Here is a Spiritual Conundrum submitted to Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life by a reader named Josh:
It says in the Bible that God knows our every word before it even leaves our tongue. If God already knows what we’re going to do, then how could we have free will?
Thanks for the great—and classic—question, Josh. I’ll get right to the point, and then we’ll explore the question in a little more depth.
The most basic answer to this question is that knowing something is not the same as causing something.
If I hold a book up in the air and let go of it, I know that it will fall to the floor. But I do not cause it to fall to the floor. Gravity does that.
In the very same way, God knowing what we will do does not mean God causes us to do it.
Further, the very idea that God “already” knows what we “will” do in the future is human, time-bound thinking, and a misunderstanding of how God knows everything. God does not look into the future and see what’s going to happen. Rather, God sees everything from an eternal state of being outside of time and space. God simply sees and therefore knows everything that to us is past, present, and future.
In other words, just as you and I can survey an entire scene from the top of a hill or mountain, and see everything in it in one view, so God can survey the entirety of creation, not only taking in everything that exists everywhere in all of space all at once, but also taking in everything that exists in all of time all at once.
But just as our seeing a vast panorama from a mountaintop doesn’t cause that scene to be the way it is, so God’s seeing everything that exists in all of time and space does not cause all of those things to be the way they are.
We’ll look at these things more closely in a minute. But first, let’s take a look at the Bible passage Josh is referring to.
The Bible on God’s foreknowledge
Here is the relevant Bible verse, in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):
Even before a word is on my tongue,
O Lord, you know it completely. (Psalm 139:4)
However, this and similar translations are probably reading a little too much into it. In the original Hebrew, there is no “before.” Here it is in Young’s Literal Translation:
For there is not a word in my tongue,
Lo, O Jehovah, Thou hast known it all!
And in the traditional King James Version:
For there is not a word in my tongue,
but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether
In other words, the Hebrew is talking about God knowing everything about what we are saying, rather than God knowing ahead of time what we are going to say.
Yet a passage later on in the same Psalm suggests that God does know everything about us before it even happens:
Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.
In your book were written
all the days that were formed for me,
when none of them as yet existed. (Psalm 139:16, NRSV)
Though we could quibble about this translation as well, the general message is clear enough: God knows what we will be not only as we are forming, but before we have been formed.
And this is supported by a whole series of passages that speak of God knowing and declaring what will happen in the future. Here are three of them from the book of Isaiah:
See, the former things have come to pass,
and new things I now declare;
before they spring forth,
I tell you of them. (Isaiah 42:9)Who is like me? Let them proclaim it,
let them declare and set it forth before me.
Who has announced from of old the things to come?
Let them tell us what is yet to be. (Isaiah 44:7)Remember the former things of old;
for I am God, and there is no other;
I am God, and there is no one like me,
declaring the end from the beginning
and from ancient times things not yet done,
saying, “My purpose shall stand,
and I will fulfill my intention.” (Isaiah 46:9–10)
Further, the first epistle of John in the New Testament states flatly:
God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. (1 John 3:20)
Everything includes . . . everything. If there were some future thing God didn’t know, then God would not know everything.
In short, though God’s foreknowledge is not a major theme in the Bible, the Bible does make it clear that God is omniscient, and that God’s omniscience includes knowing the future. Which brings us right back to Josh’s question: If God knows the future, how can we have free will?
Knowing is not the same as causing
Once again, knowing something is not the same as causing something. If I drop something, I know it’s going to fall, but it’s gravity, not my knowledge about gravity, that causes it to fall. My knowing how things work doesn’t cause them to work that way.
“Yes,” you say, “But you didn’t create gravity. God did!”
Good point. God did create the universe, and everything in it. So for God, unlike for us, isn’t knowing things the same as causing them? After all, it was God who made everything to exist the way it does, and caused everything to happen the way it happens!
Whoa there!
That’s really a whole different issue, and a whole different question. Let’s not get the two confused.
Is God’s knowledge the same as causation?
The question Josh asked is, basically, whether God’s knowledge of things that we think of as the future (more on that later) means that God, not us, causes them to happen, so that we don’t actually have free will.
And the simple answer to that question, once again, is: No. The fact that God knows things doesn’t necessarily mean God causes those things. Knowledge and causation are simply not the same thing. Just because God knows our future actions, that doesn’t mean God causes us to do those things. Only that God knows that’s the action we will take. (But once again, for God it is not in the future. We’ll get to that soon!)
The question this often gets all tangled up with in people’s minds is whether God determines everything, or whether God has created at least some of the universe—we humans—with the ability to decide and determine things for ourselves.
In other words, did God give us free will? And what about the rest of the created universe? Did God give some sort of free will to everything God created?
God created the universe with free will
On these questions, my belief is that everything God created has a certain level of free will, and that humans have the greatest level of free will. For an extended discussion and explanation of this, please see:
God: Puppetmaster or Manager of the Universe?
Short version: God creates the universe in such a way that even though all of its power to exist and to act comes from God every moment, God still created things act on their own initiative, with a certain level of randomness or free will, in doing the things they do.
This is especially true of human beings. We act by our own choice from the abilities and power that God gives us.
Specifically, God gave us the ability to make choices, otherwise known as free will. But we, not God, are the ones who actually make those choices.
For example: a car
Consider, for example, an automobile manufacturer and the cars it manufactures.
The auto manufacturer creates a car with an engine, a drive train, wheels, a body, and various controls.
But once the car rolls off the assembly line, does the auto manufacturer make it go?
No. The car itself does that, as controlled by its driver. The manufacturer doesn’t push the car along the road. Nor does the manufacturer inject the fuel and air mixture into the cylinders and send pulses of electricity from the battery to the spark plug to ignite it. The car does all of this on its own, based on its design by the manufacturer, and at the will of its human driver.
In short, once the car is made, it, not the manufacturer, causes itself to drive down the road when the driver turns the key, puts it in gear, and steps on the gas pedal.
Do the manufacturers know that the car will do this?
Yes.
Do the manufacturers cause the car to do this?
No. The car itself does it, based on the abilities the manufacturer gave it.
Our free will is real, and it is what makes us human
We humans are, of course, far more complex than cars. But the principle is the same. God gives us certain equipment and capabilities. But we, not God, are the ones who actually do things with that equipment and those capabilities.
In other words, God doesn’t cause everything we do. Rather, God gives us the ability to do what we do. We act on our own initiative, using the abilities that God gives us, to do what we want to do.
That is why we have not only a sense of having free will, but we actually do have free will.
Sure, we’re not radically free. There are many things we wish we could do that we can’t do. And there are many things we do because it was drilled into us by our parents or teachers. But each of us does have the ability to make decisions about what we will and won’t do. And that includes deciding that even though Mom and Dad ingrained this habit into us, we’re going to break the habit and do that instead.
Our ability to make these decisions about our own life, our own actions, and our own character is what makes us human. And that’s especially true when we make ourselves work hard to change who we are and what direction we’re going. We are at our most human when we are doing the hard work to change our character and our life based on a decision we’ve made about who and what we want to be.
God does not “see the future”
Now let’s get back to the question Josh actually asked, and look at the second point I made at the beginning in response to it.
We humans live embedded in time and space. We are here and not there. We are in the present moment. The past has already happened. The future hasn’t happened yet. It is very difficult for us to think about anything without thinking in terms of space and time.
However, God exists outside of space and time.
Space and time, we now know, are properties of the physical universe. Modern physics tells us that space and time are not some external gridwork in which the universe exists and moves. Rather, space and time are simply two different attributes of the physical cosmos. Without the existence of the material universe and the physical entities that compose it, there would be no space and time.
This means that there is no such thing as “before the universe was created.” Before the universe was created, there was no before and after. Time simply didn’t exist. From a theological perspective, time came into existence with the creation of the physical universe. All of those questions about what God did before God created the universe have no meaning.
Instead, God exists in a state of being that is beyond and outside of space and time. In the being and consciousness of God, there is no time and space.
God does not have the limitations that we do of being in this space and at this time, and not in all of the other spaces and times. For God, all of space and time are a present reality in an eternal now. In other words, God sees everything everywhere, and all things in all time—what to us is past, present, and future—all at once.
From God’s perspective, there is no such thing as God “knowing the future.” For God, there is no future, and no past. It is all in the present to God. God simply sees everything, everywhere, in every time, just as we stand on a mountaintop and see the whole vista spread out before our eyes at once.
God does not know “what we’re going to do”
For us, living within the arrow of time, the future is still unknown and largely undetermined. We can have some ideas about what will happen, but we don’t know for sure what will happen.
A lot of what will happen to us depends upon the choices we make. If we decide to get drunk instead of going to work, we’re going to lose our job, and our life is going to fall apart. But if we then decide to get sober, we can rebuild a good life for ourselves. Sure, it will be hard work. But that is something we can decide to do, and thereby change the course of our life. And once again, the very decision to change our life, and the hard work we do to carry out that decision, is what makes us human.
God doesn’t “know what we’re going to do” in the usual sense. God isn’t looking into our future from the present and saying, “Josh is going to buy a new car.” Once again, God is not embedded in time the way we are. God looks at everything from outside of time.
In other words, for God, Josh is buying that new car, and Josh is being born, and Josh is dying and going to heaven. God sees the whole sweep of our life from the eternal present in which God lives. For God it’s not something that is going to happen. It’s something that is happening.
Who decides what we’re going to do?
Does this mean that God causes us to be born, or to buy a car, or to die, or to go to heaven?
No.
- Our parents are the ones who caused us to be born.
- We’re the ones who decide it’s time for a new car.
- All sorts of factors go into determining the time of our death. Doing stupid things in a car could have something to do with it!
- And we are the ones who decide whether we’d prefer to spend eternity in heaven or in hell.
In other words, even though God sees, from the timeless state in which God exists, everything we choose and everything we do throughout our entire lifetime, we are still the ones making those choices, and we are the ones actually doing the things we do.
That’s because God has created us with the crucial, human capability of free will, especially in the moral and spiritual course we will take. That free will is God’s most precious gift to us after God’s love and our life itself. And our free will is a gift that God will never violate or take away from us.
In short, we make the choices. God simply sees our choices.
God sees everything, and therefore knows everything. But God has created a universe, and us in it, so that we can decide for ourselves what we will do, and who we will be.
This article is a response to a spiritual conundrum submitted by a reader.
For further reading:
- If God Sees Everything, Is Everything that has Ever Happened Still Happening?
- Containers for God
- God: Puppetmaster or Manager of the Universe?
- How did God Create the Universe? Was the World Really Created in Six Days?
- Heaven, Regeneration, and the Meaning of Life on Earth
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Lee Woofenden is an ordained minister, writer, editor, translator, and teacher. He enjoys taking spiritual insights from the Bible and the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and putting them into plain English as guides for everyday life.
Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life 
We also took up this issue some time back. God stands outside of time, thus He see what our future choices will be. It is such a stumbling block for so many, but His “foreknowledge” does not condition our free choices.
Hi larryzb,
Right. The main stumbling block is that it’s hard for us living here in the material world to think outside of space and time. God’s “knowing the future” strikes time-bound thinking as meaning that the future is already determined.
Excellent. Thank you.
Hi Dave,
You are very welcome.
This can be really mind-bending if dwelt upon too much from our tiny one-thought-at-a-time perspective. It ties in with so many science fiction themes about parallel universe, bumping into yourself from another time and so on. Would it be correct to surmise that when we transition to the Spirit World, we will have the same lack of time/space limitations? That we will view our spiritual and physical existence as one whole scene of what is?
Hi leeannemeredith,
I often see echoes in present-day science fiction of things Swedenborg wrote about several centuries ago.
Although there is no time as we know it in the spiritual world, there is still a passage of events, which means there is a past, present, and future for the people living there. They do not know the future, though they can follow the arc of the past and present just as we can, only more clearly, to get a sense of where things are going.
In the spiritual world space as we know it is replaced by distance or closeness in love and affection. Time is replaced by growth in experience, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. There is a one-way “arrow of time” in the spiritual world just as there is in the material world precisely because people are always learning and experiencing new things, not unlearning and unexperiencing things. Growth in knowledge goes forwards, not backwards.
This passage of events and experiences, and continual growth in knowledge and understanding, also means that unlike God, angels and spirits do not know the future, because they have not yet experienced it. But angels, especially the higher angels, do have a greater sense of the seamless wholeness of all Creation than do most people on earth.
Only God is omniscient, having unlimited knowledge. Angels, spirits, and humans on earth, being finite beings rather than infinite beings, have limited knowledge. That knowledge is always growing, but it can never attain to the infinity of God’s knowledge to all eternity. We will never be able to see all of time and space, and their spiritual equivalents, in one view as God does.
Thank you for explaining this. I know it’s probably getting into the realms of things we don’t need to know or understand, but I’ve been thinking on your analogy of God surveying the entire scene of events. Does this somehow mean that everything that’s happened is still somehow happening? Nothing disappears or un-happens? If God sees the entire stage, then the events are still playing out? Or is it that Quantum concept that if nobody is looking it isn’t happening?
Hi leeannemeredith,
Yes, all of this starts to get a bit above my pay grade!
However, Swedenborg’s concept of distinct or vertical levels vs. gradual or horizontal levels is helpful here. There are things that shade into one another smoothly, such as cold to hot and light to dark. But there are also things that are separated from one another by distinct boundaries, such as the liquid, solid, and gaseous states of matter and the atmosphere, the electromagnetic field, and the gravitational field, in which sound, light, and gravity travel, respectively.
In reference to time and space, within the physical universe these happen along gradual levels, one time moving on to the next, and space expanding out linearly or on a curve in all directions. However, between the physical universe and the spiritual universe there is a distinct level, and there is also a distinct level between the spiritual universe and God. One of these levels does not shade into the other along a continuum. Rather, there is a well-defined boundary where one ends and the other begins.
Although there is a relationship between these three distinct or vertical levels of reality, that relationship happens across the definite boundary that distinguishes them from one another. Phenomena on one level correspond to phenomena on the other levels, but they do not intermix with one another. Each proceeds according to its own nature and laws, appropriate to its own distinctive level of reality. Each has its own type of reality distinct from the type of reality that exists on the other two levels.
What this means is that we cannot mix and match time, knowledge, and perception from one level to the next. On the material level, what is in the past has happened, and is in the past. What is in the present is what’s happening now. And what’s in the future has not happened yet. It has not “already happened somewhere,” because that would be mixing the divine level with the physical level. That would be ascribing time to God’s timeless state.
God does see all the past, present, and future in a single present view. But God is on an entirely distinct level of reality, in which all time and space are one. That is not the case on the physical level. On the physical level, time and space are spread out, time having a directional arrow from the past through the present to the future, and space being spread out spatially in all directions from whatever center one happens to be located at. This is part of the nature and laws of the physical universe—and the physical universe plays out according to its own distinct set of laws.
On the physical level, things that have not happened yet simply haven’t happened yet. They are therefore not determined and cannot be known by us with certainty. We can extrapolate from the past and the present and get some idea of what the future will be. But we can’t know for certain that that’s what will happen, both because there is an element of randomness built into the universe by God and because our future will be affected by the decisions we make now and into the future—decisions that we have not yet made. And contrary to the Calvinists and materialists, these decisions are not predetermined, but are freely made within the arrow of time.
Since we humans living in the physical universe have such a hard time banishing time and space from our thinking, we have a very hard time not thinking that God’s mind and consciousness operates within time and space as ours do. But there are not just one, but two distinct levels between our material-world consciousness and God’s consciousness. We can’t mix and match the two. We can’t say that something that has happened is still happening, nor can we say that something that hasn’t happened yet is already happening. That would be mixing material reality with divine reality, which is not possible.
Saying that the future has already happened in the mind of God, or that the past is still happening in the mind of God, is making the mistake of mixing together things that exist on distinct levels. Time simply doesn’t apply to God. In God’s mind, things haven’t “already happened” nor do they “happen in the future.” God does not “know the future” temporally. To God, past, present, and future are all the same. They are all one, just as God is fully one. On God’s level, everything of all time and space is seen in an infinite present, and God is interacting with all of it all at once from that infinite present in which God lives. But on the material level, what is in the past is in the past, having already happened, and what is in the future is in the future and hasn’t happened yet, nor is it definitely determined exactly what will happen.
The spiritual level is in between these two. There is no fixed time and space as we know it here in the material universe, but there is still a past, present, and future, and things still spread out around us. We still can’t know the future with any certainty, though we can get a better sense of it than we can here. And we still can’t be aware of everything everywhere all at once; only of what is in our immediate surroundings, and sometimes in a broader area around us or at a particular “location” in the distance. Even in the spiritual world, we are still finite beings. We cannot see and know everything all at once as God does.
Only God sees all the past, present, and future in one view, and all of space in one view, because only God exists on the highest distinct or vertical level, which is the being of God.
I know these things are hard to grasp and hard to reconcile with our material-world conception of things. But I hope this amount of explanation makes these things a little clearer for you.
I have now posted an edited and expanded version of my previous comment here:
If God Sees Everything, Is Everything that has Ever Happened Still Happening?
Hi leeanemeredith,
About the quantum concept that if nobody is looking it isn’t happening, the standard theistic response is that God sees everything, therefore everything is happening whether or not any other observer has looked at it. That’s a somewhat simplistic view of things. But it does express the basic truth that everything exists because it is created by God and is an expression of God. That is true, not in the Deistic sense that God “wound up the clock” and left it to run by itself, but in the sense that God is creating everything that exists at every moment, such that, as Swedenborg says, existence is perpetual creation.
Thank you so much. I will re-read this information a few times I think, but your pay grade should go up a little from here! I know these are abstract ideas and it’s a big ask and that you take the time means a great deal. Your site has done a great deal in assisting me to get my Faith back on track after my terrible loss which also brought into sharp focus deep-seated and unhealed trauma due to childhood issues. A great deal of work in forgiveness toward my parents has had to be done. My child’s suicide has also highlighted the impacts of intergenertional trauma. It’s quite astonishing that such an overwhelming tragedy can precipitate so much transformation and learning how often we are merely asleep at the wheel as we trundle through life. Not realising how fleeting time is as that arrow presses ever forward. I haven’t blamed God however. I think deep down, I’ve always understood that life unfolds as it will. I wonder though, do you think God is a Spirit Being? I get tied up in these questions regarding the nature of God. Where or how God came into being. Sometimes I think of the old movie of Jason and the Arganauts and a group of godly figures standing around and discussing the human travails and laying bets on the fragile choices we make. But yes, I believe it’s indeed true that the decisions we take create the twists and turns of our lives.
Hi leeannemeredith,
You are most welcome. It does my heart good to know that this website is helping you through your life struggles.
And you don’t ask any small questions!
In a colloquial sense, God is a spirit being in that God is not a material being, but inhabits the spiritual realm. But in a strict sense, God is not a spirit being because God is a divine being, inhabiting and constituting a realm above the spirit realm. This is why the Bible says both that God is a spirit and that God is not a spirit. One statement refers to God not being a material being. The other refers to God being a divine being, not a spiritual being.
Once again, Swedenborg’s distinct or vertical levels come into play here. The three major distinct levels (there are many smaller ones within these) are:
All created things exist in the spiritual realm and/or the material realm.
We humans exist on both levels as long as we are living in the material world, and we exist on the spiritual level almost exclusively when we die, at which time we leave our physical body behind and continue our life in the spiritual world in our spiritual body—which we already have even while we are living on this earth, although most of the time we are not conscious of it.
God, who is the Creator of all things in the spiritual and physical universes, exists in the divine realm. God is the divine realm.
God does inhabit the spiritual and material realms, but God is not the spiritual and material realm, nor is any of the spiritual or material realm God. Pantheism is a mistaken view of God. It is like a human being inhabiting a house. The person inhabiting the house is distinct from the house. Even though the person is living in the house, the house is not the person, nor is the person the house. Of course, the way God inhabits the spiritual and material realms is much more complex than that, but this provides a simple image to illustrate the concept.
About Jason and the Argonauts and the gods hanging out in the empyrean realm discussing human affairs, the common view among secular scholars is that humans started out polytheistic, and gradually developed the idea of monotheism (that there is one and only one God).
Swedenborg begs to differ.
He says that the earliest people on earth knew that there is one and only one God, and they worshiped that God. They also knew about the “correspondences” or symbolism of various earthly animals, plants, and celestial and earthly bodies, and saw them as expressions of various aspects of the one God that they worshiped. In time, as the arts developed, they created drawings and sculptures to represent these aspects or virtues of God in the form of animals, trees, birds, fish, the sun, moon, and stars, and so on.
Later on, as people become more worldly-minded, they no longer had the direct connection with God that those early human cultures had. They also lost the knowledge of the symbolism of the artwork and statuary, and began to worship each one individually as distinct gods and goddesses. So according to Swedenborg, monotheism came first, and later devolved into polytheism as people became less spiritual and more materialistic.
This is reflected in the Bible story. In the earliest chapters of Genesis Adam and Eve have a personal relationship with God—who is a single being, not multiple gods. God walks among them and talks with them in the Garden of Eden. Only later does the Bible start talking about the many gods of the nations.
Where or how did God come into being?
Nowhere, and nohow. God never came into being. There is no God that made God, and then another God that made that God, as the atheists love to gabble on about. There is no infinite regression. God simply is. God is existence itself. God is being itself. Everything else that did come into existence came into existence from God.
I know this is hard to accept for materialist thinkers who want everything to have a prior cause. Whenever they think about a God or gods, they think about what made or caused God or the gods.
But nothing made or caused God. God is the being that made and caused everything else. God is what existed in the first place, from which everything else came.
Logically speaking, there must be something from which everything else came. Otherwise there would be nothing at all. Nothing comes from nothing. God is that something from which everything else came.
But God is much more than that. God is not some abstract logical construct. God is human in the ultimate sense, in that God is love, God is wisdom, God is action. God has all the positive characteristics that make us human, but God has them in infinite degree, whereas we have them in finite degree. Biblically, God made humans, both male and female, in the image and likeness of God. We are human because God is human, not the reverse.
God showed this divine humanity by coming to us as Jesus Christ, a human being who lived among us for a (short) human lifespan, and then ascended back up to the original oneness with God. But that is an entire vast subject of its own.
So God is one, God is human, and we can have a personal relationship of love and understanding with God if that is something we want. Deciding whether we want that relationship with God, and with our fellow human beings, is what our lifetime on earth is all about.
There are quite a few articles here about God. For the big picture, here’s one to get you started:
Who is God? Who is Jesus Christ? What about that Holy Spirit?
I have now posted an edited version of the above reply to leeannemeredith here:
Is God a Spirit Being?
P.S. I hope you don’t mind if I turn some of my answers to your questions, along with your questions themselves (not all the personal parts of your comments) into posts here on the blog. That way more people can benefit from these rambling thoughts of mine.
Love how you explained that and the main article about if God knows everything do we really have freedom of choice.
I hhave read allot of explanations on that point but only yours has made any sense of the topic and is very well thought out and written, thank you for freely sharing
Hi Sherry,
Thanks for stopping by, and for your comment. I’m glad you enjoyed the article and found it helpful.
Godspeed on your spiritual journey!
Hi,
I just wanted to let you know that I think your writing style is fantastic. It’s clear, concise, and it’s explained a topic that I’ve had a hard time reconciling for a long time. Thank you for this site!
Jacob
Hi Jacob,
Thanks for stopping by, and for your kind words, which I appreciate very much. I’m glad this article was helpful to you.
Godspeed on your spiritual journey!
This article was a great deal of help, so thank you for writing it. But I was wondering, if God sees everything in all of time and space, then from his perspective, are events in his “life” (creating the universe, becoming Jesus, etc.) in the past, or is he always experiencing them?
Hi Griffin,
Thanks for stopping by, and for your comment and question. As mentioned in the article, it is hard for us earth-bound humans to think outside of time and space. But for God, who is outside of time and space, “past” and “future” have no meaning, because they are not how God experiences things. Rather, God experiences everything that to us is past, present, and future in an eternal present.
So in a sense, yes, God is “always experiencing” everything. But that “always” is not something that progresses in time, as if God experiences everything in one moment, and then in the next moment, and then in the next moment as we humans would. Rather, it is a timeless “always” that is an eternal, unchanging state, above and beyond time. This is not something we can fully grasp because it simply isn’t part of our experience, which inevitably involves change taking place from one moment to the next.
That makes sense. Thank you!
Hi Lee,
This post is of great interest to me… But I’m still confused about this subject…
You said God’s foreknowledge doesn’t mean the future is already determined, but… if it’s not already determined, how can anything from the future exist for God to know?
In the past I did some reading/studying on Open Theism, which holds that God’s omniscience means He knows everything there is to know, but that the future is not “settled” yet, so God knows it as a huge set of open possibilities, and since He knows what His own plans are, plus everything about the past and present including everyone’s character, thus He is able to declare the end from the beginning with great accuracy, even though the future is not settled yet.
That made a lot of sense to me, and at the time felt like such an epiphany that it added layers of color to my understanding of God, but now I’m wondering if I need to back-track from that belief a bit, and if so, how far.
I do understand and agree that God is outside of “time and space” as we understand it, with its measurements and limitations and so forth, but is God also beyond experiencing events in a sequence? Beyond cause and effect? If so, how can He have a true relationship with humans? Doesn’t relationship necessarily involve responding to each other in a back-and-forth manner?
Back when I believed in the idea that God has exhaustive knowledge of every detail of the future the same way He does of the past, I still believed in free will, so I had figured that God had sort of “imagined out” all the possibilities and versions of how the history of the world could play out, depending on how He chose to respond to each human decision, and then instantiated the best version by acting on those pre-planned decisions. Thus it seemed like He had already done all of His responding to us, and sort of gotten it out of the way before He created us, haha…which seems silly looking back on it, and is the “black-and-white” version of the picture of color I alluded to earlier.
It also made sense to me when the proponents of Open Theism said things like, if you’re holding an important letter in your hands and pray for it to be good news before you open it, isn’t it kind of too late for God to change it at that point? (Not to get off on a tangent about how inappropriate it might be to ask for something like that to begin with and expect God to be willing to change it…it’s just a simple illustration for the idea in question…which is whether God could, if He wanted to, go “back” in time, as seen from our perspective, and change His chosen action in response to something we just did.)
So that’s the background I’m coming from as I try to understand your statement that God sees the whole human timeline as a panorama and that everything is “now” for Him… I’m trying to figure out how the whole panorama could *exist* for Him to see, if the future isn’t settled or determined…? Could one imagine part of the terrain in the analogy as being a bit blurry (the part that depends on what choices we humans are going to make but haven’t made yet)?
At one point you said “All of those questions about what God did before God created the universe have no meaning.” This doesn’t ring true for me – those questions feel very meaningful. Extending the claim that God does not change to cover even His knowledge (as opposed to His character, which of course I agree does not change), would seem to imply that humankind has eternally existed for God to know about, just as God has eternally existed (if God’s knowledge of the whole history of the universe is as unchanging as you say). This just doesn’t make sense to me. Can you help clarify if I’ve misunderstood something you stated or if I’m just missing some important piece of the puzzle? Thanks!
Hi Seeking to understand,
As I said in the article, it is very difficult for us human beings to think outside of time and space. We are embedded in time and space from birth. Everything we experience in this material world takes place in time and space.
For God, that simply isn’t the case. God is not a material being. God did not “grow up” in the physical universe. God exists above and beyond the entire physical universe. Yes, God does enter into the physical universe, especially as Jesus Christ. But that still doesn’t place any limitations on God’s knowledge or power. (For some further thoughts on this, see “If Jesus was God, How was God Still in Heaven?”)
The reason questions about what God did before the universe was created have no meaning is that there is no such thing as “before the universe was created.” Before the universe was created, there was no time for there to be a “before” in. Time and space were created along with the material universe. They are properties of the material universe, and have no meaning outside of it.
Consider how we perceive and measure time, and what time is.
Time is a measure of the regular, cyclical passage of objects through space. The oldest and most basic units of time for us human beings here on earth are years, which are based on the earth’s regular orbit around the sun, and days, which are based on the earth’s rotation on its own axis. We have divided these basic units of time into seasons, hours, minutes, and seconds so that we can measure smaller units of time. And now we measure very tiny units of time with atomic clocks based on the motion of electrons around atomic nuclei.
In every case, the principle is the same: time is measured by material objects moving through space. Where there are no material objects moving through space, there is no time. How can there be time “before the universe was created” when no objects existed that could move, there was no change, and there were no events whatsoever?
Psychologically, we humans measure time by the changes we go through from infancy to childhood to adolescence to adulthood to old age. And on smaller psychological timescales, we measure it by the changes we go and the different things we do throughout the day. Psychological time involves changes in our life and character. But if God’s character does not change, how could time apply to God? God, the Bible tells us, is unchanging. This means that time simply doesn’t apply to God. Where there is no change, there is no time.
I’m aware of Open Theism’s view of God knowing all of the possibilities for the future. But that still assumes that God is embedded in time, and experiences things as they unfold in time just as human beings do. The reality is that God sees time and space from outside of time and space. So just as we can see an entire scene from a mountaintop, while a person within that scene sees only a few trees and houses in the immediate surroundings, God sees the entire “scene” of time and space even while we humans see only the short span of the time and space in which we are living.
However, as the article says, just as our seeing an entire scene laid out in front of us doesn’t cause the scene to be the way it is, so God’s seeing the entire scene of time and space laid out before God doesn’t cause things to unfold as they do. We, who are embedded in time, still make choices, and those choices affect the future and change it. God simply sees, from outside of time what those choices and their effects are.
The trick is not to think of God as “seeing the future.” For God, there is no future, nor is there any past. It is all a present reality for God. So things are not “determined beforehand.” Cause and effect still play out within time, and still determine what the future will be when it has not yet happened.
I know all of this is very hard for us time-bound humans to grasp. It is necessary to do something that is very unnatural to us: raise our minds out of time and space to see things from a timeless, spaceless perspective. As you bend your mind to accomplishing that challenging trick, you’ll be able to understand these things a little more clearly, even if they are still brain-benders.
About God’s relationship with us, from God’s perspective, it is not an unfolding relationship, even if it is from our perspective. God has a living relationship with our entire being, past, present, and future. That is why God can provide things in our present that are calibrated to help us spiritually in the future.
When we pray for things, God doesn’t change them according to our prayers. Rather, the prayer brings about an inner change and opening in us, both individually and as a community, making us better able to receive what God already wants to give us—and is giving us as much as we open ourselves to receive it. God doesn’t change what’s in the letter. But our openness to God in prayer helps us to better deal with and respond to whatever is in the letter.
I hope all of this is at least somewhat helpful. Please feel free to continue the conversation if you wish.
Hi again! Yes, I’ve been wanting to continue the conversation for months! But life got in the way, heh… I’ve finally managed to come back to this, and re-read the article and comments to refresh my memory, and here is my best effort to crystallize my thoughts as they currently stand:
You said in regards to 1 John 3:20 that “Everything includes . . . everything. If there were some future thing God didn’t know, then God would not know everything.”
But when I say that I’m not convinced God has exhaustive definite foreknowledge of the future, I’m not questioning His omniscience, but rather, the nature of the future – in terms of the panorama analogy, I’m questioning whether there is any landscape representing the future, existing there in the panorama for God to see. If God is letting us co-create this landscape with Him, it makes sense (to me at least) for Him to see it appear as it comes into being – plus He would know, of course, His own plans and designs for the parts He is going to create Himself (which fits with the Bible saying He can declare the end from the beginning).
“God exists in a state of being that is beyond and outside of space and time. In the being and consciousness of God, there is no time and space.”
I can agree with this and still wonder whether you’re also proposing that God exists outside of cause and effect – where the cause is logically anterior to the effect, even if it’s not “before” it in time. (Or, if God Himself *is* outside of the laws of cause and effect, on account of having created them, mightn’t His interactions with humans still have to occur within that framework?)
It seems like you’re asserting that human choices *are* in fact logically anterior to God’s knowledge of them, right? As in, our choices are the cause and God’s knowledge of them is an effect?
But at the same time…it seems like you’re also saying that God’s knowledge or experience cannot grow in response to our choices…that the statement that He cannot change refers not only to His character (which I agree does not change), but also even to His knowledge and experience…
Am I right that you’re saying both of those things? Because they don’t seem compatible to me…unless perhaps you’re suggesting that humans and all of our relationships with God have existed from eternity past, alongside or inside of God…? Is that your position? That humans are eternal too, in some sense?
“About God’s relationship with us, from God’s perspective, it is not an unfolding relationship, even if it is from our perspective. God has a living relationship with our entire being, past, present, and future.”
Hm… How can it be a living relationship without being an unfolding relationship? It sounds as if you’re saying that all of that back-and-forth dialogue of responses between us and God – the heart of true relationship – simply exists eternally, but without God getting to experience it unfolding.
“That is why God can provide things in our present that are calibrated to help us spiritually in the future.”
I don’t see why exhaustive definite foreknowledge would be a prerequisite for God to be able to provide things in our present to help us in our future… Maybe it would be more of an art than a science, but I believe He could still do it very effectively, even if He only has exhaustive foreknowledge of all future possibilities, combined with definite foreknowledge about His own plans, and exhaustive knowledge of the past, present, every human’s inner mind/character, and the laws of how everything works.
I’m very interested to hear your feedback on these thoughts… And please don’t hesitate to challenge my ideas – I enjoy the type of dialogue that helps me refine my worldview, and hopefully get it closer to the truth/reality. 🙂 Thanks!
Hi Seeking to understand,
Good to hear from you again. Glad you were able to carve out some time to continue the conversation. I hope this means your life has settled down a bit.
In reading your latest comment, this passage from Isaiah came to mind:
God doesn’t think the way we humans do, nor do we humans think the way God does. Yes, there is a relationship between the two. But they are on entirely different levels. And that’s why it’s so difficult for us to conceive of how God conceives of the universe.
It might be helpful to put a bit of cosmological context around this. The above article, and everything on this website, is written based on a cosmology in which there are three distinct levels of reality:
While these three levels of reality are intimately and continually related to one another, they each exist in their own way, with their own set of rules. Those sets of rules aren’t arbitrarily different from one another. Rather, they are the way the divine order (the rules by which God operates, which are an essential component of God) expresses itself in each of the two lower levels of reality.
Each lower level of reality, while depending upon the next higher, and the highest, for its ongoing existence (only the divine level is self-existing), also operates according to its own laws of cause and effect, as well as choice or randomness, within its own level. The human mind, which is the spiritual component of a human being, operates by the psycho-spiritual laws of the spiritual level of reality. The physical universe operates according to the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and so on, which are the laws of material reality. As in the analogy of the car in the above article, while God did determine and create those laws, God doesn’t make them do what they do. They do that by the force of their own substance and order. God simply holds all those laws, and the substance in which they act, in existence moment to moment, continually giving them the power to act of their own accord.
In short, God does not cause everything that happens to happen, even if God is continually holding everything in existence and giving it the ability to do what it does. This is taken up to some extent in the above article, and in more detail in an article also linked in it:
God: Puppetmaster or Manager of the Universe?
Though we humans cannot fully grasp the mind of God, I find that knowing and understanding these general principles about the nature of the multi-layered cosmos is helpful in gaining some grasp of how God thinks and how God perceives the created universe.
Applying these principles to the issue of time:
In God, who is not only eternal, but infinite, all of what we think of as time and space is telescoped into a single eternal being. But a better way to think of it is that in God, everything exists eternally, and everything existing in the spiritual and material levels of reality is an expression on its own level of something that exists within the divine reality of God. (Evil and falsity, however, are distorted expressions of things that exist within the divine reality of God.)
God does not create the universe sequentially from beginning to end, although that is a common way for us humans to think of it and express it—such as in the six days of Creation in Genesis 1. Rather, God creates things from the inside out, so to speak. In this way of understanding things, “In the beginning” (Genesis 1:1) does not mean in the beginning of time, but in the beginning of causality. God is the ultimate reality, the only self-existing reality, and the beginning of everything else ontologically. Time itself is an expansion outward in physical reality of the infinite state, or states, of being that exist simultaneously and in complete oneness in God.
Though it is not really an accurate picture of God, an analogy is the center of a sphere, which expands out to the sphere itself by a radius remaining constant at the center (which is God) and tracing out a curving, spherical surface at a certain distance from the center. The potential for the entire sphere exists in the central point. The sphere is simply an expansion of the point into the surrounding space; and in the act of expanding it, it becomes extended in space. Even though the point itself is not extended in space, it has a constant relationship with every point of the sphere, which is extended in space. The point “sees” every part of the three-dimensional sphere even though the point itself is zero-dimensional. Not a perfect analogy (God would be infinite-dimensional rather than zero-dimensional), but it helps to form a picture in our mind of how God relates to both the spiritual universe and the physical universe.
Applying this to time, though God is outside of time, and thus non-temporal, from that non-temporal eternity God has a direct relationship with every point in time and every progression of time in the physical universe, and with every point and progression of the spiritual analog of time that is our change and growth in mind and heart as human beings. If we think of that physical and psycho-spiritual time, or change of state, as an expansion outward into a three-dimensional surface of a sphere, we have an analogy in our mind of God having a relationship with every point in time even though God is a non-temporally eternal “point.”
This also means that even though God is eternally unchanging, God has a different relationship with every point in time and space, and in the spiritual analogs of time and space. That difference in relationship is not based on any change or difference in God, but rather, in change and difference in the created beings that surround God like a vast sphere that is filled with changing entities in all different times and spaces. God has a unique relationship with every single thing within the spiritual and physical universes because every created thing is unique, and God relates to each one according to its own nature, and according to its changing nature as physical time and its spiritual analog flows forward.
So yes, our relationship with God is a living one even though there is no change in God, and even though God sees all things, past, present, and future, from a single, eternal present. The relationship is living in the sense of “changing” because we are living, changing beings, and God’s relationship with us is different in every state of change and growth that we go through. God is constant, but we are changing, so our relationship with God is changing along with the changes that we ourselves go through. From God’s perspective, God’s relationship with us is living because God dynamically flows into us in precise relationship with exactly who we are at any given moment, and throughout the flow of our lives—in lesser measure when we are less receptive to God, and in greater measure when we are more receptive to God. So God is an eternally living, dynamic “point” that eternally flows into every part of the created universe in precise relationship with its ongoing state of being.
Another analogy that can help us to grasp this is that of a power plant and all of the homes and businesses it serves. The power plant does one thing: generate power. But that power flows more or less strongly into the various homes and businesses depending upon how much they are doing at any given time, and therefore how much power they draw. If a manufacturing plant is shut down completely, it draws no power at all. But when it is at full production, it draws a great deal of power. Similarly, homes go through cycles in which they draw more or less power throughout the day and night. The power plant doesn’t “change” due to the greater or lesser draw. It simply provides exactly as much power as each recipient “asks” for. (Once again, not a perfect analogy. For one thing, power plants actually do go through their own cycles of change. But once again, it provides a way for our minds to grasp the relationship between God and the created universe.
Drawing on that analogy, God is continually powering everything in the universe, but the recipients of that power are continually deciding how much power they want, and what they will do with it. The power itself is God’s infinite love, which is eternally the same, and contains all things. Each of us receives a portion of it appropriate to our own nature, and it enables us to be the particular person we are, and do the particular things we do. In relation to other human beings, we each express some finite aspect of the infinite nature of God.
