Is there a God?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Solomon Grundy

You are a lying sack of sh*t and you know it, I know it and everybody here knows it. What does your God say about bearing false witness?



Yeah you're real Christian and religious ain't you? Hypocrite, you are against everything the Nazarene taught, and if he came back you'd crucify him again for being liberal scum. Here it is, Christmas day, and instead of offering something good, or positive, you spew your lies, ignorance, and hatred...way to go man, you're a real Christian alright.

---

Solomon, I have to admit that most of what you say here is accurate.
Sometimes i wonder if larry/johnny isn't an agent of Satan trying to draw us into his evil web.
larry has searched through years of posts to attack me. He has taken so many things I've said and twisted them to appear to say something quite different.
He has taken my confessions of past transgressions and used them over and over against me.
I've made him swear to God when I know he has lied and he went ahead and swore.
He and his alter ego johnny have mocked the Lord over and over again while posing as Christians and accusing me of terrible things including questioning my faith.
He has yanked my chain and drawn me into saying very un-Christian things in the past which I deeply regret.
johnny/larry may actually believe he is a Christian but he is certainly doing Satan's work on here.

Don't let him bait you into getting the boot on here, Solomon. You are a valued member.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Solomon Grundy

Perhaps he was referring to my only other post in the thread, which incidentally does not amount to a "gutter personal attack" but rather an observation on Dub's narcissistic view of himself as a veritable fountain of knowledge:

Quote:

Originally Posted by LWW http://forums.azbilliards.com/images...s/viewpost.gif OK ... what small has been learned in phsics since Eistein? Answer ... little to nothing. Lots of Eistein's ... and his peers ... predictions have ben verified, and that's about it.

Secaucus Fats replied:

Attachment 39

---

Who is Eistein and what is phsics?

Mac ... do you believe you have any free will at all about anything?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by hondo

LMFAO! Since when? You've gone back years to dig up my posts.

---

Your have gnerally been of a more personal note and were logged at the moment for future reference.

Sodoman Bundy's trolling has never risen to the level being recorded.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by LWW

Mac ... do you believe you have any free will at all about anything?

---

Yes. But the questions of what are consciousness time thinking mind being life memory etc are praps the biggest questions of all.
One kood say that if u hav certain pre-existing conditions then u must hav certain future conditions. In which case no-one haz any choice about anything, and zero free will.
In which case someone might say that God duzz not play dice. Or, someone might say that God duzz play dice. In both cases u hav God anyhow. It iz all a mystery.

Scientifik thinking simply replaces silly ignorant questions with a greater number of less-silly less-ignorant questions, the sillyness diminishing and the number of questions inkreecing for ever and ever amen.
mac.

In fakt i am thinking that the unlikely universe iz explainable. But explaining freewill aint gonnabe eezy.
“If the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will snap the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect—what is the source of the free will possessed by living things throughout the earth?”—Titus Lucretius Carus, Roman philosopher and poet, 99–55 BC

Below are some of the more common viewpoints meant by, or confused with "Determinism".

Many philosophical theories of determinism frame themselves with the idea that reality follows a sort of predetermined path
Causal determinism in its most general form is the idea that everything that happens or exists is caused by antecedent conditions.[3] In the case of scientific or nomological determinism, these conditions are considered events also, implying that the future is determined completely by preceding events - a combination of prior states of the universe and the laws of nature.[4] Yet they can also be considered metaphysical of origin.[5] Causal determinism proposes that there is an unbroken chain of prior occurrences stretching back to the origin of the universe. The relation between events may not be specified, nor the origin of that universe. Causal determinists believe that there is nothing uncaused or self-caused. Historical determinism (a sort of path dependence) can also be synonymous with causal determinism.

Nomological determinism (or scientific determinism) is the most common form of causal determinism. It is the notion that the past and the present dictate the future entirely and necessarily by rigid natural laws, that every occurrence results inevitably from prior events. Quantum mechanics and various interpretations thereof pose a serious challenge to this view. Nomological determinism is sometimes illustrated by the thought experiment of Laplace's demon.[6]

Necessitarianism is very related to the causal determinism described above. It is a metaphysical principle that denies all mere possibility; there is exactly one way for the world to be. Leucippus claimed there were no uncaused events, and that everything occurs for a reason and by necessity.[7]

Predeterminism is the idea that all events are determined in advance.[8][9] The concept of predeterminism is often argued by invoking causal determinism, implying that there is an unbroken chain of prior occurrences stretching back to the origin of the universe. In the case of predeterminism, this chain of events has been pre-established, and human actions cannot interfere with the outcomes of this pre-established chain. Predeterminism can be used to mean such pre-established causal determinism, in which case it is categorised as a specific type of determinism.[8][10] It can also be used interchangeably with causal determinism - in the context of its capacity to determine future events.[8][11] Despite this, predeterminism is often considered as independent of causal determinism.[12][13] The term predeterminism is also frequently used in the context of biology and hereditary, in which case it represents a form of biological determinism.[14]

