Searching for GOD...

[Stranger]

But the infinite regress lies with the logic of physical determinacy.  If everything is a consequence of previous events, there can be no definitive causal event, and therefore no originating cause for an act of deliberation.  Everything just regresses back through chains of cause and effect to the beginning of time.  So in this deterministic scenario, my mind is just an inevitable consequence of past events over which there can be no control other than the laws of physics.

Do you believe that this is the scenario which determines your conscious choices?

The deliberation is part of the chain and, yes, I do believe it, with the proviso that there may be randomness, or at least effective randomness, and almost certainly chaos (in the mathematical sense).

However, you missed the point (or deliberately ignored it) you can't choose your wants because then you'd have to want to want one want more than another. Then you'd have to choose that want, and so on, off to infinity in the here and now - before you could make a choice.

[torridon]

Speak for yourself, but I have the freedom to choose what I want to do.
As any teenager will say, - "I can do what I want"

No one is denying that we do what we want.  Go read the posts and stop wasting people's time denying straw men that no one is arguing for.  Here we go again, please read and digest :

We are free to do what we want; however no one is free to choose which wants to have.

This is a fundamental principal of how minds resolve choice, your mind, my mind, anyone's mind.

[torridon]

So we can have no personal control over what we do?
Do you honestly presume that I have no personal control over the content of this reply?

Your 'personal control' is the exercise of your personal preferences, over which you have no control. No one can want something they don't want; what we do is act on the desires that we do have.

[The Accountant, OBE, KC]

I do not use emotion as a basis for my beliefs.

I care if they are true, and emotion is not a reliable pathway to truth.

Ok - if that's what you believe about yourself. I have no way of testing for whether it's true or false that god exists, so while I care about whether it is true, my subjective experience seems to be what determines whether I hold a belief god exists.

I'm assuming you are specifically talking about a belief as to whether something exists, rather than all beliefs?

I assume you use emotion as a basis for beliefs that don't have a true or false about existing but are about personal ethics. 

For example, if I was told tomorrow that I had terminal cancer because the treatment available on the NHS or under my private medical insurance wasn't working and I was offered a chance of some expensive experimental treatment that might prolong my life but that I would personally have to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for, I believe it's not worth the money or the effort involved to take that treatment and that it's more important for my family to accept that I am going to die fairly soon and use the hundreds of thousands of pounds and the time they would have spent (taking care of a very sick me that would probably be permanently weakened even if I gained another 5-10 years of life) to make the most of their own lives after I died.

I think my above belief is based on emotion - it's not a true or false.

[The Accountant, OBE, KC]

I pretty well agree with this. The question is whether 'emotional' is an accurate description of it. It's almost non rational rather than about emotion, but I feel things to be true/false and then as you say add in the reasons afterwards.

Possibly that's a better word to use. I'm not sure. I can reason that my life seems to work better with my interpretation of Islam and god in it, but it's possible that the metrics that I use would be different from the metrics someone else might use to judge "better" or "worse" and a lot of the metrics are of course qualitative rather than quantitative. About the only quantitative one I can think of, off the top of my head, is the significant increase in my bank account when I stopped drinking alcohol. I'm sure there must be others but can't think of it right now. On the other hand, if I hadn't stopped drinking alcohol and therefore hadn't had kids I would probably have networked more, especially with more senior people in the business, and got a lot more promotions in my investment banking job rather than switching to accountancy for a better work-life balance, and would be earning a much bigger salary than the my current more tax-efficient salary ...so maybe that's not a good metric to use.

Also there are different types of belief. I know what time the train is due to arrive, and based on my usage the likelihood of it arriving. But as to morality or beauty, I don't have that derived in the same way. Religion seems to start in the area of beauty/ugliness and then in the cases of some religions move into the area of trains in making objective claims to truth. I know you have had an ongoing discussion about what people mean when they use the term truth, and I agree that some religious people use it in an almost mystical sense rather than the objective idea that is more common, but it's difficult to see that AB is using it in a way that isn't a claim to objective truth. That said, how AB uses it is a discussion to be had with him, here I'm just using him as a possible example.

I agree that AB is making an objective claim - the existence of something. The only point I was trying to make was that when he used the word "true" it was in connection to his spiritual conviction based on subjective experience rather than objective evidence that souls or gods exist, as neither of those concepts are testable or, if I understand his opinion correctly, these concepts are not part of this material world but 'exist' in some other realm/ dimension that he also can't provide any evidence for. So 'exist' in relation to the supernatural doesn't seem to mean the same thing as when 'exist' is used in relation to the natural.