With this cosmological context in mind, I’ll move on to some of your more specific questions, but in a new comment later on in the day.
Hi Seeking to understand,
Now to respond more specifically to some of your specific statements:
“Foreknowledge” is a human, time-embedded concept. As I say in the article, God does not “see the future.” A future exists only in the realms where there is time, or its spiritual analog, which is change of state. We humans exist, and think, within that arrow of time, which moves from the past to the future. God, however, does not exist within the arrow of time. God is entirely outside of the arrow of time. The arrow of time simply doesn’t apply to God. So God is not seeing our future from our present. God is seeing our entire past, present, and future in a single view.
God does, in a sense, see time unfold. But not from within time. God sees the entire sweep of time and space, which to us is unfolding and changing, from an unchanging position, or state, outside of both. What for us is unfolding progressively is fully and simultaneously visible to God. God is aware of what time is, and is aware that from the perspective of our consciousness, things happen in sequence. But God himself/herself does not experience them in that way. Not only God’s thoughts, but God’s very way of thinking is higher than our human way of thinking. It is on an entirely different level, just as the heavens are on an entirely different level than the earth.
This means that God does not see the landscape of time “appear as it comes into being.” From God’s perspective, the entire sweep of time is a present reality, experienced, not sequentially, but simultaneously.
And about our “co-creating” with God, though that is a popular idea in New Age circles, it’s not quite what it seems. Though we can loosely speak of humans creating things, in fact we don’t actually create anything in the same sense that God does. God creates all of existence out of God’s own self-existent being. We, on the other hand, take the materials and the patterns God gives us, and mold them into a particular form. This could be called “co-creating,” but on the part of humans it’s more like reshaping rather than actually creating anything new.
Ultimately, God is the only one acting in any situation. Everything else reacts, taking the action that comes from God and turning it in a particular direction. And even our ability to do that comes from God. This leads to:
No, God doesn’t exist outside of cause and effect. However, God is always on the cause side of the laws of cause and effect, and causation always flows downward through the levels. Another way of saying this is that the flow of power is uni-directional from God through the spiritual realm to the material realm.
However, that form of top-down causation does not flow in or through time and space. Rather, it flows into time and space. Causation within the physical realm flows within time and space from one time and place to another, “horizontally,” so to speak. Ditto for cause and effect within the spiritual realm, in its analogs of time and space. But causation between levels flows vertically, not horizontally. It is therefore an entirely different dimension or axis of causation than the type of causation that flows from one point in time to the next. Divine causation is continually sustaining everything in both the spiritual and the material realms, at all times and in all places, from a state within and above time and space.
No, God’s knowledge isn’t an effect of our choices. As I just said above, causation always flows from God into all created reality.
Knowledge is not caused by the things known. Knowledge is not a passive recipient of information. Rather, knowledge is an active process of seeking out information and actively incorporating it into one’s being.
This is illustrated by the act of sensory perception. It is a popular misconception that seeing, for example, is a process of sensory data flowing into the eye and from there into the mind. But that’s not what happens at all. Rather, sensory data, in this case varying shades and intensities of light, flow into the eye and strike the retina at the back of the eye. There, the sensors of the rods and cones actively “grab” the incoming information and begin processing it into forms that the brain can further process. The brain, in turn, actively sends out nerve impulses to gather that pre-processed information, and engages in further processing to turn it into visual imagery in the brain. Or, as those who believe that the mind is distinct from the brain (as I do), the brain processes the incoming signals into a form that the mind can reach out and take into itself in the form of visual imagery.
If a person is unconscious, most of this process does not happen even if the eyes are open. The light is still flowing into the eye, but the mind is not reaching out, taking it, and processing it. Therefore no vision occurs.
A teacher can teach until he or she is blue in the face, but if the students aren’t actively listening, no learning takes place. Ultimately, the teacher doesn’t actually teach anything. Rather, the students, if they are learning anything at all, are actively reaching out with their minds, “grabbing” information from the teacher, and actively processing it and incorporating it into their sea of knowledge and understanding. Without this action on the part of the learner, no teaching or learning takes place. Learning is active, not passive.
In the very same way, our choices don’t cause God’s knowledge of our choices and their effects. Rather, God’s mind actively reaches out, gathers, processes, and integrates all of the choices and events of our lives, making them a part of God. However, once again, this is not a process that happens through time, but rather from a state of infinite, eternal being outside of time. Which leads to:
The reason God’s knowledge or experience cannot grow in response to our choices is that all of the knowledge of all of our choices is eternally present in God, in the state in which God exists outside of time and space. So in everything God is and does, all of that knowledge is a present reality. Everything God does takes into account all of that knowledge simultaneously. This is something that is not possible for created, finite humans, but it is possible for the uncreated, infinite, omniscient, omnipotent being of God.
Saying that God’s knowledge grows implies that God exists in a state of time or its spiritual analog, change of state. But God does not exist in a state of time or change. God is eternally one and unchanging, and encompasses all knowledge of what to us is past, present, and future in a single eternal oneness.
So no, I’m not saying both of those things.
And also, no, humans and all of our relationships with God have not existed from eternity past, alongside or inside of God. God’s eternity is not an eternity of time, so in God’s eternity there is no past and no future. That’s why humans and our relationships have not existed alongside or within God from “eternity past.” Humans are eternal into the future, but not into the past. We each have a starting point within time. We also have an ending point within material time, but no ending point within spiritual time.
But more than that, humans do exist within the arrow of time, whereas God exists outside of the arrow of time, and flows into it. So on our human level of existence, time does exist, and things do happen sequentially. The future has not yet been entirely determined, because not all of the choices and random fluctuations have happened that will cause the future to be what it is. So in time, and in our ongoing changes of state, or psychological and spiritual growth as human beings, meaning in our human realms of consciousness, events are unfolding, and what happens in every present moment decides and determines what will happen in the next moment, and so on.
But in God, those things don’t exist as past, present, and future events. Rather, they all exist in an eternally present divine knowledge and consciousness. So although in a sense you could say that the future exists in God, in God it is not the future, but the present, whereas in our lives it is the future until it becomes a present experience.
I realize this sort of stuff can easily tie our human brains in knots. That, once again, is because we are ultimately incapable of thinking outside of time and change. We can only think about the state of God’s mind outside of time and change.
It is a relationship between the temporal and the eternal. On the temporal side (our side), it goes through changes, and back-and-forth, as time and change unfold. On the non-temporal side (God’s side), it is an eternally present relationship that reaches into every time and place of our lives. For us, the relationship unfolds. For God, it is an eternally present relationship. Once again, God is aware that we experience it as unfolding over time. But for God the entire relationship is eternally present. This means that even in our present, God is relating to us according to the entire sweep of our existence, from conception and birth through all of our eternal life in the spiritual world.
Once again, for us humans, the way God engages in relationships with God’s creations is impossible. We exist within the arrow of time and change, and they are part of the definition of our being. But for God, it is possible.
As I hope is at least somewhat clear from all the foregoing, my view and understanding is that “exhaustive definite foreknowledge” represents in its very expression a misconception about the nature of God’s knowledge. God’s knowledge is neither knowledge of the past nor knowledge of the future. It is simply knowledge in an eternal present of all things that to us are past, present, and future.
It would therefore be impossible for God not to have exhaustive knowledge of all things because all things are perceptible to God in the eternal present in which God exists. Not knowing something that to us is a future event would be, not just seeing only possibilities, but an instance of actual blindness on God’s part. Past, present, and future are all the same to God, because God exists outside of time. God simply sees it all in one view.
I’m not saying all of this is easy to understand. When I was younger, I thought along similar lines to what you are expressing here, even though I had in my hand the theology that showed that my thinking was limited and mistaken on these subjects because it was still bound and limited by time and space. Even now I can’t think entirely outside of at least ongoing changes of state. But several decades later, I have gradually come to realize and accept something like what I believe is the reality of God’s relationship to time and space, even though ultimately God’s state and God’s consciousness is not something I can experience for myself.
It is, of course, your choice whether to even attempt to bend your brain to these things, and also whether you think there is any merit or truth to what I am saying. I am expressing as best I can, in a rather short space, what has taken me a good forty years to bend my mind around. So if it all seems strange and impossible now, I would only ask that you put it on file in your mind, consider it over time, and see if, as you move along in your thinking and your life, it comes to make some sort of sense to you.
And I can promise you that if you can come to some understanding of these things, as enigmatic and paradoxical as they may seem at first glance, they will throw an entirely new light on our existence and our relationship to God, not to mention on the whole sweep of Scripture and on the past, present, and future history of humankind.
Hi Lee!
Thank you so much for replying so quickly (I’m amazed at the timestamp on that first one – looks like you were up in the middle of the night too??) – I really appreciate how much time you’ve invested in explaining these things!
I’ve been mulling it all over, and one point where I’m still wondering whether I’ve understood your position, is in regards to whether you would agree that (apart from cause and effect, which you did already discuss, and it was very interesting) that human choices are logically anterior to God’s knowledge of them?
That would not require them to come first in time, or even sequence, really…just logically speaking, since you said “God simply sees everything, everywhere, in every time, just as we stand on a mountaintop and see the whole vista spread out before our eyes at once”, I think that means the humans making the choices give God something to reach out and actively “see” (in the way you described, where He actively takes it in).
Is my understanding accurate yet? If not, I guess I might still be missing some important key to making sense of this paradigm for thinking about this subject, and I don’t want to just assume, since I was wrong in assuming you would agree that our actions “cause” God’s knowledge of them…but I wonder if you would at least agree they are logically anterior.
Thanks!
Hi Seeking to understand,
You are most welcome. I enjoy answering questions and engaging in conversation on spiritual subjects. It not only helps others in their thinking and in their lives, but it helps me to clarify and develop my own understanding of things as well. And yes, I’m sometimes up at odd hours.
If I understand your question correctly (and I’m not sure I do), then I would have to say no, I don’t think our choices and actions are logically anterior to God’s knowledge of them. It is not a case of “We make choices and take actions, therefore God sees and knows them.” God sees and knows our choices and actions not because we make and do them, but because God has the ability to see and know our choices and actions.
Does this address your question?
Haha…well…not exactly… Maybe this is the disconnect… I’ve been assuming that it goes without saying, that God has the ability to see and know our choices and actions, so I haven’t been explicitly saying so, but here is my *actual* position:
– We make choices and take actions
– *And* God has the ability to see and know our choices and actions
— Therefore God does, in fact, see and know our choices and actions
Is that your position also? I mean, you said that God’s knowledge of our actions is not what causes them; we decide freely… So…I’m having trouble figuring out what is the distinction between that assertion, and the idea that our decisions are logically anterior to God’s ability to actively reach out and see/know them…don’t they have to exist for God to have something to reach out and actively observe?
Hi Seeking to understand,
I’m still struggling a bit to understand the question, but I’ll take another shot at it, and see if I get a hit.
First of all, there is no possibility of a universe or even a time or instance in which God has the ability to actively reach out, see, and observe things but there is nothing out there to observe, so that God’s ability is only theoretical, and not actual, unless there are observable objects.
To see this, it is necessary to understand that God does not exist in time, but outside of time. Time is a property of the created universe. So for God, there is no time “before the universe was created.” For God, the entire universe, including its extension in time, is a present reality. So there is no such thing as God without objects to observe.
Further, the various attributes of God, such as omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence (being all-loving) do not and cannot exist separately from one another, but are in a continual union of oneness. This means that all of God is entirely present in everything God creates and does. It also means that the act of creation is a seamless whole originating in the love of God, being expressed through the wisdom of God, and being effected by the power of God.
Further, God’s wisdom is fully one with God’s ability to see, perceive, and know everything in the universe. God doesn’t create something and then come to know it. God fully knows everything God creates in the very act of creating it. This is true even though, as the above article states and explores more fully, God has created us, and I believe also the rest of the universe, with freedom to act by our own choice, as if on our own, so that God does not determine everything in the universe. (For more on this, once again, please see: “God: Puppetmaster or Manager of the Universe?”)
The reason God can know our choices and actions even while not actually causing them to be that way is not only that God is outside of time, but also that creation happens from a state outside of time, and is actually a continuous (from our perspective) creation of everything that exists from moment to moment. Even as we are making choices and taking actions that God doesn’t determine, God is creating both us (including our mind and our ability to make choices) and the reality in which our choices and actions unfold from within each moment. However for God it is not “each moment,” but a simultaneous creating of the entire unfolding universe and everything in it from a position within and above it, outside of its dimensions of time and space.
This means that our choices and actions are not logically anterior to God’s knowledge of them because God is continually creating us, our choices, and our actions even while leaving us in freedom to be who we are, make the choices we will make, and take the actions we will take.
I know this sounds paradoxical. But it is an illusion to think that we want, think, choose, and do things on our own, from our own power. Everything we do is done as if we are doing it by ourselves, when in fact we are doing it from God, both directly and as mediated through the various regions of the spiritual world, broadly including heaven, hell, and the intermediate state in between them called “the world of spirits.” We don’t do anything at all on our own, or from our own power, because on our own we do not exist, and we have no power that is really ours.
Even evil exists as a corruption of God’s love and power, and can only exist because some amount of God’s love and power does flow into evil people, keeping them in existence and giving them the ability to be human. However, evil people and evil spirits take that love and power flowing in from God and twist it into something evil, contrary to its own intrinsic nature. This is the “spiritual physics” behind the biblical teaching that God loves even God’s enemies.
Jesus stated very clearly that we have no power of our own:
He even said to Pilate, who was about to execute him, and thus about to do a very evil act:
Even the power to do evil comes from God. But those who do evil twist that power into something contrary to God’s will, and thus divorce themselves from God—although they cannot completely separate themselves from God or they would cease to exist.
It may seem as if the fact that we have no power of our own, and that even our freedom and ability to choose and act come continually from God, means that we are mere puppets, or that our existence is illusory and unreal. But that is not the case because we exist in the lower level of reality in which God has created us. We are not ultimate, self-existent reality. Only God is. But we are a secondary, derived and created reality. And in that level of reality, we are indeed real. We’re just not as real as God.
Because reality itself is multi-leveled, we can exist and be real in our own level of reality even though the entirety of our reality is derived from and created by God.
It would therefore be logically impossible for our choices and actions to be logically anterior to God’s knowledge of them. Without God’s creative mind creating us, our choices, and our actions moment-to-moment, those choices and actions would not exist. And as I said earlier, God knows all of these things in the act of creating them. God has simply chosen to give us the ability to, in a sense, decide what God will create in our own lives and level of reality.
That also may sound paradoxical and contradictory, and as if we are in some way logically anterior to God’s creation of us. But keep in mind that even though we are making choices and taking actions, God is still creating the universe and everything in it from moment to moment. It’s just that as God’s power flows down into the created universe, the way it is received by the created beings determines how, and how much, of it will be expressed in those lower levels of reality.
We loosely say things such as, “When I turn the spigot, it causes the water to flow.” But that is not correct. What’s causing the water to flow is the potential energy of the water itself where it is stored at a higher altitude, or the pressure within the air bubble in a pressurized water tank. Opening the spigot doesn’t cause the water to flow. It simply allows the water to flow.
That is our position within creation in relation to God. We don’t actually cause anything. Rather, we allow one thing or another to happen based on our choices and our actions pursuant to them. It is power from God that actually causes these things to happen. (This form of causation is distinct from the temporal, sequential causation in which our choice results in a particular outcome. God’s causation of everything in the universe through power flowing into the universe from God is a prior form of causation, and flows into temporal and sequential causation, giving it existence.)
This means that God is always the active force, and we are always passive recipients relative to God. Nothing we choose or do is logically anterior to God’s knowledge or power because we ourselves, our ability to make choices, our ability to act, and all of the consequences of our actions are flowing into us from God. We are simply allowing more or less of that inflow into ourselves, and directing it one way or another based on our choices. And in the very act of creating everything we are and do, and allowing us to direct that creation where it enters into our life and existence, God has full knowledge of everything we choose and do, and all of its consequences.
I’ll stop here, and you can tell me whether any of this addresses the issue and question you are raising.
Hi Lee… I’m so sorry, I fear I must be driving you crazy… I must have been making this sound much more complicated than it really is… All I’m really trying to ask is whether it’s safe to assume you would agree that *one* of the requirements for God to believe/know that we made a choice is for us to actually make it…as opposed to the absurd idea that God could believe we made a choice we didn’t actually make, or the Calvinist idea that our choices are only illusions and God’s pre-determination is all that is required for anything to happen at all, at any level of reality (and that we don’t even open the spigot or direct the water or anything).
I think it’s implicit in what you’ve been saying, that you would agree with the first statement – and I know you disagree with the latter two – but I guess I’m just trying to figure out what words could be used to express this idea, that accurately reflect position on this point.
(By the way, I don’t mean to imply that it’s been a waste for you to write what you did – it’s all very fascinating, and I’m taken with the spigot analogy…very interesting stuff, I’m mulling it all over, and it’s very helpful to my understanding of all this…)
Thanks!
Hi Seeking to understand,
It’s the “logically anterior” language that my mind bridles at. That doesn’t make sense to me. I do disagree with the idea that God could believe we made a choice we didn’t actually make, which is indeed absurd. And I not only disagree with the Calvinist idea that our choices are only an illusion, but I think it is the absolute nadir of horrible falsification of the teachings of the Bible and of the truth. Once Christian doctrine got to that low point, Christianity was at a complete end, and it was necessary for the Last Judgment and Second Coming to happen, and the New Jerusalem to begin its descent—all of which are spiritual events, not literal, physical ones.
I suppose you could say that one of the requirements for God to know that we made a choice is that we actually made it. But that is almost tautological. God knows what happens and what exists, not what doesn’t happen and what doesn’t exist. Even if God knows that some alternative course of events could be a possibility, that is still accompanied with the knowledge of what actually happens. So God would never be unsure or unclear of how events unfold just because they could have unfolded in a different way.
As for words to express that idea, I guess I just wouldn’t make it that complicated. I’d say, “God knows our choices and actions.” I don’t see the need to get it all tangled up in concepts of logical anteriority. But if you see some critical issue here, please feel free to keep driving me crazy! 😀
Haha! I learned a new word when I looked up “nadir” 🙂
What I’m working on mentally reconciling now, is the (paradoxical?) idea that God can know all of our choices and actions, without God’s knowledge ever changing, *and* without our choices being in any way eternally present inside of God, from God’s perspective outside of time, which I believe I now understand to be your position…but let me know if I misunderstood it.
Thanks 🙂
Hi Seeking to understand,
Vocabulary is good! 😀
The knowledge of our choices and actions is eternally present in God. But the choices and actions themselves exist in the (created) spiritual and physical levels of reality, not in the divine level of reality. Creation is distinct from God, even if God is present in all of Creation, and perceives everything in all time and space that unfolds in Creation.
Does this help?
Hi! Sorry it took so long to reply, things got really busy again…
I think that helps, at least in the sense of making your position seem internally consistent rather than seemingly self-contradictory… So that does make it an option, for me to adopt it as well…it’s just that…it seems so flat and static, for God’s knowledge of our choices and everything to be eternally present in God and for God to literally be completely unchanging. I’m not really sure why people seem to consider that a compliment… I mean, unchanging in character, yes – I see that as a compliment. But to be completely unchanging even in one’s knowledge or experience? No offense, but…it seems so boring…
If (since) God is Life itself, that seems to imply growth, and since God is Love itself, that seems to mean relationship is central, and if the whole history of a relationship is eternally present in God’s knowledge, somehow that just seems to take something away from it… I know, you’re probably going to say I’m just stuck in our human way of thinking, and that God isn’t static, because that implies staying the same from one moment in time to the next whereas God is actually completely outside of time… So maybe I do just need to mull this over some more and see if I can come to terms with it… But I’m just letting you know where I am at this point in my processing of this idea.
If you feel like answering the thread further, one of the things I’m pondering is the idea, which I think Swedenborg espoused, that everything in this world is analogous to something in the spiritual world, and that everything in the spiritual level is analogous to something in the Divine level of existence, so if there is a spiritual analog to time (which you said is states), why wouldn’t there be a Divine analog to time/states?
Thanks 🙂
Hi Seeking to understand,
Yes, from our position embedded in time and growing and changing through time, the idea of God not changing does seem static. However, God is dynamic in a different way, in that God is not only eternal love and wisdom, but also eternal action. That action creates and sustains the entirety of the spiritual and physical universes. From that perspective, God is the most dynamic reality, whereas the rest of the levels of reality are less dynamic and more static because a) they are, relatively speaking, passive recipients rather than active initiators, and b) they are “slowed down,” limited, and finite versions of the infinite activity that is God.
Still, you may be happy to know that while God at God’s core is unchanging, when God enters into the universe, that eternal, unchanging nature of God is expressed in what we perceive as dynamic, changing realities. In a sense, what is eternal in God is “spread out” over time and space when it enters into physical reality, and also when it enters into the spiritual analogs of time and space (which are actually prior to and above the physical versions).
In particular, when God entered into the spiritual and physical universe as Jesus Christ, God did, in a sense, change in a process that Swedenborg calls “glorification.” This was a process that took place progressively throughout Jesus’ earthly lifetime. It involved taking the finite and fallible humanity that he received from his human mother Mary and transforming it step by step into an infinite divine humanity that is the human presence and expression of God. In the Incarnation, when God entered into time and space, God partook of time and space and, from our perspective, developed as a human being.
This is a vast topic, which I can’t do justice to here. But you can get a taste of it in this article:
If Jesus Christ is the One God, Why Did He Talk and Pray to the Father?
Meanwhile, if you feel the human need to think of God as being dynamic in the sense of changing through time, you can look to the lifetime of Jesus Christ on earth, and see God expressed in what we humans can perceive as a dynamic, changing, and very human reality.
About your last question, it would be most helpful to illustrate it with a chart, but I’m not sure I can do that in a comment. So here are two columns that you can put side-by-side in your mind to visualize the divine, spiritual, and physical versions of space and time:
Space:
Time:
The divine analog of space is God’s love. The divine analog of time is God’s wisdom, or divine truth.
In the human mind, psyche, or spirit, which exists on the spiritual level of reality, the analog of space is changes of emotional state, or love. We are “located” in the spiritual world, and in human community, according to the current state of our loves, feelings, emotions, drives, motivations. These are what “move” us around in human society, closer to some people who share our loves and feelings, and farther away from other people who love and feel very differently than we do.
Meanwhile, our psychological analog of time is in our mental and intellectual changes of state. Put more simply, spiritual time progresses for us as we learn more things and become more intelligent, understanding, and wise. Our thinking mind is especially what develops in us from infancy to childhood to adolescence to young adulthood to middle adulthood to our elder years. As we grow more and more in knowledge, understanding, and wisdom, we become more mature both physically and psychologically.
At the divine level, God’s love encompasses infinite states of love, and God’s wisdom encompasses infinite states of wisdom and truth. However, since they are one in God, Swedenborg actually speaks of “infinite state” rather than of “infinite states.” All of the states that we experience spatially and sequentially, or in our emotions and in our thinking mind, are present in infinite completeness and form in their original divine versions in God.
When that infinite state of divine love and wisdom expresses itself in the lower levels of reality, it becomes emotional and intellectual changes in human beings and human society, which is a spiritual reality, and it becomes space and time in the physical universe.
Hi Lee!
I’ve been wanting to reply for so long, and finally found a good time to do so! 🙂
Your last reply was so helpful, thought-provoking, and generally fascinating, that it has raised further questions for me, so I hope you don’t mind if I pick back up on this conversation even though it has gotten a bit old?
This paragraph is what I am most interested to explore further:
“Still, you may be happy to know that while God at God’s core is unchanging, when God enters into the universe, that eternal, unchanging nature of God is expressed in what we perceive as dynamic, changing realities. In a sense, what is eternal in God is “spread out” over time and space when it enters into physical reality, and also when it enters into the spiritual analogs of time and space (which are actually prior to and above the physical versions).”
I read the article you linked to, “If Jesus Christ is the One God, Why Did He Talk and Pray to the Father?”, and besides some unrelated questions that I think I should put in the comments for that post rather than here, I wanted to ask one that relates to that paragraph I quoted… Taking it together with other posts of yours that I have read, my understanding so far is that what Jesus did, in battling the forces of evil and winning, led to a change in the way God was able to relate to us on earth… My question is, was that a change in the fullest sense?
I mean – I don’t have a clear understanding of what precisely changed, but in a post called “If Jesus was God, How was God Still in Heaven?”, you said “And because Jesus achieved a full victory over the Devil, Jesus is able to give us the power to defeat evil and the Devil within our own souls and in our own lives as well” – so am I understanding correctly that prior to that in the human timeline, from our perspective, God was less able to do what you described effectively?
And if so… Is there a term for that level of reality in which God can undergo changes, or what seem like changes from our perspective at least? If there is a word I can use to succinctly refer to it, that might facilitate clarity in any future conversations about this…
Thanks again 🙂
Hi Seeking to understand,
You don’t ask any easy questions, do you! 😀
I had to re-read my previous comment just to see what I told you. Good stuff! 😉
To answer your last question first in good biblical fashion, the term Swedenborg uses for the part of God that comes to us and touches us directly, and that changes in the realm of time and space, is the Divine Humanity. This is the human expression of God, which we know most concretely as Jesus Christ. Swedenborg usually simply calls Jesus Christ “the Lord.” He doesn’t think of the Lord as a separate being from the Father or the Holy Spirit. Rather, he sees the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as all being within, and part of, the Lord. There are not three persons or three gods, but one God, who is the Lord God Jesus Christ. For more on this, see:
Who is God? Who is Jesus Christ? What about that Holy Spirit?
In short, the Divine Humanity is God reaching out to us and relating to us as a (divine, infinite) human being relating to (created, finite) human beings.
In the lifetime of Jesus Christ the Divine Humanity developed through time and space in a process that Swedenborg calls “the Glorification.” This was the process of Jesus making his human side, which originally came from Mary, fully divine, such that by the time of the resurrection there was nothing left of the finite humanity derived from Mary; it had all been replaced by an infinite, uncreated, self-existent divine humanity. As Jesus says in the Gospel of John, “Just as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself” (John 5:26). This would be impossible unless the Son was fully divine, and not some secondary, derived “person” of God “born from eternity” (something the Bible never says).
I realize this is a brain-bender; but understanding it is the key to understanding the Incarnation and the Glorification. Some of the linked articles go into this in a little more detail. The fundamental idea is that God, in a sense, “expanded” or flowed outward with the divine being to include a Divine Humanity that had not previously existed. An imperfect analogy is to think of a human being developing from a single fertilized egg into a full-grown human being. The DNA is still the same; it is still the same human being; but it has now developed from potential in the complete set of human DNA in the fertilized egg to an actual in the adult human being that has grown according to the pattern contained in that DNA.
When God “develops” in a new form, there is no separation from the core being of God, because God is one and indivisible. Unlike human sons and daughters, who separate and distinguish themselves from their parents, the Son of God never separated from God, but remained one with God. The Son of God is not a separate person distinct from God the Father, even though it may appear that way to human eyes, but rather an “expanding” of God into “territory” that God did not previously occupy. It’s just that the Bible had to use terms and concepts that humans could grasp in some way to describe the cosmically unique event that was happening, so the metaphor of “father and son” was used.
I hope these few thoughts will give you some mental grasp of what was going on in the Incarnation and Glorification.
The big change from before to after the Incarnation (God becoming “flesh,” or human, in Jesus Christ) is that before the Incarnation, in reaching out to human beings on earth God worked primarily through angelic and human intermediaries.
In the Old Testament, God spoke to people through angels, and also through human leaders such as Moses, Joshua, the High Priest, and the prophets. Ordinary people rarely if ever heard God’s voice directly. And even when someone “saw God face to face,” it was actually God filling an angel with the divine presence so that the angel represented God.
That’s why in Genesis 33 it says:
but a few verses later in the very same chapter God says to Moses:
Skeptics will jump all over this as a blatant contradiction in the Bible. But what’s happening here is that human beings before the Incarnation could not see God’s actual face, which was the infinite core Divine Being, because that would indeed have been fatal. It would have been like having a direct, unfiltered encounter with the sun, which no human being could survive. However, they were able to speak to God “face to face” when God spoke through angels, and the angels were so filled with God’s presence that they thought and spoke as if they were God. For another example of this, read Genesis chapters 18–19, where the beings who visited Abraham, and later Lot, are sometimes called “men,” sometimes “angels,” and sometimes “the Lord.” For a related article, see:
What is the Biblical Basis for Humans becoming Angels after they Die?
Unfortunately, as the generations and ages passed, people paid less and less attention to God’s messengers, both angelic and human. And there were fewer and fewer people God could call upon to deliver God’s messages because humanity in general was getting more and more materialistic, and listening less and less to anything that came from the spiritual world and from God. The last prophetic books of the Old Testament speak of events that happened several centuries before the coming of Christ. There was a “dead zone” in there where God was not speaking to the people because the people were not listening. This is what Isaiah was speaking of poetically in this passage:
He saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no one to intercede; then his own arm brought him salvation, and his righteousness upheld him. (Isaiah 59:16)“His own arm” is Jesus Christ, who is not some separate “person” of God, but God’s own powerful and loving arm reaching out to save humanity from spiritual destruction. See also the famous passage in Isaiah 63:1–9, which is another poetic rendition of the same idea.
In other words, the connection between humanity and God through angels and human leaders, priests, and prophets was becoming so weak and tenuous that humanity was in danger of being cut off altogether from God and the spiritual world, which would have resulted in our spiritual death. That was when God came personally as Jesus Christ to restore the connection between humanity and God. Unlike God’s former appearances through angelic and human intermediaries, this time it was God’s own human presence reaching out to humanity, and speaking directly to us. That’s why, when Philip asked to see the Father, Jesus replied:
Now the Father (the infinite Divine Being) can speak to us directly in the Divine Humanity who is Jesus Christ.
This is why, although institutional Christianity quickly reverted back to the old Jewish model (see “Christianity is Dead. Long Live Christianity!”), in true Christianity there are no priests serving as intermediaries between humans and God, because God is his own mediator in Christ, and people now have a direct relationship with God in Jesus Christ. See, for example, 1 Timothy 2:5; Hebrews 12:24. These passages make it sound like Christ is separate from God, but that is not the reality. That’s what Paul was addressing when he said, “Now a mediator involves more than one party; but God is one” (Galatians 3:19). And that’s why Paul also said:
What appears to us spatially-challenged humans as two is actually one God. This is all explained in the “Who is God” article linked above. For another, somewhat technical angle on this, see:
What is the difference between the Swedenborgian and Oneness Pentecostal doctrines of God?
The upshot is that unlike before the Incarnation, God no longer has to work through angelic and human intermediaries to reach us and speak to us. Although God still does use angelic and human intermediaries for many things, God, as the Lord Jesus Christ, can now also have a direct relationship with us. Now we can see the face of God and live, because God has become the Divine Humanity, Jesus Christ, whose face we can see, and to whom we can talk person-to-person. See:
How does Jesus Appear to Us? Can We See God Face to Face?
I hope this helps to answer your excellent questions.
Note: I have now posted an expanded version of this response as an article here:
How did the Incarnation Change God’s Relationship with Us?
Hi Lee
Happy New Year
what would Sweedenborg and yourself say about people who claim to have predicted the future or say they can regulary know what will happen in the future kinda like Nostradamus? Because sweedenborg says we are not allowed to see the future and that even Angels cannot see the future so it would seem kinda unfair that god would allow certain people to see what will happen even if we have free will.
Hi AJ749,
Interesting question!
In general, yes, we’re not allowed to see the future because it would tend to make us fatalistic, and would sap our energy and dedication to working hard toward our earthly and spiritual goals. However, Swedenborg does mention in one place that angels have a clear view of the future. I don’t think he means that they know every single thing that’s going to happen to eternity. But even here on earth we can extrapolate what’s happening now into the future. For example, if we see a marriage in which the couple are at each others throats and are flirting with other people, we can have a pretty clear sense that divorce is in the near future for that marriage.
About Nostradamus, one trick for predicting the future is to do it in veiled, metaphorical, and poetic terms rather than making stark, literal predictions. Then when things happen, people read it into the predictions made hundreds or thousands of years ago. For example, Nostradamus never actually mentions the name of Donald Trump. But after Trump was elected President of the United States, a number of people suddenly “discovered” that Nostradamus predicted his rise to power.
This is not actually total hocus pocus. There are certain repeating patterns in human life. Prophets, seers, and prognosticators learn and see those patterns, and they lay them out in more or less veiled terms, helping others to see those patterns as well. When some individual or collective human event happens according to those patterns, it was “predicted” by the prophet, seer, or prognosticator. And that’s not entirely wrong. Even in the stock market people who are skilled at watching the patterns can often predict what is coming. And though many predict wrongly because they are not watching the right signals, or they have preconceived ideas of what is supposed to happen, others do make predictions based on their more objective reading of the economy, and those predictions actually come to pass.
In short, it’s not a cut-and-dried matter of “we can’t know the future.” We can’t know the future for sure, and because our thinking is clouded by various notions and considerations, we often see the future inaccurately. But yes, it is possible for us to know something of the future if our thinking is clear, and we understand the patterns of human life and the common results of various human attitudes and behaviors. If you see someone chain-smoking year after year, you can make a pretty solid prediction that there will be lung disease in their future. If you see someone sleeping around very promiscuously, you can make a pretty solid prediction of an STD in their future. But if you see someone working hard and keeping their life clean and on track, you can make a pretty solid prediction that that person will make it, even if there may be many setbacks along the way. Not 100%, of course. Life throws us some curve balls. But in the normal course of events, certain attitudes and actions lead to certain results.
If we use our sense of the future to throw up our hands and give up on the work in front of us, it is a destructive knowledge. And that, as I said above, is why we’re generally not allowed to know the future with any clarity, if at all. Our future is the result of our present efforts and actions. We will have no good future if we don’t apply ourselves to our tasks and our path in the present.
I saw in a different sweedenborg article about the future that the only way that we can see the future is to predict based on current actions E.G if someones driving irrisponsibly all the time you can predict they will crash . But you cant see the future from visions because god would never allow it ?
Hi AJ749,
In general, no, God doesn’t allow us to see the future through visions. That’s because for most people it would have a negative effect instead of a positive one.
However, that is not an absolute law, but a generalization based upon our particular spiritual state. Some people do, for example, have near-death experiences in which they are shown visions of the future. And of course, in the Bible there are many prophecies of the future based on dreams and visions.
In other words, when God sees that something good can come of it, God does sometimes allow people to see the future in dreams, visions, and experiences of the spiritual world while still living here on earth.
The caution is that those visions of the future commonly are not literal, but metaphorical in their imagery. For example, a prophet might see the rise and fall of empires, and though that could be interpreted as relating to human empires here on earth, its greater and more proper meaning relates to spiritual “empires,” meaning the rise and fall of successive “churches” or religious eras.
For example, shortly after the time of Jesus, Judaism as it had existed up to that time came to an end when, in 70 AD, the Romans sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Jewish Temple, which put an end to Judaism as a Temple-centered religion focused on animal sacrifice. The Judaism we have today, Rabbinic Judaism, is quite different from the Judaism that existed prior to 70 AD. And the change is not just a change in outward rituals, but in the whole spirit of the religion.
Today Christianity is going through a similar change, from the Christianity that existed prior to the Age of Enlightenment to a new form of Christianity that is slowly but surely replacing it. See:
Christianity is Dead. Long Live Christianity!
If someone has a near-death experience in which he or she sees future events, those events may or may not take place literally and physically in the material world. Rather, they may be metaphors of great changes and cataclysms in the collective human mind and spirit as our culture goes through great changes in the coming decades and centuries.
In other words, even if we “see the future,” it still may not be certain exactly what our vision of the future is referring to. It may unfold in a way very different than we thought when we initially saw the vision.
Hi lee
Sorry ro bombard you with all these comments im sure it takes alot from your day, i just wanted to say that what we have just talked about has massively helped me understand god a little more as i had a real problem with people seeing literal events but others werent aloud to but put it as spiritaul and metaphorical makes so much more sense and helps to undersrand ones that make little sense literally aha
Hi AJ749,
Glad to hear it! That’s what I’m here for.
Hi lee
that makes sense because for many prophecies made in NDEs and others , the things they say are to happen arent physically possible but if you view it metaphorically like the Second coming and the apocalypse it makes much more sense that its metaphorical for spiritual change
Hi AJ749,
Exactly.
if we are promised eternal happiness in heaven does that not contradict free will. are we truly free if we are always happy. it makes it so that is the only option to chose. do we just lose our free Will when we die and go to heaven
Hi Noah,
Thanks for stopping by, and for your comment. It’s a good question.
In response, there are two different types of freedom. There is freedom of choice, and there is freedom to live as we choose.
Here on earth, we have spiritual freedom of choice, which, at the most basic level, is the freedom to choose good or evil, heaven or hell. However, we are not always free to live as we choose.
When we die and go to the spiritual world, we have already made the major choice of which direction we want our life to go in, and what we want to devote our life to. There, our primary freedom is the freedom to live as we choose. We do still make various choices day-to-day, but if we have chosen heaven, we have no desire to go to hell, and if we have chosen hell, we have no desire to go to heaven.
Depending on the choice we made, we may or may not always be happy in the spiritual world. If we have chosen heaven, we will be happy most of the time, though not necessarily all of the time. We do still have our struggles there, especially in the lower heavens. If we have chosen hell, our life alternates between pleasure and misery, since our pleasures inevitably bring misery upon ourselves.
We do not lose our free will in heaven. But as for freedom of choice, we’ve already made our big choice, and that will not change. But we still have free will in being able to live as we have chosen, and also to make various choices in pursuing the general direction of life that we chose during our lifetime on earth.
Hi Lee, I love your power plant analogy! As for the concept of God seeing everything at once, to me, it’s like there are two “plans,” depicting all pathways of all humankind: One is lying on top of the other, covering the world, so to speak. The one “on earth” is the one we humans are creating with our own choices, day by day, and our paths are not complete, there’s a lot of white space, we create as we go along, seeing only until the next bend. God, however, “sees” the same from above (outside time and space), but he sees the plan on top, which also contains the endings, the whole big picture. But to my question: You said in your example with the car and the manufacturer that “once the car is made, it, not the manufacturer, causes itself to drive down the road,” etc., and “Does this mean that God causes us to be born …? No. Our parents are the ones who caused us to be born.” So, when parents decide to start a family, it is their free will/choice. At the risk of sounding stupid, but does that mean that no person is created or “designed” by God?
Hi Pink,
Not stupid at all. In fact, that is a surprisingly tricky question to answer.
For the ordinary person, the idea that “God made me” is enough, and it is true enough. God did make everything in the universe, and continues to sustain everything in the universe from moment to moment.
However, the way God does this is far more complex than the ordinary person thinks. God doesn’t sit on a throne in heaven and say, “Hmm, today I’m going to create Pink, and Pink is going to have these physical and mental characteristics.” Rather, God designs a universe that will produce Pink with unique physical and mental attributes. And God includes in that universe a certain amount of freedom or randomness to produce Pink in a way that is not predetermined.
These days we have an analogy for this in the developing technology of artificial intelligence (AI). Early AI systems were directly coded by programmers to do specific things, such as play chess. Getting the computer to do more complex tasks required more lines of code.
