just accept my Heroes thinking, wee Albert, we need to pretend that we have freewill, an illusion but one that we need.

Gonnagle.

[Outrider]

Dear Outrider,

This whole freewill thing is a troubled road for me ( old Nearlysanes fault )

Anyway I am no further forward

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/proceed-your-own-risk/201311/do-we-have-free-will

So is Alan Burns wrong with his stance on freewill.

Or should I just accept my Heroes thinking, wee Albert, we need to pretend that we have freewill, an illusion but one that we need.

Gonnagle.

Society is built upon the precept that we have free will, we operate as individuals on the presumption that we have free will. Whether we do or don't doesn't really change the experience of living, so I just operate on the understanding that I'm trying to maximise that experience (of course, that's not my fault, that's just how I am  ).

Personally, I don't see how we can, my take is that Alan is wrong - I can't prove we don't have free will, but then there's a whole raft of things I can't disprove. What I've yet to see is an explanation of free will that makes sense, whether it conjures 'supernatural' elements like 'souls' or 'spirits' or not - until then...

O.

[Rhiannon]

I've spent years living my life from one set of given beliefs - not religious - and I'm now trying to live in a different way. Am I choosing to do this?

[Outrider]

I've spent years living my life from one set of given beliefs - not religious - and I'm now trying to live in a different way. Am I choosing to do this?

Almost certainly - the question is, in that same situation, would you ever choose anything different? Is there the possibility you could have chosen to, say, return to your previous faith, or abandon spirituality altogether, and still be you?

You chose your path, but it seems unlikely that you could actually have decided upon any of the other feasible paths.

O.

[Gonnagle]

Dear Rhiannon,

A minefield, do we choose our parents, do we choose which school we go to, do we choose which country we are born in or live in.

Actually that has me thinking, old Shaker talking about his natural pagan soul and how he likes the Autumn a person born in a hot climate which with hardly any differences in seasons, would his natural pagan soul be different, did Shaker choose his naturally pagan soul.

A minefield this freewill stuff.

Gonnagle.

[Rhiannon]

I've spent years living my life from one set of given beliefs - not religious - and I'm now trying to live in a different way. Am I choosing to do this?

Almost certainly - the question is, in that same situation, would you ever choose anything different? Is there the possibility you could have chosen to, say, return to your previous faith, or abandon spirituality altogether, and still be you?

You chose your path, but it seems unlikely that you could actually have decided upon any of the other feasible paths.

O.

I wasn't thinking about spirituality so much as the 'stories' I believed about myself, picked up from family and reinforced by others. They weren't especially helpful or nice, and I'd prefer to believe something different.

[bluehillside Retd.]

Rhi,

I've spent years living my life from one set of given beliefs - not religious - and I'm now trying to live in a different way. Am I choosing to do this?

Depends what you mean by "I". If you opt for the Alan Burns version of free will you have to invent an invisible little man at the controls (called the "soul" or some such) who's the real "I" telling the rest of you what to do (but who apparently does not have another little man at his controls telling him what to do).

Fortunately there's no evidence for such a thing and neuroscience increasingly tells us that there's no need for it (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/illusion-conscious-will etc) so that leaves you with an indivisible "I". The question then would be, could all the bits of your brain have done anything else given an identical set of circumstances? As the answer seems to be "no" - after all what mechanism could have caused a different outcome? - then it seems we live in a deterministic universe, albeit with the strong impression of free will possibly because it confers an evolutionary advantage.     

 

[Alan Burns]

My own take on free will:

The conclusion that free will is an illusion is based upon the assumption that thought processes in the brain are derived entirely from the physical state of the brain cells.  This conclusion is validated by the fact that there is nothing else we can detect in the brain, and physical activity in the brain cells can be detected during certain thought processes.  In some instances, the physical brain activity precedes the conscious awareness of a "free will" decision.

Most of the world's religions believe that there is more to humanity than a physical body.  The concept of humans having a soul which will survive the death of the material body is central to Christianity, and if this soul is to be held responsible for the way we run our lives, it must have some control over what we do.  So if free will exists, the soul has to be the source of free will.  How it can interact with the deterministic nature of the material in our brain cells would most likely be via the quantum events which appear to have no discernable cause, but may well have an undetectable spiritual cause derived from the soul.  And if the soul is not restricted by deterministic rules of science, it may do whatever is needed to enact a free will choice, even if it means going back in time to set the brain cells in motion.