I am reminded of John 18:37-38
"You are a king, then!” said Pilate. Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” “What is truth?” retorted Pilate. With this he went out again to the Jews gathered there and said, “I find no basis for a charge against him.”

I looked that up and yes I suppose the meaning I get from the way Jesus is described as using the word "truth" here is that it is not referring to something ascertainable by science. Jesus said his kingdom was not of this world.

[jeremyp]

That is your personal opinion, but millions of highly intelligent Christians would beg to disagree.

And billions of highly intelligent non Christians would beg to agree.

Honestly, given that Christians are outnumbered by non Christians by at least two to one, do you not see that claiming numbers makes you right looks utterly stupid?

[Alan Burns]

And billions of highly intelligent non Christians would beg to agree.

I doubt if they would agree to Stranger's claim that the evidence of the new testament is "laughable", which is the context of my original post.

[Sassy]

* sigh *

Back to the endless, thought-free repetition of baseless assertions that have been addressed endless times before. Can you actually think at all, let alone deeply? How much thought does it take to realise that people have already given you answers to what you're typing and that you've just ignored them?

Answers according to whom or what?  The fact is that man has only his own assertions and you seem to think because someone has written or stated something according to your own thoughts that it is absolute. NOTHING is absolute when it comes to faith and faith isn't just religious.

[Sassy]

What happens to the brains of those with mental illness? Do they choose what they want?  I am not sure that people really think about the reality of not being able to choose the reactions in the body caused by the brain if chemicals imbalance.  Do you wonder why you have these long drawn out discussions when really it is a matter of faith and choice?

[Sriram]

https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p04s223f/physics-suggests-that-the-future-has-already-happened

[torridon]

https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p04s223f/physics-suggests-that-the-future-has-already-happened

The block universe puts the most fundamental nail in the coffin of free will 

[Stranger]

I doubt if they would agree to Stranger's claim that the evidence of the new testament is "laughable", which is the context of my original post.

I stand by this 100% - citing the NT as objective evidence for a god is laughable. I doubt you'll find many thinking Christians who would say that it was. It's a collection of old writings (the gospels written well after the events they describe) that were written by and selected by believers.

In what possible way do you think it's objective evidence of a god?

[Gordon]

I doubt if they would agree to Stranger's claim that the evidence of the new testament is "laughable", which is the context of my original post.

Oh I think a good chunk of them might: aside from what is trivially true, such as place names, the extent to which the NT incorporates mistakes or lies is an unresolved risk that undermines it being viewed as historical fact, especially when it comes to outlandish claims such as the resurrection.

[Sriram]

The block universe puts the most fundamental nail in the coffin of free will 

There is a belief that God knows all past, present and future. He is beyond Time. It may seem conflicting but could still fit into the world order. 

Just as randomness and uncertainty principle may seem valid at one level but everything fits into the classical world very well.  Similarly freewill could be valid at one level but could nevertheless fit into the bigger picture of everything being predestined.

[wigginhall]

I doubt if they would agree to Stranger's claim that the evidence of the new testament is "laughable", which is the context of my original post.

I don't understand how a collection of documents are evidence for anything.   They record what some people seem to have believed, but this doesn't tell us about their veracity.  If I dig up some documents showing that people believed in phlogiston, does this mean that it exists?

[Alan Burns]

I stand by this 100% - citing the NT as objective evidence for a god is laughable. I doubt you'll find many thinking Christians who would say that it was. It's a collection of old writings (the gospels written well after the events they describe) that were written by and selected by believers.

In what possible way do you think it's objective evidence of a god?

There is much written about why the Gospels offer objective evidence of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.  This is just one aspect:
If they were deliberately written and selected by believers, how can you explain the obvious inconsistencies in each Gospel?  The inconsistencies offer evidence which you would expect to find from original eye witness accounts,  but not from deliberately selected and edited texts.  But these inconsistencies do not detract from the profound underlying message.

[Alan Burns]

The deliberation is part of the chain and, yes, I do believe it, with the proviso that there may be randomness, or at least effective randomness, and almost certainly chaos (in the mathematical sense).

If what we perceive to be a deliberate act is regarded as just another inevitable link in the endless chains of cause and effect, whatever you choose to write can have no definitive causal event.  Your words become just an end product of physically driven events with no definable cause or interaction.  So in this scenario, what takes ultimate responsibility or credit for what you write?