However, many recent AI systems are designed with the ability to teach themselves how to do particular tasks, which may require far fewer lines of code than would be required under the old system of programming everything in directly. Once such a system is designed, it operates autonomously. There is no programmer watching over it deciding everything it will learn, and how it will interpret it. Rather, the system consumes data fed to it by the programmers or found on the Internet, and seeks out patterns and structures in that data. That’s how it teaches itself.
The result of this type of AI system might be quite different from what the programmer intended. We have found to our chagrin that AI systems commonly have stereotypes and biases built into them based on the data they consume. Recently there was a big flap about an AI system that, when given a head shot of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, produced an image of her in a bikini. See: What a picture of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a bikini tells us about the disturbing future of AI.
Did the programmers design this system to produce an image of AOC in a bikini? I think not! But the program they wrote did produce such an image. In other words, they created a system that does things that they themselves didn’t tell it to do. They did tell it to auto-complete head shots by adding bodies. They didn’t tell it to put women in a low-cut top or a bikini over half of the time.
In a very similar way, God designed the universe to do certain things, such as produce human beings. But God didn’t tell the universe exactly which human beings to produce. The universe, and more specifically, biological fathers and mothers, do that based on their own biological and mental characteristics. And even the biological parents don’t get to decide exactly what their offspring will be like.
So . . . yeah . . . complicated! For an article that goes into more detail on this whole issue, please see:
God: Puppetmaster or Manager of the Universe?
Thank you, Lee, that helped. 🙂 I was wondering, what about the unique God-given gifts and talents that (or so I thought) every person has? So a child has the genes, physical/behavioral characteristics, etc., from its biological mother and father–is it about inherited vs. acquired traits? Are those gifts from God given only after I realize I have sinned, repent, and decide to sin no more? Or can I assume that they have always been there somehow from the beginning, lying dormant, and are only freed to develop after I accept the inflow of God’s love? But that would imply that God indeed had “something” (more) to do with my creation. Do I have to ask in faith for those gifts/to see what my gifts are, and then (only then) will I discover them?
Hi Pink,
This is a variation on the nature vs. nurture debate that has been going on for centuries. These days, biological scientists like to attribute everything to heredity. But we are certainly formed by our upbringing and surroundings as well.
I think that each person has a spiritual “genetic blueprint” just as each person has a physical one, and that it has a great influence on our character and direction. However, the environment in which we are brought up, our experiences along the way, and the decisions we make, especially at various critical crossroads in our life, also has a major influence on the person we become.
As for God creating us, God does create us because God creates everything. It’s just that God uses a more complex means of doing it than traditional religious views have suggested.
Back to nature vs. nurture, our spiritual genetics, like our physical genetics, are only a potential. We’re the ones who make it actual by the way we live. And it can be bent one direction or another depending on our experiences and our choices. What we will become is there in potential when we are conceived and born. But we’re the ones who actualize it in a particular way that makes us the specific person we are, and will be to eternity.
Hi, thank you. I was thinking more along the lines of spiritual gifts as mentioned in 1 Corinthians 12 or Romans 12:3-8 or 1 Peter 4:10-11. Is it true that those specials gifts are only for the “saved”? Is it to be understood then as kind of amplification of innate talent (or skills one has developed), say, the gift of teaching? So when there comes a situation in which it is especially needed (in order to honor God and help others), then (when asking/praying for it) it will be provided in abundance, meaning God makes use of what is already there?
Hi Pink,
Ah. I tend to think that we have certain innate or “natural” talents, which we may or may not develop, and which we could develop in a good or bad direction.
For example, someone may be naturally talkative and extroverted, which could make him or her good at public speaking. But if he or she never develops that talent by actually engaging in public speaking, then it remains a mere “gift of gab,” and is not developed as a real and effective gift. A person could also develop that natural ability and become a demagogue, whipping people up into a frenzy to accomplish no good end. Or a person could develop that natural ability to spread the Good News to all who have ears to hear.
In other words, I don’t believe that these gifts are only for the “saved.” But a person who is saved, meaning spiritually reborn, can use them to accomplish good for God’s kingdom. That is the only way they become true gifts. If we use them for bad ends, they become curses rather than gifts.
Again: Thank you! Just finished reading all four chapters of “Death and Rebirth”–great stuff! Have a good week.
I have read so much of your writings here, but I didn’t come across Prayer – do you believe in prayer, do you pray, if so, what do you pray for, how do you pray? Do you believe God answers prayers? It seems to me that after reading all the above, God put everything in motion and sits back and observes us as we make our choices. I have always been taught “The Power of Prayer” can change lives, my life, your life – it is life a new road map sometimes; it can heal the sick, it can our bad situations into good. So, what are you thoughts, beliefs about prayer? If you do pray, who do you pray to?
Hi Jeffrey,
Thanks for stopping by, and for your comment and question. No, I don’t have a lot about prayer here, but this is one article that you might enjoy, along with the discussion afterwards:
Pray to God, but Row Away from the Rocks
Talking with God, by Gwynne Dresser Mack, is an excellent book about prayer from the perspective of my church and its beliefs. Unfortunately, it is long out of print. However, the link will take you to its Amazon page, where currently there are two used copies available. A few more copies are currently available through the AddAll used book search site, here.
I do not believe that God puts everything in motion and then just sits back and watches. That would be a form of Deism, which I do not accept. Rather, I believe that God remains actively involved in Creation, and especially with human beings within Creation.
And yes, I believe God hears and responds to prayers. However, this is not a matter of getting God to notice us or of changing God’s mind and so that God decides to do something God wasn’t planning to do. Rather, prayer opens up lines of communication and receptivity among us, so that God is able to do things for us that God always wanted to do, but that we were not ready to accept until we asked for it.
And of course, God considers the long-term, eternal effects of answering any of our prayers. God, whose perspective is eternal, will answer prayers only when they will help lead us toward eternal life. That is why so many prayers for material things are not answered—or are answered with a “no.”
Being a Christian, I pray to Jesus Christ. I don’t make any distinction between Jesus and God. They are one and the same being. There are no three Persons of God. Praying to the Father for the sake of the Son, and so on, is mistaken prayer. God is one, and Jesus Christ is that God.
Though some people pray to saints or to ancestors, the ones they are praying to do not hear their prayers. They are living their own lives in heaven (or hell). Only God hears and responds to prayers.
Good luck in court with that “Your honor, I didn’t cause the piano to fall on his head, gravity did.”
Or maybe “I only pulled the trigger, the bullet killed that man”.
Hi Steve,
What does this have to do with the article?
I would suggest reading it again, and this time paying attention to what it says.
From what I gather, from a timeless perspective, we have free will and have made all choices we have, are, and will make in a single, eternal moment. But from a time-based perspective, the future is as fixed as the past, which is why angels said in Conjugal Love that to the extent the future is revealed, one may lose freedom (or something like that).
It also agrees with the Novikov self-consistency principle, and it makes time “symmetrical” in that the future is fixed like the past (in case time travel works), and because space and time are the same (stuff is fixed in space in a single moment).
Is this essentially how the writings of Swedenborg view time and free will?
Hi K,
No, not quite.
Your first sentence is more like God’s consciousness, which exists only in God. All created beings, including humans, live within the arrow of time in the physical world, and within the arrow of sequence of events in the spiritual world. This is not reversible, and the future is not fixed.
Of course all our choices are made in the present because our consciousness is always in the present. That is the only point at which we can make choices. But once we make a choice, the moment in which we made that choice slips into the past, and we continue on in the present, moving toward the future. We will continue to make choices in our current present, and those choices will continue to affect how things unfold for us in the future. If we had made a different choice, our future would have unfolded differently.
Even the past is not as fixed as people commonly think it is. At least, not in our mind. Yes, we can’t change what we did, or what happened. But we can change our attitude toward what we did, and what happened. And this will change our perception of the past. This means that our experience of the past can change, even if the past itself didn’t change. And within our consciousness, the past is what we perceive it to be, and also how it affected us.
For example, let’s say a man suddenly loses his job, his wife, his house, and so on. Most people would consider this to be a calamity. The man is likely to become depressed, and perhaps even suicidal. But assuming he doesn’t actually kill himself, life goes on.
Let’s say he is able to start a new life, and now that all the things that were binding him to his prior career are gone, he is no longer has to continue in that career. He may be forced to end that career. Let’s say he had always dreamed of a different career, and now he is able to start it. After a decade or so, he is happier with his life than he ever was before he lost everything. Perhaps he has remarried, and his current wife loves him and supports him in his new career in a way that his first wife never would have.
Now he looks back on his past with a different attitude. Instead of thinking of it as a disaster, he thinks of it as a blessing in disguise. That life crisis is what made it possible for him to finally live the way he could only dream of living before. He is not bitter about what happened to him. He may even thank God for throwing his prior life into chaos so that he could begin a new life unencumbered by the old one.
This is an example of the past changing in a person’s consciousness. The events that happened didn’t change. But it looks completely different to the man now than it did when it first happened. For him, the past changed, because from his current perspective it has a completely different meaning than it did in the year or so after it happened.
Our future is not fixed at all. Certainly there are forces in motion that will tend to direct it one way or another. But we have the ability to make choices and take actions that will change the results of those forces, or at least bend them in a different direction.
This is another way of saying that our free will is real, and our choices have real effects upon our future life.
So no, I don’t believe that the future is fixed like the past, nor do I believe that time is “symmetrical” in that sense. Space and time are not the same. Time has a one-directional arrow. Space does not. Time is not a “fourth dimension.” It is a phenomenon entirely distinct from space, even if the two are always interacting with one another.
In Swedenborgian terms, time relates to truth, whereas space relates to love. Just as love and truth are entirely distinct from one another, but are in constant interaction with one another, so are space and time.
I thought time and space were one and the same – in the physical – because of the theory of relativity. Also inside the event horizon of a black hole, space and time appear to “swap” (so the singularity becomes inevitable), which seems to point at the two being the same.
Do you think it’s still possible that space and time in the physical could still be found to be one and the same, even if it’s more of a “marriage” between the spiritual equivalents?
Of course current science could change in the future, and challenge the notion of space and time being the same.
Hi K,
As I understand it (which is not a very thorough understanding), in the theory of relativity time and space are not the same; rather, they are in fundamental interaction with one another. Saying that they are the same would be like saying that a man and a woman who are married to one another, and who are one in spirit, are the same as each other. No. Their oneness includes and encompasses their inherent differences.
Similarly, time and space are fundamentally different from one another, but they unite with one another to form a single reality, sometimes called “spacetime.”
I don’t see how the singularity becoming inevitable means that space and time have swapped. But yes, science does change over time. It is good to keep an open mind both about our spiritual ideas and about our scientific ideas, so that when we learn new things it doesn’t completely shatter our understanding of and relationship with God and the universe.
It’s also good not to get too far divorced from common sense, which assures us every day that time and space are two distinctly different things.
If it is discovered that the future is fixed like the past in the physical – or even that time travel is possible in the physical – it still wouldn’t contradict what Swedenborg says about spiritual and free will, right?
(like free will still existing despite “fate” being a thing in the physical)
Hi K,
If it were discovered that the future is fixed like the past, that would indeed be a problem not just for what Swedenborg says about free will, but for free will in general. You can’t simultaneously have free will and a fixed future. (This is the irrationality and self-contradiction of Calvinist predestination, which, if true, would destroy both Christianity and humanity.)
If something like this were discovered, civilization as we know it would collapse. Humanity is based on the existence and reality of free will. If there is no free will, there is no humanity. Life becomes the inexorable acting out of what has already been predetermined. This would lead to fatalism, apathy, and the end of human life as we know it. At that point, the machines might as well take over, and there would be no escape from the Matrix, because we ourselves would be nothing more than machines.
But . . . I don’t think the future is fixed like the past, so I don’t think this will ever be discovered.
And I don’t think time travel into the past will ever be possible. If it were, we would already have many time-travelers from the future visiting us today. But we don’t—outlandish conspiracy theories to the contrary notwithstanding. This strongly suggests that time travel to the past is not possible. Only time travel to the future, which is possible under basic principles of relativity, if and when we become capable of near-light-speed travel.
Do you think it’s possible that backwards time travel is still possible, perhaps with a “Novikov self-consistency principle”, while the future still isn’t fixed? Although it seems that people in the physical may never invent it, as there’s a lack of time travelers. And if all changes to the past have already been made, it could mean that even if the future isn’t fixed, people could be compelled to go back in time to make the changes that were part of history all along, which may not be that compatible with free will.
And if faster-than-light interactions are possible in the physical, backwards time travel is possible as well.* The spiritual seems to be able to interact with the physical without regard to the speed of light. Although maybe Divine providence doesn’t permit interactions with the physical that violate causality?
* http://www.physicsmatt.com/blog/2016/8/25/why-ftl-implies-time-travel
Hi K,
The linked article comes to the same conclusion that I do: faster-than-light (FTL) travel would create paradoxes, and therefore is probably impossible. If we could travel faster than light, then it would be possible for future information to be conveyed to the past, which would make it possible for a future being to prevent a past event from happening, thus changing the future in which the being who sent the message came from. That’s a paradox.
The Novikov self-consistency principle is a theory that it’s not possible for this to happen. If that principle is valid, then once again, FTL travel or communication simply isn’t possible. That’s what I tend to believe. And I’ll continue to believe it until there is some evidence otherwise. I don’t think that evidence will ever come.
Traveling close to the speed of light is another matter. That we know is possible. And in effect, it would cause us to time-travel forward in time. That doesn’t create paradoxes. Only backwards time travel would cause paradoxes. And once again, that doesn’t seem to be possible, if only because we have never seen any visitors from the future, and if it were possible, we should see such travelers. We live in a very interesting time in human history. It is not believable that future historians wouldn’t come back to this time to study it in person if that were possible. And it’s not believable that they would all be able to avoid blowing their cover. If they could come, they would come, and we would know it. It’s likely that some of them would purposely blow their cover in order to gain power and wealth in the present through their knowledge of the future.
As for the spiritual interacting with the physical, this is still tied to time on the physical side of things. And the spiritual side still experiences passage of events that seems not to be able to get ahead of where physical time is.
There is a whole series of specific time-links with the spiritual world in the form of people’s physical deaths. For every person, this happens at a specific date and time. Before that time they are living on earth, and not in the spiritual world. After that time they are living in the spiritual world and not on earth. People who have not yet died are not yet living in the spiritual world. If you have died, you can’t visit people who haven’t died yet, unless communication is granted with that person while s/he is still living on earth. It’s not possible to break even the spiritual “arrow of time” and visit a not-yet-deceased person in that person’s future in the spiritual world.
How exactly this works, since there is no time and space in heaven, I don’t claim to know. That’s a bit beyond my pay grade. But that it works is according to all of the knowledge, evidence, and experience we have.
In short, not even the spiritual world can violate the material world’s arrow of time. That’s not possible. If it were, once again, spirits from the future could communicate with people on earth from the past, creating the same paradoxes that would happen if FTL travel and communication were possible on the material plane.
I don’t think it’s so much that Divine Providence doesn’t permit interactions that violate causality, as that God has created the universe in such a way that its own laws don’t permit interactions that violate causality.
For that to work, there has to be a one-way arrow of time. That arrow can speed up or slow down in the perception of anyone living within it. But it cannot go backwards. Only forwards.
Thanks for the reply.
Also, does Swedenborg write about the future in the physical not being fixed, or spirits and the spiritual not being able to violate causality in the physical?
Hi K,
On your first question, Swedenborg doesn’t write about it in those exact terms. But he covers it in a general way when he says that everyone is predestined (by the Lord) to heaven, and people go to hell only by using their free will to choose hell instead. For example:
More specifically, he rejects determinism in this fascinating passage:
In short, a fixed future—which would be “absolute necessity,” or in more technical terms, determinism—is incompatible with free will.
On your second question, Swedenborg accepts the idea that miracles are possible through bringing spiritual or divine forces to bear on things in the physical realm. So he would reject the idea that spirits and the spiritual cannot violate causality in the physical realm.
I still think it’s possible for people who live in this life or the next to gain information about the universe faster-than-light by spiritual means. Out-of-body experiences can be a thing, and Swedenborg may have really had that vision of that fire that didn’t reach his home.
How this works with the whole faster-than-light meaning time travel thing is another story, but it may still be possible.
Hi K,
It is possible to extrapolate into the future based on past and present events. However, this is never certain. People could make different decisions than expected, which would change the results from what was expected.
As for OBEs and Swedenborg’s vision of the fire, these do not involve FTL travel or time dilation. Rather, they involve seeing things that are happening a short distance away (cosmologically speaking) in the present time. The short distances involved would not create any humanly discernible delay in the information reaching a person at the speed of light.
Even in the spiritual world, people do not travel instantaneously to distant regions of heaven. According to Swedenborg, in the afterlife people continue to live in regions of heaven that are associated with the earthly planet they came from. When he traveled to the regions in the spiritual world of planets outside our own solar system, it took many hours, or even days.
How this relates to earthly time is still a bit of a mystery to me, since the nearest star is over four light years away. However, for the most part, his encounters with people of other planets didn’t involve conveying any specific, scientifically testable information that would violate the speed of information flow in the material universe. It was mostly general information about the nature of the inhabitants and their planet. (And some of his information about physical conditions on their planets was clearly wrong, as covered in my article on the subject.)
In short, information people receive with their spiritual senses about physical things while still in their physical body is either from such a short distance away that relativistic time effects don’t come into play (as in the case of Swedenborg seeing a fire in Stockholm from about three hundred miles away in Gothenburg), or the information conveyed is so scientifically non-specific that it doesn’t convey any information that would be impossible to convey by physical means in such a short time period.
In general, our spiritual senses are not a reliable source of information about the physical universe. They are tuned to see spiritual things, which operate by correspondences. This colors any information they may draw from the physical universe, such that it is not subject to ordinary scientific investigation.
Thanks again for the reply.
Whatever the nature of time and speed limits are in the physical, I take it that the spiritual is far less limited – at least aside from one not being able to actually do the spiritual equivalent of “backwards time travel” with the spiritual equivalent of time?
Meaning spirits could travel relatively quickly to the spiritual equivalent of other star systems or even galaxies – assuming such things are in the spiritual – by flying there without spacecraft?
(as you said, Swedenborg may have done that, and days are far shorter than thousands or millions of years)
Hi K,
The speed of light is a physical limitation. It doesn’t apply in the spiritual world. There may be some spiritual analog, but yes, I gather that spirits can travel vast distances in the spiritual world much faster than we could travel analogous distances in the physical world.
In the spiritual world, travel happens through “changes of state,” meaning changes in a person’s or group’s state of mind and heart. These changes are to bring the person’s or group’s spirit into harmony with the state of the community to which they are traveling. Travel time can be faster or slower depending upon how eager or reluctant one is to go through those changes in mind and heart.
Swedenborg says that everything we have here on earth exists in the spiritual world. He, of course, doesn’t mention spacecraft or even automobiles, because those didn’t exist in his day. But he does mention people walking, flying (without the need for wings), and I believe riding carriages also. The general sense, though, is that conveyances aren’t really necessary for travel. Most commonly, he speaks as if the group he is with is traveling on foot along various pathways.
(Also I take it that it’s not inherently “sinful” to enjoy fictional stories of faster than light or backwards time travel, assuming such things really are impossible?)
Hi K,
No, there’s nothing sinful about enjoying science fiction. If there were, I’d be in big trouble! 😀
Another question about free will: it’s been argued it doesn’t exist because decisions people make are based on external factors and brain chemistry. Can free will still exist despite that? Do such things correspond to the spirit where free will really is?
Hi K,
Those factors are simply conditions under which we make our choices. In fact, the more hemmed in we feel, and the more pressured we feel, and the more weight is bearing down on us, the more real our decisions are. When it feels to us like there is no more hope, and all is doomed, if we then decide to act in an honorable and considerate way, even when it seems like there would be no benefit to us in it at all, that’s when we are at our most human, and our most free.
About brain chemistry, I would say that our free will, and the choices we make pursuant to it, have more effect on our brain chemistry than the other way around.
The argument against free will from neuroscience has been summed up here:
https://philosophybreak.com/articles/free-will-illusion-sam-harris/
quote from article:
“These findings are difficult to reconcile with the sense that we are the conscious authors of our actions. One fact now seems indisputable: some moments before you are aware of what you will do next — a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please — your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this ‘decision’ and believe that you are in the process of making it.”
Hi K,
I’ll respond more later when I’ve had time to read the article. (It’s late here.) But the basic error in this quote is the idea that we make decisions with our “brain,” meaning our thinking mind. The reality is that we make decisions in our “heart,” meaning our love/emotional self, and then our thinking mind confirms and supports the decision we have already made in our heart. That’s what’s really going on in the phenomenon that Sam Harris is describing. But Western intellectuals such as Harris can’t see or understand this because they are trained to think and believe that human intellect is primary, when in reality love and emotion is primary, and intellect is secondary, following what love tells it to think and do. Their fundamental misunderstanding of how the human psyche works leads them into all sorts of errors, including the denial of human free will. Ordinary people who make decisions every day understand human reality better that these so-called “rational” intellectuals.
Hi K,
Now that I’ve had time to read the article, it’s clear to me that Harris is the atheist equivalent of a Calvinist. He contorts himself into positions just as unnatural philosophically as Calvinists do theologically, all in an effort to say that there’s no free will, but that you’re still responsible for your actions and you should still make good choices, but then again, you’re really not responsible for your actions because it’s all predetermined—in Harris’s mind, by genetics, and in Calvinists’ minds, by God. Here’s the resulting “philosophical” gobbledegook from the linked article:
Yes, according to both Harris and Calvinists we both do and don’t have the ability to change our life. Harris may think he’s being “scientific” and “rational,” and that he has gone beyond the “irrational” and “unscientific” theists that he fulminates against, but really he’s just rehashing the same irrational, self-contradictory arguments that the Calvinists have been making for almost 500 years now. And they make no more sense coming out of the mouth of an atheist than they do coming out of the mouth of a Calvinist.
Once again, ordinary folks who make choices every day are smarter about these things than “smart” people like Harris and Jack Maden, the author of the linked article, who tie themselves in hopeless self-contradictory Gordian knots on issues that are beyond their materialistic scope and ken.
Oh, and speaking of atheists who think they’re smart and everyone who believes in God is stupid, see:
God Is Unconvincing To Smart Folks? – Part 1
Harris’s view that there is no such thing as free will because everything is predetermined is not only part of the old Newtonian scientific paradigm, but leads to absurdities such as the idea that the Mona Lisa was predetermined and inevitable at the time of the Big Bang. On the science side, see:
God: Puppetmaster or Manager of the Universe?
Science itself no longer posits or even supports the sort of strict determinism that would be necessary for Harris’s rejection of free will to have a sound scientific basis.
The neuroscience experiments that Harris and the article cite are all about relatively trivial choices that don’t have much impact on a person’s life, such as whether to eat beef or lamb for supper tonight. The big, determinative choices in life are nowhere near so simple.
The big choices in our lives usually happen when we are under extreme weight and pressure of one sort or another, to the point that our life seems to be spinning out of control. The Swedenborgian/Christian term for this is “temptation,” which is not about whether or not to eat one too many cookies, but about whether to give up in despair and allow our life to go to ruin or whether to do the hard work of acting and moving forward with integrity even when there seems to be no benefit in it to ourselves. These choices cannot be reduced to milliseconds of cortical activity before we become conscious of the choice we have made. These are decisions we agonize over, go back and forth about, backslide and then press ourselves forward again. No analysis of neural activity will throw any light on these big, life-changing choices that determine whether our life will go down to ruin or up to better things.
Our day-to-day decisions about what to eat and what to wear simply flow from the ruling love and subordinate loves that we have put at our center, and surrounding our center, by these big choices in life. I still think that we have free choice even in what we will eat for dinner tonight. I do not think that is just an illusion no matter what neuroscience says about neural firings in the brain that seem to precede our choices. But as I said in my previous short comment, our conscious, thinking mind is not where we make our choices. Rather, we make them in our heart, and then they are communicated to our thinking mind. We are the ones who decide and have decided what our ruling love will be. We put that ruling love in place as the ruler of our life, and then proceed to make choices based on it, which our thinking mind then apprehends, supports, and carries out. The real choices have already been made before these little choices are made.
Even when it comes to food, we decide upon a dietary plan of one sort or another, and then proceed to carry out that plan. Eating beef or lamb is just one of the small choices made in the unconscious mind, not requiring much of our conscious thinking and effort, pursuant to the bigger choice we have made about our plan and guidelines for feeding ourselves.
Beyond that, the materialist view does tend to lead people to a denial of our humanity, which is tied up in our free will. It leads us to an affirmation that we are simply animals with bigger brains that make it possible for us to have conscious awareness of our actions, unlike lower animals. Take away the spiritual realm, and it’s hard to argue against that view. (Though as I said above, current science simply doesn’t support the type of strict, Newtonian-style determinism that Harris espouses.)
Once we recognize that humans are not only material beings, and that there is a part of a human being that exists beyond the physical brain, Harris’s views become even more foolish and irrational. Not only do ordinary joes and janes know that intellectual big-shots like Harris are full of . . . manure, but once we add in the spiritual dimension, Harris’s views become hopelessly narrow and small-minded.
Once we recognize that our consciousness is not physical, located in the material brain, but is spiritual, located in our spiritual mind, then neuroscience, while still telling us interesting things about how the human physical body functions, ceases to give us sound conclusions about how human thought, emotion, love, ideas, decisions, and so on, work. None of our decisions are made in our physical brain. All of them are made in our spirit, and are then communicated to our brain, which proceeds to instruct our body to carry them out.
Unfortunately, most people these days are not very spiritual, and not very self-reflective. Many people make their “choices” by default, and allow themselves to be led along by their desires without consciously taking charge of those desires.
This goes back to a theme present in the very first chapters of the Bible. When God first made humans on earth, he told them:
In the spiritual sense, having dominion over the fish and the birds and every living thing means attending to our own thoughts and feelings, and directing them from our higher spiritual self, which is represented by “Adam” or “Humanity” in the Bible story.
Unfortunately, we quickly failed to follow God’s directions on this point. In Genesis 3, Eve, then Adam, allowed their outward senses—represented by the serpent, and by Eve seeing the tree of knowledge of good and evil as “a delight to the eyes” (Genesis 3:6)—to direct their actions rather than having their actions directed by their inner spiritual self and their connection with God, represented by the tree of life, and by God walking with them in the garden. As a result, they fell into “slavery to sin,” as Jesus terms it much later in the New Testament (see John 8:34).
By definition, being a slave means not being free. In allowing ourselves to be led by our physical senses and desires, we do indeed abdicate our true, spiritual human free will, and become “slaves”—or Harris’s predetermined beings. So if Harris is talking about materialists such as himself, of which there are many, then his arguments do have application. But to people who have made the choice not to be led by outward, physical things, but by spiritual things and by God, his arguments are mere chaff that the wind drives away. The wheat of free will is in our spiritual self, not in our physical body and brain. But since Harris believes that our physical body and brain is the sum total of who we are, he easily falls into an irrational denial of the free will that we all experience every day.
So, let Harris think that free will is an illusion. His spirit is still making choices about what he wants to believe, what he loves most, and how he wants to live. His spirit is still communicating those choices to his physical brain, which then marshals and orders the physical body to execute them.
And when Harris and his fellow “rational,” “scientific” atheists find themselves continuing to live in the spiritual world after their physical death, contrary to all “reason” and “science,” the angels who receive them will know just how foolish Harris and his atheist friends have been. But those angels will still welcome them and love them and care for them.
When Harris finds himself in the spiritual world after his death, the angels will look for the good in his heart, hoping that this will be enough for him to recognize how foolish and ignorant he has been, all the while thinking of himself as smarter than everyone else. And if underneath all the “scientific, rational” bluster he does have a good heart, then he, too, will accept the truth about God, spirit, and human free will that you and I have known in our heart all along.
Thanks for the reply. The “metaphysical naturalism” (material atheist) view that the brain is a bunch of simple processes that builds up to something complex like a biological computer – and in which consciousness is an emergent property – can sound fairly convincing. Especially when things like drugs or injury altering brain chemistry are brought up as “evidence” of that theory.
(I wasn’t aware of the “make decisions with the heart” thing before.)
Also does the physical brain react to the spiritual mind via “correspondences”, so scientists searching for the soul or consciousness in brain activity will have the freedom to conclude there’s nothing supernatural about the way the brain works?
also thanks again for the thorough replies
Hi K,
You’re welcome. (He says, after posting a non-thorough reply. 😉 )
At least one neuroscientist finding on this is discussed in Sheldrake, Rupert. Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery (pp. 123-125) who is a skeptical atheist, so you get more balanced treatment. Short excerpt: ” Instead of free will, we have “free won’t.” This conscious decision depended on what Libet called a “conscious mental field” (CMF), which emerged from brain activities but was not itself physically determined by them. ”
I don’t think this is right as it still assumes the brain is all there is, but it does support the notion that we have free will to choose or reject ideas which is in alignment with Swedenborg I think.
Frederick Myers of the Society for Psychic Research back around 1900 asserted that the brain was actually a filter on the mind’s view of the material world. Viewed this way, the findings leave open the possibility of the mind considering the input, deciding, and then initiating action in the brain. It accounts for all of the findings and provides Free Will decisions without jumping through hoops.
Of course, atheists don’t report on alternative explanations.
Hi Ted,
Fascinating stuff.
Of course, for atheists and materialists of every stripe, explanations must come without any reference to a spiritual realm, or to God. From their perspective, consciousness cannot be a spiritual phenomenon, and therefore must be a phenomenon or epiphenomenon of physical process. It therefore makes sense to them to search in the brain for the seat of consciousness. And since the brain does serve as a connection between the conscious mind, which is spiritual, and the physical body and physical world, for those who do not believe in any spiritual level of reality the brain is the logical place to look.
The problem for materialistic determinists who deny free will is that every human being experiences free will every day. It’s a matter of common sense that we have free will. And no matter how many fancy arguments the atheists and materialists make, ordinary people just aren’t going to listen to those arguments, because they know very well that they do have free will.
It would be better for them to accept the reality of free will, and then go looking for the support for it in their particular areas of study and expertise. Based on your quote from Sheldrake, this seems more like what he is doing. I don’t think materialists will ultimately be successful in providing the basis for free will, because ultimately it is not a material phenomenon. But they can at least study how it works itself out in the human brain and body, and in human actions and relationships.
I’m not sure I would call the brain a filter on the mind’s view of the material world, as if it limits and directs what the mind can gather from the physical senses. Certainly it does have filtering capabilities. But these seem mostly to be focused on rendering intelligible to the brain and mind the vast welter of raw information streaming in through the physical senses.
I think, rather, that the mind uses the brain and the senses to gather the information it wants and needs to go about its business in this world, not to mention to support and develop its perspective and orientation as it moves forward on its spiritual path. So if the brain is filtering our raw experience of the material world, it is doing so at the behest of and under the direction of the mind. I made some related remarks about the process of visual perception in comments here and here, though you have to wade through some other material to get to the relevant parts of the comments.
I actually find the ‘Consciousness is a total epiphenomenon’ to be the funniest since the very existence of the word ‘Consciousness’ falsifies the claim.
As to the body, it is clearly a filter as we can’t see all of the EM spectrum, hear all of the sounds, nor smell all of the smells. My very tentative characterization is that the body is an amplifier to make sure we pay attention to things that will keep us alive against the ‘noise’ of the spirit world.
I periodically interact with some atheists on social media and their minds are closed and they can only produce trite routine responses. Sad.
Hi Ted,
The common denominator of the materialist “explanations” of consciousness is that they don’t actually explain consciousness. There’s “epiphenomenon”: an extra goodie tacked on to the real stuff. There’s “emergent property”: It just sort of happens when things get complex enough. There’s “panpsychism”: It’s just a general property of reality as it exists. And so on. It’s something like saying, “That house is there because it’s there.”
It’s a good point that our senses cannot detect everything in our environment. But for the most part, they can gather the information we need to go about our lives. And the body does seem to have the ability to amplify particular sensory inputs. But I would say that the mind is using the body to focus on those particular inputs, similar to an astronomer pointing a telescope at a particular celestial target that s/he wants to study in detail. The telescope has the capability of pointing at and focusing on particular objects, but it’s the astronomer that directs it to do so.
About closed-minded atheists, the sad reality is that most of them have been either so hurt by religion through their harsh religious upbringing, or are so disgusted with religion as it predominantly exists in the world today (hint: The Christian Church is Not Christian), that there will be no way to penetrate their defenses against God and spirit. This is why I am angry with Christianity as it exists in the world today, and hope for it to go away as soon as possible so that real Christianity can finally come back into existence in the world.
I don’t blame the hardened atheists. If I thought God and the afterlife were actually like what the present-day “Christian” Church (not to mention other corrupted religions) describe them as, I’d be an atheist, too.
I agree. I’ve told you before that most of my life I was an agnostic, but when I was led to Swedenborg I found he provided key insights to make the Christian mysteries comprehendible.
Hi Ted,
I was blessed enough to be born into it, so that I never had to reject God and religion.
What will Calvinists think about this?
Do you know what open theism is? I wouldn’t call it heresy, but would you call it error or disagreement? I will go with error.
Open theism seems like a polar opposite of Calvinism. That a good way to put it?
Hi World Questioner,
Please see:
Does God Grow and Develop? What about Open Theism?
And yes, Calvinism and open theism are about as close to polar opposites as you can get. Having said that, both of them are wrong because neither of them represents a correct understanding of the nature of God.
Hi Lee,
What are your thoughts on “if our existences continue” as ‘normal’ after we die like how “afterlife science” has apparently a “tough time” getting a handle on questions about our exact identities as they persist after death, but so called “first-hand reports” and “communications sources like “Douglas Conacher” shed some light describing life on the other side” of how post-death so called “astral states” may eliminate the limbic system in the brain? Why the limbic system?
I also remember hearing how “Scientific journals” simulated certain parts of the brain and the persons “free will” went away? Along with how your free will, will “go away” if an emotion turns out of control and is now “dominating your actions like a trance which are influenced by baseline instincts”?
And on the same topic of free will I remembering hearing that there is supposedly “scams” on the “astral world” which a “strange operation” that involves giving your “consent” to “less-than-trustworthy characters in our “neighboring dimension.”?
Thank you Lee
Hi Sam,
I can’t really say why these folks focus on the limbic system. It does have some important functions relating to emotion and behavior. Perhaps that’s why. But as usual, it’s just not worth spending the time to try to figure out all these labyrinthine ideas. It’s just endless wandering through endless mazes.
I can assure you that our spiritual body has a brain that has every part that the physical brain has, including the limbic system. The physical body and brain is an expression and correspondence of the spiritual body and brain. No part of our physical body is missing in our spiritual body.
As for free will, this is never taken away from us. However, as Jesus says, “anyone who sins is a slave to sin” (John 8:34). When we engage in evil and sinful behavior, we become addicted to it, very much like a heroin or meth addict. True freedom comes only from living a good and loving life, according to the truth. That is why Jesus also said, just a few verses earlier:
Notice that it is the ones who “continue in his word,” meaning live according to his teachings, who will know the truth, and be made free by it. Just learning it in our head is not enough. Only living by it.
I am sure there are plenty of scams in the spiritual world just as there are in the material world, and that many people fall for those scams. But only in the world of spirits and in hell, not in heaven. And no one who has a good heart will be eternally hurt by those scams. The scammers will ultimately sink down to hell, where they can no longer scam good people. People of good heart who were scammed will rise up to heaven, where the evil scammers can no longer reach them, and where they will laugh at their former foolishness.
Hi Lee,
Thank you kindly for all the clarifications and assurances on these subjects and what they mean. And how we don’t have to worry about such things.
Thank you again Lee
Buddy,
If we drop a book we CAUSE the book to fall BECAUSE we KNOW it will. It will not fall on its own.
If I push someone off a cliff and tell God “I didn’t cause the man to fall, gravity did” do you think I’d get away with that?
If God is eternally in the present, and present is not really what it is, it’s more than that, but let’s go with that, and He is also omniscient, He has to know what will happen in OUR future.
In this respect our lives are like a script or a book. He knows everything that will happen to us. We are infallible, and little things like dropping books are irrelevant for the most part. But if God didn’t know where we would end up, that means He does not know the present, either, (His present which is our past, present, and future) and could be surprised by our decisions
That makes no sense.
Hi Mike,
Thanks for stopping by, and for your comment.
If you were on the International Space Station, and you dropped the book, would it fall? No. It would just float away in whatever direction you nudged it. That’s because you don’t cause the book to fall; gravity does. If you caused the book to fall, it would fall even if there were no gravity. But it doesn’t.
And of course if you pushed a man off a cliff you would be responsible for his death because you intentionally put him into a situation in which he would die. But you still didn’t cause him to fall. Gravity did that. What you knew is that if you push him off the cliff, he will fall and die because of gravity. That’s why you would be culpable for his death. Again, if there were a cliff on the International Space Station, and you pushed a man off it, he would just float away in the direction you pushed him. It’s gravity, not us, that causes people to fall off cliffs.
Now about God:
God is not in our present within time. God is in an eternal present. That eternal present is outside of time and space. This means that God sees all time and space in God’s own state of eternal here-and-now.
This means God doesn’t know what will happen to us. God knows what does happen to us. As the above article says, God does not “see the future.” This would imply that God is in a particular point in time, like us, and is looking from there toward the future. But God is not in time like us. God is outside of time. What to us is the past, present, and future is all in the present for God. Another way of saying this is that we live within the arrow of time, but God doesn’t.
However, just because God sees what will happen in our future, that doesn’t mean God causes it to happen. It also doesn’t mean that our future is determined, and that the universe is deterministic. It does not mean that God had already decided everything that would happen before God created the universe. Once again, this would assume that God is within time, which God is not.
Instead, God created the universe so that it would unfold according to its own laws within the arrow of time, building in some “randomness” that, when it gets to the level of human beings, is free will. God made it possible for us to make choices that would change our future. God sees what will result from our choices, but God doesn’t cause or predetermine those choices, or their effects.
I realize this is hard for us ordinary mortals to wrap our head around. We can’t really think outside of time, because we are embedded in time. This is why Christian Calvinists, for example, came to the conclusion that God decided before creation who would be saved and who would be damned. But that belief result from the same fallacy as thinking that because God knows what to us is the future, this means that God has already determined what the future will be. That’s just not how it works.
If you look out the window and see a tree swaying in the wind, you know the tree is there, and you know it’s swaying in the wind, but you don’t cause the tree to be there and sway in the wind just because you can see it. The tree grew there from a seed over a period of many years, and the wind is caused by heating and cooling of the atmosphere. You see the effects of both of these, but you don’t cause them to happen.
In the same way, just because God sees whether we will spend eternity in heaven or in hell, that doesn’t cause us to spend eternity in heaven or in hell. It is our choices during our lifetime on earth that cause us to spend eternity in either heaven or hell. God would much prefer that we choose heaven over hell. However, God has given us free will as an essential part of our humanity. If we want to choose hell, God will allow us to do that even if it is not what God wants.
I would suggest that you re-read the above article, and also read this one:
God: Puppetmaster or Manager of the Universe?