Fatalism is normally distinguished from "determinism".[15] Fatalism is the idea that everything is fated to happen, so that humans have no control over their future. Fate has arbitrary power, and need not follow any causal or otherwise deterministic laws.[3] Types of Fatalism include hard theological determinism and the idea of predestination, where there is a God who determines all that humans will do. This may be accomplished either by knowing their actions in advance, via some form of omniscience[16] or by decreeing their actions in advance.[17]

Theological determinism is a form of determinism which states that all events that happen are pre-ordained, or predestined to happen, by a monotheistic deity, or that they are destined to occur given its omniscience. Two forms of theological determinism exist, here referenced as strong and weak theological determinism.[18] The first one, strong theological determinism, is based on the concept of a creator deity dictating all events in history: "everything that happens has been predestined to happen by an omniscient, omnipotent divinity".[19] The second form, weak theological determinism, is based on the concept of divine foreknowledge - "because God's omniscience is perfect, what God knows about the future will inevitably happen, which means, consequently, that the future is already fixed".[20] There exist slight variations on the above categorisation. Some claim that theological determinism requires predestination of all events and outcomes by the divinity (i.e. they do not classify the weaker version as 'theological determinism' unless libertarian free will is assumed to be denied as a consequence), or that the weaker version does not constitute 'theological determinism' at all.[21] With respect to free will, "theological determinism is the thesis that God exists and has infallible knowledge of all true propositions including propositions about our future actions", more minimal criteria designed to encapsulate all forms of theological determinism.[22] Theological determinism can also be seen as a form of causal determinism, in which the antecedent conditions are the nature and will of God.[5]

Logical determinism or Determinateness is the notion that all propositions, whether about the past, present, or future, are either true or false. Note that one can support Causal Determinism without necessarily supporting Logical Determinism and vice versa (depending on one's views on the nature of time, but also randomness). The problem of free will is especially salient now with Logical Determinism: how can choices be free, given that propositions about the future already have a truth value in the present (i.e. it is already determined as either true or false)? This is referred to as the problem of future contingents.

Adequate determinism focuses on the fact that, even without a full understanding of microscopic physics, we can predict the distribution of 1000 coin tosses
Often synonymous with Logical Determinism are the ideas behind Spatio-temporal Determinism or Eternalism: the view of special relativity. J. J. C. Smart, a proponent of this view, uses the term "tenselessness" to describe the simultaneous existence of past, present, and future. In physics, the "block universe" of Hermann Minkowski and Albert Einstein assumes that time is a fourth dimension (like the three spatial dimensions). In other words, all the other parts of time are real, like the city blocks up and down a street, although the order in which they appear depends on the driver (see Rietdijk–Putnam argument).

Adequate determinism is the idea that quantum indeterminacy can be ignored for most macroscopic events. This is because of quantum decoherence. Random quantum events "average out" in the limit of large numbers of particles (where the laws of quantum mechanics asymptotically approach the laws of classical mechanics).[23] Stephen Hawking explains a similar idea: he says that the microscopic world of quantum mechanics is one of determined probabilities. That is, quantum effects rarely alter the predictions of classical mechanics, which are quite accurate (albeit still not perfectly certain) at larger scales.[24] Something as large as an animal cell, then, would be "adequately determined" (even in light of quantum indeterminacy).

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by cushioncrawler

Yes. But the questions of what are consciousness time thinking mind being life memory etc are praps the biggest questions of all.
One kood say that if u hav certain pre-existing conditions then u must hav certain future conditions. In which case no-one haz any choice about anything, and zero free will.

---

Well, if you accept that you have true free will then you must believe that a god exists.

The universe iz a mystery, and life too, but any such mystery aint explained by gods.
Replacing one scientifyk question with another iz ok -- but that dont mean that replacing one mystery with another iz ok.
mac.

So how do you have true free will?

In an atheist determinist universe, the die was cast for every future event at the moment of the big bang.

As physicist and authorbBrian Greene stated, without a god “All you are is a bag of particles acting out the laws of physics. That to me is pretty clear.”

The obvious answer to your question is that there is no true free will, but merely an illusion of that that we are all mainly tricked by. Not saying that's true, but it would answer your query. Some argue strongly that it is true-- there is no free will-- showing the brain waves in the motor cortex preceding the supposed 'choice,' so that the later explanation we make of it that we 'chose' to do anything is post hoc revisionism.

It's also true that predetermination and fated salvation were preached in Calvinism, also a denial of free will, from a Christian perspective of how God's omniscience must be interpreted. It's a weird notion that has mainly been scorned in more recent centuries, in that whatever one may do, if one is destined to be saved for eternity, one will be, regardless.

So apparently, the topic of free will is not only different from a question of God's existence, but both crude materialist determination theory and certain Christian theologies together argue there is no free will under those opposite kinds of theory of the world (that is, God's existence may be immaterial to that question).