My own take on reality is that my conscious awareness and free thought processes invoke the choices I make.  There is no scientific definition of how conscious awareness and free thoughts arise from our brain cells.  The best science can offer is that it is an "emergent property", but this is just a phrase used for a perceived pattern of activity made up from simple elements.  It still requires some form of  awareness to perceive the pattern of activity as a whole rather than as individual elements.  We have the Leibnitz Mill argument which likens the brain to a mill of machinery with each part pulling or pushing other parts, but nothing to give overall perception of what is taking place.  My own conscious awareness must be able percieve the content of many hundreds (or thousands) of brain cells in any particular instant, with free thought processes going on at the same time.  The human soul to me is the only feasible explanation for how I can come to terms with the reality I perceive.

[ekim]

Gonnagle

So is Alan Burns wrong with his stance on freewill

I think he is approaching it from the wrong angle.  I would suggest that a follower of Jesus would see it as a conflict between 'self' will, in the sense of being attached to those desires and fears which promote being self centred (including group self centeredness) and being united with God's Will.  It implies free choice rather than free will e.g. God or Mammon.  The attachments to 'self' considerations is strong and is personified by Satan, and the story of the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness is to illustrate what those who aspire to 'power and glory' have to confront.... the possibility of megalomania.

[ippy]

My own take on free will:

The conclusion that free will is an illusion is based upon the assumption that thought processes in the brain are derived entirely from the physical state of the brain cells.  This conclusion is validated by the fact that there is nothing else we can detect in the brain, and physical activity in the brain cells can be detected during certain thought processes.  In some instances, the physical brain activity precedes the conscious awareness of a "free will" decision.

Most of the world's religions believe that there is more to humanity than a physical body.  The concept of humans having a soul which will survive the death of the material body is central to Christianity, and if this soul is to be held responsible for the way we run our lives, it must have some control over what we do.  So if free will exists, the soul has to be the source of free will.  How it can interact with the deterministic nature of the material in our brain cells would most likely be via the quantum events which appear to have no discernable cause, but may well have an undetectable spiritual cause derived from the soul.  And if the soul is not restricted by deterministic rules of science, it may do whatever is needed to enact a free will choice, even if it means going back in time to set the brain cells in motion.

My own take on reality is that my conscious awareness and free thought processes invoke the choices I make.  There is no scientific definition of how conscious awareness and free thoughts arise from our brain cells.  The best science can offer is that it is an "emergent property", but this is just a phrase used for a perceived pattern of activity made up from simple elements.  It still requires some form of  awareness to perceive the pattern of activity as a whole rather than as individual elements.  We have the Leibnitz Mill argument which likens the brain to a mill of machinery with each part pulling or pushing other parts, but nothing to give overall perception of what is taking place.  My own conscious awareness must be able percieve the content of many hundreds (or thousands) of brain cells in any particular instant, with free thought processes going on at the same time.  The human soul to me is the only feasible explanation for how I can come to terms with the reality I perceive.

Perhaps you might take up a serious suggestion from me, my wife took up child psychology and has gone as far as her GCSE A level we have other professional interested people in my immediate family, I'm only a looker on, they have all mentioned how difficult the course work is for students that have religious beliefs of one kind or another, quite a challenge for their beliefs so I'm told.

Perhaps you might like to go for the Open university and do a course on human psychology, one thing it would be a good thing to do and it could also sort out a large amount of the questions that you might see as challenging at the moment.

ippy     

[Outrider]

The conclusion that free will is an illusion is based upon the assumption that thought processes in the brain are derived entirely from the physical state of the brain cells.

No, it's based on the observation that activity in the brain strongly correlates with, and pre-empts the awareness of thought processes. In the absence of evidence for any other strongly or weakly correlating system, it's a reasonable deduction that brain activity causes consciousness. It's not an assumption, it's a deduction.

This conclusion is validated by the fact that there is nothing else we can detect in the brain, and physical activity in the brain cells can be detected during certain thought processes.  In some instances, the physical brain activity precedes the conscious awareness of a "free will" decision.

All this is true, but you have the events back to front: the conclusion comes from the evidence, it isn't that the evidence confirms a preconception.

Most of the world's religions believe that there is more to humanity than a physical body.

Most of the world's religions believe many things for which there's no evidence.

The concept of humans having a soul which will survive the death of the material body is central to Christianity, and if this soul is to be held responsible for the way we run our lives, it must have some control over what we do.