Again, these are difficult concepts to grasp. If we think with our material-level mind only, it does make no sense. But if we can lift our mind up at least abstractly up to spiritual ideas, in which there is no time and space, we can begin to understand how God could know everything that to us is the future even though within the arrow of time the future still isn’t determined.
God created both the material universe and the spiritual universe to have a certain amount of autonomy exactly for this reason. This is covered more fully in the “Puppetmaster” article.
I hope this helps. Feel free to continue the conversation if you still aren’t getting it.
If God sees everything and knows everything and I think he does. Then when he created us, he knew if we would choose Heaven or Hell. So, my question is why let us be created if we are going to choose hell?
Hi Regina,
Thanks for stopping by, and for your comment. It’s a good question.
The basic answer is that if God didn’t create anyone God saw would choose hell, that would take away our free will, and our humanity along with it. It would be like one person saying to another person, “You can make any choice you want, but if you don’t choose what I want you to choose, I will kill you.” That’s not real free will.
For a considerably longer discussion of this and related issues, see a comment thread on another post starting here, responding to similar questions raised by another reader.
I’ve really struggled with this. I’m 53 and single. I was built a marriage and children but it never happenI was from Indian family and expected to have an arranged marriage, they were Hindu. I was Christian. I was praying to get married and have kids ever since I was 16 or 17. I did tell my family I wasn’t going to have an arranged marriage, but that still didn’t give me freedom to date. At 18, A Christian guy used to visit me at my holiday workplace, he did it two days in a row. He would just come and stand in front of me and chat and smile for a few minutes. I wasn’t sure about my attraction to him, but I was always friendly. His face was covered by a big moustache. I was also conditioned to rebuff any male attention because of family harassment and aggression around consorting with the opposite sex. He then asked if he could come again the next day. I hesitated and froze a little bit and said I would be busy the next day. I could see him redden and his face stiffen and I didn’t see him again. I then saw him at enrolment at university and he had shaved his moustache. He was very handsome. He was introduced to me and I smiled and said “yes I know he used to visit me at work”, but he was super cold to me. We were in the same Bible study and same class but he didn’t progress anything and at times I felt like he was laughing at me, a little unkindly. He got engaged to someone else a few years later. Now I was a young kid, I was from a family that didn’t allow me to date, and had I pushed through, I know now they would have accepted it but I didn’t know that at the time. More than that, I wasn’t fully attracted to him I
that one week he visited me, but was subsequently, and he didn’t actually ask me out. He just asked if he could keep dropping into my work. He then shut down on me. After he got engaged, we shared a car ride together to some Christian camp and we got on very well, and then after he got married he was kind of mean to me a few times making fun of me. I wonder now if he was wondering if he should’ve done something and he was taking it out on me. Are you saying God abandoned me in that moment? Did he have no way of guide me or him one way or another?
Hi Asha,
Thanks for stopping by, and for telling your story. It is a hard thing to want marriage and a family, but to have this life pass you by without experiencing those things. Fortunately, from my Christian perspective, marriage is not limited to this world, but exists in heaven also. See:
Can you Fall in Love in Heaven if you Haven’t Found Someone on Earth?
Still, it’s hard not to have that dream become real in this life. In your case, it sounds like your hopes for marriage and family fell through the cracks between your Hindu family and your own Christian faith. That is very unfortunate.
However, about the particular man you mention, I would say that you dodged a bullet. Based on what you have described, I see three possibilities:
If he is a weak-willed person, he wouldn’t have been a good husband. You would have lost respect for him before long.
If he didn’t feel a strong enough connection to you to pursue you even after you gave him an initial no, then he probably wouldn’t have gone the distance with you anyway. Men get rejected all the time. Those who feel a strong pull toward a particular woman will not give up after a single rejection.
If he is self-centered, and will be mean to anyone who doesn’t play along with his desires, then you are much better off not tied to him. He would have made your life miserable.
God didn’t abandon you. God saved you from binding yourself to the wrong man.
There may still be someone out there for you. If you’re still stuck on this particular man, I would suggest letting him go. This will help to clear your mind so that you will be open to the possibility if someone comes along who could be a partner and a husband to you.
I realize it’s too late for children. But it’s not too late to find someone to love. And as the linked article says, even if you don’t find someone here on earth, you can still find someone when you move on to the spiritual world. (There are more articles linked from the end of this one that address the common Christian misconception that there is no marriage in heaven.)
Although your life has not been what you had hoped for and dreamed of, there is still hope. God still has good gifts to give you.
I hope this helps. If you have further thoughts and questions, please feel free to continue the conversation.
Very, very amazing Response thank you
Hi there, I put the comment in but I still don’t think I have a Response
Sorry, I got your absolutely amazing Response. I felt that deep down as well. I hadn’t thought about him until recently when I was reviewing my life and wondering why God abandoned me.
Hi Asha,
You are most welcome. I’m glad my response was helpful to you. Godspeed on your spiritual journey!
Hi, Lee
Can you look at this video which makes some claims about free will
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
Thanks for stopping by, and for your comment and the video link.
I’m writing now as I watch it. Currently this YouTuber is showing us a timeline saying that only one thing can fill each slot in a timeline, and therefore everything is already predetermined. This is such a ridiculous argument that I’m quite surprised he’s making it with a straight face.
He’s ignoring the very basic fact that the future has not yet happened. Of course you can look back on your life’s timeline from the future and see what actually happened. But you’re not there yet. Anything that is currently in the future hasn’t happened yet, and therefore could happen in one way or another due to a number of factors. He’s talking as if there is no such thing as the past, present, and future, and we’re looking back at everything from the future, which is not the reality of our situation.
Yes, when an event happens, only one event can happen. But when the event has not yet happened, it could happen in many different ways to fill that “slot.” His argument is like saying that since you made x move in a now completed game of chess, that’s the only move you could have made. But in fact there are many different moves you could have made. It’s a very silly argument.
It is only in hindsight that we know how the game of chess unfolded, and can see every move that was made in the game. When we’re still in the middle of the game, the rest of the game is not yet determined. If it were, who would bother watching chess games, or even playing chess?
Hmm. I guess this YouTuber isn’t married. 😀
The rest of the video doesn’t add much. He just goes on about how having alternate timelines doesn’t make any difference because your own life is in only one timeline.
Basically, I think this guy is still living in a Newtonian universe that’s pure mechanical cause-and-effect.
But that’s not the universe we live in. Not only relativity, but quantum mechanics has come along since then. Though relativity might still have strict cause-and-effect relationships, quantum mechanics does not. This YouTuber does not take that seriously. Early on in the video he simply rejects the idea of randomness out of hand, saying, in effect, that we call things “random” only because we don’t have enough information, but if we had all the information, we could predict everything that will happen in the future.
This idea just doesn’t hold up under current science. Maybe in a Newtonian or even an Einsteinian universe it could, but not in a quantum mechanics universe.
Would this guy seriously argue that at the moment of the Big Bang, the Mona Lisa was inevitable? The whole idea is just plain silly. At minimum, real randomness exists even in the physical universe. Even from a purely materialistic view of reality, the universe is not entirely deterministic. Not according to present-day physics.
Of course, what he’s not taking into account at all is the reality of God and spirit. He’s assuming that material reality is the only reality that exists. And since even present-day materialistic science doesn’t support his hypothesis that everything is predetermined, how much less is that the case of God and spirit are real?
Along those lines, here’s another article you might find interesting:
God: Puppetmaster or Manager of the Universe?
P.S. Sorry about the disappearance of your other attempts to post this. The spam checker has been generating quite a few false positives lately.
Thank You,
For a thoughtful response and my reaction was similar but i thought i may not have understood the argument properly. Also i have some questions regarding that and actually as silly as it may sound i have heard this “one timeline = no other possibility” argument many times and someone who i was debating with posted that video.
Is timeline and implication that could have done otherwise would lead to branch off a timeline, a theoretical concept or supported by science?
Also at 7:00 in his video he made some claims about Heaven and regardless of dimension you live you can have only one timeline therefore determined. Can you please adress that?
Also is the whole argument about timeline and one slot at once have any scientific validity? And his argument about looking back and seeing one thing happened seems more like Logical determinism instead of causal? Do you agree?
Also he seem to have made another argument in comments (his pinned one) where he deny free will even if soul or immaterial existed, It’s
“One may try to escape this fate with the idea that there is more than physics at play. Thereare spiritual properties (your soul, the heavensor whatever) that grant you free will. It wouldthen be argued that those spiritual propertiesalso hold a certain type of characteristics thatresult in a certain set of decisions made. If yoursoul determines what decisions you will make,then you still don’t have free will, because yourdecisions are dependent upon the soul that youwere born with, and you didn’t chose which soulto be given.”
I think his denial seems more ideological than scientific.
Sorry to bother you with long paragraphs but I’m quite concerned about this topic and notion of No-free-will is on rise these days people claim there is no evidence of free will but there is lot of evidence against it and People like Sam Harris and M. Gazzaniga are one mission to eliminate it.
I’d like to hear your response.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
You’re welcome.
In response to your further questions:
I really am quite surprised that this “timeline” argument is taken seriously by anyone. It’s so obviously silly that it seems clear to me that it’s just another case of determinists casting about for arguments to support their already existing belief that the universe is deterministic. It’s similar to theists searching high and low for arguments to logically and irrefutably prove God’s existence, which cannot be done.
About Sam Harris, you might want to give this article a read if you haven’t already:
Is Free Will an Illusion? A Response to Sam Harris
Not being a scientist, I probably can’t give you the best answers about whether science supports this or that idea. But from what I understand, many scientists resist the idea of a multiverse, and of multiple timelines happening simultaneously, because these are not scientifically testable hypotheses. If there are other universes besides ours, we have no way of gathering any data about them precisely because we live in this universe, not in those other universes. And if other timelines besides the one we’re in exist, we likewise have no way of gathering any data about them precisely because we exist in this timeline, not in one of those infinite alternate timelines.
Speaking for myself, I do not think we live in a multiverse, nor do I think there are multiple simultaneous timelines constantly branching off from one another. It’s a classic plot device in science fiction—although I think it’s largely been played out by now. And it’s a way to get around the idea that our universe is amazingly well-tuned for life, and therefore probably had a Creator. If ours is just one of an infinite number of universes, it’s easy enough to use the anthropic principle to say that the reason we just happen to be in a universe well-tuned for life is that only universes well-tuned for life can have in them living beings capable of contemplating the universe.
Meanwhile, even in the scientific realm there are papers coming out questioning whether our universe really is as perfectly tuned for life as has been claimed. For example, the recent paper “The impact of the cosmological constant on past and future star formation,” referenced in a Sabine Hossenfelder video here, suggests that there might be other possible tunings of the universe that would be more favorable to life than ours, so that ours really is not the best universe for life. As Hossenfelder suggests in her video, this makes multiverse theory less likely to be needed. I would add, less likely to be needed by people who wish to avoid the possibility that the universe was created by some being called “God.”
However, I should add that this study is just an initial shot over the bow. There are many possible caveats. For example, the paper assumes that more stars than our universe has would mean more possibilities for life. But that’s not necessarily the case. More stars could mean more supernovas sterilizing all the star systems in their region of space, leading to a lower possibility life in that universe. A lot more study and modeling would be needed to support or disprove the paper’s hypothesis that our universe is not optimally tuned for the existence of life.
Of course, if we simply accept that the universe was created by God, then we can presume that God would make the universe suitable for life because that’s the whole point of the universe: to have free, rational human beings who can be in mutually loving relationship with one another and with God. To use Swedenborg’s formulation of this idea, the purpose of creation is a heaven from the human race (see Divine Providence #323).
Back to the “timeline” argument for determinism, once again, it’s just assuming the result. It’s pretending that time doesn’t really exist, and that we are not in the middle of our timeline, but at the end of it. It’s assuming the result by assuming that since our timeline does unfold the way it does, that means it must unfold the way it does. It’s a classic case of begging the question. For this argument to hold water, it would have to demonstrate that timelines are deterministic, which is precisely what it is assuming about timelines.
Our ordinary experience of our timeline is that it is not deterministic, and that we do make decisions that change how our timeline unfolds in the future. The “timeline” argument for determinism doesn’t refute this. It simply assumes that our perception of free will is an illusion, and makes its argument based on that assumption.
Another logical fallacy in the argument is the idea that because only one item can fit in any given slot in a timeline, this means that only one possible item can fit in any given slot in the timeline. The two are not the same.
If I have a pile of children’s play blocks of all sizes, shapes, and colors, and I’m arranging them in a long straight line all the way across the playroom floor, one after another, I can put only one block at each point along the line. However, I can put any block I want at that point. Each point is not limited to one specific block. It’s only limited to a single block. That single block could be any one of the blocks in the pile I’m pulling the blocks from, of any size, shape, or color.
In short, the argument makes no logical or rational sense. It assumes the result. And it makes the unwarranted claim that each future point in our timeline is capable of holding only one specific event, to the exclusion of all other possible events.
Again, I’m very surprised that anyone takes this argument seriously. It is fatally flawed logically, and it makes absolutely no sense. This is the sort of thing that causes Swedenborg to say here and there that ordinary simple folk understand how the universe works better than highly educated people.
To take an argument that’s completely illogical even in this physical realm and apply it to the spiritual realm—about which these materialists know little or nothing because they reject its very existence, and therefore don’t bother to study it seriously—makes even less sense. In particular, this person says:
This assumes that the course of souls is determined from the moment of birth, and then argues on that basis. But that is precisely the point of contention. Theists (except for Calvinists and other assorted deterministic religious riff-raff) say that souls are not determined from birth, but that we have free will to choose our future course, whether toward heaven or toward hell, and where in particular in heaven or hell we will go. For that argument to be valid, this person would first have to demonstrate that souls are determined from birth. But that is precisely what he’s assuming.
In short, his argument is just as logically flawed when applied to the spiritual realm as it is when applied to the physical realm.
Btw,
Really good article of your, I enjoyed it.
In comments i found this argument which was in support of video
“I mean, what would be the point of ‘multi timelines’, (hence universes) when only ONE couldbe experienced and remembered!? Like the guysaid; on your death bed, you are not able to look back on all these events – just the events you experienced, and HAD to experience on the only ONE timeline that exists – therefore the otherso-called choices (that we call ‘free will’) do not need to exist at all – and DON’T! The only thing that leads us to believe the choice of free will,is that BEFORE we reach what we THINK wedecided to do – we don’t know what it will be, likewhen you are a child for instance, you don’t know if you will get married – but you will only do ONE thing, marry or not – no choice, and go in ONE direction, and so the other timeline cannot exist but the one you are on, because it’s impossibleto experience the other! If it existed, then who is experienced the alternative choice? Not you that’sfor sure – and so it’s not yourself, and therefor cannot exist! Great Video!”
I don’t understand if they make such argument cause they already assume free will doesn’t exist or they don’t believe in free will cause they agree with such arguments.
I am a believer in God always has been but i find world weirder as it’s very disorganized in which people don’t only deny God but deny themselves and their agency. I’m not sure if religion can survive till next century but i also hope God must be doing something even tho it appears he is not.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
Right. The argument just assumes that free will doesn’t exist, and then argues on that basis. It’s a silly argument involving several basic logical fallacies.
Present-day Christianity may not survive into the next century. Its day has passed. But spirituality will survive in one form or another, along with a belief in God and spirit.
Hi Lee,
I think my replies didn’t reach you it’s fine but i kind of want your input on some of the arguments he’s making in these videos and in the comments. Tbh i find comments even bizarre as there seem to be many Christians who very predeterminists, and this guy is literally arguing why there can’t be free will even in heaven because of his argument. And another thing i find weirder is he seems to believe in control but says this
“in regards to control. We dohave control over things, but that control isitself an automatically occurring processwithin this predetermined sequence ofevents. It’s still all cause and effect.”
btw this are the videos,
Tbh, i disagree with his opinion but some of his argument despite not being his seems problematic but i want your input on them.
God bless
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
On the first video, I agree with his general attitude about pride and ego. However, that’s not because we’re “all the same person,” except that each one of us is influenced by different circumstances, and therefore turns out different. Again, he’s just assuming that our life is deterministic, and that we don’t really make any choices, and then arguing on that basis.
Pride and ego are a delusion because we aren’t our own creator, and we didn’t produce any of the influences that affected who we are. Even when we make a choice to do good instead of evil, where did the ability to make that choice come from? It didn’t come from ourselves. It is a gift from God. So it makes no sense for us to get all up in our ego and think we’re better than other people. Even the ability to do good comes from God, not from ourselves.
But yes, our ego can be a driver to move us forward, especially in the earlier stages of our spiritual journey. On that, see:
Spiritual Growth 101 with Mike Tyson: “The Virtue of Selfishness”
See also:
Self-Esteem is Made to be Broken
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
On the second video, I agree that our emotions and experiences, whether good or bad, do matter, and that science can’t properly take these into account because it looks at things from an external, materialistic viewpoint.
However, if everything is determined, then in the end, although it may matter to us whether we’re experiencing joy or pain, it is ultimately meaningless. It’s all just part of the inevitable unfolding of events. If even our consciousness is deterministic, then any idea that we can actually do anything about our own situation or anyone else’s situation is an illusion. Even if we help a poor person, that was predetermined from the moment the Big Bang happened. It has no real meaning in any ultimate sense, even if it has meaning to us and to the poor person because we think we’re changing the poor person’s situation, and because the poor person is now happier and less miserable.
This guy makes some good points, but then he ties them back to determinism, thus vitiating anything good about those points. If there is no free will, then our suffering or joy is ultimately meaningless. It’s only a fleeting experience of beings who have no agency over their own life, but are just cogs in the machine of the universe, who sometimes get crushed between its turning gears—gears that just keep on turning regardless of any pain they may cause to sentient beings.
It’s a dark, nihilistic view of the universe. It says that we live in a universe that gives some of us great joy and others of us great pain, and that we are powerless to do anything about that reality. The universe is intrinsically unjust and unfair. We are simply victims of our fate, both individually and collectively, which was determined at the moment of the Big Bang.
Thanks for your insight but i found it bit weird that he thinks we matter because of mathematical and some logical inference based deterministic argument.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
It’s all just a lot of big words that make these people sound smart, but once you examine them, are just a bunch of gobbledygook.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
On the third video, again he makes some good points about the wrongness of hating people, the futility of revenge, and the hope to reform people. But again, his tying all of this to determinism vitiates everything he says. Of course Hitler was responsible for his actions. He did not have to become the monster he became. He could have made a different choice.
It’s interesting that this YouTuber draws on religion, but seems not to be religious himself. Even atheists get their morality from the God and religion that they reject.
Fortunately, God does not abide by the flawed “logic” of the determinists. God has given us free will along with our humanity so that we can make choices that will make life better both for ourselves and for other people. Part of the humanity God gave us is that we can also make bad choices that hurt both ourselves and others.
To deny free will is to deny our humanity and make us into animals. That is what determinists are doing.
About the statement you quote:
This is exactly the contradiction that exists in the Calvinist view, in which we must choose the good, but really we don’t have any choice because God has already determined from before Creation who will go to heaven and who will go to hell.
Any person who has any common sense at all will recognize that the statements “We do have control over things” and “That control is itself an automatically occurring process within this predetermined sequence of events. It’s still all cause and effect” contradict one another. Both cannot be true. We either do or do not have control over things. If it’s all cause and effect, then we have no control. We’re just following a predetermined course, over which we have no control whatsoever. Again, please see:
Is Free Will an Illusion? A Response to Sam Harris
And:
Response to a Calvinist Critique of my article “Faith Alone Does Not Save”
Again thanks for such insight,
I would have loved it if you could address that metaphysical shift in his video that even if we invoke soul, god or religion, problem of responsibility remain and blame remains delusion because we didn’t choose soul and what applies to our body(nature and nurture) also applies to soul and but instead of nature nurture he just turn to ” whatever mechanism” that must determine soul, in the comments of his video he made that same argument against some religious commenters.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
Once again, if we now know that event the physical universe is not mechanistic, it would make even less sense to think that the spiritual realm is mechanistic and deterministic.
Yes, a soul has an initial state and tendency. I do believe that each person’s soul already has a unique character in potential, and that this innate character will play itself out in each person’s life.
However, that doesn’t mean it’s deterministic. That innate character can be turned and modified in many ways that aren’t predetermined when the soul is first created.
Fundamentally, it can go in either a good or an evil direction. There are no evil souls. Every soul is created by God to reflect and express some good aspect of God. The Calvinist idea that some souls are created predestined to hell is a horrendously false and blasphemous smear on the good name of God. However, we humans do have the ability to take what is good and twist it into something evil. If a person ends up in hell, that is through the person’s own choice, not because he or she was created to go to hell. The default destination is always heaven, not hell.
Even if people choose to steer their innate character toward what is good and not toward what is evil, there are many different ways that basic good character could be expressed. A person who is naturally intelligent could choose any number of different scientific, philosophical, or religious disciplines to apply that natural intelligence to. Exactly what he or she will do with that innate intelligence is a matter of personal choice.
Asserting that we don’t create our own souls, and therefore even our spiritual life is deterministic, predetermined, and outside our choice and control is, once again, simply begging the question. It is asserting that there is no free will, and then arguing that there is no free will on that basis. It’s a circular and illogical argument.
The reality is that God has specifically created our soul to have freedom and rationality as fundamental elements of our humanity. Without these, we are not humans but at best animals and at worst robots. The word “human” means nothing if there is no free will.
These materialists are using their own humanity and free will to deny their own humanity and free will. The irony is that it is the very existence of their rationality and freedom that allows them to decide to believe that there is no free will, and that ultimately, we are not humans, but animals.
on first response,
I agree with the way you put it but not with that YouTuber. I think pride and ego are counter to our spirituality and faith towards god but i don’t think they are delusion in a sense related to actual delusions, i know it’s not your point but that guy certainly implied it as an illusory experience.
I also think we’re not creator of ourselves, only in a sense that our existence and existence of everything that exists comes from God. But i also view it in a way that God has created us in a way that allow us to be a creator of ourselves to a extent in a sense that he has endowed us with tool that allows us to be the way we want to be to a extent that matters. But as everything comes from God and everything in existence is ultimately dependent on God, But that dependence is not constraining but it’s a form of Freedom, as even our Freedom depends on God. We may not have produced any influence that made us who we are but it wasn’t forced on us to make us who we are either as nothing from God is.
This is my point and it’s consistent with school of thought or religion i come from.
I think as i have seen from other responses you too agree with this point.
I think opposite of this view is materialistic views such as this, i read it on Stacs exchange philosophy,
“Free will is the idea we do what we wish. In anearthly sense, this fits in perfectly creating asociety as it is. Jailing the criminals who misuse their free will and crowning the adherers ofaccepted morality.
Put it in a cosmic sense, and you see the unjustness of said society. Do humans program themselves before being born? No. They don’t choose their personality. It is both inherent and changed due to environment. So, if a man doesn’t get to choose his own self behavior, his likes and wants, then how is he doing anything he wants?He is simply a randomly generated character playing out a determined life.
Consciousness makes one think they act on their own accord, but actually consciousness plays the said personality that cultivated itself. Free will is an illusion that flows with consciousness. BTW,true free will is actually impossible.”
what do you think of such views that simply says True Free will whatever that means to them is simply impossible.
This is response to the Video about Pride being delusion btw.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
I do agree with your views as expressed here.
And I disagree with the materialist denial of free will.
Materialists make humans into just another species of animal. They deny our free will, which means our rationality doesn’t mean anything either. In this way, they deny our humanity, and make us into animals—which is what they believe we are.
As suggested in the material you quoted, this also tears down the foundations of civilized human society. If it is unjust to jail criminals, then we just have to let them run free, prey on innocent people, and destroy the peace and security of our human communities. This, in fact, is exactly what is happening in some cities and countries today in which religious values have been rejected, along with any objective morality.
Also thanks for your insight on original, “timeline” argument. I agree with most of what you say. In my view the whole point about timeline and slot and picture of our reality in terms of events in timeline one or many is absolutely flawed. What are your thoughts on that.
Also I have a question to about your view on decision making as it seemed like a compatibilist view by looking at your some of your responses on article sam Harris. What do you think of Conscious mind as playing role in decision making ot exercising free will?
btw someone in comments did raise that question about role choice,
@bjk790 . 8mo ago
but before the timeline separates i can choose if i wanna get married or stay single that means i am choosing a timeline for me so how can that be predetermined?
and he simply responded,
@mazi_thoughts .8mo ago
The you that chose it was predetermined tochoose it.
isn’t that sort of a straw man or assumption based belief?
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
Of course that’s what someone who believes in determinism would say. That doesn’t mean it’s true.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
Compatibilism is a very nice attempt to believe two things that are mutually contradictory. As such, it is illogical and false.
Having a feeling that we have free will even though underneath that appearance we are actually determined and not free is, in fact, a denial of free will. It’s just saying that we can live as if we have free will, and make choices as if we have free will, but really, we don’t have free will; even our “choices” are predetermined.
This is exactly the sort of argument that Calvinists, who believe in double predestination, make. They try to have their cake and eat it to by saying that we have to choose to have faith, but really, God already decided before Creation whether we would choose good or evil. Like the compatibilists, it’s a self-contradicting belief. In plain terms, it is false.
To me, both compatibilism and Calvinism demonstrate that we humans are capable of convincing ourselves of anything we want to convince ourselves of, no matter how ridiculously illogical and false it might be.
Our free will is not just an appearance masking and underlying reality of determinism. We really do have free will, and our choices really do determine how our life will proceed into the future and to eternity. We really can make one choice and go to heaven, or make the opposite choice to go to hell, and nobody but ourselves determines that. If we go to hell, it’s our own choice and our own fault.
Thanks for clarifying your stance on compatibilism. On this i actually agree it’s nothing but World salad hiding underlying hard determinism.
And i have been on discord group where mostly philosophical debates occur and it’s safe to say Both Compatibilists and determinists attack Free Will/Libretarian Free will as something incoherent.
They God as far as calling it an Impossibility. Here’s a quote of determinist
“For someone to have free will, it (will) has to be uncaused but if it is uncaused then it’s an uncaused cause therefore it can’t be caused even by you regardless of how you define you”
This argument is originally made by Nietzsche and Sabine Hossenfelder who is against philosophy and philosophers in general on every matters but endorses this piece because it suits her ideological denial of free will. Have you heard of this line of argument before and what are your opinion of this, and would you try to refute it.
And onto matter of Compatibilism, i have been debating Compatibilists and they all provide Argument of Julian Baggini,
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/mar/19/do-your-genes-determine-your-entire-life
https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-think-about-free-will-in-a-world-of-cause-and-effect
what do you think of these both article, actually do read them sometimes and please provide your insights on them. As some claims it’s an fatal blow to Free Will as we know it.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
I’ve been following your discussion with Lee and decided to comment. You are wasting your time with the Compatibilists and Determinists (C&D) because the root of their argument is in their World View which is rarely stated. There are at least two Materialist World Views that can lead to C&D and a myriad of theological World Views that do the same thing. Unless you are arguing World View you can’t convince them they’re wrong. And, if you accept their World View they are probably right.
I don’t accept any of these World Views because I believe there is a Creator ‘First Cause’ God who is Good and involved in the Universe based upon scientific reasons. The first question then becomes would such a God have created a Compatibilist or Determinist Universe? And the answer is no because it wouldn’t be Good. The second question: Could such a God create a Universe with true Free Will for his creatures? And the answer is yes because it would be Good. And so he did.
Ted
Hi Ted,
Good to hear from you again, and thanks for your good thoughts.
Thanks for your response. I do agree with you. But there’s just too many people with a materialist world View and claim that their world view has been proven. Which consequently imply that all what you mentioned are just false. I’m not accepting their world view but the evidence they often site make me question things. Even tho there is no conclusive evidence there are evidence that fuels this debate. Materialists do seem to thrive on inconclusive but empirical scientific findings. That’s the materialists but there are logical determinists like Galen Strawson, And many others who make claims like Free will is contradictory and incompatible any world view, how do you respond to them? I have my own response but I’d like to hear yours.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
I did read the two articles. They contain all the contradictions inherent in compatibilism. We either do have free will or we don’t. If we feel as if we have free will, but in fact our “choices” are predetermined by our heredity and environment, then we don’t have free will.
The crux of the matter comes in this statement from the Psyche article:
Precisely. Since materialists have ruled out the possibility of spiritual reality, and of God, they have no basis on which to believe in free will. They don’t really believe in will at all, since will is an inherently spiritual thing.
The problem for them is that people feel as if they have free will, and people make choices on that basis. So these materialists have to find some argument to deal with that. The further problem is that if in fact people don’t have free will, then there is no basis on which to hold people responsible for their actions. But if we don’t hold people responsible for their actions, then society will collapse into chaos.
So they come up with the self-contradictory idea of “compatibilism” in which somehow we both do and don’t have free will at the same time.
The article in The Guardian did seem to make some sense by the end of it. But that was only after he had made this assertion:
So although at the beginning of the article he seems to be attempting to be sensible by rejecting the idea that we are entirely a product of our genetics, he only jumps from the frying pan into the fire by saying that no, we are entirely a product of our genes and our environment. There is no room for free will.
He then starts talking about how if there’s not free will “all the way down,” then we’re not free at all. But that’s black-and-white thinking. It’s like saying that if you can’t choose to paint your house any possible color, but are limited to the colors available in the paint store, then you don’t have free will. Which is silly. You decide to paint your house one of the available colors. Just because we’re not radically free, that doesn’t mean we have no freedom at all.
Of course our character and life are heavily determined by our genes and our environment. Reincarnationists to the contrary notwithstanding, we don’t choose the circumstances of our birth. And we do have a particular blueprint for our character that is embedded in our genes. We don’t get to choose whether we’re extroverts or introverts, and so on. These are just part of the initial state of our character—and our environment further shapes our character.
It is within these pre-existing and imposed-from-the-outside conditions that we have our field of freedom. The later part of the Guardian article was saying basically this. That we don’t have absolute freedom, but we do have a zone of freedom within the particular constraints of our heredity and environment.
This is a sensible (and true) position to take. And in that article Baggini takes it precisely because it’s the obvious truth based on all of human experience.
Unfortunately, he seems not to really believe it, as shown in his earlier statements in the same article, and by his later article in Psyche. He seems to actually be a compatibilist, which means that he holds the mutually contradictory view that we both do and don’t have free will.
Either we do have free will or we don’t. As I already said, compatibilism is self-contradictory.
Really, it’s just an attempt to have their cake and eat it too. Compatibilists really don’t believe that we have free will. But since it’s so blindingly obvious that we do have free will, they argue that in a sense, we have free will, and we have to act as if we have free will, even though we don’t actually have free will.
This position is no different than the position of the Calvinists (drawing on Augustine) in religious circles. And it’s just as irrational. And just as toxic. Take away free will, and we are all animals. There is no basis for ethics or morality, and no basis for holding people responsible for their own actions. This leads only to the destruction of our humanity, and of human society along with it.
The bottom line is that because of Baggini’s rejection of the spirit, and of spiritual reality, he cannot accept the idea of free will, but rejecting free will is so destructive that he tries to make room for it even while rejecting it. And so his mind is divided into two mutually warring camps, torn between the obvious reality of human free will and his materialistic beliefs that cause him to reject free will.
He just waves off the inherent randomness of quantum mechanics, saying this is not the same as free will. Which is true. Free will is not the same as randomness. But randomness is, by definition, non-deterministic. And if even non-living physical processes are not entirely deterministic, what basis is there to reject the possibility that human beings, who are living, conscious, and rational, may also be at least partly non-deterministic?
The whole thing makes no sense whatsoever. He’s arguing against reality based on his own pre-existing deterministic materialism.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
What these materialists and skeptics don’t want to accept is that there is an uncaused cause. That uncaused cause is God. God is self-existent, which means God is uncaused. And God is the cause of everything else. Philosophically, God is the “First Cause” of everything.
The denial of any first cause (and therefore of God) results in the problem of infinite regress, which amounts to just continually kicking the can down the road without ever arriving at any reason or cause or explanation for the existence of anything. Ultimately, materialism cannot explain the existence of the universe.
Free will is not uncaused. It is caused by God. It is something that God, who is the uncaused cause, created as an attribute of human beings. Our choices themselves are also not uncaused. They are caused by the leanings and decisions of our heart, meaning our will. In free will there is an actor, which is the human will, guided by the human intellect.
The skeptics’ and materialists’ argument would also reject the possibility of randomness as being “uncaused.” But there does seem to be actual randomness in the universe, even apart from human free will. That randomness on a quantum level might lead to patterns on the visible level, but the quantum actions themselves do seem to occur randomly, not in a deterministic fashion.
Even a random action has a cause. It has something driving it. It’s just that the something driving it does not dictate which way it will go.
Human free will also has a cause. That cause is what we love and what motivates us. And it is also powered by pleasure and enjoyment. We choose what we believe will give us pleasure and enjoyment. And when we have been reborn, we also choose what we believe will give other people, and God, pleasure and enjoyment. So there is a driver, but we can direct that force of will one way or another. That’s what freedom of choice is.
Even a switch must have something to power the switch. If there is a light switch on the wall, but nobody ever touches it, it will just sit there in whatever position it’s in, whether on or off, forever. But if someone comes along and flips the switch, then if it was on it turns off, and vice versa. Just so, even our choices must have a driver, or a cause, and that cause is our will or our desires.
In short, I don’t think much of that argument. It simply assumes that everything is mechanistic and deterministic, and then argues on that basis that everything is determined and there is no free will. As I said before, it’s a circular argument.
Hello Lee,
Nice to hear from you again. I do agree with most of your responses but I’m still left with many questions.
From your response
“Of course our character and life are heavily determined by our genes and our environment. Reincarnationists to the contrary notwithstanding, we don’t choose the circumstances of our birth. And we do have a particular blueprint for our character that is embedded in our genes. We don’t get to choose whether we’re extroverts or introverts, and so on. These are just part of the initial state of our character—and our environment further shapes our character.”
I have few questions regarding this. In this you do seem to agree with materialist view of soft genetic determinism. From what i have learned from theological answers to such questions character, personality traits and anything supposedly mental cannot be caused by material substance. Like one of best theological arguments i have heard, gives example of non- material self after death of body has same character, personality and other things as an argument that they are immaterial not caused by material genes. I’d like to hear your response and if we don’t accept materialist view then we consequent ly shouldn’t accept the arguments of genetic and environmental determinism imposing heavy constraints on Human free will. If we accept this position we are left with very muddy position of Naive Compatibilism.
“It is within these pre-existing and imposed-from-the-outside conditions that we have our field of freedom. The later part of the Guardian article was saying basically this. That we don’t have absolute freedom, but we do have a zone of freedom within the particular constraints of our heredity and environment.”
Again, when Baggini says about absolute freedom he implied ” ability to do otherwise” he has said it many times “You couldn’t have done otherwise ” To him zone of freedom means doing things that you didn’t choose but genes and environment did. He explicitly said in article that “We couldn’t have done otherwise cause we couldn’t have been a different person than we were at time of choice” He never said we have genuine ability to make choice. He implied we can only do one thing that our gene or environment brings.
“This is a sensible (and true) position to take. And in that article Baggini takes it precisely because it’s the obvious truth based on all of human experience.”
This is Sensible position of people who allign with physicalist world view but not for Spiritual world view. A freedom constrained by physical genes and environment is not genuine freedom. It again will fall in compatibilist category. Also I don’t this is a true position as well if you are not materialist. Almost every genuine theological arguments i have heard have asserted that tendencies or dispositions we are born with and our environment do play a role in shaping our personality and character, they are foundational in early stages of human life but afterwards they only have role as an “influence” not drivers or deterministic cause of our behaviour and choices. Most theologians reject the view that our choices are heavy constrained by things we couldn’t have control or can’t take control of like genes/environment.
I’d like to know if you affirms the belief that mind over matter which is pillar of spiritual/theological views. Do you agree with theologians or do you actually believe in Gene/environmental determinism ( of sorts)?
Also, You said something about reincarnationists? What did that imply. What’s you position on it.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
On the question of reincarnation, please see this article:
The Bible, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Reincarnation
Short version: reincarnation is a materialistic misunderstanding of the sacred literature of humanity, which is really talking about spiritual rebirth, not about physical rebirth.
Bottom line: reincarnation does not happen. See the article for a full explanation.
“This is a sensible (and true) position to take. And in that article Baggini takes it precisely because it’s the obvious truth based on all of human experience.”
Also Baggini when talking about Human experience as an argument makes lot of straw man claims, And once again From a theological pov, one would disagree that this position is an obvious truth based on Human Experience.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
There are several false dichotomies and false idea within all of these issues with and arguments against the reality of free will:
All of these are false.
I’ve already covered the first one. Just because we’re not radically free, that does not mean we have no freedom at all. That would be like saying that because we can’t decide to spend a weekend on Jupiter, that means we can’t decide which state or country to go and which hotel to stay in on our next vacation.
The only being who is radically free is God. All the rest of us have limited freedom, precisely because we are finite beings, not infinite beings. Everything about us has limits. But limited freedom is still freedom.
The most important kind of freedom we have is the freedom to choose between good and evil. This is what determines whether we will live to eternity in heaven or in hell. This freedom is complete for everyone who reaches a state of rational adult self-responsibility. For those who don’t reach that state, the default destination is heaven. None of them will ever go to hell.
The falsity of the second idea follows from this. Just because heredity and environment impose some limitations on our freedom, that doesn’t mean we have no freedom at all. Just that our freedom operates within certain limits.
I think of it as having a “cone of probability,” which puts outer limits on the direction we can go, but which still allows for considerable freedom of motion within those limits. However, we actually have two cones of probability: one heading toward heaven, and the other toward hell. We have complete freedom to decide which of these cones we will travel along.
This also means that even in heaven (or hell) we do have freedom of choice in ordinary daily matters. We’ve already made our big up vs. down choice, and that won’t change. But we can decide to read this book or that book in heaven, or to harass this person or that person in hell. Freedom of choice does not cease even in the afterlife.
The third false dichotomy is the idea that if we can see any genetic or environmental cause for something, this means that spiritual causation cannot be operative. This is an error that even the theological folks you refer to are making.
It is true that physical things have a certain resistance to spiritual things. But the bigger picture is that physical things are an expression of spiritual things. The basic idea of Swedenborg’s teaching of correspondence is that every physical thing is a direct, detailed expression of some corresponding spiritual thing, which, in turn, is a direct, detailed expression of some element of God.
Applying this directly to genetics and the environment, our genetics and our environment are not independent of spiritual causation. They are a result of spiritual causation.
As for genes specifically, according to Swedenborg our soul builds our body in the womb. Of course, Swedenborg did not know about DNA, because it hadn’t been discovered yet. But if we extrapolate out Swedenborg’s theory of generation to today’s knowledge of genetics, the soul uses the DNA as a blueprint to build the body just as a contractor uses a blueprint to build a house. The house itself is not the blueprint, and the finished house will have many element to it that were only suggested by the blueprint, but that are fleshed out by the knowledge, experience, and skill of the contractor and the construction crew.
In other words, even having a DNA blueprint is not deterministic. Rather, it provides parameters within which the builders do their work. More on this under the fourth point.