However, you missed the point (or deliberately ignored it) you can't choose your wants because then you'd have to want to want one want more than another. Then you'd have to choose that want, and so on, off to infinity in the here and now - before you could make a choice.

You are obviously stuck in presuming that everything is entirely caused by something which precedes it. 
You seem unable to contemplate the possibility of an entity which can generate a causal event, such as the human soul.

[Roses]

If what we perceive to be a deliberate act is regarded as just another inevitable link in the endless chains of cause and effect, whatever you choose to write can have no definitive causal event.  Your words become just an end product of physically driven events with no definable cause or interaction.  So in this scenario, what takes ultimate responsibility or credit for what you write?You are obviously stuck in presuming that everything is entirely caused by something which precedes it. 
You seem unable to contemplate the possibility of an entity which can generate a causal event, such as the human soul.

Whilst a 'soul', in the way you regard it could exist, there is no evidence that is so, anymore there is any evidence fairies, unicorns and elves exist.

[Stranger]

There is much written about why the Gospels offer objective evidence of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.  This is just one aspect:
If they were deliberately written and selected by believers, how can you explain the obvious inconsistencies in each Gospel?  The inconsistencies offer evidence which you would expect to find from original eye witness accounts,  but not from deliberately selected and edited texts.  But these inconsistencies do not detract from the profound underlying message.

So, they are obviously inaccurate therefore they are accurate...     

[Stranger]

If what we perceive to be a deliberate act is regarded as just another inevitable link in the endless chains of cause and effect, whatever you choose to write can have no definitive causal event.  Your words become just an end product of physically driven events with no definable cause or interaction.  So in this scenario, what takes ultimate responsibility or credit for what you write?

I do.

You are obviously stuck in presuming that everything is entirely caused by something which precedes it. 
You seem unable to contemplate the possibility of an entity which can generate a causal event, such as the human soul.

And you are still (apparently) too afraid to face up to the logic.

If something is not entirely due to its antecedents, then part of it must be due to nothing (which means random). You have never had the courage to try to face up to that (unless you count inane nonsense about "the present" that you then refuse to define in any logically significant way).

[torridon]

You are obviously stuck in presuming that everything is entirely caused by something which precedes it. 
You seem unable to contemplate the possibility of an entity which can generate a causal event, such as the human soul.

I cannot contemplate an entity that generates events outwith the paradigm of cause and effect without being random.  It is inconceivable, like a four sided triangle or a piece of string that is longer than infinity.

[wigginhall]

If what we perceive to be a deliberate act is regarded as just another inevitable link in the endless chains of cause and effect, whatever you choose to write can have no definitive causal event.  Your words become just an end product of physically driven events with no definable cause or interaction.  So in this scenario, what takes ultimate responsibility or credit for what you write?You are obviously stuck in presuming that everything is entirely caused by something which precedes it. 
You seem unable to contemplate the possibility of an entity which can generate a causal event, such as the human soul.

So the soul generates a causal event, but doesn't cause it?  How does that work?

[Alan Burns]

So the soul generates a causal event, but doesn't cause it?  How does that work?

Conscious willpower of the human soul generates its own causal events - otherwise we are just mechanistic machines driven by the laws of physics with no will of our own.

[torridon]

Conscious willpower of the human soul generates its own causal events - otherwise we are just mechanistic machines driven by the laws of physics with no will of our own.

Nothing  'generates causal events' out of thin air.  If that were to happen, then those events would be random events.  Our will derives from something.  We all have a will of our own, in the sense that my will is personal to me and yours to you, just as my habits are personal to me and yours are to you.  But that doesn't mean that my will is somehow disconnected from the broader information flows, rather it is constructed from them.  Each mind processes information in a unique way, my neural pathways have developed differently to yours over the passage of time. so we end up making choices that reflect our individuality.  That doesn't validate any notion that we are somehow magically divorced from the broader flows of cause and effect.  If I want something, it is always traceable back to some reason giving rise to that desire.  To deny this principal is to claim that our will is random.

[Gordon]

Conscious willpower of the human soul generates its own causal events -

How exactly: by what mechanism or process does the soul do this, and what factors influence the soul?

otherwise we are just mechanistic machines driven by the laws of physics with no will of our own.

Leaving aside your usual simplistic hyperbole and fallacious thinking, in essence this is how it is: since, and unless we act randomly, and we don't, then prior influences, personal traits and preferences, along with prevailing circumstances, will always be constraints. This is just as well, since to be 'free' as you envisage it would be no freedom at all but would involve becoming a hostage to fortune (and randomness).