I'm more than willing to be corrected on this, but I was under the impression that at least some schools of Christian thought held that our souls was not in control, but was rather a sort of score-sheet - our activities in life stained the soul to a greater or lesser degree, but not that it was the controlling influence in our lives.

So if free will exists, the soul has to be the source of free will.

Even in your own formulation of the argument, no. If there's free will, and if there's  a soul, there's still no reason to presume that the soul is the source of free will, they could be unrelated alleged phenomena.

How it can interact with the deterministic nature of the material in our brain cells would most likely be via the quantum events which appear to have no discernable cause, but may well have an undetectable spiritual cause derived from the soul.

The quantum world is still the material - that we don't understand all the mechanisms doesn't allow you to randomly insert supernatural phenomena, that's just 'god of the gaps' argument of the level of Depak Chopra.

And if the soul is not restricted by deterministic rules of science, it may do whatever is needed to enact a free will choice, even if it means going back in time to set the brain cells in motion.

So if the soul exists, and if it's not deterministic (despite the fact that everything else we can demonstrate exists is deterministic) and if it interacts with the brain in some way we can neither detect nor demonstrate, then it might be the source of the free will we have no evidence to suggest exists in the first place... You do see that's more than just a bit of a stretch, right?

My own take on reality is that my conscious awareness and free thought processes invoke the choices I make.

And you're entitled to that idea, but that's all it is: an idea, devoid of any basis in reality.

There is no scientific definition of how conscious awareness and free thoughts arise from our brain cells.

There is, you just don't like that definition.

The best science can offer is that it is an "emergent property", but this is just a phrase used for a perceived pattern of activity made up from simple elements.

Whereas 'soul' is just a phrase used in place of 'I don't know, and not knowing scares me'. Emergent properties are as well defined as they can be, well evidenced and in this instance supported by the available evidence.

It still requires some form of  awareness to perceive the pattern of activity as a whole rather than as individual elements.  We have the Leibnitz Mill argument which likens the brain to a mill of machinery with each part pulling or pushing other parts, but nothing to give overall perception of what is taking place.  My own conscious awareness must be able percieve the content of many hundreds (or thousands) of brain cells in any particular instant, with free thought processes going on at the same time.  The human soul to me is the only feasible explanation for how I can come to terms with the reality I perceive.

The argument from personal incredulity - I can't understand/accept the scientific explanation, therefore 'soul'.

You still haven't explained how something can feasibly be both 'free' and 'will', that I've seen to suggest that the concept is viable in the first place, but even if it were this is far, far short of any sort of explanation for how it comes about.

O.

[torridon]

My own take on free will:

The conclusion that free will is an illusion is based upon the assumption that thought processes in the brain are derived entirely from the physical state of the brain cells.  This conclusion is validated by the fact that there is nothing else we can detect in the brain, and physical activity in the brain cells can be detected during certain thought processes.  In some instances, the physical brain activity precedes the conscious awareness of a "free will" decision.

Most of the world's religions believe that there is more to humanity than a physical body.  The concept of humans having a soul which will survive the death of the material body is central to Christianity, and if this soul is to be held responsible for the way we run our lives, it must have some control over what we do.  So if free will exists, the soul has to be the source of free will.  How it can interact with the deterministic nature of the material in our brain cells would most likely be via the quantum events which appear to have no discernable cause, but may well have an undetectable spiritual cause derived from the soul.  And if the soul is not restricted by deterministic rules of science, it may do whatever is needed to enact a free will choice, even if it means going back in time to set the brain cells in motion.

My own take on reality is that my conscious awareness and free thought processes invoke the choices I make.  There is no scientific definition of how conscious awareness and free thoughts arise from our brain cells.  The best science can offer is that it is an "emergent property", but this is just a phrase used for a perceived pattern of activity made up from simple elements.  It still requires some form of  awareness to perceive the pattern of activity as a whole rather than as individual elements.  We have the Leibnitz Mill argument which likens the brain to a mill of machinery with each part pulling or pushing other parts, but nothing to give overall perception of what is taking place.  My own conscious awareness must be able percieve the content of many hundreds (or thousands) of brain cells in any particular instant, with free thought processes going on at the same time.  The human soul to me is the only feasible explanation for how I can come to terms with the reality I perceive.