Further, even the DNA itself is an expression of characteristics of the proto-soul that forms at the time of conception. The physical DNA corresponds to the “spiritual DNA,” which is (in my view, which is a variation on Swedenborg’s view) a combination of unique offshoots of the soul of the father and the soul of the mother. Even the specific DNA itself is an expression of the initial character and direction of the individual’s soul.
Our environment on this earth is also an expression of spiritual realities—and not just in general, but right down to the smallest details. Not a single leaf on a tree or a single ant in an anthill exists without corresponding to some spiritual reality of which it is an expression. When we are being influenced by our environment, we are being influenced by something that is an expression of spiritual reality.
Bottom line: the idea that anything “determined” by heredity or environment excludes all spiritual causation is fantastically wrong. Heredity and environment themselves are caused by spiritual realities and forces.
On the fourth false dichotomy, having a specific character does not take away our freedom. In fact, without a specific character we could have no freedom at all. It is precisely because we do have a specific character that we are able to exercise our free will.
Take as an analogy an automobile, which we’ll anthropomorphize “Cars” style for the sake of the illustration.
A car is able to drive on any road it wants to drive on. It can get on the highway and speed along swiftly, breezing past everything on the way to its destination. Or it can use secondary highways and take a slower route, passing through each town center on its way and taking in the local scene. Or it can just head over to the filling station to refuel and chat with its blue collar buddies.
All of this depends upon in being a car, and having all of the parts and functions that a car has. If it didn’t have wheels, an engine, an accelerator, a brake pedal, and so on, it couldn’t drive at all, which means that it couldn’t choose to go anywhere at all. It is precisely because it has the specific form and character of a car that it has the freedom to go wherever it wants.
The same is true of human beings. If we didn’t have all the parts and characteristics of a human being, including the physical ones such as a brain, arms, and legs, we couldn’t do anything at all, and we would therefore have no freedom at all. It is precisely because we have a specific, highly complex, and highly specialized form that we have the freedom to engage in all sorts of different activities of our own free will.
Form does not preclude freedom. It is a requirement for freedom.
This is just as true of the individual character of a particular human being as it is of the general form and structure of being human. A person who has high natural cognitive ability can choose to go into any number of different intellectual fields. If he or she did not have high natural cognitive ability, that freedom would not exist, because intellectual pursuits would be difficult or impossible for that person.
Similarly, someone who doesn’t have high cognitive ability, but comes from a family of skilled workers can choose from many different blue collar jobs, and excel at whichever one is chosen. Someone who grew up in a wealthy intellectual family would flail around hopelessly in the same job because he or she just doesn’t have the character and background for it. So much so that it has become a meme in popular TV shows to put the boss on the production line and see how he or she does, usually with hilarious results.
Having a specific character is actually a boon to freedom because it gives us some initial direction and focus in which to make our decisions. If we had no particular character, aptitudes, or natural skills at all, we could spend our whole lifetime just trying to figure out who the heck we are and what we want to do with our life given that anything could be possible for us.
As it is, people commonly head in a particular direction in their life because of their natural character and abilities, and they make a life for themselves within the set of choices this character and those abilities open up to them. This is much more efficient than starting out with something that has no natural direction at all.
And again, just because we are not radically free, that doesn’t mean we’re not free at all. Someone who comes from a blue collar family is very likely to end up working a blue collar job. But there are thousands of different blue collar jobs out there to choose from. A blue collar baby can look around and see which one of those jobs appeals to him or her most, and which one he or she would most enjoy doing.
In short, far from taking away our freedom, the fact that we have a specific character, and character type, makes freedom possible for us, and makes it much easier to exercise that freedom. If we were radically free, we would be so overwhelmed by all the possibilities that we would probably never do anything significant at all. But since we, as created and finite (limited) creatures are also limited in our choices, this provides us with choices that we can handle, so that we truly can be free to choose what kind of life we want to have without being overwhelmed by so many choices that we can never reasonably evaluate them all, and therefore we just freeze up.
I am reminded of a funny anecdote from Soviet times, probably apocryphal, in which a Russian moved to America, but was completely overwhelmed by how many different brands and kinds of toothpaste there were in the store, and annoyed that no one would tell him which one to buy. Eventually, having so many choices became so burdensome that he went back to Russia where there was just one or maybe two kinds of toothpaste in the store, and life was easy. (Or maybe it was a scene from some long-forgotten comedy.)
Once again, starting out with a particular character does not mean we have no freedom. It means that we have something definite to work with in exercising our freedom.
And once again, the most important freedom we have here on earth is the freedom to choose between good and evil. This is not just a choice of action, but a choice of what love, or motive, we will put at the center of our life and character.
This freedom cuts across all natural character types. No matter what our natural character is, we can choose to direct it toward good, meaning toward love for God and the neighbor, or toward evil, meaning toward exclusive love for ourselves and material possessions and pleasure.
This freedom transcends all the “determinative” factors of heredity and environment. It is a spiritual choice, and it will determine what we do with both our heredity (our natural character) and our environment.
We are not controlled by our heredity and our environment. We are only given a general direction, which has good and evil variants. Whether we take the good or the evil route, and what specific direction we go within our cone of probability, depends entirely on our own free will and choice.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
But honestly, I wouldn’t bother refuting it with the people who make these arguments. Their eyes and their minds are closed. They are blind people who cannot and will not see the light. It is a waste of time to argue with them, because they are impervious to any spiritual truth at all. Only a personal crisis would have the possibility of dislodging them from their blindness. When atheists become believers, it is usually in the wake of some crisis in their life that their atheism cannot deal with.
Hello Lee,
I once again found some things that doesn’t sit well with the general religious or theological view.
Main point of traditional theological argument does justify the general definition of freedom. It is that while environment and inherent(not using the term gene) characters do have impact on personal they are not fixed and set in stone. Person is influenced by them not bound by them. If you cannot in any way influence your character(gene) or environment you are born in then you are just a bot running a program. I know it’s not your point but i saying from argument pov. If you agree that a person is bound by the character they are born with and nothing about their character is what they chose while that choosing itself not being determined by other character, or they cannot change themselves and their environment without being subject to choosing only one set of things then freedom is non existent. And they cannot choose heaven in face of hell.
Like i think you point is not that but it did appear that way. Summary of point is one question. Is your point as implied above that let’s say, a man born selfish will reamin selfish but do have little choice of doing many things that are only selfish? Or a man born selfish is selfish as long he wants to stay selfish and not change, also can choose to change and his choice to change being product of his own free will not outside causes like genes or environment.
“In short, far from taking away our freedom, the fact that we have a specific character, and character type, makes freedom possible for us, and makes it much easier to exercise that freedom. If we were radically free, we would be so overwhelmed by all the possibilities that we would probably never do anything significant at all. But since we, as created and finite (limited) creatures are also limited in our choices, this provides us with choices that we can handle, so that we truly can be free to choose what kind of life we want to have without being overwhelmed by so many choices that we can never reasonably evaluate them all, and therefore we just freeze up.”
The answer from traditional theological argument would be that while one have all the possibility one can only manifest the possibility one wills or work hard towards. Having some kind of freedom doesn’t mean one have all the information about all the possibilities that exists that would require omniscience. One can only manifest the possibility one chooses. The question of being overwhelmed is not relevant when discussing on this subject. Then one can also argue that one have the choice to be overwhelmed by all the possibilities and do nothing or choose one possibility based on what reflects their current situation the most and what they want.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
Let’s say you have a bowl that has fifty marbles in it, each one different from every other. In an hour or so you could look at each marble, narrow down your choices, and pick out the one that you like best.
Now let’s say that you have a bowl that has a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) marbles in it. In order to choose your favorite from among all those marbles, you would have to look at something like a million marbles a second to get it done in your lifetime. Obviously, that’s impossible. The reality is that if you had to choose among a quadrillion marbles, you just couldn’t do it. The task would not just be overwhelming; it would not be humanly possible.
For our freedom of choice to be real, it has to have limits on it. Those limits have to be commensurate with the limits of our cognitive and physical abilities.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
We’re all born selfish. That’s not really a character trait as I was using the term. Selfishness is what might be called an orientation.
Being introverted is a character trait. But introverts can direct all their energy toward serving themselves, or they can direct their energy toward serving other people.
For example, introverts can make great computer programmers because they can be quite happy focusing on the machine and the coding without much social interaction. But computer programmers can become hackers in the negative sense, using their skills to make a profit by stealing from other people or to gain a sense of power by damaging other people’s computer files, online reputations, and so on. Or they can write and maintain software that helps other people to get constructive work done, such as store inventory software or airplane autopilot navigation software.
This is what I mean when I say that selfishness is not a character trait as I was using the term, but an orientation. Selfishness directs our character traits to accomplish things of benefit primarily or only to ourselves. Selflessness directs our character to accomplish things that benefit other people.
We do have some limited freedom to modify our basic character traits. Humans are complex beings. But it’s highly unlikely that someone who is naturally very introverted is going to become a flaming extrovert. The most that’s likely to happen is that he or she will become less introverted.
The primary freedom we have is in what we will do with our particular character. There is the basic up and down freedom, which we have in full. That is: will we use our character to pursue selfish and greedy (evil) motives, or will we use it to pursue selfless and benevolent (good) motives? Every person who has achieved adult mental capacities has this choice, and no outside forces can make that choice for him or her.
This is true even if the realm of that choice is within an evil milieu, such as a gang or an organized crime family. See:
Can Gang Members Go to Heaven? (Is Life Fair?)
There is also the freedom to use our particular character in different ways. Not all introverts become computer programmers. Some prefer to work with their hands, so if they can, they’ll pick a job that involves physical tasks, but ones that can be done solo or with only a small crew. One person I know worked for a number of years as a solitary grave digger, and quite enjoyed the solitude. Introverts will avoid working on great big construction crews. There are many different jobs that introverts can choose among that will still suit their character. The same goes for other character traits.
And of course, even having chosen a profession, an introvert can choose which jobs to take. The computer programmer will choose particular coding languages and particular types of software to work on—of which there is a huge variety to choose from. And even within the particular types of programming, the programmer might jump at working for one client, but avoid another client who is troublesome. Even within a specific branchlet of a specific branch of a specific profession, there is a great deal of freedom of choice.
This is all to illustrate that having a particular natural or “genetic” character does not at all mean that we don’t have freedom. It just means that we have freedom within a certain field.
Saying that having a particular inborn character means we have no freedom is like saying that a soccer player has no freedom on the field because he has to play soccer, and he has to play it within the field. The reality is that he can run all over the field. If an opposing player is approaching him, he has many choices. He could go to the opposing player’s right or to his left; he could do a lateral pass to a team mate to his right or to his left; he could pass the ball back to his team’s goalie and let the goalie pass it back out; and so on. A soccer player does not feel unfree because he “has to play soccer on the soccer field.” He has a great sense of freedom, and also actual freedom, in being able to choose how he will play the game overall, and from moment to moment in the midst of the gameplay.
In short, it’s just plain wrong to say that since we start out with a certain inborn character, that means we do not have freedom.
P.S. That last statement is not directed at you, but at those who claim that because we have an inborn character, we do not have free will.
Btw, i did find answer of some questions elsewhere, i may have misunderstood what you may have said. Do please don’t mind some of questions. But i will appreciate answers anyway.
Once again i have this question,
“Our choices themselves are also not uncaused. They are caused by the leanings and decisions of our heart, meaning our will. In free will there is an actor, which is the human will, guided by the human intellect.”
From this response of yours, it appears as a compatibilist argument of sort. And i have a question on your view of agency. Do you view “soul” / “self” as an agent or it is a passive doer of what learnings or decision if heart brings it. Is heart the agent or “self”. Is soul the carrier of “Free will” an agent or heart.
“Human free will also has a cause. That cause is what we love and what motivates us. And it is also powered by pleasure and enjoyment. We choose what we believe will give us pleasure and enjoyment. And when we have been reborn, we also choose what we believe will give other people, and God, pleasure and enjoyment. So there is a driver, but we can direct that force of will one way or another. That’s what freedom of choice is.”
Once again this is sort of argument that compatibilist will claim, unless your view is that we have a critical say in what we love and some say in what motivates us. Also that we could choose something despite knowing it will NOT give us pleasure or enjoyment. The moment a cause becomes linear and deterministic, Free choice losses it’s meaning.
I actually wanted to ask you this question since some time, at times i felt you are compatibilist and at time Libretarian so, what your position actually is? Also your views on God and many religious views are somewhat different from general religious views I’m familiar with.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
Again, there is a fundamental false dichotomy here, which is that our “heart” (meaning our love and motivation) is distinct from our soul.
In reality, our “heart,” meaning our will, is the central element of our soul. And our “head,” meaning our intellect, is an accompanying central element of our soul. Together, these are our soul. Our will is the substance of our soul, and our intellect is the form of our soul. From these central elements of our soul come all our words and actions, which is the third essential element of being human.
As in Einstein’s E=MC2 equation, substance and force are interchangeable. Our core love, or motivation, is both the substance of our soul and the driving force of our soul. It is where all our words and actions come from. Our intellect shapes and guides our words and actions in the specific direction our will wants them to go.
And yes, we do have a critical say in what we love and what motivates us. This is an essential element of our will. As humans, God has created us with free will. Without free will we are not human. It is fundamental to the nature of human free will to be able to choose between various alternatives. The greatest choices is between good and evil, or between heaven and hell. Within that choice there are many subsidiary choices as to exactly how we will go about being good or evil.
Consider, as an analogy, someone making the big choice to go to law school and become a lawyer. That will determine the entire course of that person’s life. And yet, within the field of law there are many different specialties, such as personal injury, corporate law, family law, environmental law, and so on, not to mention prosecution vs. defense, etc., etc., etc.
Even when the “big choice” has been made, there are still many smaller choices to be made. And even once we have gone into some specific area of law, such as personal injury, we can choose which cases we will and won’t take. We’re not going to suddenly decide to be a doctor instead. But we may decide we’re not going to take any more bicycle injury cases because we don’t like doing that kind of case.
Our freedom of choice is many-layered. There’s the big choice between good and evil. There’s the smaller choice of exactly which kind of good (or evil) we will pursue, and once we’ve chosen our life’s “career,” there are the everyday choices of which specific things we will or won’t do within our chosen specialty. Even contractors make choices about which housing development they will or won’t work on, which style of house or apartment building they will build, and so on.
Our freedom of choice never ends. It is given to us by God, and is protected in us by God as an essential element of our humanity.
So no, I’m not a compatibilist at all. As I’ve said in previous responses, compatibilism is self-contradictory, and therefore false. We either have free will or we don’t. We can’t both have free will and not have free will at the same time. This is true even if we have limited free will rather than radical or unlimited free will. We are finite (limited) beings. We therefore have limited free will that is within our limited capabilities as created beings distinct from God, who is the only unlimited being in the universe.
And yes, our will is our driver. But one of the key characteristics of that driving force is that it has freedom of choice. That is an essential part of its nature.
It also has another kind of freedom, which is the freedom to live the way it has chosen. This freedom is greatest when we choose good, and it is far greater in heaven than it is here on earth, where many external and bureaucratic factors put limits on our ability to live as we choose. If we choose evil, it becomes self-limiting—but that’s another topic entirely.
I introduce this here just to point out that freedom of choice is not the only kind of freedom there is. The freedom to live as we choose is just as essential. Without it, we are not free, and our freedom of choice doesn’t mean anything.
About choosing what gives us pleasure, our choices are between different kinds of pleasure. We may have a bowl of fruit in front of us, and choose one or another of the fruits depending upon which one is most appealing to us right now.
We can also choose short-term pleasure or long-term pleasure. These aren’t always contradictory, but sometimes they are. If, in the bowl of fruit, there are also various types of candy, the candy might look more appealing to us, but we might choose to eat a piece of fruit anyway because we know that the fruit is more healthful, and we’ll be happier long-term. Over time, if we keep choosing the fruit and not the candy, we’ll also develop a taste for the fruit, and the candy will become less and less appealing to us. Eventually it won’t even taste very good to us if we decide to have some one day.
This also demonstrates that it is not necessarily mere pleasure that drives our choices. Underneath that, it is good that drives our choices, as in, “Which of these things do I think is the most good?” And our definition of “good” will inform that choice. If we think that momentary pleasure is the most good thing, we’ll choose whatever gives us the most pleasure right now. But if we think that long-term happiness is the most good thing, we’ll choose what we believe will lead to that.
The choice between good and evil is also a choice between different kinds of pleasure. Evil has its pleasures just as good does. Otherwise, why would anyone ever choose it? There is a certain type of pleasure in dominating other people and forcing them to bend to our will and serve us. Otherwise, why would anyone ever choose to put self, power, and control over others at the center of their life and motivation?
There is also, of course, pleasure in loving and serving other people. Ultimately, that pleasure is much greater, such that it’s more than mere pleasure. It is joy and even bliss for those who devote their life to it.
So we can choose which type of pleasure we prefer. Nothing forces us to choose one or another. People who have wonderful, loving upbringings sometimes choose greed and a desire for power. People who have terrible and abusive upbringings sometimes choose to be a good and caring person. In fact, having experienced abuse, they may very well decide that this is not the kind of life they want for themselves or their children, and work very hard to leave that kind of life behind even if they had started down that path themselves under the influence of their upbringing.
This ability to choose between different types of pleasure and even different types of joy (on the positive side) is central to our humanity. Without it, we are not human.
Compatibilists try to have it both ways, saying we are both free and not free. This is a fallacy and an illusion. If we are not truly free, we are not human, and our life is meaningless.
The reality is that we are truly free, even if it is not infinite or unlimited freedom. Within the circumstances of our lives, whether good or bad, we can choose to bend everything toward good, or to bend everything toward evil. And we can choose to go into one particular type of good and useful service, or into one particular type of fraud and crime.
This freedom is an essential part of our humanity, and is therefore protected by God above all else. That is why God will never force us to be good, or indeed, to do anything at all. God always knocks on our door, but never forces us to open it. That is entirely our choice.
Actually, i didn’t read this part and posted many questions above. Also thanks for clarifying you stance on it.
One more thing is that while we do have agreement on many things, fundamentally we disagree on unity of soul being analogous to heart and intellect. I actually come from very different religious background. But it’s not what i want to argue on.
Btw, you did have some good points on arguments of Baggini and i saw further arguments that comes from some who goes further than Baggini
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022/12/07/julian-baggini-reviews-a-new-book-on-free-will/
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022/05/19/julian-baggini-on-free-will/
the person who posted this made some explicit claims in argument, can you look at it whenever you are free and tell if his arguments really hold
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
In the first paper, after talking about a hierarchy starting with physics and moving up to psychology, the author says:
First, the laws of physics aren’t as “hard” as the author would like to think. We don’t live in a Newtonian world. We live in a quantum world. And quantum physics has “softness,” in the form of randomness or indeterminacy, built right into it. The determinists are still living in the old scientific paradigm. They have not grasped or accepted—because it contradicts their deterministic beliefs—that current science no longer supports determinism. Each time I read one of their pieces, they mention the randomness inherent in quantum physics in passing, if at all, and then basically ignore it as if it’s not real. Then they go back to their Newtonian thinking.
Second, from a spiritual perspective the laws of physics are not the origin and basis of everything. God is. From a spiritual perspective, the laws of physics are very far down the totem pole of causation. In fact, they’re almost as far down the totem pole as you can get. They are at minimum a derivative of a derivative. God is primary. The spiritual realm is secondary, derived from God. The physical realm, including the laws of physics, is tertiary, derived from the spiritual realm.
From a spiritual perspective, the fundamental error of the determinists is their belief that nature is the origin and cause of everything. It is their materialism that causes their determinism.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
From the second article, a quote from Julian Baggini:
This is a fine example of mentioning quantum physics, then pretending it doesn’t exist. It’s true that randomness is not the same as free will. But it’s also true that randomness is incompatible with determinism. And that’s the fundamental issue. Determinists wave a red flag of “Randomness and free will are not the same!” to distract us from the fact that randomness is fatal to determinism. If there is randomness in the universe, then the universe is not deterministic.
Nature does not have free will. But randomness in nature is a representation, on the level of nature, of human free will. It’s like a projection of a skeletal cube (meaning, for example, a cubic figure made out of toothpicks) onto a flat surface. What’s on the flat surface is not a cube, but it is a representation of a cube. It offers an indication that the cube exists, even though a cube can’t exist on a flat surface because a cube requires three dimensions. For beings such as us who live in three dimensions, we can see the representation of the cube on a flat surface and infer the existence of the cube that is casting its shadow there.
Since nature doesn’t have will, it cannot have free will. Randomness is the closest it can get to having free will. And it does have randomness, according to quantum physics.
Animals do have something like will, though it is really desire or drive rather than will. But that desire or drive gives them a much closer emulation of free will than the randomness of inanimate nature. A dog can run this way or it can run that way. And any dog owner who pays any attention can notice that sometimes a dog hesitates, apparently deciding what to do next, before making a decision and doing whatever it does. This isn’t human-level free will. Animals do not have a concept of moral good and evil, which means they cannot make moral choices as humans can. But I do think that animals, especially higher animals, have actual freedom on their own level. It’s more than just instinct. It’s the dog deciding which course of action will give it the most pleasure, or the most of what it wants, and then acting upon that decision.
Honestly, I’m not sure I want to spend the time to read all the rest of the article. I skimmed some of it. But it always seems to boil down to, “That would be nice, but since everything is determined, and we don’t have free will, it doesn’t matter anyway.” The author is simply assuming that free will is an illusion, and judging everything on that basis.
Bottom line: I think the assumption is wrong. And when one starts with false assumption, all the conclusions based on it are also false. It’s not worth the time to go through evaluating every false conclusion. Once the underlying assumption is rejected, the rest of the argument is baseless and valueless.
And the assumption is based not only on materialism, but on old-style Newtonian materialism. Add in spirit and God, and the whole structure falls to pieces even faster and harder.
To me reading this stuff feels similar to reading Protestant works based on justification by faith alone, which is unbiblical and false, leading to everything based on it being unbiblical and false. Or more to the point, it is like reading Calvinist stuff that assumes predestination (which is the religious equivalent of determinism), and judges everything on that basis. But predestination is unbiblical and false, which means that every conclusion based on it is unbiblical and false.
That’s why I don’t waste my time reading volume after volume about faith alone and predestination. Why bother? It would be like spending large amounts of time reading up on flat earth theory. The earth isn’t flat, so why waste my time with flat earth theory, beyond the very basic facts required to refute it, which anyone can pick up in five or ten minutes if they wish? There are much more fruitful uses for my time and attention.
Having said that, if there is a specific point or argument that you want my response to, please pinpoint it, and I’ll be happy to address it.
Hi Lee,
Sorry for any confusion but I actually didn’t asked for counter to article but arguments made in comments. Btw there’s this article and in comments no. 23, as supposedly an argument that makes free will impossible is provided. And you can look at all the comments and do any of them hold any meaningful counter to it in your view. Can you look at that if it,
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/12/22/an-unconvincing-attack-on-robert-sapolskys-argument-for-determinism/#comment-2123675
Also on our previous discussion about inherent character and role of free will, you said that the whole argument is based on false dichotomy but can you also point how or what you add to argument that solves it.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
Honestly, I think the linked comment is just a whole lot of big words without any real-world meaning.
You can’t have determinism at the micro level but not at the macro level. No amount of micro determinism will resolve into macro indeterminism—or into “unpredictability” masquerading as indeterminism. Our capacity or lack thereof to accurately predict what will happen has little or nothing to do with whether or not the universe is deterministic.
Basically, the argument is that even though we feel free because we don’t have the intellectual and observational capacity to accurately predict the future, we aren’t actually free because the universe is in fact (in the determinists’ belief) deterministic. On that, as I’ve said many times here, I think they’re just plain wrong.
And compatibilism, as I’ve said a number of times before, is self-contradictory. Human life cannot be both deterministic and non-deterministic at the same time, which is the basic idea and the fundamental fallacy of compatibilism. It is an attempt to square a circle, which cannot be done.
It doesn’t matter how many fancy words are spewed out by materialists and Calvinists who fancy themselves the smartest people of all. It all adds up to a great big pile of nonsense.
We’re either free or we’re not free. The two are mutually exclusive.
My belief is that we are free, even if we are not radically free, and that both determinism and compatibilism are fallacious and wrong.
If this is not answering your questions, please spell out for me exactly what your questions are. Thanks.
The argument or comment goes like
“Although he does a great job in pointing out the incoherence and impossibility of libertarian free will, Sapolsky sometimes leaves the impression that determinism undermines responsible agency and control, when in fact it’s an essential ingredient. For actions to be up to us, we have to determine them in accordance with our character, motives, deliberations, and intentions, so any indeterministic causal slack in the choice-making machinery would attenuate, not augment, our control over and responsibility for action.But it’s understandable that folks dislike determinism given the bad press it’s gotten, so they appeal to arguments like Doyle’s in trying to carve out some sense in which they could have done otherwise in a way that was up to them and not chance. But the libertarians haven’t been able to spell out how indeterminism, probability, undecidability, or an open future make an act more up to you than it already is under determinism. All told, it’s irrational to want to be able to do otherwise than what your choice-making machinery determines in a given situation, since any departure from that machinery wouldn’t be your doing. Of course you might wish you had done otherwise, and you can learn from bad choices and perhaps do otherwise in the future. But having the capacity to choose other than what your very own choice-making processes determine wouldn’t get you anywhere in making better choices or in being more responsible for them.My pretty positive review of Sapolsky is at https://naturalism.org/resources/book-reviews/whats-wrong-with-determinism-review-of-determined-by-robert-sapolsky“
This is one of top supporters of Jerry Coyne and he usually comments against free will.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
Right. And as I said, it’s all just one great big pile of nonsense.
If in fact our choices are predetermined, then they are not choices at all, we are not responsible for them, and they have no meaning whatsoever. And we are not human.
This is just a secular version of an old Calvinist argument. And it’s every it as irrational as the Calvinist version of the same argument.
“I think Jerry’s assessment is pretty much spot on.But I disagree that the reason we don’t have free will is due to the laws of physics. I believe there is a fundamental principle of logic that makes free will a non-sensical idea. A free will action would require something to come from nothing. It would require an action to have a non-random direction with nothing giving it that direction. But if that action is to be meaningfully credited to a self, the self must determine the action. Then, if it is to be an act of free will, the self must act independently of its own properties or be able to self-determine its properties. Both of those would require the self to meaningfully and non-randomly act based on nothing.
Even if an immaterial entity were possible it would still exist only by virtue of having properties of some sort. Those properties would have to be determinant of everything that entity does. Any action it carried out not determined by it’s own properties would be determined by nothing. Nothing, being that which does not exist, can give no direction to anything.
Finally, Doyle seems to make a mistake that Daniel Dennett also made. Doyle says:“Arguably, human behavior is undecidable, not just chaotic. And that would mean that human choice is free in exactly the way we’d want it to be; determined—by our own whole selves,”And in a conversation that Dennett had with Sam Harris, Dennett agreed with Harris that his brain activity was fully determined but later he explained his compatibilist view by way of example, paraphrasing he said something to the effect of:
When I’m out on a boat I can’t control the wind or the water but I can choose how I handle the boat.
There is a mistake in both of those statements. They imply that entities are internally determined but that they can act independently of external entities and that this amounts to free will. This is not so. If an entity is internally determined it must also be externally determined. In other words, when entities interact they do so logically as a single entity – materially separate but logically inseparable.”
btw this is another another argument made in same page, it takes logical determination to next level.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
Again, this is all just a great big pile of nonsense.
Free will doesn’t mean something coming from nothing. It means something coming from free will. Free will is not nothing. It is a capability of the human mind and heart, given to us by God.
But these people will just keep on coming up with more and more and more silly and ridiculous arguments for their already existing rejection of free will. And they’ll think of themselves as being the smartest people in the universe for doing so. They’re piling one illogical assertion on top of another, and thinking of themselves as the most logical beings in the universe.
Every statement in this whole chain of logic is false and nonsensical. The first statement, that free will means something coming from nothing, I already pointed out is false and nonsensical. Then:
No. If it is to be an act of free will, the self must act from its own properties, one of which is the free will given to it by God.
This argument simply assumes that we are deterministic beings having no free will, and then uses that assumption as an argument for determinism and a lack of free will. It is begging the question, AKA a circular argument.
Again, this simply assumes that all entities are determined, and then argues on that basis. It doesn’t consider the possibility that one of the properties that the immaterial (i.e., spiritual or divine) entity has is free will.
Further, having properties does not make something deterministic. In fact, for free will to exist, entities must have properties or they would have no basis on which to act and no ability to act. As in the example of a car, if a car didn’t have properties, such as an engine, wheels, and a steering wheel, it could not drive at all. But just because it has those properties and others, such as brakes and a chassis, that doesn’t mean it’s determined. It can drive on any road the driver wants it to drive on precisely because it does have properties. Without properties, it wouldn’t be able to do anything at all.
This argument is saying that everything has the property of being predetermined, and then argues for determinism on that basis. It is just another circular argument that assumes the result.
This is an obvious truth—which, of course, the writer, being utterly irrational, entirely denies.
Why? This makes no sense whatsoever. It’s like saying that if I can (internally) decide how to handle the boat, then it must be the wind and the water that (externally) controls my decisions. This is such a silly argument that it’s hard to believe that anyone who considers himself intelligent can even make it.
What it really boils down to is materialists believing that physics is what determines everything, despite early denials of this in the above quoted statement. These arguments are anything but logical. They’re pure materialism. And they’re outdated materialism based on old Newtonian physics.
Again, this makes no sense whatsoever. If entities interact, then they are not a single entity, materially or logically. A single entity cannot interact with itself unless it, too, has distinct entities within it. If I say something to my wife, that doesn’t mean my wife and I are the same entity. Interrelated entities yes, but the same entity, no. She is one person, and I am another. We are two entities interacting with one another. And we are not “logically inseparable.” I can logically state differences between me and my wife that make us distinct beings. For one thing, I am male and she is female. But we are also in relationship with one another.
This argument is basically trying to hold that there are no real relationships whatsoever. Everything is just one great big single predetermined entity, and each part of it, including every person in it, is just a cog in the machine. It is the old Newtonian mechanistic worldview carried forward to a later era when Newton has been superseded as a full explanation of the nature even of the physical universe.
And of course, if God and the spiritual universe exist, as I believe they do, then these arguments become even more ridiculous to the point of insanity.
These people just pile one illogical and circular argument on top of another to “prove” their already existing rejection of free will. None of their arguments make any sense whatsoever, although to themselves they seem to be the height of intelligence and wisdom. You could argue with these people all day, all week, and all year, and they would just keep coming up with more and more senseless and irrational arguments for their position, all based on assuming the result. They take it as an axiom that free will doesn’t exist, and then base all their arguments on that axiom. They take it as an axiom that being predetermined is a property of everything that exists, and then argue for determinism on that basis.
The people who think of themselves as the smartest and most rational people in the world are commonly the most blind and irrational people. They refuse to accept the obvious reality that as human beings we have free will. Ordinary uneducated people see this obvious truth every day. They make decisions, and then they experience the consequences of those decisions, good or bad. It takes a highly educated person to deny the obvious and come up with these insanely irrational and self-contradictory arguments against the facts of human life that are obvious to everyone except these self-important but utterly blind people.
Thanks for your response Lee.
Well this argument was supposed to by product of foundational logic and would hold for any world view but i guess it just take one possibility and assert it as only true possibility.
But i want to know your argument against the argument that try to frame free will as unnecessary or something that would complicate things, basically “freedom would be bad thing”
Like this
“All told, it’s irrational to want to be able to do otherwise than what your choice-making machinery determines in a given situation, since any departure from that machinery wouldn’t be your doing. Of course you might wish you had done otherwise, and you can learn from bad choices and perhaps do otherwise in the future. But having the capacity to choose other than what your very own choice-making processes determine wouldn’t get you anywhere in making better choices or in being more responsible for them.”
and
“Having voluntarist free will would mean being entirely capriciousTake the assumption that we would be robbed of an essential human capacity for choice if our decisions were in any sense inevitable. But imagine what would need to be true for your choice not to have been inevitable. It would mean that you had the power to override your settled preferences, personality and life history, and could decide to do something that is not determined by these but only by something we call your ‘free will’. Such a freedom would be gratuitous, since the only grounds for our choice would be the power to choose itself. Is pure caprice really a form of free will worth wanting?To take a trivial example, we don’t want the capacity to choose any flavour of ice-cream but the one we think we’ll most enjoy. We don’t want the capacity to vote for any political party but the one that we think will most advance our values. Our freedom to choose matters precisely because it reflects our personalities, preferences and values, not because it can override them. Our moral and political commitments would mean nothing if they were things we could choose to change at will.”
Both are compatibilist argument from compatibilists.
After that can you respond to her questions/arguments
https://sheseeksnonfiction.blog/2017/03/26/the-paradox-of-prayer/
https://sheseeksnonfiction.blog/2017/09/1https://sheseeksnonfiction.blog/2017/09/10/the-paradox-of-christian-free-will/
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
Once again, these arguments are an attempt to have it both ways. We either do or don’t have free will. We either can or can’t make choices. If our choices are “inevitable,” as this person argues, then they are not choices.
The very use of the term “choice-making machinery” shows that this person is thinking in mechanistic, deterministic terms. These arguments simply assume that free will is not real, and argue on that basis. But if free will is not real, then there are no “choices,” and this writer should just admit that, and stop trying to have it both ways.
Free will is not “machinery.” It is not mechanistic, and it is not deterministic. If it were deterministic, it would not be free will. That’s the whole point of free will: that it is not deterministic.
If free will is not real, then we cannot make “bad choices” and learn from them. We can only follow a predetermined course that was programmed into us from the beginning. There are no choices, and no learning. Only the illusion of these.
Responding to some of the statements in the second quotation:
No it wouldn’t. Free will and rationality go together. We don’t make capricious choices. (Well, sometimes we do, but mostly not.) We make considered choices. We evaluate various courses of action, consider which one we think would be best, and pick that one from among the possibilities. Our definition of “best” does change from time to time, but it is still not capricious. It is thought out and considered. That’s why God gave us rationality.
This exact thing plays itself out in people’s lives all the time. It’s what makes us human.
During my seminary years I did a practicum working for an agency that counseled abusive men. One of the counselors had been an abusive man himself in earlier years. However, at one point in his life he made a choice that he didn’t want to live, or be, that way anymore. He then did the hard work of changing his attitude toward women so that he was no longer abusive. He lost his first wife due to his abuse, but he had remarried, and now had a respectful and equal relationship with his wife.
This was precisely a case in which he had “the power to override [his] settled preferences.” Originally, his “settled preferences” were to verbally and physically abuse his female partner. But through an act of free will, he overrode that preference, and changed himself and his life.
This sort of scenario works itself out in the lives of millions and billions of people who make a choice not to think, desire, and live the way they have been living up to now, but to make a break with their past self and become a different person.
Not radically different. They’ll still have the same basic character traits. But in the instance of a choice to move from evil to good, they will turn those character traits away from selfish and greedy actions, and toward kind, thoughtful, and constructive actions.
This is exactly what it means to be a human being on this earth.
And yet, people make that choice all the time. During my teenage years, when we went down to the local dairy bar, there was my favorite flavor of ice cream (black raspberry), but I often decided to have a different flavor. As they say, “variety is the spice of life.” How boring would life be if we had our favorite flavor of ice cream every single time, and never had any other flavor! Who knows whether we might try a flavor and decide that it’s our new favorite? But even if our favorite flavor stays the same, having other flavors and then going back to our favorite makes our favorite taste even better to us.
This argument flies in the face of all human experience.
But political parties change, and our values change. We may switch from one party to another as a result. And we certainly do want that choice. One-party states are usually not nice places to live.
It is true that our freedom reflects our personalities, preferences, and values. But if we cannot change at least our preferences and values at will, then once again, we are not humans, but pre-programmed robots. People change these things all the time. Again, this argument flies in the face of human reality.
Long story short: either we have free will or we don’t. And if we don’t, we can’t make “choices.” We can only follow a predetermined path, for which we bear no responsibility whatsoever because we were not the one who laid it out. These arguments are not only self-contradictory and self-defeating, but they take away our humanity.
once again, Thanks for your response. I still have few questions.
“All told, it’s irrational to want to be able to do otherwise than what your choice-making machinery determines in a given situation, since any departure from that machinery wouldn’t be your doing. Of course you might wish you had done otherwise, and you can learn from bad choices and perhaps do otherwise in the future. But having the capacity to choose other than what your very own choice-making processes determine wouldn’t get you anywhere in making better choices or in being more responsible for them.”
In this argument apart from materialistic implication. Can you specifically respond to this claim that
“All told, it’s irrational to want to be able to do otherwise than what your choice-making machinery determines in a given situation, since any departure from that machinery wouldn’t be your doing.”
Isn’t he implying two things that you are your choice-making machinery but also not when,,also isn’t he assuming that people when they they would’ve done otherwise actually don’t mean that they would’ve made their choice-making machinery or problem do otherwise than what decision it determined.??
also from your response
“Not radically different. They’ll still have the same basic character traits. But in the instance of a choice to move from evil to good, they will turn those character traits away from selfish and greedy actions, and toward kind, thoughtful, and constructive actions.”
my question is by basic traits do you mean basic universal traits of humans or if not then do you think being abusive can be a basic trait cause i have certainly seen an article where so called “criminal gene ” is being used as defense in court. I think theologically speaking, being anything that may be taken as an excuse for someone’s wrong doing cannot be basic trait that is out of control. Do you agree?.
Btw thanks again for your kind response. And is there a way to delete comments cause i would certainly like to delete few.
Also
Happy New Year!
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
There is no such thing as “choice-making machinery.” Making choices is not mechanistic. It is a capability of the human mind, which is not a machine, but a living spiritual organism. Calling it “machinery” betrays the mechanistic and deterministic assumptions of the author of that piece. He is simply assuming that choice is not real, and is the mere working out of mechanistic and deterministic processes, and then arguing that we are deterministic based on that assumption. Once again, it is a circular argument.
So yes, he is assuming that we are mechanistic beings that have “choice-making machinery,” and arguing on that basis.
I’m not quite sure what your second question about his assumptions means. The language is not clear to me.
When we make choices, the choices are expressing our own will. Whatever choice we make, it comes from our own desires molded by our own rationality, and the results become a part of who we are. There is not some outside force causing us to make those choices. We will, of course, take into account various outside forces and circumstances. But the choices are our own.
In short, this argument makes no sense whatsoever. No supporter of free will thinks that the choices we make are not really us, or ours, as this person seems to think would be the case if we had actual free will (which we do).
By “basic traits” I mean such individual traits as whether a person is extroverted or introverted, and how much, the person’s basic level of intelligence, the person’s leaning toward emotion or reason, the person’s interest in ideas vs. interest in physical action, and so on—all the things that make each person an individual, and not exactly like anyone else.
I don’t go for the “criminal gene” thing. Perhaps there is something to it. But criminals can make choices just like anyone else. Blaming it on their genes is just weaseling out of their adult self-responsibility. I don’t have any respect for that at all. Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.
If a person is truly mentally deficient in a way that prevents him or her from making rational choices between good and evil, then that will be taken into account in the afterlife. Nobody is condemned spiritually for something over which he or she has no control. But here on earth, we still have to punish criminals, or society will fall into chaos.
For most criminals, the “criminal gene” is just an excuse to avoid responsibility for their own actions.
About deleting comments, I can do that, but I prefer not to because it messes up the thread of replies. If I’m going to delete a comment, I usually do it before it even appears publicly, for reasons outlined in our comments policy. I haven’t seen anything in any of your comments that would warrant deleting them.
Actually, The whole “criminal gene” thing is supposed to be a case for determinism and materialist view that Person is just interplay of “genes” and environment.
And of course religious side of people and even scientists who are religious deny case for such genetic determinism.
This is same argument as Sam Harris make when he says if he switch place between him and a criminal atom by atom that would be him, so criminals don’t deserved to be punished.
Btw, i was randomly searching for a article and found this,,
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/free-will-could-all-be-an-illusion-scientists-suggest-after-study-that-shows-choice-could-just-be-the-brain-tricking-itself-a7008181.html
i know you have looked at such articles before but this one has some bold claims. What do you say?
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
About Sam Harris and his views on free will, please see:
Is Free Will an Illusion? A Response to Sam Harris
That article covers the triviality of these “scientific experiments,” as reflected in this statement from the article you link here:
Many of our small decisions are made on autopilot, without a lot of thought about it. If that weren’t so, we’d be continually stalled as we try to think out every little step we take.
Our big decisions are made quite differently. These we do think about and hash out in our mind. Even if the decision itself takes place at one moment, there has been months, years, or even decades of lead-up to them in which we have gained relevant experience on which we are basing our decision.
To use the classic example, an alcoholic does not become sober overnight. It commonly takes years of going down, down, down until the alcoholic is in the gutter, sometimes literally, before he or she makes the big decision to get sober. This is not some trick of the brain. It is a human being evaluating his or her life, and deciding to send it in an entirely different direction.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
I left comments on both of the posts you linked to. They’re currently “awaiting moderation,” and may or may not be approved and appear publicly. Just to make sure my time writing them wasn’t wasted, I’ll copy the comments here.
In response to the first post, I wrote:
In response to the second post, I wrote:
Thanks Lee
I Want your general view on study of these types conducted by psychologists, Like Dan Wagner, John Bargh who have conducted studies that priming and environmental cues may determine choices at unconscious level and conscious choice is just post-hoc rationalization. Do you think these studies as flawed or they in any way pose some kind of threat to perceived role of conscious choice. Some studies people are manipulated in lab. Also are you aware of argument from social psychology which include “Situationism”. You can look at it on Wikipedia. According to supporters of it they use stanford prison experiment.
Btw, There is one more thing i have seen many studies that suggests that self-directed change through self-effort is possible even to modify what you “called” Basic traits. My question is you implying that basic traits of people remain same has any biblical or your denominational background or is it what your own pov. Like radically changing one’s personality maybe very hard,but not impossible, this was a headline of recently conducted Finnish study. I find the study findings to be aligning with theological view about power that self-directed effort has on person own personality. Do you agree with it?
With that said, i have question that what is your denomination and what are your views on catholicism and other denominations, and their position, are all denomination equally vaid or some are more closer to Jesus than others. I myself am not belonging to any of them but just curious.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
I’m not familiar with those studies, so I can’t comment very specifically on them. But in general, these studies seem to find some internal or environmental factors that apparently determine people’s small-scale “choices,” and then generalize that to deny free will altogether. That’s a huge leap, and not a warranted one. The people who conduct these experiments have probably already rejected the reality of free will in their own mind, and they are just looking for evidence to support that pre-existing belief. While that doesn’t necessarily completely kill the scientific value of experiments (sometimes experiments show the opposite of what the scientists conducting them want them to show), it does tend to color the results.
Though I do think we have actual free will even in the small things, I’m not too concerned about that. Our small choices tend to be in line with our big choices, which is where our free will is most critical.
Swedenborg speaks of each person having a “ruling love,” or “predominant love,” which all his or her other loves and desires are directed by and serve in a hierarchy of loves and motives that has the ruling love at the top. If minor choices seem “automatic,” it may just be a factor of those choices following the pattern and direction set out by our big choices, and ultimately, by whatever love and motivation we put at the center of our life and character.
“Situationism” seems to be one side of a common debate between internal and external locus of control for our actions. It seems to me quite obvious that our actions are an interplay of both internal and external factors. We do make choices, but we make them within the context of the situation we’re in.
As for radically changing our basic character traits, I wouldn’t rule it out entirely. If a very introverted person wanted to become extroverted, and had a real drive to accomplish that change, maybe it would be possible through long persistence in bringing it about. It’s much more likely, though, that a very introverted person will seek out work and situations where introversion is a positive rather than a negative.
We humans are complex creatures. It’s best not to say that this or that is impossible for us. That’s a formula for being proven wrong. Still, I think it would be a very unusual person who would attempt to change his or her own basic character rather than harnessing that character toward positive (or negative) goals.
Thanks Again for your amazing response.
Personally, I don’t find it unusual(in fact quite common) that people often want to change their characters to achieve sort of goals and other things. But again, character traits are almost never polar ends but sort of in between spectrum.
Also, there are tons of psychological studies and most of them are from John Bargh, Dan Wegner, one of their statements goes like
“Bargh posits, along with Daniel Wegner and other scientists in the field, that the concept of ‘free will’ is an illusion. Bargh and Earp make this point explicit: “Clearly it is motivating for each of us to believe we are better than average, that bad things happen to other people, not ourselves, and that we have free-agentic control over our own judgments and behavior—just as it is comforting to believe in a benevolent God and justice for all in an afterlife. But the benefits of believing in free will are irrelevant to the actual existence of free will. A positive illusion, no matter how functional and comforting, is still an illusion.”
“
They are,most reputed Psychology professors btw.
And i saw on reddit the same argument against freedom
“Such a freedom would be gratuitous, since the only grounds for our choice would be the power to choose itself. “
This piece is from Baggini but people make similar arguments, so my question is, Isn’t freedom of choice being a ground for choice a basic intuitive understanding of freedom? They frame arguments in such a way that Your dispositions and Personality determining a choice takes away freedom but then they also argue that if it doesn’t determine it in a deterministic sense then freedom is just random. Because to them a ground for choice being Free will or freedom of choice is just either random or incoherent concept that is defeated by logic. Basically their argument in simple terms is if a person is a deterministically programmed computer (operating in deterministic system) then his sense of choice is illusion but if a person isn’t deterministically programmed computer operating in deterministic system then the person is simply a randomizing machine, or literally nothing, so they would derive conclusion that anything that is not determined or random is incoherent and defeated by logic. If you have heard of them or Not but Galen Starwson and Derek Pereboom made such arguments and many Causal and Logical determinists on internet repeat their arguments.
How do you respond to them?
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0915161107
And if you have time sometimes do look at that paper, which in arguments i saw someone claiming that these make definitive case and according to them, after reading this you’ll become a materialist determinist, and how belief in soul, supernatural or Freedom is just silly nonsense. I want your perspective on that paper.
If possible can you write something regarding such scientific papers and if they produce a fatal blow non- materialist beliefs.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
For the most part, it’s a waste of time to respond to them, because their minds are already made up. Their minds are stuck in materialistic darkness, which means they simply cannot see the light when it comes to spiritual things such as free will. Of course they’re going to deny free will. That goes along with denying God and spirit. In one place Swedenborg is talking about “the view that people are just like brute animals,” and says that “people who think this way even compare themselves to animals, not inappropriately” (Other Planets #58).
But more substantively, elsewhere he says:
Materialistic philosophers and scientists commonly think of themselves as the truly intelligent and wise people of the world, whereas they see people who believe in God as irrational simpletons. In reality, the opposite is the case. Simple-minded believers are commonly wiser and more sensible in real life than these highly educated academics who think they’re so smart.
Rejecting free will is one of those areas of real life where simple-minded people are smarter than these highly educated people who think they’re so smart. To the average person on the street, it’s obvious that we have free will, and that we make choices every day. It takes fancy philosophical and scientific papers written by blind materialists to deny this obvious reality of human existence.
Free will is a spiritual characteristic, meaning it is a capability of our spirit. It therefore makes sense that people who deny that we have a spirit would deny that we have free will. All their materialistic logic and science will seem to them to make that conclusion inevitable, even though to anyone who has actual understanding and insight on the nature of human existence, that conclusion is just plain silly.
Aside from paying attention to everyday human experience and believing that it is real, not a mere illusion, the main reason to believe there is free will is that it is an ability of our mind or spirit that God has given us as an essential part of our humanity.
It’s ironic, isn’t it, that the materialists who think they are so smart view everyone as living in a great big illusion, whereas people who believe in God and spirit see everyone as living in reality!
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
About the paper you linked, it’s probably about as far as a materialist is going to get along the curve of understanding on this subject. At least its author rejects determinism and doesn’t try to deny or ignore the randomness inherent in physical existence. He uses a fancy word, “stochasticism,” to talk about it, making him sound very smart, but it’s basically the same thing.
You say:
Well . . . that didn’t work for me! 😀
In reality, the paper doesn’t “make a definitive case.” It just assumes that there is no God and no spirit, and argues on that basis. People who already reject God and spirit will find its arguments “definitive.” People who don’t will find them “diminutive.” 😉
But more seriously, in response to the paper, and especially to its “Figure 1” about halfway into the paper, I’ll bring in some material from Swedenborg’s introduction to his 1769 book Soul-Body Interaction. (All quotes are from #1 of that book.)
In the paper’s Figure 1, Item A loosely represents what Swedenborg calls “spiritual inflow.” Decision-making flows in from the Will, which is pictured as residing above our conscious thought, and then conscious thought flows into our unconscious neural activity below it. It then shows some lesser feedback from the bottom to the middle item.
Item B could be argued to be like pre-established harmony, but it isn’t really. Pre-established harmony was one of Leibniz’s ideas, but it seems never to have become very popular or accepted. Really, Item B is just a stepping-stone from Item A, which the author rejects to the author’s own belief, which is represented in Item C.
Item C, as you might guess, reflects what Swedenborg calls “physical inflow.” In it, our unconscious neural activity, which the author thinks of as consisting of his favorite three elements of “genes, environment, and stochasticism,” flows up into our conscious thought and determines it. Will is taken out of the picture altogether as a mere illusion. There is then some secondary backflow from our conscious thought down to our unconscious neural activity.
Continuing on from his opening salvo above, here’s what Swedenborg says about physical inflow:
He’s speaking of physical stimuli rather than unconscious processes, but the idea is the same. Physical things flow into the mind and cause it to sense what it senses, or do what it does. As suggested in the paper’s reference to ancient Greek philosophers, this essentially materialistic view of things has been in existence among some thinkers since ancient times. And according to Swedenborg, it’s based on deceptive appearances, not on sound reason.
About spiritual inflow, by contrast, he says:
It was at a secular college that I attended decades ago that, in a course on psychology, we studied “perception,” meaning not insight, but how we see physical things. There I learned that the idea that images flow from our surroundings through our eyes into our brain is completely wrong. In reality, even in the rods and cones of the retina the incoming signals are being processed. The brain then reaches out actively through the optic nerves to fetch the pre-processed data, which receives more processing along the way, and it then completes the processing to create a visual image of our surroundings. This is exactly what Swedenborg said, in compact form, here in SBI #1, two and a half centuries ago.
Swedenborg also has a short section on pre-established harmony, to which he gives short schrift just as he does to physical inflow. He concludes by saying:
Materialists believe in physical inflow, which in the case of the author of this paper involves biological processes giving us a sense of consciousness and the mere illusion of free will. In reality (he believes), we are entirely directed by heredity, environment, and a random element, none of which we have any control over. In other words, in classical language “the body activates the soul.”
Swedenborg calls this view a “deceptive appearance.” Having experienced the spiritual world for himself, he was able to see and sense how spiritual things flow into material things, including the mind flowing into the body—and not the other way around as the materialists believe (but reducing the spirit to a biologically-generated consciousness).
Once again, this paper is probably about as good as it’s going to get from a purely materialistic perspective. But it’s still just blindly basing theories on physical appearances, and not on spiritual realities.
Once again, free will is a spiritual capability. Once we accept that our spirit is real, no amount of blind materialistic reasoning based on deceptive appearances can disprove the reality that we humans have free will, and we exercise that capability every day.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
In response to this:
I grew up in the denomination that goes by the name The Swedenborgian Church of North America (SCNA). The link is to its website. I was ordained in that church in 1996, and remain on its Roll of Ministers to this day, though I no longer work within the denomination. I did serve as pastor of one of its churches for a decade following my ordination. I also edited its monthly devotional magazine, Our Daily Bread, and served on many boards and committees from the local level right up to the national level of the church.
The SCNA (whose corporate name is The General Convention of the New Jerusalem in the United States) is the original Swedenborgian denomination in the United States, founded in 1817. The first Swedenborgian denomination in the world was the General Conference of the New Church in Great Britain, founded in London in 1787. The General Convention in the U.S. was a sister, or perhaps daughter, body of the General Conference in Great Britain. The SCNA covers the U.S. and Canada. It is a very small denomination, currently having fewer than 800 active members, which is down from its peak of about 10,000 around 1900.
The SCNA is the most liberal of the Swedenborgian denominations worldwide. It ordained is first woman in 1972, and its first openly gay person in 1997. Though I don’t consider myself a liberal, and I don’t support all of the denomination’s stances, I do support the ordination of women and gays. I am closer in my thinking to the SCNA than to any of the other Swedenborgian denominations around the world. So far I have chosen to maintain my affiliation and ordination with it.
About other denominations, they are all under God’s auspices, and they all provide a pathway to God and heaven for members who live according to their teachings from a good heart. In particular, anyone in any Christian denomination who follows the two Great Commandments given by Jesus himself is on a pathway toward heaven.
Having said that, I believe that the key teachings of all the main branches of Christianity are unbiblical and false, starting with the Trinity of Persons and working its way down to such teachings as the satisfaction theory of atonement, justification by faith alone, penal substitution, and so on. None of these are taught anywhere in the Bible (see: “Christian Beliefs” that the Bible Doesn’t Teach).
These churches are therefore not Christian doctrinally, because they have substituted human doctrines for the teachings of Jesus Christ. However, church members who listen to Jesus’ teachings as presented to them in their pastors’ sermons and classes, and who live by those teachings, are Christians. Many of the leaders of those churches are genuine Christians even though they are not doctrinally Christian due to the false doctrines of their churches.
What brings people close to Jesus is living by his teachings. Those who do so are close to Jesus, and are real Christians. Those who don’t are Christians in name only, no matter how many times they may invoke the name “Jesus Christ.”
Thanks Lee,
On that paper,
It didn’t work for me either even tho I’m not 100% on spiritual side.
But some of the things in that paper were just unusual even for a determinists like, Comparing Humans with bowl of sugar. Also the quote from Einstein was bit of thought provoking, what do you think.
And can you once again clarify the difference between physical inflow and spiritual inflow, in general context of Spirituality and do they both play a role or it’s spiritual inflow the guiding factor of physical.
And, there’s one more video i want your opinion on or rather overall view on it, you may have watched it already
reason for this is, i never thought this YouTuber would make video on this topic and this video has a massive reach, from young kids to adults everyone watches his content. If possible can you make a separate blog that addresses and responds to the videos by putting your alternate spiritual arguments as an explanation for things in video.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
Basically, physical inflow is the idea that cause and effect flows up the chain from physical to spiritual (or psychological), whereas spiritual inflow is the idea that cause and effect flows down the chain from divine (God) to spiritual to physical. Pre-established harmony is the idea that different levels are created to operate separately but coordinated with each other; cause and effect does not flow either up or down.
Though the chart in that article has backflow, according to Swedenborg there is no backflow. Only acceptance or resistance. The flow is always one-way, from God to spirit to matter. However, spirit can accept or not accept the inflow from God, or accept more or less of it. Ditto for matter accepting inflow from spirit variably. The higher levels can sense the receptivity or lack thereof of the lower levels. This means that information can “travel up” the levels, although really, it’s the higher level reaching out and gathering information about the lower level. Really, the flow is still one-way.
As an example, if I turn on a hose, the water always flows from the water tower to the spigot to the nozzle. It never flows from the nozzle to the spigot to the water tower. However, I can turn the nozzle off so that it doesn’t flow at all, or I can set the nozzle to spray rather than to a solid stream. The water flow will adjust accordingly. The water tower can sense how much water is going out, and will refill itself as needed based on that flow.
This, according to Swedenborg, is how inflow works. He said that spiritual inflow, from top to bottom, is correct, whereas physical inflow, from bottom to top, and also pre-established harmony, is incorrect.
Thanks Lee,
I agree that Video by them best explains the situation from materialist pov.
but as you can imagine comments are majority people who deny it, when they don’t have any argument they simply use “Introspection argument” of Sam Harris which is they claim they don’t feel free will and even illusion doesn’t exist. Like this what someone said,
“Introspectively speaking, it seems to me obvious that free will is illusion. Thoughts just emergefrom background causes, and actions are just thoughts about actions that we have more thoughts about committing to bringing into being(more or less the argument Sam Harris puts forth). I think it is an intuitive one,”
I find it very unusual but what’s your take on instropection argument put forth by Likes of Sam Harris and others.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
It seems obvious enough to me that this “intuitive” support of determinism is based on previously existing deterministic views. We interpret what we see according to our ideas and beliefs. Someone who believes that free will is real will “intuitively” feel that he or she is making real decisions that aren’t just the working out of “background causes.”
However, a further wrinkle is that our thoughts do indeed emerge from beyond our own self and consciousness. Not from “background causes,” but from the angels and spirits around us. If our connection with them were cut off, we would not be able to think at all, or have a single idea.
Our freedom is not in originating our thoughts, but in which ones we choose to accept and make a part of our system of belief, and which we reject and exclude from our beliefs and ideas. We can’t control what thoughts come into our mind. But we can control which ones we foster and focus on, and which ones we reject and put out of our mind.
Sam Harris and his ilk are not wrong in thinking that we aren’t the origin of our own thoughts. But they are wrong in thinking that since our thoughts come from elsewhere, that means we have no free will.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
About the video, it’s better than most popular videos on this topic, but still limited to a materialistic viewpoint, which doesn’t allow for a proper answer to the question of free will. The concept of emergence is probably about the best that can currently be done from a materialistic perspective to support the reality of free will.
But really, emergence is an illusion based on observing obvious realities, such as human free will, from a materialistic perspective, and trying to account for these realities that are clearly not deterministic.
On the no-free-will side the video at least takes quantum randomness seriously rather than just waving it away. But it observes that randomness is not the same as free will, so that quantum randomness doesn’t provide a particularly good argument for free will. That’s true. However, quantum randomness does smash the idea of determinism. Even if a supercomputer could fully analyze the state of everything a moment after the Big Bang, it still could not predict the Mona Lisa.
This doesn’t destroy the no-free-will position, but it does cause a major chink in its armor. Determinism is not a workable theory based on today’s physics. It could be sustained based on Newtonian physics, but not based on today’s physics. That’s why I say that determinists are stuck in the past scientifically and conceptually.
Back to emergence, many materialistic types resist the idea of emergence precisely because it doesn’t seem to follow laws of cause and effect. At higher levels, new properties “emerge,” apparently without anything in particular causing them to emerge. This causes many scientists, materialists, and atheists to be skeptical of emergence, and to look for ways to reject it.
The reality is that emergence is an illusion. It is based on what Swedenborg would call physical inflow, meaning that cause and effect flows upward. The idea is that reaching a particular level of amalgamation and complexity of lower things causes higher functions to appear that are not inherent in the lower levels themselves. But somehow this is still a result of the amalgamation and increased complexity of the higher level.
Based on Swedenborg’s idea of spiritual inflow, that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening instead is that higher levels—in this case the spiritual level, and above that God—is organizing the lower (material) level into complex forms that can serve as habitations and tools for spiritual forces to operate.
For example, in this view life is not an emergent property. It is something that already exists on the spiritual level, and that inhabits physical forms of sufficient complexity and of the correct configuration to be able to host life. Life does not emerge from dead matter. Life (spirit) organizes dead matter so that it (life) can inhabit dead matter.
Biologically organized matter is still intrinsically dead. Life does not “emerge” from inanimate matter at a certain level of complexity. Life is the spirit dwelling within the organism, giving it life. As soon as the spirit departs, or the organism becomes incapable of supporting life (which also causes the spirit to depart), the organized matter reverts back to its intrinsically dead state.
Similarly, free will does not “emerge” at higher levels of amalgamation and complexity. Rather, it is a property of our spirit, which then acts upon matter, actuating our brain cells to fire this way rather rather than that way, and through our brain cells, actuating our feet and hands to carry out the decision that the spirit has made.
In summary, materialistic arguments can chip away at determinism and provide some indications that we actually do have free will, but materialism can never provide a proper basis supporting the reality of human free will. That’s why materialists will always tend toward determinism and a rejection of free will. Only based on an acceptance of the reality of God and spirit, and of spiritual inflow rather than physical inflow, can a really solid case be made for the reality of free will.
Thanks Lee,
If you don’t mind, can you clarify on connection with angels and spirits and their role in emergence of thought, also if the idea that only passing thoughts are beyond our consciousness but we can originate a thought that we choose to think about is what you’re arguing for. Also why did you say we would not be able think if our connection with them were cut.
Also there’s another thing that i may be troubling you with but i recently watched a video, which had some strange arguments and claims. And they seem made some arguments which says necessity and desires are one.
If you are free sometimes, can you watch it and tell me what do you think of it.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
We don’t originate any of our thoughts. In fact, we don’t originate anything at all. Ultimately, everything comes from God, including every thought and every feeling we have. None of it comes from us.
Mostly, though, our thoughts don’t come directly from God, especially while we’re living on earth. Instead, they come through angels and spirits. We’re not normally aware of them, nor are they normally aware of us, but our mind lives in a particular part of the spiritual world, in connection with the angels and/or spirits there. That’s where our thoughts come from. None of them are original to us. Just because we’ve never had a particular thought before, that doesn’t mean it’s actually brand new. Just that it’s new to us.
God is infinite and omniscient, and also eternal and timeless. Every possible thought exists in the mind of God from eternity, to eternity—though in God it is in an eternal now. It is therefore not possible for us to have a truly brand new thought. However, there can be thoughts that no other human beings (angels, spirits, or people on earth) have had. These “new” thoughts start with angels, move down to spirits, and from there move into the minds of people on earth.
Thoughts are not exactly the same in heaven and the world of spirits as they are on earth because heaven and the world of spirits (and hell) are spiritual, whereas earth is material. Our thinking on earth is more earthly, whereas in heaven our thinking is entirely spiritual. This means that there is some transformation of thoughts as they move from God to angels to spirits (and also to evil spirits in hell) to people on earth. But it’s still the same thought, only expressed on a different level. It’s like a three-dimensional cube being projected onto a two-dimensional surface.
In short, none of our thoughts are new or original to us. They all come from the spiritual world, and ultimately from God. But we can bring about unique variations in those thoughts based on our particular character, personality, choices, and so on. A thought isn’t exactly the same in one person as it is in another, nor is it exactly the same in us as it is in the angel or spirit it came from. We each put our unique imprint on it. So in that sense it is “new,” but really it is just a variation on a theme. And in the mind of God, it already existed in all its infinite possible variations.
So each of us does express some unique element of the mind of God. But none of it is original to us.
I still have not completely understood this but my point was that, what does it mean for humans that their thoughts don’t originate in them but Angel put them forth and what does that actually mean for responsibility of kind of thoughts we have and we ultimately entertain. Who is responsible for us having sometimes terrible thoughts? Us or Angels?
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
We’re not responsible for thoughts that pop into our head. That is not something we can control. What we are responsible for is the thoughts that we accept, agree with, and make a part of our thinking.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
Some responses to the video as I watch it:
First, claiming that it’s great that we don’t have free will is a fine example of “sweet lemons.” It’s baloney, but people believe all sorts of ideas that are baloney.
However, people sense that others will not accept their ideas if they think those ideas will make human life worse rather than better. So the people who have those ideas go through all sorts of mental gyrations and contortions to try to convince other people that life would actually be better if those things were true. The anti-free-will people, both secular (such as the interviewee in the video) and religious (such as Calvinists) make that argument in various ways.
It’s pure bunk. Human life is better with free will than without free will.
In fact, without free will, there is no such thing as human life. Without free will there is only animal life, and we are mere animals.
Right at the beginning the person being interviewed in the video makes a basic mistake, which is the a variation of the same mistake that the Randians (“Objectivists”) make: the idea that if we have free will, it’s “all about us.” Randians confuse selfishness with being self-motivated. This guy confuses making choices based on free will with being self-absorbed. Both are variations of the same error.
In reality, we can choose to be selfish and self-absorbed or we can choose not to be selfish and self-absorbed. Here are the basic “loves” that we can choose to put at the center of our life, in descending order from highest to lowest:
If we put the third and/or fourth at the center of our life, we are choosing selfishness and greed, and we are indeed choosing to be self-absorbed. In this case we are both self-motivated (i.e., we’re making our own choice to be that way) and selfish.
If we put the first and/or second at the center of our life, we are choosing to devote our life to the well-being of others, and to doing God’s work. This is still being self-motivated, but it is not being selfish. We have made our own choice to devote our life to God and the neighbor; we are not being directed or controlled by anyone else in doing so. But our choice is not to be selfish and self-absorbed, but to devote our life to the well-being of others, and to God’s “kingdom” or realm.
This is a state of being that Randians don’t account for in their philosophy. They don’t properly distinguish between selfishness and being self-motivated. A person can act from his or her own internal motives, not subject to the will of other people, but do so for the benefit of other people. And such a person can be completely personally fulfilled in doing so.
Similarly, the man being interviewed in the video doesn’t account for the possibility that we could have free will and make our own choices, but those choices could not be all about us, but about what we can do for other people. It’s a basic error that arises from not knowing and understanding the hierarchy of possible “ruling loves” that Swedenborg lays out in his theological writings.
I should add that putting God and the neighbor first does not mean neglecting and vitiating our own life. As long as the four loves are in their proper order, God first, then the neighbor, then the world, then ourselves, they are all good. Loving ourselves is necessary in the sense that we must provide for ourselves to have a healthy mind in a healthy body so that we will be in a condition to serve God and the neighbor. If we neglect our own self and our own good, we will ultimately destroy our ability to be of service to God and the neighbor.
This is another area that Randians, and the guy being interviewed in the video, have made a basic error. There is no inherent conflict between taking care of our own well-being and devoting our life to the well-being of others. Further, taking care of ourselves and our own needs is not “selfish” if our purpose in doing so is to make ourselves better able to serve God and the neighbor.
The guy being interviewed is wrong when he says that personal agency means “your life is all about you and my life is all about me.” That’s the case only if we use our free will and personal agency to choose to be selfish and self-absorbed—which is a misuse of our freedom. If we use them instead to choose to devote our life to the well-being of others, then “your life is not all about you, and my life is not all about me.”
Right off the bat, the interviewee is making basic mistakes about human nature and human psychology.
I take his point that the universe is so complex that it would take a computer bigger than the universe to calculate its future based on its past, and that therefore even if the universe is deterministic, the only way to find out what the results will be is to allow it to move forward and observe the results.
The problem is that the universe is not deterministic. That idea is based on old Newtonian physics. It can’t be sustained now that we know that quantum processes, which have an inherent randomness to them, are central to the working out of the universe.
In other words, even if we just stand by and let the universe work itself out, the universe could go one way or it could go another way at any point along the way. The way it works itself out is not predetermined based on its previous state. Yes, it has a strong tendency in one direction rather than another. But that tendency can be overridden by random events that are not caused or determined by the states that came before them.
Bottom line: the universe simply isn’t deterministic. Any arguments based on the universe being deterministic are false because they are starting with a false premise.
The interviewee defines “libertarian freedom” as “having complete free will.” Perhaps a few New Age guru types argue that we have complete free will to do or be anything we want to be, without limits. But ordinary people who have basic common sense understand that we do not have “complete free will.” Our free will has limits. There are some things we just can’t do. This doesn’t mean we have no free will at all. It means that we have free will within a certain field of possibilities.
To use a sports analogy (once again), a soccer player does not have complete free will. S/he cannot kick the ball right out of the stadium in the direction of his own team’s net, all the way around the world, and into the opposing team’s net. Not only is this impossible, but the ball would have gone out of bounds, so even if it were possible, the goal wouldn’t count. What the soccer player does have is complete freedom to kick the ball anywhere s/he wants within the boundaries of the soccer field. It’s still free will, and that free will is very real, but it is not unlimited free will. It is free will within the boundaries of the soccer field and within the rules of the game.
The idea that if we don’t have complete free will, we have no free will at all, is a basic boneheaded mistake that I see the anti-free-will people making all the time. It’s a false dichotomy. We humans are limited beings. Everything about us has limits, including our free will. That doesn’t mean we have no free will. It means we have free will within certain boundaries.
Q: “Is there randomness involved?”
A: “I don’t think so. I think ‘randomness’ is the word we use when we don’t know.”
Incorrect. There is actual randomness even in the physical universe.
There has been a lot of push-back against quantum physics precisely because many physicists don’t like the idea of randomness. As the interviewee goes on to say, Einstein famously objected, “God does not play dice with the universe.” Unfortunately for those detractors, the randomness in quantum mechanics is real. It cannot be reduced to determinism. The best that can be done is to reduce it to statistical probabilities, but that’s not the same as determinism.
Bottom line: randomness in the universe is real. It is not just a matter of our inability to know the outcome ahead of time due to the complexity of the interactions. It is actual randomness. The interviewee is simply wrong about this. The universe is not deterministic.
“There is no fundamental randomness.” Yes, there is. He’s not taking quantum physics seriously. He’s arguing all around it, but missing the basic point that there is inherent, fundamental randomness in quantum physics.
I could go on, and maybe I will later, but that’s enough for now. So far, the interviewee is building a case based on faulty assumptions. And when an argument is built on a false foundation, its conclusions cannot help but be false.
Well, it would be nice if you respond to his points about objective idealism and desire and necessity being same thing.
Btw on your first point, do you think Bertrand Russell made similar argument
http://antoine.wojdyla.fr/blog/2016/01/01/bertrand-russell-on-free-will/
btw, idk how i stumbled upon a blog or idk what that is, but this seems borderline insanity,
there is a guy ,
http://causalconsciousness.com/
tbh, i just don’t find anything he says that much of an argument, but there is interesting video,
Someone on quora sent it, do you think he succeeded in it.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
I finished out my response to the earlier video (the interview with Bernardo Kastrup) in a long comment here.
In the course of that comment I do talk about the idea of “desire and necessity being same thing.” Somehow I missed the part about “objective idealism.” Can you give me a timestamp on that?
Btw, this is a video, i want your response on cause. Many hard determinists in the end resort to this kind of argument after failing to prove determinism. And this guy is someone who preach Hard determinism. He simply moves from argument to another in hope to establish hard determinism.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
I just wrote a long response to the video, here. George, the maker of the video equates causation with determinism. That is an error. Not all causation is deterministic. Quantum-level causation is probabilistic, not deterministic. Yet it is still “causal,” to use George’s term. Free will is also causal. Our free choices are the cause of everything that flows from them. Within us, free will is where causation starts. Our free will also has a cause, which is God creating us with free will. None of it is acausal. But causation and determinism are not the same thing. That’s a fundamental error that George makes.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
About the Bertrand Russell quotes:
He starts right off at the end of the first quoted paragraph making a basic mistake, which is that actions done by free will are “uncaused.” But the will is itself the cause of the actions. The fact that the will can make choices about which specific action to take, and what direction to go, does not make its actions “uncaused.” The choice and the will itself are the cause.
What he should really say is that these actions are not determined. In quantum physics, random actions are not uncaused. They have causes. It’s just that the results of those causes have randomness to them. What they are not is determined. In the double slit experiment, if no photons were being shot at the screen through the slits, nothing would happen at all. There is a cause in the form of photons being shot at the apparatus. It’s just that the results of that cause are random rather than deterministic. If there were no cause, nothing at all would happen.
In the very same way, the will itself is the cause of actions done by free will choices. It is the will that makes the choice, and the will that directs the thinking mind and the body to carry out what it has decided to do. This is a chain of causation, not something “uncaused.” It is simply a non-deterministic chain of causation.
It is telling that late in the quotes, Russell throws doubt on the reality of the will itself:
This reflects something Swedenborg commonly observed: that the human mind can easily see the workings of the thinking rational mind, but only with difficulty see the workings of the will and of love. Scholarly types therefore emphasize and focus on the thinking mind, and downplay or deny love and the will. They thereby fall into basic error about the nature of human beings, which is fundamentally one of will and of love, and only secondarily one of rational thought. Rational thought serves the will, and not the other way around.
The focus of intellectuals on the intellect is parallel to the tendency among theologians to drift away from love and good deeds, and toward faith and belief as the fundamental element of religion and salvation. The entire Protestant wing of Christianity has made this fallacious leap by its acceptance of Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone. But the rest of traditional Christianity has made the same error by, for example, asserting that only those who believe in Jesus Christ can be saved. In saying this, they betray their underlying notion that it is what we believe, not what we love and how we live, that determines whether or not we are saved. In fact, the opposite is the case. Belief is only a means and a guide for love to accomplish its will in the deeds it does.
The secular world commonly parallels the religious world in its thinking and perspectives. Even as they reject God and religion, secular thinkers move in the same fallacious directions as religious thinkers. The increasing focus on intellect among intellectuals, and the sidelining of will, love, desire, and emotion, is one aspect of this underlying parallel between faulty religious thought and faulty secular thought. Here, Bertrand Russell falls right into the same trap that so many theologians have fallen into.
In the second quoted paragraph Russell writes:
Here Russell almost sees the light when he says that “the wish is the cause of the action.”
Still, he assumes the aforementioned error that acts of free will are uncaused, which he goes on to talk about more in the rest of the paragraph. It also misses the point that he himself has just made, which is that the will (“wish,” in his terms) itself is the cause of human action. Does the human will have causes? Yes. It is something created by God, which is the cause of human will, and human free will. But the very point is that God created us with free will. Human free will is not itself uncaused. It is caused by God. But it is still free, because that is what God caused and created it to be.
This whole argument simply assumes that the universe is deterministic (which it is not), and also assumes that God is incapable of creating a non-deterministic universe, let alone free will that really is free, and isn’t just an illusory appearance of free will. As for the universe being non-deterministic, those who argue against this, and for a deterministic universe, haven’t fully grasped and accepted the implications of quantum theory.
I suppose they could just reject quantum theory, but its conclusions are not based on mere theory. They are based on extensive and repeatable experiments that have led a rather reluctant scientific community to accept that Newtonian determinism just can’t be upheld anymore in light of the evidence. The randomness in quantum mechanics is real, and is supported by extensive scientific experiments.
Assuming God created the universe, this means that God certainly is capable of creating a non-deterministic world in which cause and effect are still operational. And if God is capable of creating a non-deterministic world that has randomness built right into it, but still operates by definite physical laws, why would God be incapable of creating the human mind at a higher, spiritual (non-physical) level that is capable of making free, non-determined choices about what it will do and which direction it will go?
As I’ve said numerous times before, those who argue against free will beg the question by simply assuming that the universe is deterministic, and then basing all their arguments on that assumption. But if God is capable of creating randomness that is intrinsic to the physical laws and workings of the physical universe, then God is just as capable of creating a higher spiritual level in which free will is real, and is fundamental to human nature.
This is why atheists who reject determinism also reject the existence and reality of God and spirit. If God and spirit are real, it becomes even more difficult to maintain their assumption of determinism than it is in the face of the developments in science itself that have happened over the past century or so.
However, even here, these secular thinkers are following in the footsteps of certain theologians, most notably John Calvin, who rejected free will based on fallacious religious arguments. Skeptics may think they are divorcing themselves from God and religion, but for the most part they are coming to the same false conclusions as various theologians have before them, only stripping away the divine and spiritual elements of the arguments and confining themselves to physically-based arguments. Yet the outcomes are the same. As they say in programming, “Garbage in, garbage out.” Start with faulty assumptions, and all your conclusions will also be faulty.
In the same quotation:
Of course we can. People do what they would rather not do all the time. I don’t know what Russell is smoking here.
Being able to do what we would rather not do is one of the key elements of human free will. Animals do what they would rather not do only under outside compulsion and training. Otherwise, they do only what they want to do, because they are entirely driven by their animal desires. Even training harnesses their animal desires to get them to do what the trainer wants them to do. We humans uniquely have the ability to internally compel ourselves to do things we would rather not do in order to pursue goals that we have set for ourselves, and execute decisions we have made about our character and our life that run contrary to our natural inclinations—which are focused on benefiting only ourselves, and the extended self of our family and clan.
Animals cannot engage in freely chosen self-compulsion. Humans can do so precisely because unlike animals, we have free will.
In the next paragraph Russell says:
Here he is confusing influences and causes. He is also not grasping the role of human intellect in free will. Human free will does take into account various influences in making its decisions. If a course of action is likely to result in injury or death, we will evaluate whether we really want to do it despite the risks. We still have freedom to act, but the freedom is not unlimited. It has boundaries and parameters, which the will, and its supporting intellect, must take into account in making its decisions and acting upon them.
Further, without intellect, will is blind, and cannot make rational choices. The point of religious education is not to determine the outcome (a choice for heaven) but to provide the intellectual foundation required to make a choice between good and evil. Of course, those providing the religious education hope that the ones they are educating will make the choice for good rather than evil. But if they have a clear understanding of their role, they will be aware that they are not causing their students to choose the good, but rather are giving them the intellectual weapons and armor that they need to make the good choice and fight the good fight.
A pile of lumber is not a house. And if nobody decides to build it into a house, it will never become a house. But if there is no lumber, there will also be no house because without materials it is not possible to build a house no matter how much one may decide to build one. The materials for building that house are an essential component of the will carrying out its desire to build a house. Just so, the intellectual materials provided by religious education are an essential component in the human will being able to exercise its freedom in choosing to build the “house” of good and heavenly character.
More abstractly, the will depends upon the intellect in evaluating the possible choices it could make, and in making and carrying out those choices. Free will is not arbitrary. It is exercised within a particular set of circumstances, using the intellectual materials available to it. The better the intellectual materials, the better the choices can be.
For example, if people don’t even have the concept of being born again, they cannot make the choice to be born again. Having that knowledge makes a choice to be born again possible. Not having that knowledge would be like looking at a pile of lumber but not having the concept of a house. In that situation, the free will could not choose to build a house because it doesn’t have the concept of a house available to it to choose.
This is exactly the sense in which religious education is providing the materials free will requires to make its choices. Religious education teaches people about the reality of God, spirit, and the afterlife, and provides definite concepts such as the battle between good and evil, the possibility of being spiritually born again, and the role of truth in fighting the battle against evil and falsity. If a mind is not equipped with this type of knowledge, it cannot make a free and informed decision to choose good over evil and heaven over hell.
Russell continues to make the same mistake in the next paragraph. To extract one statement from it:
No, the legal or medical or financial advice is not the cause of our action. It is the information required to make sound choices. The will to be in good legal or physical or financial health is the cause of our action. The information available to us is not the cause, but the means at our will’s disposal to make and carry out its desires, which are the real causes of our actions. Again, Russell falls into the fallacy of thinking that intellect is primary, when in fact will is primary and intellect is secondary.