Multiple issues with that, and they all owe a debt to your base strategy of starting with beliefs and trying to map them onto observed science, rather than just taking in what we have discovered to date and trying to understand it on its own terms without all the religious overlay. Most markedly, the insistence on a human soul as the real causal agent because that pushes you into a solipsist position of insisting that all other animals must be organic mechanoids devoid of any inner feelings because your overarching religious narrative denies souls to creatures other than Sapiens. I don't think you have faced up to that yet.

As far as I can see, there is no need to invent a 'soul' to explain decision making, it is a spurious addition, and anyway, free-will makes no sense conceptually. When a choice is made, that choice defines what our will is.  Being 'free' of our will makes no sense. On what basis could we make a choice if it was not our will ? Admittedly we feel free, that is because the range from which we can choose is often enormous and we are not consciously aware of the constraints, but there again I am not aware of the vast majority of things going on in my body. I cannot feel the state of my spleen right now, nor my left kidney. Awareness is on a strict need-to-know basis.

[Alan Burns]

I'm more than willing to be corrected on this, but I was under the impression that at least some schools of Christian thought held that our souls was not in control, but was rather a sort of score-sheet - our activities in life stained the soul to a greater or lesser degree, but not that it was the controlling influence in our lives.

This reminds me of what I learnt in primary school.  I imagined my soul to be a big white balloon which I carried round with me, and it got stained with black marks when I did something wrong, but I was able to get it cleaned up again by going to confession.

As I matured I realised that if my soul is destined for heaven, my "awareness" must be in my soul, not in my body, otherwise I would not perceive heaven.  And the lack of any feasible material definition of awareness means that science does not contradict this realisation.  As I previously stated, my most basic concept of reality dictates that it is awareness (my soul) that drives my free will decisions, and ultimately defines my destiny.  So hence my conclusion that it is our human soul which gives awareness and free will, and will ultimately define our destiny.
(And I still need to get cleaned up occasionally by going to confession!)

[torridon]

As I matured I realised that if my soul is destined for heaven, my "awareness" must be in my soul, not in my body, otherwise I would not perceive heaven.  And the lack of any feasible material definition of awareness means that science does not contradict this realisation.  As I previously stated, my most basic concept of reality dictates that it is awareness (my soul) that drives my free will decisions, and ultimately defines my destiny.  So hence my conclusion that it is our human soul which gives awareness and free will, and will ultimately define our destiny.
(And I still need to get cleaned up occasionally by going to confession!)

Well as most higher animals seem to have some degree of awareness you have to give souls to other animals as well. Something has to give because this thinking does not add up. Given that there isn't any actual evidence for souls. or for heaven, or for free will, or for Gods or devils or witches or demons or angels, and further, that most of these concepts do not even make sense if you try to think them through, I'm proposing that it is the beliefs that have to give.

To me, it seems that religious beliefs, rather than explaining our condition, they provide a philosophical framework to form a backstory to our lives that is good enough, good enough for most people, good enough for most of the time. But they don't really explain it, they just purport to. To get to an authentic understanding which is true to the evidence requires abandoning cultural belief systems, they just get in the way, they obscure truth, rather than clarify it, ultimately.

[Alan Burns]

Perhaps you might take up a serious suggestion from me, my wife took up child psychology and has gone as far as her GCSE A level we have other professional interested people in my immediate family, I'm only a looker on, they have all mentioned how difficult the course work is for students that have religious beliefs of one kind or another, quite a challenge for their beliefs so I'm told.

Perhaps you might like to go for the Open university and do a course on human psychology, one thing it would be a good thing to do and it could also sort out a large amount of the questions that you might see as challenging at the moment.

ippy   

A Christian friend of mine had a son who suffered behavioural problems and was advised to seek help from an expert in child psychology.  The expert diagnosed that the problem was caused by the parental Christian teachings given to the child, and reccommended that the child be taken away from the parent!  The fact that this parent had four other perfectly normal children was not considered.  This mother then had to jump through several hoops to get her son's problem diagnosed correctly and get appropriate treatment which proved successful.

This Christian friend will not mind me disclosing her identity as the writer and broadcaster Anne Atkins, who now has a very poor opinion of experts in child psychology.

[Shaker]

Ugh, that vile woman. I can well believe any offspring of hers having issues.

[Rhiannon]

Didn't one of them run away?

She came to public notice because of her bigoted anti-gay Thought for the Day broadcast. She then had an advice column for teens in the Telegraph.

Thankfully the Telegraph now use Graham Norton.

[Shaker]

Didn't one of them run away?

If they had any sense.