From the next paragraph:
The will is the decision to walk to a certain place. The rest is simply our mind and body carrying out the decision of the will. This is pretty basic. Of course we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how to put one foot in front of another. We did when we were first learning to walk. But now that we’ve learned to walk, we no longer have to spend any of our conscious mental energy at it.
This is part of the progress we make as we develop. Things that at first were difficult and required focus and concentration have now, through practice, become habitual and second-nature. They are part of the mental and physical equipment we have furnished ourselves with in order to carry out the decisions that our will makes.
This, once again, is because humans are good at seeing and grasping the workings of the intellect, but very poor at seeing and grasping the workings of the will and the heart.
And so on. This simply illustrates that we humans are not radically free. Some things in our life our involuntary. We don’t make choices about them. Others are voluntary. We do make choices about them. But even when we’re not making conscious choices, the partially voluntary actions of our body, such as breathing, continue to function. Further, once we have made a choice, and set a direction for our life, we don’t have to keep making that choice over and over again. The will marshals the thinking mind and the (acting) body to carry out those choices, and they continue on in that direction unless and until the will redirects them on some other course.
None of this is a denial of free will. It simply illustrates in more detail how free will works. We’re not making free will choices every second about every action we take. We don’t freely decide to put our right foot forward, then our left, when we’re walking somewhere. That’s something we mostly do semi-automatically, only paying attention, for example, when we’re on treacherous ground that requires conscious focus and concentration to traverse without slipping and falling.
The underlying fallacy is that if we’re not radically and totally free, making a conscious decision about every little action we take, then we’re not free at all. That’s absurd. Most of our actions are taken pursuant to choices we’ve already made. We don’t have to decide to do each individual thing, and take each individual action, pursuant to a previously made choice.
When carpenters build a house, they don’t have to make a conscious decision about every nail they drive and every stringer they place. It’s all part of the plan. They simply and efficiently do the work called for by the plan, without having to agonize and scrutinize and make conscious choices about every step along the way. Every once in a while they have to pause, consult the blueprints, and even make decisions about things that aren’t clearly spelled out in the blueprints. But for the most part they work away, placing the stringers, pounding the nails, installing the sheet rock, installing the roofing, and so on without having to think about it very much. They have developed the required skills, and they know what they need to do to build the house. This doesn’t mean they have no free will. It means that they’ve already made the decision to build this house, and now their mind and body is simply carrying out that decision.
Finally:
Here Russell’s lack of understanding of the distinction between mental (intellectual) and volitional (will) functions is evident. He more or less equates them, when in reality they are two very distinct capabilities of the human mind or spirit. Volition is the driving cause. “mental,” i.e., intellectual “antecedents” are merely the means. They are not part of the cause.
What these thinkers and philosophers are missing is Swedenborg’s clear delineation of the nature of the human being as consisting of will, intellect, and action. If they had a clear understanding of these very basic concepts and components of the human being, they would have a lot less confusion about human free will. But since they commonly reduce humans to mere animals produced by nature, they cut themselves off from a higher and better understanding of humans and what makes us distinct from animals, which is precisely our higher functions of free will and self-aware intellect.
I took a glance at the causalconsciousness website. Right away I saw some of the fallacies I’ve already dealt with here and in previous responses to you. But if there’s something specific there that you’d like me to respond to, let me know. I’ll take a look at the video next.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
Reactions as I watch the video:
Right off the bat “George” (the speaker in the video), starts to get into trouble:
As I’ve covered in other responses, free will is not about having “the ability to choose our thoughts, to choose our feelings.” These things come to us mostly involuntarily. Our free will is in choosing which of our thoughts and feelings to accept, foster, act upon, and make a part of ourselves. “Deciding what we want” is not the same as “choosing our thoughts” and “choosing our feelings.” Our thoughts and feelings are the possibilities among which we make our choices about what we want.
Right away, George is misunderstanding human psychology and the nature of free will.
Next, he talks about punishment and guilt being negative things. Of course punishment and guilt can be overdone, and then they become negative and destructive. But in proper proportion to the evil deeds, these are healthy responses to wrong behavior that can prompt people to reconsider their choices and their actions, and make better choices.
Life is not all unicorns and rainbows. There is such a thing as evil in the human heart. Facing and dealing with it requires hard things and hard experiences, including guilt and punishment. The alternative is to let evil continue unchecked, which will cause far more damage than punishment and guilt in response to evil choices and actions. We will not “create a better world, a more compassionate and understanding world,” by banishing the idea of free will. The result would be exactly the opposite.
He repeats the mistake about free will being the ability to choose our thoughts. I don’t think people will actually say that if you ask them about free will. They will say, rather, that they can choose to do what they want.
And then he goes on to wrongly define free will:
First, it is mere opinion that all of these things together compel our every thought, action, and feeling. This is the premise from which he works, not a conclusion that he can demonstrate. But to analyze his definition of free will:
He falls into the common trap, which I’ve discussed in several of my previous responses, that if we’re not radically free, we’re not free at all.
We can’t decide “whatever we want.” We can’t decide to fly without wings or an airplane. We can’t decide to visit the center of the earth. We can’t decide to live on a planet in another solar system. Closer to home, we can’t decide do be rich and automatically get rich; we might be able to work hard and get rich, but then again, we might work hard and not get rich. We can’t decide we’re going to marry a certain person, and have it automatically happen; the other person would have to mutually agree to it. We can’t decide to be a nuclear physicist if we live in a poverty-stricken country that doesn’t even have any universities we could go to so that we could gain the necessary education.
There are many constraints on our freedom. We can’t just arbitrarily decide “whatever we want.” All of the factors he lists are parameters and boundaries within which our free will takes place. We have a certain character and personality. We’re highly unlikely to choose something that is completely at odds with that character and personality. We have unconscious processes going on in our mind that influence our thoughts and actions. What we have and haven’t learned definitely puts boundaries on what we can choose; if we don’t even know a particular career exists, there is no way we can choose that career for ourselves. And yes, we have a genetic makeup that shapes our physical and mental character.
However, none of these compel us to take a certain course of action. Rather, they are conditions and circumstances and parameters within which we make our decision. The person in a poverty-stricken country can’t choose to be a nuclear physicist. But s/he can still choose to do honest work, however poorly paid, or to engage in criminal activity to make a living. Some people will starve to death before they engage in petty theft. Others will turn to petty theft and even seriously criminal actions to avoid starvation. These are things people can make choices about even in the most constrained conditions.
Free will is not the ability to do anything we want regardless of our character and circumstances. It is the ability to make choices within the boundaries and parameters set by our character and circumstances. In particular, it is the ability to turn our character and actions toward good or toward evil within whatever circumstances we may find ourselves in.
Just because we can’t decide “whatever we want” regardless of the circumstances, that doesn’t mean we have no free will. It means we have limited not unlimited, free will.
Then again, everything about us is limited, not unlimited. Only God is without limits. So we shouldn’t expect humans to be radically free, without any limitations. The very distinction between us and God is that we are finite (limited), whereas God is infinite (unlimited). We should therefore expect that everything about us is limited, not unlimited. It would be irrational and illogical to expect our free will to be unlimited, regardless of genetics, character, or circumstances.
This wrong definition of free will is a basic fallacy among many people who don’t believe in free will. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of human psychology, and it leads to all sorts of fallacious conclusions.
He then goes on to make the same mistake that Bertrand Russell and others do, which is thinking that free will amounts to our choices being “uncaused.” But I’ve already responded to that fallacy in my response about Bertrand Russell, so I won’t repeat it here.
He also verges into infinite regress. But there is an uncaused cause in the universe, which is God. That is where all causation comes from. And God is perfectly capable of creating a universe in which human beings who have free will exist.
This is just silly. Of course people experience their will as free. He may deny that it is actually free, but to say that people don’t experience it as free flies in the face of the daily experience of billions of people on this earth.
It takes philosophers and “smart people” to deny the basic, common sense understanding of ordinary uneducated people. These “smart people” commonly reject the evidence of human internal and emotional experience, replacing it with what they see as more reliable guides to truth, which are all physical and material. Even the internal and emotional experiences of people they resolve back to “nature” in their minds, because underneath it all, they think of Nature as God the Creator.
George goes on to say that we experience the world as flat. That’s not entirely true. People who stand at the edge of the ocean or a large sea and watch ships coming and going can directly experience the curvature of the earth by watching ships go over the horizon and sink below it, which wouldn’t happen if the earth were flat. At least some of us have known that the earth is spherical for over 2,000 years, based on direct experience and experimentation. And now, a growing number of people have been to space and seen with their own eyes that the earth is spherical.
Maybe in our daily lives we experience the earth as flat, but for thousands of years we have also had experience that demonstrates to us that it’s not.
He says that the illusion that the world is flat doesn’t impact our daily lives unless we want to go up into space or visit the moon. But anyone who gets into an airplane and takes a long-distance flight is having his or her daily life impacted by the fact that the earth is spherical. Long-distance flights follow, as much as possible, great circle routes that take into account the curvature of the earth’s surface. The shortest route between London and San Francisco goes over the southern tip of Greenland. Flying straight across the ocean, as would seem sensible on a flat map of the earth, would in fact be longer and require more fuel. So yes, the reality that the earth is spherical, not flat, does impact our daily lives in many ways.
Another is that much of our long-distance communications happens through satellites that orbit a spherical earth. If the earth were flat, satellite-based communications would be impossible. Every time we browse the internet or pick up our cell phone and call someone thousands of miles away, the fact that the earth is spherical is having an impact on our daily lives.
Perhaps unreflective people claim this. But people who have examined their own thoughts and feelings don’t claim such things. They are well aware that their choices are affected by all sorts of factors, including their own desires and how their parents raised them. But they are also aware that within those constraints, they have a domain of free will where they can choose which direction to turn all those influences towards.
For example, people whose parents physically abused him or her can unreflectively do the same to their own children continuing the chain of abuse. Or, they can think about how their parents’ abuse affected them, and make a choice not to do the same thing to their own children, thereby breaking the chain of abuse. It is precisely in understanding the various influences on us that we are able to make the best and most effective choices for our own life and the direction we will guide it.
None of these factors compel us to do one thing or another. But they do create boundaries and parameters and factors within which and based on which we make our choices and act upon those choices.
Yes, in fact, we do. People who smoke their first cigarette commonly find it to be very unpleasant. But because their friends do it, they think smoking is very cool, so they overcome their initial repulsion to the taste and experience of cigarette smoke, and develop a taste for it. People choose their tastes all the time. Some people choose not to eat meat anymore, and they develop a taste for vegetable foods. Some people decide not to follow their religious dietary rules, and develop a taste for pork or beef. Some people decide they don’t want to dress like bumpkins anymore, and choose to dress stylishly. And the reverse. We choose our tastes all the time!
Of course, he misinterprets Paul’s words in Romans. Again, George thinks that since Paul doesn’t have absolute free will, he doesn’t have free will at all. That’s not what Paul said, or meant. Paul chose to have faith in Jesus and follow Jesus, and that gave him freedom from the slavery to his own desires that he decries in that passage. Based on his own experience, he urges others to make the same choice.
George also cites Augustine, who is considered a great figure in Christian history. Augustine did originate many current Christian ideas. But his ideas also caused more destruction of Christian doctrine than just about any other theologian in Christian history. For example, when John Calvin formulated his odious doctrine of double predestination, he looked back to Augustine as one of his sources and authorities.
Ugh! Now George is getting into stupid atheist fallacies. “Can God create a boulder so large that he can’t lift it?” He doesn’t understand the nature of divine omnipotence. But I have already dealt with that in this article:
God Is Unconvincing To Smart Folks? – Part 2
I suppose I’ll keep watching, but this video is full of so many fallacies that it’s hard to keep up with them all, let alone respond to them all. The bottom line is that he assumes that there is no free will, and then interprets everything he sees based on that assumption.
He continually confuses “will” with “free will,” and equates them to each other. But that is also a fallacy based on the fundamental fallacy that there is no free will. Our will is determined by our ruling love. This is what drives our choices. But we can decide what our ruling love will be, whether good or evil. I do believe that our choice between, to use his example, going to the library to browse art books or going to the mall for a cup of coffee is an actual free choice. But even if it isn’t, as he contends, these are minor, subsidiary acts of will. Even if these ones are “caused” by something else, ultimately that cause is our will, which we can turn toward evil good or evil using our freedom of will. Once we’ve made that choice, our other choices generally fall in line with that big, fundamental choice. This is the phenomenon that he is seeing. But he’s missing the fundamental type of free will, which is the freedom to determine what our ruling love, or central motivation, will be.
As I’ve said before, there are four general categories from which we can choose, and many variations within each category. The general categories are, once again:
Whichever of these we put first in our life, that will influence and determine all the rest of our choices. But as long as we are still living on this earth, we have the ability even to act against our current ruling love. This ability is part of the freedom of choice that we have, and can exercise, during our lifetime on earth. So even George’s analysis of acting on “the strongest will” is not entirely accurate. Sometimes we strongly want to do something, but restrain ourselves from it because we are making a choice to redirect ourselves away from our current strongest desires toward something that we have decided will be better or have better results. When we are making a choice to turn away from evil desires, which have been strongest in ourselves up to now, toward good ones, this is the process of regeneration.
In short, we certainly do experience free will. Even in our small daily choices, such as whether to have lamb or beef tonight, we exercise free will, and we experience ourselves as having free will. But our greatest ability and experience of free will is in making the big choice of which way to turn our life, whether to good or to evil—and within either good or evil, where specifically to direct ourselves and our life career.
But because this George fellow is so smart, he tries to convince us not only that we don’t have free will, but even that we don’t experience free will, which is obviously false to anyone who has any kind of common sense at all. It is particularly noxious to try to convince people that they’re not experiencing what they plainly are experiencing. Though I know George doesn’t intend any harm, really, this is an example of gaslighting people.
Even George talks about making choices. If we didn’t have the experience of having free will, we wouldn’t even talk about making choices. We would recognize that it’s all determined, and that we don’t make any choices at all. That’s just not the experience of ordinary people. It’s not even George’s own experience, or he wouldn’t casually talk about making choices. But because he’s so smart, he denies the experience, and tries to convince both himself and us that really, we don’t experience precisely what we do in fact experience every day: making free choices about our actions and our attitudes.
Same fallacy, different way of wording it. Free will is itself a cause. When we make a choice in our will, and act upon it, that is the cause of our resulting actions, and of any consequences that flow from them. What he’s really arguing is that all cause and effect is deterministic. But that’s both his assumption and what he’s trying to establish. So once again, he is begging the question. He’s simply assuming that all cause and effect is deterministic, and then arguing for determinism on that basis.
Here he edges into understanding, based on quantum physics, that causality is not entirely deterministic, but involves probabilities. But he doesn’t see the implications of this, and continues on his merry way without realizing what he has just undermined his entire premise in denying free will, which is that causation is entirely deterministic. He equates causality with determinism. The two are not the same.
It is telling that here he speaks of “things going on that we don’t understand.” Maybe he doesn’t understand it, and other determinists don’t understand it, because it doesn’t square with their deterministic Newtonian conception of the universe. But quantum physics is quite well understood by those who study it, based on extensive experimentation and the results of those experiments. It’s not fuzzy or uncertain. It’s just that determinists don’t like it, but they have to deal with it, so they relegate it to “things we don’t understand,” and move on as if the universe were Newtonian and deterministic after all—which quantum physics demonstrates that it is not.
It’s almost becoming a sport for me in watching these anti-free-will videos to see how they’re going to trivialize and sideline quantum physics. It’s sort of like watching how faith-alone Protestants deal with the one verse in the Bible that actually mentions faith alone, which is, “You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:24). The reality is that just as James 2:24 is fatal to Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone, so quantum physics is fatal to determinism. The determinists just don’t want to admit it. At minimum, the universe is probabilistic, not deterministic. But from a spiritual perspective, it is much more than that.
After that whole discussion, he goes right on to discuss causation as if it is intrinsically deterministic, and non-deterministic causality cannot exist. But quantum physics proves him wrong. And that’s still only on the physical level. Add in the spiritual and divine levels of reality, and there are whole vast universes of phenomena that George isn’t even contemplating.
Similarly, he tries to deny randomness, but this also is inherent in quantum physics. It’s why quantum physics is probabilistic, not deterministic. Randomness is not “incoherent.” It’s part of the well-established nature of the physical universe. George is clinging to an old paradigm of how the universe works, not realizing that we have already passed into a new paradigm in science.
He claims that nature has compelled us to believe all sorts of illusions, such as that the earth is flat, that it is sitting still, and so on. That’s funny! Most people today don’t believe those things! So much for being compelled to believe them by nature. Even 2,000 years ago the ancient Greek philosophers knew that the earth was spherical. They knew how big it is, to within 1% accuracy. So much for nature “compelling” us to believe the illusion that the earth is flat!
In in concluding his talk, he says that thinks the world would be better without the “illusion” of free will, and that we will soon have the evidence we need to prove that free will is an illusion. Both are false. I’ve already covered the fallacy of the scientific experiments that “prove” that we have no free will.
As for the world being a better place with free will, just look at the results of the application of political philosophies that posit that humans can simply be molded to behave a certain way within society if only the proper economic and social conditions are applied to them. These political philosophies at heart deny human free will, believing instead that humans can be fully molded by external influences and inputs. The result of regimes that have followed this type of ideology has been horrific slaughter, starvation, and poverty, every single time, across all nations and cultures. Only political and economic systems that accept the reality of human free will and moral choice have been able to build societies in which there is a high level of financial and social stability and security. (Not that any human regime has ever been perfect.)
Yes, the question of free will is very important. The denial of free will won’t lead to a better world as George imagines. This idea has already been tried numerous times. It is still being tried in various nations all around the world. The result has been uniform and predictable: widespread oppression, starvation, poverty, and death. That is the real-world effect of denying human free will.
On the positive side, it is human free will that has made it possible for us to confront, battle against, and largely relegate to the past many old evils. We fought that battle over slavery. We’re now fighting it over racism, sexism, and other isms. All of these battles are based on choices that we made individually and collectively no longer to think and live the way we have in the past.
Without human free will, the world would be a horrendously darker place than it is today. That’s the reality of human experience as it has played out over many centuries, in many different nations and cultures.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
More on that video:
The whole point of free will is that we can not be what we are. We can make choices to be someone different than we are. For example, if we are an inveterate liar, we can make a choice not to lie anymore, and do the work of stopping ourselves from lying, and replacing it with a firm habit of telling the truth.
Saying that “we cannot not be what we are” is just another way of saying “we are deterministic beings.” It is just another example of begging the question.
Again, more begging the question. If “what we are” is a being with free will, then our choices “are a function of what we are,” and they are real choices, not predetermined “choices” that aren’t really choices at all precisely because they are predetermined.
Most of the arguments in the video seem to be one case after another of begging the question: assuming that we have no free will, and then arguing that we have no free will on that basis.
At about timestamp 27:20 he talks about the justice system, and ties free will with justice based on revenge, which he also connects to punishment, whereas under a system without free will, he says, the justice system should be based on deterrence and preemption. But this is a web of faulty thinking.
First, free will is not required or necessarily connected to revenge. Even if we don’t have free will, based on human psychology people will want revenge upon other people who have done bad things to them or to their loved ones. You can say that it’s all based on “nature” and it’s all determined if you want, but revenge is a known psychological phenomenon, so it is clearly functioning whether or not we have free will. In short, connecting revenge with free will is a fallacy. If revenge is somehow connected to free will and is a factor only if there is free will, then the reality that revenge does exist in human psychology and behavior is itself a denial of determinism.
Second, punishment is not the same as revenge. The purpose of punishment is precisely to bring about the deterrence and preemption that he says the justice system should be based on. Without punishment, what would be the deterrence, and what would preempt people from engaging in illegal and destructive behavior? It’s contradictory to say that the justice system should not be based on punishment, but it should function to deter and preempt criminal behavior. Punishment for crime is integrally connected with deterrence and preemption.
Third is his whole argument about how deterrence is a variable in a deterministic system. Maybe so. But deterrence is also a factor in people’s freely made choices under a system of free will. Seeing the consequences of our actions, whether good or bad, is a key piece of information (and experience) that we evaluate in making our choices. Bad consequences for bad actions are intended not only to deter and preempt, but also to bring up short people who have bad motives and engage in bad actions, in the hope that they will reconsider their actions and make a decision to change and become a different person. That’s the whole point of calling it a “reform system.” You can’t reform people against their will. Every time that’s been tried it has been a spectacular failure. Even Skinnerian behavior modification therapy is effective only if the people undergoing that therapy go into it with a desire to change their behavior.
Once again, besides making a fallacious connection between revenge and free will, he assumes that we have no free will, and then argues on that basis. But under a system of free will, revenge is also wrong, and punishment is also necessary for deterrence and preemption, which, along with presenting people with the choice to change their desires and actions, is the purpose of the justice system. And, of course, protecting innocent people from harm.
In the afterlife, punishment can no longer bring about a choice to become a different person because our freedom of choice between good and evil exists only during our lifetime on earth. There is no punishment in heaven. But in hell, punishment is still about deterrence. Even if it is meted out by fellow evil spirits who have motives of revenge in punishing other evil spirits who have hurt them, under God’s economy and under the watchful eye of angels who moderate the punishments, evil spirits bent on revenge are allowed to mete out punishment only to the extent that is required to deter the other evil spirits from that sort of behavior, and no more. To use the popular phrase, even in hell the punishment must fit the crime.
As the video goes on, he draws further on the fallacy that I pointed out in my previous response: that if we’re not radically free, then we’re not free at all. This is false, and its falsity vitiates his arguments. We can have limited freedom, and still have free will within those limits.
And he returns to another fallacy that I mentioned, which is that free will means that your life is all about you. Not true, as I explained in my earlier response. We can use our free will to make our life about God and the neighbor rather than about ourselves.
Though he does make some good points along the way, when it comes to the core issue of his rejection of free will, his arguments consist of one fallacy piled on top of another.
I also note that over and over again he reduces everything back to “nature.” This is exactly what Swedenborg identifies as the source of most of the falsity that prevails among scholarly and academic types. They think that nature is the source of everything. But since God, not nature, is the source of everything, any philosophy based on the idea that nature is the source of everything is fallacious all the way to its foundation.
A general observation about his idea that our life isn’t about making choices, but about being the observers and experiencers of the universe playing itself out: This is basically the Shakesperean line (whose idea predates Shakespeare) that “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.” No matter how grand the play may be, the actors are just actors. It’s not their own life. They’re just following the script. If this is how the universe is, then we are all just actors. We have no real agency and no real self. We’re just playing out a predetermined script written by someone else—in this case, “nature.”
Maybe some people, such as the interviewee, find this satisfying because the play is so grand and complex. But your average person is not going to find this satisfying because it takes away the essence of our humanity, and makes us into automatons.
Starting around timestamp 48:30 he talks about Schopenhauer’s concept of the will of the universe. But if the universe is material and nothing more, then the universe does not have a will. It only has energy, matter, force, vector, laws, and so on. Will is a function of consciousness. The universe is not conscious. It therefore does not have a will. Saying that it does is projecting our own nature onto the material universe. Humans have will. Nature does not.
However, for those who are materialistic and want to reduce everything to nature, and make nature the Creatrix, the idea that nature has a will is attractive because that would account for our having a will. We instinctively feel, and some people rationally argue, that whatever creates something else must have in itself the properties that the created thing has, or it would not be able to create that thing. So if nature is our Creator, and we have will (whether or not it is free), then it is an attractive (but fallacious) idea that nature must have a will.
About his equation of desire with necessity somewhere around timestamp 51:30 (which you asked me to comment on in a subsequent comment):
Once again, this simply assumes that we have no free will. It assumes that we cannot change our desires, and that we must necessarily act upon our desires because, if Schopenhauer is correct, will is everything, and there is nothing else. So everything is determined by our will, aka our desires.
But if we have free will, then we can change our desires. We can start out with a desire to have sex with multiple partners, and decide instead to live a life of faithful, loving monogamy with one partner. We can start out with a desire to make our living by stealing, and decide instead to stop stealing and make our living through honest work. We can start out with a desire to murder people who stand in the way of our plans, and decide instead that murder is not a valid response to people who are frustrating our plans. When we make these decisions, over time the underlying desire itself fades away, and is replaced by a different desire.
This is the process of being “born again” that Jesus talks about, and that Swedenborg delves into extensively using the Latin word regeneratio, traditionally translated “regeneration,” but simply meaning “born again.” The end result of our regeneration, if we walk the path and do the work required, is that our desires will change from selfish, greedy, and evil ones to selfless, generous, and good ones.
Our free will during our lifetime on earth is fundamentally this ability to decide whether we will continue to be self-absorbed, greedy, pleasure-seeking, and so on, or whether we will change and become people who unselfishly love God and love our neighbor, and devote our lives to the happiness and well-being of our neighbor.
The idea that desire and necessity are one and the same simply assumes that we have no free will, and that our desires cannot change—or that if they do, we are not the agent of that change, but it is just nature working itself out.
However, if we do have free will—which is the reality—then this identification of necessity and free will is fallacious. We are not determined by our desires. Our will, and specifically our free will, can override our desires, force ourselves not to act upon them, and replace the actions that those desires would lead to with different actions. When we exercise that ability of will and free will, then over time God from within will replace our old desires with new ones. This is the meaning of the Bible’s statements about replacing our heart of stone with a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 11:19; 36:26).
Yet again, his argument that desire and necessity are one and the same begs the question.
I note (around timestamp 1:08) that he says that we are “monkeys running around.” This is what Swedenborg says about materialists or “worshipers of nature”: that they equate humans with animals, and think there is no real difference between humans and animals. That we are just animals that have bigger brains and greater cognitive abilities.
From a spiritual perspective, this is a fallacy. Although physically and in the lower levels of our mind we are animals, humans have two higher levels of mind that lower animals do not: the spiritual and the heavenly. The spiritual has to do with understanding, and the heavenly has to do with will. Animals don’t have understanding. They have only instinct and a type of knowledge, about which they are not self-aware. They also don’t have will. They have only desire. It may be true of animals that desire and necessity are the same. But it is not true of humans.
Only when we make ourselves into animals do we take away the higher, spiritual and heavenly capabilities that are unique to humans. And yet, we can’t entirely take those capabilities away from ourselves. Even hard materialists actually do have will and understanding, and actually do make free will choices even while denying that they are doing so.
No, we’re not computer chips. And computer chips are not neurons. Humans are distinctly different from computers. It’s very popular to equate computers and humans, but this is a fallacy. Computers are indeed “algorithmically determined.” They do what they’re programmed to do. That’s not the case for human beings. Computers are not alive. Humans are. Computers are not conscious. Humans are. Computers have neither will nor understanding. Humans do.
The popular equation of computers and humans is a major fallacy that leads to all sorts of false conclusions. On that subject, please see:
Are We Headed for an AI Apocalypse?
And yet, he rejects compatibilism. This makes to sense whatsoever. If we are determined beings, we do not have moral responsibility. But his saying that we do demonstrates that even people who reject free will can’t entirely shake the reality of free will out of their minds. They still think and act as if we have free will. His insistence that we have moral responsibility when this would be meaningless in a deterministic universe is one example of his living as if there is free will even though he intellectually believes that there isn’t.
If we have no free will, then not only do we have no moral responsibility, but we don’t have responsibility for anything we think, feel, say, or do. It is all determined by something other than and outside of ourselves. We are not responsible for it because we didn’t cause it.
The reality is that we do have free will. It is impossible for us to live as if there is no free will, because that’s not the reality of our human nature or our life. Even the interviewee can’t avoid his innate realization that as humans, we actually do have free will. If he didn’t have that realization, his argument about moral responsibility would make no sense whatsoever, and the objection that it’s all just determined anyway, and we don’t have any choice in the matter—which in this instance he just brushes aside even though that’s what he’s been arguing for throughout the entire video—would be a mortal wound to his insistence that we do have moral responsibility.
Sooner or later, people who deny free will get tangled in contradictions. That’s because their denial of free will is a denial of the reality of human life and society. This is the point at which the interviewee begins to entangle himself in contradictions, saying that we have moral responsibility when really, according to his prior arguments, we have no responsibility for anything because everything we say and do is just the inevitable working out of nature.
Earlier in the video he heaped contempt on another thinker who said that we shouldn’t tell people that they don’t have free will. But he is doing exactly the same thing by saying that we have moral responsibility when any sort of responsibility is incompatible with a lack of free will. Only if we have free will and can influence our own behavior do we have any responsibility for anything we do.
This realization is what prompts free will deniers to contradict themselves or step back from the full implications of their denial of free will. They recognize that taking away free will takes away our humanity, and removes any reason for people not to just do whatever they feel like doing, regardless of morality, right and wrong, consequences, or anything else. When free will is denied, there is no good argument as to why people shouldn’t engage in evil behavior if that is what they desire to do.
Even this thinker, who apparently prides himself on simply “following the truth,” cannot entirely accept the idea that he has put at the center of his thinking: that free will is an illusion, and that the universe is entirely deterministic.
Again, he speaks of “the mind of nature.” But nature does not have a mind. Nature is not conscious. It doesn’t think. It doesn’t feel. This is just another way in which he cannot accept the implications of his own belief in determinism.
And then he steps away from his earlier idea that things are “algorithmic” by saying instead that no, they’re “organic.” Again, he can’t quite accept the implications of his own belief in determinism, so now, as the interview moves toward its conclusion, he begins to soften things around the edges, insisting upon moral responsibility and stepping away from mechanistic determinism.
It’s as if, just as he’s looking over the precipice of the true implications of his rejection of free will, he simply can’t take that ultimate step. H shrinks back and reintroduces ideas that are compatible only with the reality of human free will.
Back to the flow of the video:
The universe is not an organism. It is a physical system. It does contain organisms, at least on our particular planet. But the idea that the universe is “alive,” and is an “organism” is roundly rejected by physicists because the universe plainly is not alive, and plainly is a non-living system except in those tiny parts of it that have developed biological life.
What he’s really grasping for is God as the Creator, who is a (divine) “organism,” and from whom the life of our biological systems come. But since he has rejected the existence of God, he instinctively attributes God’s characteristics to nature, even though logically, based on his own system, that makes no sense at all. If nature is the origin of everything, then somehow life emerged out of non-life. And the vast bulk of the universe continues to be a non-living entity, and thus not an “organism” but a system.
And now he is attributing free will to cells. Cells don’t “decide” anything. But they do become cancerous. So how can cancer be the result of a “decision”? According to him, there is no such thing as a “decision.” It is all just the working out of the deterministic forces of nature. And yet, cancer exists in this deterministic universe.
I find it quite telling that as he gets to the end of the interview, he brings up one idea after another that contradicts his denial of free will.
But if we take cancer as a metaphor related to human free will (which is what he seems to be doing), then cancer is when a group of “cells” (i.e. humans) that decide to make bad choices. Healthy cells are a metaphor for humans who decide to make good choices.
I also find it fascinating that even atheists can’t avoid making references to God. Clearly he is saying that nature is God—which is what materialists believe. But still, God comes into the picture.
In the end, the interviewer really can’t accept the interviewee’s rejection of free will. He says, in closing out the video:
Yes! After arguing strenuously against free will, the interviewee (whom I suppose I should name: Bernardo Kastrup) brings in multiple concepts that imply free will—something that the interviewer senses.
“Allowing ourselves” to be a violin in the hand of God is precisely what our free will is. We don’t actually do the actions we do. God (or the Devil) does them. Our free will is in whether we allow God to play us, or whether we instead allow the Devil (meaning hell, or the collective force of human evil) to play us.
As the interviewer perceives, the “allowing” in “allowing ourselves to be played” has no meaning if we have no free will. If there is no free will, we are simply played. “Allowing” it to happen is meaningless and nonsensical because we have no choice in the matter.
Even this free will denier returns to human concepts that have meaning only if we have free will. Intellectually he believes that there is no such thing as free will. But emotionally and in his gut, he knows that we humans do indeed have free will. That’s why, when he gets deep into the topic, and when he begins wrapping it all up, he keeps saying things that have meaning only if we have free will.
The problem with denying free will is that it flies in the face of all human experience. The reality is that we humans do have free will. Even people who intellectually deny it cannot entirely escape that reality.
Objective idealism is what he is arguing for,
https://www.essentiafoundation.org/the-red-herring-of-free-will-in-objective-idealism/reading/
Here’s more on that.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
I’ve already responded to most of what Bernardo Kastrup says in the linked article in my responses to the video interview of him that you posted earlier, so I won’t repeat all that.
It is interesting that even though he is an idealist rather than a physicalist, he comes to the same conclusion about free will that the physicalists do: that it doesn’t exist, and is an illusion. So really, there’s not much difference when it comes to practicalities and conclusions. Either way, as he says, the only freedom that holds water is:
If he actually believes this, then his philosophy is just as self-contradictory as the compatiblism that he rejects. He seems to simultaneously believe that we have freedom to allow ourselves to be what we must be, and that we have no freedom at all because it is all determined by the substrate of reality in which we exist in his philosophy of objective idealism.
Freedom to allow ourselves to be what we must be implies that we could not allow ourselves to be what we must be. Otherwise it is not freedom. But he denies that we could be anything but what we must be. So he’s just spinning up a word salad that contradicts itself. We’re either free or we’re not free. We either have free will or we don’t. And if, as he argues, we don’t have free will, and even, as he argues, the very question of free will is a meaningless one, then he shouldn’t talk about “the freedom to allow ourselves” something, because that freedom also does not exist.
About objective idealism, I think it’s just as fallacious as physicalism. I had mistaken Kastrup for a physicalist because his arguments sounded exactly like the arguments of physicalist. Now I discover that he is an idealist. But his arguments are indistinguishable from physicalist arguments, so what’s the difference? Both think that there is an objective reality that is outside us that determines everything we are, and that precludes the possibility of free will.
I’m not a physicalist, and I’m not an idealist. I am a Swedenborgian, aka a believer in true Christianity, which posits three general levels of existence and reality:
God, or the divine level of reality, is the source of the other two, which also reflect the nature of God, each at its own more limited level. All three of them are “objectively” real. But God is the most real, the spiritual level is less real, and the material level is still less real, because the lower levels are one and two distinct steps away from the ultimate reality of God.
Further, God is not an impersonal force, but a human being. In fact, in Swedenborg’s philosophy (and in the Bible if understood correctly), God is the only truly human being. Our humanity is a lesser version of the ultimate humanity of God. We are created human in the image and likeness of God, which means that we are a lesser copy of the original reality of humanity.
This is also where our free will comes from. It is a gift given to us by God, and never taken away. Here on earth we have the freedom of choice between good and evil. In the afterlife, we have the freedom to live as we have chosen, and to make choices within the general direction we have chosen to take, whether good or evil, and within the specific type of good or evil we have chosen.
Even in our afterlife in the spiritual world, although we no longer have the basic choice between good and evil, and the basic choice of what type of person we want to be (within the possibilities of our inborn heredity and our environment), we still have freedom of choice in exactly how to carry out the desires of the type of person we have chosen to be. We can, to use the example given in the video by “George,” choose to go to the library and peruse books about art or to go to the mall for a cup of coffee and some companionship. Both can further the general choice we have made about what sort of person we want to be. There are many variations and many areas of growth within that general character choice, so that we can make many choices within the “cone of probability” of our general choice about who and what we want to be as a person.
The problem with both physicalism and idealism is that they reject the existence and reality of God. Physicalism accepts only the lowest, material level of reality. Idealism accepts only the middle, spiritual level of reality. Both therefore reject the reality and existence of God as the ultimate cause and source of both the spiritual and the physical. Both therefore misunderstand and misinterpret the nature of reality, which has not just one level (material or ideal/spiritual), but three levels, as outlined above.
Ultimately, the rejection of God causes physicalism and idealism to merge into the same conclusions. In the case of free will, both reach the conclusion that it does not exist. One is just as mistaken as the other. I don’t see any substantive difference between them. Only God makes a real difference, and both of them reject God.
Hi Lee,
It’s good to be back and hope you are doing well.
I do agree with most of points. However, I actually wanted to ask if that George Ortega guy in anyway succeeded in making an argument that would make one think that we actually don’t experience free will.
I have seen many determinists making this argument that we don’t experience free will. Or that introspection actually show a determinist picture.
Their arguments are not just that we don’t choose our thoughts but that everything we do is determined by thoughts that appear out of nowhere, that includes even our choice of which thought to act upon and which one to ignore, also our action to being a popped thought that we commit to, arguments like this
“Introspectively speaking, it seems to me obvious that free will is illusion. Thoughts just emergefrom background causes, and actions are just thoughts about actions that we have more thoughts about committing to bringing into being(more or less the argument Sam Harris puts forth). I think it is an intuitive one,”
and the kind of that George guy made.
For your point about our free will is in fighting against desires and shaping them
And in, fact someone posted a supposed scientific paper by an Indian psychologist that’s supposed to prove why we don’t have free will and us making strong choices like is an misunderstanding
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/sapient-nature/201205/free-will-is-illusion-so-what
Can you look at this and see if it succeeds or is just another of many that attempted to establish determinism
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
About the article:
I don’t see any actual arguments against free will in it. Only a whole series of assertions that free will doesn’t exist. Since the article makes no actual arguments, its arguments can’t really be rebutted. They’re simply the opinion of the author. I happen to disagree with the author’s opinion.
But just to take up one of them: Whether I would act the same as X did in X’s situation is irrelevant to whether free will exists. The relevant question is whether X could have acted differently than X did. The author asserts without any evidence that X couldn’t have.
It’s just opinion.
But more than that, it’s unscientific, because there is no way to construct an experiment in which there are multiple Xs in exactly the same situation, and seeing whether they all do exactly the same thing. The whole thing is based on an unprovable and unfalsifiable assumption, because we can only see what X did, not what X could have done. Saying that X inevitably would have done what X did is therefore pure assertion, without any actual or even possible evidence to substantiate it.
As for the author’s rosy conclusions, they’re just borrowings from what the great religions of the world have already said for thousands of years about the consequences of our actions, punishment, moral suasion, teaching people the truth, treating people with compassion, and so on. The only difference is that in the case of religion, there’s solid grounding for that because religion looks to a God of love and justice, which is the ultimate source of all these virtues that we are meant to practice.
Meanwhile, in a godless, deterministic world, there’s really nothing to stop people from coming to the opposite conclusions—the ones he’s arguing against—which are basically fatalism and a rejection of personal responsibility for our actions. Why should we come to the conclusion that the values and actions that are best for everyone are the ones we should take? Who’s to say that the world should be good rather than evil? If I want to be evil because I think it will benefit me, regardless of whether it damages other people, what, in this valueless system, is to tell me that I’m wrong, and you’re right that I should act in a good and moral fashion that benefits everyone?
What these materialist philosophers are attempting to do is to rebuild on a materialistic, deterministic basis everything that religion built up over thousands of years based on inspiration from God. They’re just borrowing from religion and trying to make it work based on their materialistic views, because it sounds good.
However, once again, without any standard against which to measure our moral values, there is no particular reason for any individual to choose good over evil. And in reality, the vaunted wave of new atheism has not brought about the promised more ethical and moral world it promised. The tendency toward hedonism is now even stronger than it was before, because quite frankly, why not just enjoy ourselves if there’s no God, no afterlife, no judgment, and no standard of morality against which to measure ourselves?
Unfortunately for this author, atheism and determinism can’t extricate themselves from this understandable, highly likely, and actual reaction in people’s minds when they are told that God is not real, and neither is free will.
It’s the very same type of problem that the Protestant faith-alone folks have when they tell people that actions don’t matter for our salvation, only belief, and then have to keep fighting an ongoing battle against people saying that if actions don’t matter, I can do whatever I want, good or bad, as long as I believe in Jesus. They’ve had to argue this issue from the very beginning of Protestantism, and they’re still arguing it today five centuries later.
False ideas have consequences. And the consequence of the evidentially unsubstantiated opinion among so many materialists that there is no free will is a collapse in moral values, and a society focused more on hedonism than on ethics and compassion. That’s why the materialists have to spend so much breath arguing against these conclusions that a large number of people are inevitably going to come to based on their materialistic and deterministic philosophy.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
I don’t particularly want to go back and rewatch George Ortega’s video. I think I already responded to its main points. But if there’s something I missed that you specifically want my reaction to, feel free to post it here.
About this:
This is one of the pieces of evidence that these people’s rejection of free will is just their own subjective opinion, which they then see “evidence” for everywhere.
Most people very much do experience themselves as having free will. The fact that these determinists don’t experience themselves as having free will suggests that this is just a matter of subjectivity and confirmation bias. They then try to convince other people that even they don’t actually experience free will, when the fact of the matter is, once again, that most people do experience having free will.
I.e. most people experience themselves as making choices, when they could have made a different choice. To try to deny this is to fly in the face of common, well nigh universal human experience going back thousands of years.
About this:
And this, once again, is mere assertion. It’s not really an argument. It’s just an opinion.
Just because we don’t consciously originate our thoughts, that doesn’t mean we can’t consciously choose which ones to grasp and act on, and which ones to let slide and not act on. That “argument” is about like saying that because I didn’t make the car I’m driving, that means I don’t actually decide where to drive it. Or even more to the point, it’s like saying that because there are a hundred different cars that I didn’t manufacture already available to buy on the car lot, that means I don’t actually choose which one to buy.
In short, it’s a silly argument that isn’t really an argument at all. It’s just a bald assertion.
Hi. I have a question.
As mentioned above, in the article about how humans have the highest free will. It’s mentioned that God is not the one who causes us to born or go to heaven.
I do not blame God.
The free will problem here is that, if free will is actually a free will, why don’t we get a chance to not be born at all?
Isn’t our existence our parent’s will and not ours?
It’s our parent’s free will for us to born so is free will even ours to start begin with?
Hi anony,
Thanks for stopping by, and for your comment and question.
First, I would say that ultimately God does cause us to be born, but God does this through the free will of our parents. After all, God is the one who created the entire universe, including our ability to have children. God also causes us to go to heaven, but only if we willingly accept God’s offer of heaven. This, also, is part of our free will.
But the main point is that we can’t choose whether to be born.
But really, how could we, if by being “born” you mean coming into existence? If we don’t exist, we can’t make any choices, precisely because we don’t exist. Something outside of us has to bring us into existence. Ultimately, it is God who does this. But yes, the direct cause of our existence is the will and actions of our parents.
Even after we are born, our free will develops only gradually. As infants, we act mostly in response to our feelings of comfort and discomfort, and we are entirely dependent on our parents and caregivers to take care of our needs. Over time we begin to be able to make choices about our own life, starting with the infamous “terrible twos,” in which we start to assert our own will by saying “No!” to the things our parents want us to do. It is only in adulthood that we have full rationality and free will in moral and spiritual matters.
In other words, not only do we not choose to come into existence, but we also don’t choose most of what influences us in our formative years. We are not radically free. But we are free within the circumstances in which we were born and raised. We can choose to turn what we have been given toward good, or toward evil. That is the primary freedom of choice that we have during our lifetime on earth.
The main point is that even though we don’t and can’t choose to come into existence, God has provided that those who do come into existence will increasingly have free will about what to do with our existence. I don’t see how it could be any other way, since as I said earlier, something that doesn’t exist can’t choose to exist.
In the end, we are not our own creator. God is our Creator. And God not only creates us, but also provides everything we need to walk a path that leads to heaven and eternal happiness, no matter how dark and painful the path may sometimes be here on earth.
Thanks Lee, for your INPUTS
as that guy would put it.
but i think the arguments that i wanted you to look and may other make it this from article
“If you think carefully about any decision you have made in the past, you will recognize that all of them were ultimately based on similar—genetic or social—inputs to which you had been exposed. And you will also discover that you had no control over these inputs, which means that you had no free will in taking the decisions you did. For instance, you had no choice in where, to whom, and in what period of time, you were born. You also had no choice in the kind of neighbors and friends to whom you were exposed during early childhood. You therefore had no choice in how you made your decisions during that time.”
“It might seem, at first blush, that many of the decisions you made later—during late childhood or adolescence—were based on free will, but that is not the case. The decisions you made during late childhood and adolescence were based on the tastes, opinions, and attitudes you had developed in your early childhood, and on those to which you were exposed through your family, friends, media, or the natural environment. And so on, which means that the decision you now make are based on the tastes, opinions and attitudes you have developed over the years or on those to which you are now exposed through contact with the external environment. Looked at in this light, belief in free will is itself a consequence of genetic and social inputs: without the development of the neocortex and without exposure to the idea of free will from societal inputs, we wouldn’t believe in free will.”
“Thus, although it might seem like you exercise free will in overcoming temptations or in overriding self-centered interests, this is not the case. Free will is equally uninvolved when you give into temptations and when you curb them.”
People make argument like,
If our choices have reasons, for example: drinking cold water after coming out of burning sun, don’t reflect free will but that choice is caused by us coming out of burning sun.
I would like to hear your response on it.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
Once again, this is simply begging the question, and assuming the result. There is no actual argument here. There is simply an assertion that all of our choices are not really choices, but are merely the result of “inputs to which [we] had been exposed.”
If free will is real, then it is precisely not the result of inputs to which we have been exposed. It is what we do in the context of those inputs.
Of course when we make decisions we take into account all the conditions in which we make the decisions. Otherwise they would have no reality and meaning. If there are no women from among whom I can choose a spouse, then there is no choice at all, because there is nothing to choose among.
Without specific conditions, we cannot make choices. Choices are the direction we decide to go within the conditions in which we find ourselves. When this writer asserts:
This is just bald assertion. It is stating his opinion. This whole statement is simply bald assertion, without any supporting arguments whatsoever.
And regarding point about introspection argument, i think there’s more to argument than just bias.
You’ll better understand hearing from Sam Harris himself who claims he’s pioneer of introspection argument even tho many before him has made such arguments, for example Buddhists
Actually, Timestamps are there and this is response video, so you need to fast forward to hear argument of Sam Harris. Ignore all others just look at introspection and meditation part. Then I want your response on it.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
Harris’s “introspection” argument is just a variation on the same theme: that we are determined by our inputs.
We don’t control what thoughts come into our mind any more than we control what happens around us. In both cases, it is irrelevant to the question of free will. Our free will consists in how we react to the thoughts that come into our mind, just as it consists in how we react to the conditions in which we find ourselves, and the events that happen around us.
Bottom line: Harris is simply wrong to say that we are determined by our thoughts. This is just as wrong as saying that we are determined by the genetics and conditions in which we were born and live. It is simply another case of assuming the result, and asserting opinion as fact. It is Harris’s opinion that we are determined by our thoughts and by our conditions. He asserts this opinion as fact.
Really, he isn’t even making an argument. He’s just making an assertion. And he’s wrong about that assertion.
The point that I definitely wanted your views on was
“We Don’t choose our next thought and we don’t what we’re going to do next anymore than what a person sitting next to is going to do next”
Do you this is case
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
It’s not always true that we don’t choose our next thought.
Swedenborg compares our will or motivation to our heart, and our intellect or understanding to our lungs. The parallel of our thinking mind to our lungs is instructive.
Most of the time our breathing happens automatically, outside of our conscious control. However, we are also able to take control of our breathing and consciously direct it.
I use this ability when I’m out cycling and climbing a long steep hill. I pace my breathing using the cadence of my pedaling as a basis. I also long ago trained myself to breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth when engaging in heavy exercise. The ability to control and direct my breathing makes it possible for me to avoid exhausting myself by falling into rapid uncontrolled breathing. Breathing in through the nose also filters the incoming air better, whereas breathing out through the mouth makes it possible to expel the air more rapidly and efficiently. Once I’ve crested the hill and the riding is easier, I can gradually relax my control over my breathing and let the autonomous nervous system take over again. When I’m cruising along a flat or slightly inclined road, I don’t pay attention to my breathing at all. I just enjoy the ride and the scenery, and let my lungs do their work on their own.
Our thinking mind is similar. Most of the time it “breathes” automatically. We don’t direct our thoughts. They just come and go as needed to supply our mind with the thoughts and ideas it needs to go about its ordinary business during the course of the day. But then we run across a hard problem that requires our focus. Now, instead of just letting our thoughts take their natural course as supplied from the (spiritual) atmosphere around us, we focus our thinking and direct it to the subjects and ideas we are interested in and need to resolve for ourselves. At these times we do consciously choose our next thought through our focus on specific subjects.
My daily work involves translating, revising, and editing Swedenborg’s writings. When I’m doing this, I must focus and concentrate my mind on the specific subjects Swedenborg is covering in the specific passage I’m working on. I’ll get the gist of the whole section, then look at specific issues within it that need understandable expression in the target language of the translation—which in my case is English. Usually I’ll deal with the easier issues first, and tackle the harder ones afterwards. This also gives my unconscious mind a chance to work on the tough nuts, so that sometimes by the time I get to the hard issues, a good solution comes to mind unbidden. Other times I must hit the books and rack my brain to come up with a good solution to the translation problem in front of me.
In these times of intense mental effort, I certainly am choosing my next thought, and I certainly do know what I’m going to think about next, because I’ve surveyed and laid out the various linguistic issues I must deal with one after another, and I take each one of them in turn. At these times I also block out extraneous thoughts and even much of the environment around me because I need my full concentration on the specific idea and translation of it that I’m currently focusing on. If my wife knocks on the study door to bring me some food or tell me something, I practically jump out of my skin! It happens every time! 😀 All of a sudden I realize that there’s a whole wide world around me. 😉
My experience of this is far from unique. Anyone who does brain work of any kind for a living or for personal enjoyment and learning knows what it is like to focus the mind on a specific subject or issue and dig deep into it. These are the times when we are consciously controlling our spiritual “lungs,” which are our thinking mind.
Perhaps most of the time in the ordinary course of our daily life we don’t choose our next thought. But every one of us has the ability to take control of our thinking mind and direct it toward specific thoughts and ideas that we are interested in and want to learn more about or resolve in our mind.
In other words, common experience refutes the idea that we have no free will, or more specifically, no freedom of choice, when it comes to our thoughts. Much of the time we are not consciously exercising that free will. We’re just letting our thoughts roam where they will. But whenever we want to, we’re perfectly capable of directing our thinking, and of choosing what we will and won’t think about at this particular moment of our lives.
And in the bigger picture, we are perfectly capable of selecting, out of the thoughts that arise unbidden in our mind, which ones we like and will cherish and make a part of our thinking and our structure of beliefs, and which ones we will let pass through without much notice. To use another metaphor, our mind is like a constantly flowing stream. Sometimes we cup our hands, dip them into the stream, and drink some of the water. These are the thoughts that we make a part of ourselves. The rest we just allow to flow on through our mind and go on their way.
And if I’m not bothering you too much then there is an answer on quora and i think this is an bottom of deterministic argument often seen,
Answer to Does free will exist? by Gretis Li https://www.quora.com/Does-free-will-exist-4/answer/Gretis-Li?ch=15&oid=53332134&share=23783eb7&srid=55172a&target_type=answer
it’s by the user named Gretis li who believes Reality is dream, and we are being dreamt and under the illusion think of ourselves as dreamers. Basically we don’t exist, yet somehow he goes to great extent in convincing us how free will not only not exist but is impossible.
would love to your thoughts on it, if you are free to give it a read and give your opinion on it.
Regards,
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
In response to this:
In setting up the two sides of the question that s/he is presuming to adjudicate between or transcend, the author is already falling into error:
The author is setting up a false dichotomy, which s/he then proposes to solve. The Randians in the video you posted in your previous comments are materialists. They don’t believe in God or in the spiritual world. But they defend free will. There is no fundamental conflict between the material world and the spiritual world when it comes to free will. Both provide support for free will.
Further, not all determinists are materialists. Calvinists believe in God and spirit, but they believe that there is no free will as that is usually understood. They believe that since before Creation, God has already chosen which of us will go to heaven and which will go to hell. Some Calvinists have latched onto compatibilist arguments. They may even be the source of compatibilism. But as I said just above, compatibilists reject free will as it is usually defined, meaning the ability to freely choose between different options.
Physicalism and materialism, not to mention the physical universe itself, do not inexorably and inevitably support determinism and negate free will.
Next:
Yes. Despite Ayn Rand’s definition of free will as choosing to think rationally (not a bad definition, just not a fundamental one), it is our heart, meaning our will and desires, that makes our choices. This, and not our rational brain, is the “I” that makes the choice. But during our life on earth, we’re still choosing which “I” we want to have.
This is where s/he again starts to go off the rails. The reason this is a fallacy is that we actually have two centers of motivation, one in our lower self and one in our higher self. Our lower self wants to act from selfishness and greed. Our higher self wants to act from love for God and/or the neighbor. There is a battle between the two, and this battle is the forum for our underlying choice of what our desires will be.
Our normal everyday choices are made based at first on our default desires, which are self-centered, and later based on our chosen desires, which are either selfish or benevolent, depending on which choice we have made in the midst of our battles of temptation.
One of the ongoing errors of the anti-free-will people is focusing on minor decisions and tracing them to our desires, and therefore rejecting free will. But that type of free will is not the fundamental level of freedom of choice. It is mostly freedom to act upon our desires. (But even then I still think there is a lower level of freedom of choice.)
True freedom of choice is precisely the freedom to choose what our desires will be. This is the big, overarching choice we make during our lifetime on earth. Once our lifetime on earth is over, we have made that choice, and henceforward our primary freedom is the freedom to act upon our loves and desires.
As I said parenthetically just above, I think even then we actually do make free choices about whether to eat an apple or a banana. But these are minor matters. Even I’m wrong and these choices are not free, they’re still pursuant to the major free will choice we made, which is the choice between good motivations and evil motivations.
So yes, we do choose our desires. But this is a major, ongoing, lifelong choice, not one that we make each time we are making relatively minor daily decisions such as whether to eat an apple or a banana.
And here the author descends into the same bald assertion that Harris engages in. Once again, this isn’t even an argument. It’s just assuming the result, and begging the question. It is asserting that we are entirely products of our heredity and environment, and then arguing on that basis that we are mere products of our heredity and environment. Fallacy 101.
In the end, this author falls into the same trap of asserting an opinion, then basing his/her argument entirely upon that asserted opinion. The opinion is that we are determined by our heredity and our environment. No supporting arguments are given for this assertion. It is just asserted:
Of course the conclusion is escapable. Simply state that we can freely choose within the conditions created by our heredity and environment. I.e., believe that there is free will.
This whole piece is nothing more than saying, “No, there isn’t!” Again, no actual arguments are given. It’s just bald assertion.
Hi Lee,
can I request a part 2 of this all this assertions and fallacy you have already discussed I did guess this much of your response, and in that quora answer what came after this,
1. Mean
2. Free Will is the ability to freely choose between different courses of action
3. There must be a reason (value ranking system) for a choice to bemeaningful.
4. The choice that is chosen is always the most desirable (highest value)
5. Humans can not choose the desires (value ranking system) that determinetheir choices
6. Since humans do not choose the program (value ranking system) thatdetermines their choices, they do not have free will.
This is his inference
and most striking statements are one’s that I found in his conclusion
“Conclusion: Humans do not have free will. A compatibilist would argue that humanshave free will as long as they are free to fulfill their desires, but considering the factthat all of our desires are given to us by factors completely out of our control(genetics and environment), this argument seems to be a cop out of the finest order.Is a puppet free if he loves his strings? In my opinion no he is not, but its up to you todecide for yourself. Freedom, it seems, has everything to do with a lack of necessityand constraint, and all independent decision-making entities (programs, humans)require necessity and constraint in the form of a value ranking system in order tomake meaningful choices. If an independent decision-making entity was completelyfree, it would have no framework with which to make any choices at all, no way ofcomparing and evaluating different options, and no way to even comprehend its ownexistence. Freedom is an ideal that is impossible to live up to, yet humans havealways had the strange conviction that freedom is ours, despite countless evidence tothe contrary. Is this conviction wrong? Is determinism right after all?”
Are his statement regarding freedom being a meaning killer valid?
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
The logic starts to break down with this point in the progression:
It is true that, as stated in point 3, “There must be a reason (value ranking system) for a choice to be meaningful.” It is not true that we always choose the most desirable option, or the one of highest value, even by our own lights.
For example, let’s say a young woman gets a job at a retail store as an hourly employee, stocking shelves, ringing up purchases at the register, and so on. She makes a starting salary that pays her bills, but doesn’t do much more. She sees that there are supervisors and managers who make more money than she does. Making more money would be more desirable, and of higher value.
Does she choose to go for that?
Not necessarily. Being a supervisor, and especially being a manager, requires more work and more responsibility. In her current position, she can clock in, do her hours, clock off, and go home. She doesn’t make a lot of money, but she doesn’t have a lot of hassle, either. The work is not difficult, and it pays the bills.
Choosing to be a supervisor or manager means doing more than just clocking in and putting in the time. It means doing better than average work, and really putting out the effort to move the store forward. If a manager tells her to set up a certain display, and she does it as requested, then her job is probably secure, but she’s not going to get a promotion. But if she uses her own creative thinking and makes a really striking and original display that people notice, and that drives sales, the managers are going to notice! If she continues to do more than the minimum, and especially if she knocks it out of the park in tasks that other employees just do the required minimum on, it won’t be long before she’ll get a promotion. If she has the drive and ability, she can work her way all the way up to store manager and beyond.
Most ordinary employees don’t do that. They just clock in, do what their supervisor assigns them to do, and clock off.
An argument could be made that this is “the most desirable” for her. Maybe she’s got a husband or boyfriend who supports her, and she’s just making money for cosmetics and fun. But you can’t reasonably argue that her choice to just put in the minimum required to keep her job is choosing “the highest value.” In fact, it’s choosing the lowest value, higher only than not having a job at all.
Many low-level employees will complain about their low pay, and about being told what to do all the time by their supervisors and managers. But they won’t put out the effort to do their job better so that they can be worth a higher hourly wage or even a salaried position, and be one of the ones who tells other employees what to do. It’s not because retail companies aren’t always looking for people that they can promote to supervisory and managerial positions. Their own choice to do the minimum is what keeps them in the lowest paid positions in the store and the company.
In other words, it’s just not true that we always choose the most desirable and highest value option. Many times we choose a less desirable and lower value outcome because we don’t want to put out the effort required to achieve something more desirable and of higher value.
The next two points are also fallacious:
We don’t have to choose the value ranking system to make choices among the various available options. As I’ve suggested before, this is like saying that because we don’t decide what cars are going to be on the car lot, and don’t manufacture them ourselves, that means we can’t choose a car to buy from among the ones available on the car lot. This makes no sense at all. It’s a completely silly argument. It’s hard to believe that someone is making it with a straight face.
Plus, the value ranking system doesn’t “determine our choices.” As covered just above, people commonly choose something lower over something higher on the value ranking system. We choose which values we want to follow. The values don’t choose us. Saying that the value ranking system makes our choices is like saying that the Ferrari makes us decide to buy it instead of a Volkswagen. Maybe we don’t have enough money for the Ferrari. Or maybe the Volkswagen would work much better for our purposes, which happen to involve commuting rather than racing and showing off to our friends.
Again, this whole line of reasoning is completely silly. It has nothing to do with the realities of human life and choices in the real world. These people are setting up theoretical theories without bothering to check them against reality.
Yes, there is a pre-existing value ranking system. Here is Swedenborg’s basic schema of that value ranking system, from highest to lowest in value:
Our biggest choices in this life are about which of these we will give the highest priority in our life, so that it rules everything we think, feel, say, and do. We didn’t create this ranking system. God did. But just because we didn’t create it, that doesn’t mean we can’t make a choice from among the available options.
This whole line of reasoning makes no sense at all.
In fact, if there weren’t some basic ground rules to our existence, we would have no freedom and no rationality at all, because there would not even be the basic functionality in which freedom and reason could exist. It would be like trying to play a game that has no rules. Without rules, there is no game. But within the rules, there are thousands or millions or even an infinity of possible games we can play. Soccer, for example, requires rules for it to be a game at all. But no two soccer games are ever exactly the same, and that will be true for as long as we humans continue to play the game of soccer.
Once again, the idea that if we aren’t radically free so that we determine and decide everything that exists, including the basic rules of existence, then we’re not free at all, makes no sense whatsoever.
We don’t make the rules. God does. But we can decide whether we want to play by God’s rules, or try to break God’s rules, and we will reap the consequences of our decisions, and of our actions pursuant to our decisions.
What evidence to the contrary? It’s just a bunch of fallacious reasoning and assertions to the contrary. All the evidence of actual human experience supports the belief that we have free will.
It’s not a “strange conviction” that we have freedom. It’s the everyday experience of billions of people whose brains aren’t so scrambled by their own materialism and “superior intellect” that they ignore reality and replace it with their own silly and ridiculous theories.
Freedom is not “an ideal that is impossible to live up to.” I don’t even know what this person is talking about. If I decide to have eggs instead of cereal for breakfast, how is the freedom to make that choice “an ideal that is impossible to live up to?” It’s just an everyday fact of life for every single person on the face of this earth who has an intellect that is functional enough for him or her to be a self-responsible adult.
The big choices in life, such as whether we’ll put God or personal power first in our life, are also not “an ideal that is impossible to live up to.” This is something that every rational, self-responsible adult is not only capable of doing, but must do in the course of his or her life. Making that choice is what God put us here on earth to do. And God has given us both the capability and the required materials and conditions that are necessary to make that choice.
Even these numbskulls who deny free will without any evidence whatsoever have free will. They are exercising it in the very act of ignoring all human experience, literature, and testimony over thousands of years, not to mention the latest scientific theories and discoveries that disprove determinism, and replacing it all with their own silly, unsubstantiated notion that free will is an illusion. Their very denial of the obvious reality of human free will is itself an example of their exercising of human free will.
Thanks Lee,
I agree with your response.
recently i have seen some so called decisive attacks on “self” and free will
https://psyche.co/ideas/what-removing-large-chunks-of-brain-taught-me-about-selfhood
https://archive.skeptic.com/archive/eskeptic/13-03-20/#feature
I would love to have your response on these as they are related to soul and sense of self.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
First, I find it amusing that here are two materialists making opposite arguments about the brain. One says that even cutting out large chunks or an entire half of the brain doesn’t change people’s sense of self all that much. The other says that even a small change to one piece of the brain can radically change a person’s character and sense of self. So which is it?
There is a sense of certitude in these people about the materialistic and deterministic nature of reality, and the absence of any deeper spiritual self, even though they come to opposite conclusions about the effect of the brain on people’s sense of identity. This suggests to me that they have an already formed conclusion in their mind, and they are simply looking for, or even manufacturing, evidence to support that pre-formed conclusion. These are two fine cases of confirmation bias.
The neurosurgeon asserts that our sense of self is an illusion, but he provides no evidence for that. He just keeps asserting it, and saying that the survival of the sense of self after major brain surgery shows that it’s an illusion we manufacture.
Why should that be the case? It’s equally plausible, and even more plausible, that our sense of self survives despite major damage to the brain because it is a real thing that exists above and beyond the brain. From a spiritual perspective, our sense of self is in our spirit, not in our brain and body. It will persist in us during our life on earth as long as there is enough of a physical brain left to operate into and through. It will simply use whatever elements of the brain it has to carry out its will in the body.
The neurosurgeon also says in passing that we live in a “deterministic universe,” when the most recent science simply doesn’t support that. Most of these skeptics are still living in a Newtonian universe. That universe has long since been superseded by a quantum universe, which is probabilistic, not deterministic.
Similarly, the neurosurgeon asserts, without any evidence, that free will is also an illusion. I’ve already dealt with this extensively, so I’ll just reiterate that these are just bald assertions, without any evidence whatsoever to back them up.
The Skeptic author goes into the whole “the brain decides things before you consciously decide them” thing, which I’ve already responded to, so I won’t repeat that, either.
But really, the main lack in his argument is that he doesn’t realize that, as Paul said two thousand years ago, we have both a physical body and a spiritual body. Apparently Thomas Aquinas didn’t pay any attention to that either, nor have many Christians who think we must be reunited with our physical body in order to have senses again. This is false. Our spiritual body has a full suite of senses that are entirely independent of our physical senses. This is why “Nathalie” could float above her dying body and see everything going on around it. Clearly she was not seeing this with her physical eyes, or hearing it with her physical ears. She was seeing and hearing it with her spiritual eyes and ears.
Stating that we can bring about various movements in the body, and even various emotions, by stimulating different parts of the brain does not prove, as this author thinks, that these things originate in the brain. It’s logic 101: correlation does not imply causation. These are the same parts of the brain that the spirit “stimulates” in order to bring about the actions that it wants to do, and express the emotions that it wants us to consciously feel.
The brain is a tool, but is a very complex and finely tuned tool. Normally it is the spirit that is using that tool for its own purposes. If a neuroscientist with an electrode manages to hijack the tool and make it do his bidding, it only shows that the tool works.
If I’m using a wrench to fix my car, but someone grabs that wrench and starts beating the engine with it instead, does that prove that I have no self, no free will, and no soul, and that the universe and everything in it, including me, is deterministic? No. It proves that someone grabbed my wrench and started attacking my car with it.
As I’ve said previously, as long as our consciousness is residing in our body, and is engaged in the material world, it does depend upon the physical brain for its functioning. The radio/TV analogy is not wrong. It’s just limited. The relationship between mind and brain is more complex than the relationship between broadcast tower and receiver. But the analogy still holds.
Once the mind/spirit is freed from the physical brain, none of the damage to or limitations of the physical brain affect it anymore. A blind person will indeed see in the spiritual world, because the optical nerve of the spiritual body has not been severed; only the optical nerve of the physical body. Ditto for hearing, use of limbs, or even missing limbs. The spiritual body remains intact through all this damage to the physical body. Once we leave behind the physical body, we also leave behind its damages and its limitations.
There’s more I could say, but that’s enough for now. If there’s something I missed that you want me to address, let me know.
From my perspective, these are materialists who already believe that free will, the self, and the soul are not real, and are simply interpreting everything they see in conformity with that already existing belief. They also have no understanding of how spiritual things work, and how the spirit interacts with the physical body. And they have no awareness that we have a spiritual body, which is the body that we inhabit after death. Our spiritual body has every part, organ, and capability that the physical body has, only it remains intact even as the physical body is damaged and deteriorates with age.
Actually, he does provide some already famous defense in comments. I’m talking about neurosurgeon in pshyche link.
What I’m actually looking for is a defense that can establish that even tho some alterations to brain does alter some mental functions and sense of self, it doesn’t disprove self or soul.
Actually, i recently read a blog post which talked about about how Science specifically Neuroscience has almost ruled out free because of studies that show neurons start firing few seconds before conscious act, or brain recordings predicting decisions of moving left or right hand or turning left or right few seconds before initiation with currently best 80% accuracy. How do you deal with them.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/one-among-many/201802/the-dangerous-doctrine-free-will
I want your response on this which actually says free will is dangerous doctrine.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
As I’ve said before, as long as our spirit is connected with our body, and our thinking is focused on the material world, our consciousness does depend on the state of our physical brain and body. Our spirit is dwelling in the body, and is constrained by any flaws or malfunctions in the body. Once our spirit is freed from the physical body, and is living and conscious in the spiritual body, the physical body no longer has any influence on it.
This is why psychologists and psychiatrist find that changes to the brain change people’s personality and behavior. Once the person dies, or even while the person has a spiritual experience while still alive, and is temporarily separated from the body, those changes to and conditions in the brain will have no further effect on the person’s personality and behavior.
Scientists can study people’s minds only while they are present in their body. They cannot study people’s spirits when their spirits are separated from the body because at that time their spirit is not engaged with physical matter, which is the only thing scientists can study with their material instruments and methods. Materialistic scientist will therefore assure themselves that the mind is just a function of the body, and entirely dependent on the state of the body.
Let them believe that. They must believe it to maintain their faith (I use that word advisedly) in materialism. If they were to admit that the mind can function independently of the body, they would have to give up that faith, and start believing in the reality of God and spirit. Some do eventually reach that conclusion on their own. Many do not. And as long as they don’t, they will write article after article, and book after book, insisting and “proving” (to themselves and to other materialists) that there is no such thing as a soul, and that humans are the sum of their physical parts.
This, as I said, is absolutely necessary for them to maintain their faith in physicalism. No amount of argumentation and rationality to the contrary, or even thousands of years human experience of God and spirit, will budge them from this faith.
About neurons firing before people are aware they’ve made a choice, as I said before, this has to do with trivial decisions that probably aren’t really decisions at all, but just people acting according to their habitual character. Our real decisions in life are not made in nanoseconds. They are made over periods of months and years of contemplating life and what we want from it. No firing of neurons nanoseconds before we grab the forbidden cookie can explain this.
I’ll deal with the Psychology Today article in a separate reply.
Hi fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a,
About the Psychology Today article:
After the hook of the first paragraph about a school shooting, the author (Joachim I. Krueger Ph.D.) starts his argument by saying:
However, in dealing with free will, instead of recognizing its complexity, he reduces it to a simplistic caricature. For example, he says:
And:
Then he admits that he’s set up a straw man:
If, instead of setting up a caricature of free will as an easily smashed foil, he took the idea seriously, and recognized that it is just as complex as his anti-free-will theory based on the complexities of human psychology, he would not have written an article full of so many faulty assumptions and arguments. However, because of his fervent belief that free will not only does not exist, but is dangerous, he can’t approach the subject rationally.
The author is not objectively evaluating two different positions to determine which one is most reasonable and fits the facts of reality best. He is interpreting everything according to an already adopted position. His purpose is to obliterate the position he doesn’t believe in.
This is not the way to arrive at truth.
Because he has an already existing hard position against free will, he has not bothered to study the nuances of free will and understand its complexities. Even without Swedenborg, his arguments are superficial based on the long history of argumentation and debate among theists about God, spirit, evil, and free will. Add Swedenborg’s treatment of these subjects into the picture, and the author’s arguments fall apart completely.
Good analysis of positions opposed to one’s own involves, not selecting the weakest version, but the strongest version of those positions. This author has taken the intellectually lazy route of choosing the weakest version and easily mowing it down. He thinks he has obliterated free will. Instead, he has missed the mark entirely. He has delivered a tremendous roundhouse punch to a scarecrow.
Before he even gets into the main body of his argument, he throws in an ad hominem:
Ah yes, free will is not only pernicious, it is characteristic of self-satisfied people! We don’t have to read any further to realize that this author has an ax to grind. People who disagree with him about free will are not only in error intellectually, they are bad people! This isn’t a rational argument. It’s a tribal one. My tribe believes the right thing and is good. Your tribe believes the wrong thing and is bad.
To take up the second and third quotes from the article given above:
Free will is not an uncaused cause. It is caused by the human will, and flows from the human will.
This is also why the statement in the third quote is erroneous. We can infer things about the person’s character, psychology, identity, or attitudes based on his or her choices and actions precisely because those choices and actions are an expression of the person’s will, which is at the center of the person’s character and identity.
These are silly arguments based on a caricature of free will. Personally, I’m not aware of any “hard libertarians” who argue that free will is an “uncaused cause.” Perhaps there are some. But I’m fairly familiar with libertarian arguments, and I’ve never heard that definition of free will from them. If any “hard libertarian” has made such an argument, I would be interested to hear about it. And of course, that person would be wrong.
Even using the term “hard libertarian” is an epithet. It’s part of the author’s painting of anyone who disagrees with his position as a bad person. The article has an ax to grind, and it just keeps on grinding it.
Moving on from his “self-satisfied” epithet, the author says:
Obviously people can help but believe in free will, because the author himself does not believe in free will. Again, this is a silly, superficial swipe at people who believe in free will. Next:
Of course a person who did good could have freely chosen to do bad. This is not a matter of how certain obviously intellectually benighted people feel about free will. Any serious discussion of free will posits that a person can make either good or evil choices. Otherwise, it’s not free will.
Again, this is a silly, superficial argument that lazily attempts to substitute ordinary non-intellectuals’ feelings about free will for serious intellectual treatments of free will. It calls to mind the old medieval practice in war of the mounted knights on each side mowing down the opponents’ peasants instead of going after the opponents’ knights. Next:
Why were they rescuers and lifesavers in the first place? Presumably they chose that line of work because it expressed something about their character. When it comes time to do their job, are they really going to say, “Nah, I think I won’t bother saving that drowning person this time!” Of course, they could say that. But in rescuing people in distress, they are simply expressing the life choice they made earlier to become a rescuer.
This brings in a very simple distinction that the author seems not to know and appreciate. There are at least two kinds of free will:
In the example given, the rescuers are exercising the second. They have already exercised the first by going into that line of work.
This points to a major fallacy in anti-free-will arguments. They assume, caricature style, that every action a person takes, when s/he could have taken a different action, is a matter of individualized free choice. But most of our actions are pursuant to bigger, previously made choices about what sort of person we want to be and what sort of life we want to live. Most of the things we do day-to-day flow seamlessly from that previous choice, and the character we have made for ourselves based on it.
Oops, I just realize that I have a scheduled Zoom meeting in a few minutes. I’ll post this much now, and finish my response to the article later.
Continuing on:
Here we get to the heart of the matter. The author opposes free will because he thinks it justifies “wreaking vengeance” on people who do bad things.
But right off the bat, he is confusing punishment with vengeance. Though the Bible does sometimes speak of “vengeance” in relation to God, this is a metaphor, not something to take literally. There is no vengeance in God. In fact, God does not punish anyone, either. Evil spirits do.
But bringing it down to earth, the purpose of punishment for evildoers is not vengeance, or revenge. it is deterrence and amelioration of behavior.
Vengeance is about getting back at people for what they have done to us. In a just society, that’s not what the penal system is about. Rather, evildoers are imprisoned in order to protect innocent people from their evil actions, and they are punished to deter them from engaging in that behavior again, and to warn others against engaging in that kind of behavior. It’s all about protecting the innocent, about getting the guilty to reconsider their ways, and about influencing people who are on the fence away from evil behavior and toward good behavior. It has nothing to do with getting back at people who have harmed us or our loved ones. It’s all about protecting the innocent and inducing the guilty to make a different choice—or failing that, to prevent them from harming innocent people again.
He then goes on to make further faulty arguments based on the false idea that free will is a phenomenon of “uncaused causes.” Since I’ve already negated that, I’ll skip over his arguments here.
We then get to one of the reasons that a denial of free will is so problematic:
And later, when he is wrapping up the article:
If I’m not mistaken, he’s saying that some people are just bad and that’s all there is to it. This denies the possibility of rehabilitation. Some people, apparently, are just constitutionally bad, and we simply have to accept that.
Well, I don’t accept it. I believe that as long as a person is still alive and breathing on this earth, and has at least minimal adult rational functioning, it is possible for him or her to make a different choice, and begin walking the path toward no longer being bad. The idea that we would just write some people off as involuntarily and ineluctably bad is, in my mind, cruel and heartless.
This is not to say that if you dig down deep enough, everything is ponies and rainbows. Some people truly are bad, and if they never make a choice to change, we must take action to deter and contain their evil and destructive behavior. But we must also hold out the possibility to them that they could choose something different, and give them the information and tools to make that choice if they come to that decision. We can’t force them to make that choice. It must be made freely. But we can present to them the possibility and the path, so that at least they have an opportunity to make a different choice about their life, and take a different path than they have up to now.
And here is his final tour de force, before his concluding line (already quoted) and his addendums:
This assumes his faulty view of free will (as an uncaused cause) and of freely taken actions (as having nothing to do with a person’s character), and is therefore just a lot of potboiler nonsense.
However, the question of whether the gunman could have made a different choice is a real one. We are not radically free. Sometimes we take action under overwhelming pressure, and do things that we would not do if we were not under that pressure. I don’t know the background of this particular shooter, but many of them have mental health problems or have had hellacious experiences of abuse and rejection. Some of them may not have been free.
And if they were not truly free, but were acting under duress, then that must be taken into account in our handling of them. It may still be necessary to incarcerate them because of the danger of reoffending. But they must also be treated as mental health cases. I could write more about this, but instead I’ll refer you to this article and a related article linked at the end of this one:
Lee Boyd Malvo: Human Justice vs. Divine Justice
These are not simple black-and-white issues. Even the author wants to make it a black-and-white issue by simply declaring the shooter “bad.” But the shooter is also a human being, and human beings are complex. As covered in the linked article, God’s justice does not work in the same way as human justice. Human justice must protect society from criminals whether or not they are evil (“bad people”) in their heart. Divine justice in the afterlife peels away all the external layers and all the external forces and pressures, and works based on what is in a person’s heart of hearts.
Even our human justice system attempts to do this to some extent. For a murder conviction, there must be a motive. If there was no intent to kill, it is judged as manslaughter, not murder, and the penalties are less. God’s justice is all about motive. Then again, in the spiritual world, after the initial phase there, all external pressures are taken away, and everyone begins to act from the heart. There is then no distinction between motive and action. One is the seamless expression of the other.
The author’s gun argument is also shallow. The idea that we can just get rid of all the guns, and then everything will be fine, is a pipe dream. People who have criminal intent will get their hands on weapons. The only way to counter that is by having good guys (police, soldiers, etc.) who have equal or greater weapons and are willing to oppose criminals with lethal force if that’s what’s necessary to defend and protect the innocent.
Guns, like swords and other weapons, are a force multiplier. When used for good they defend the good. When used for evil they attack the good. Guns themselves are neither good nor evil. They can only be used for good or evil.
There’s plenty more that could be said, but that’s enough for now. In summary, the author has set up a straw man and done a terrific job of knocking it down. But the reality of free will is still standing, and it is much more complex than the caricature this author has made of it.
Hi Lee,
It’s fantasticunabashedlyf0de8eea8a new id
Thanks for your excellent answer and i think question of responsibility still remains that whether the gun man who has some difficulties growing up or harsh conditions like bullying or negligence makes him less responsible. As for another point about character, is character something despite having something to do with our action is an excuse for i could not have done otherwise in that moment. It’s an regular argument of compatibilists. I’m looking for your insights on this.
btw, there’s one reaction video that i want your response on, and if agree with them
Hi Sachin,
At least now I have an actual name for you, and not just that crazy handle! 😉
I’ll respond later about the video. It’s very long. I don’t have time to watch it right now.
The rest of what you said got a little garbled, but I’ll take a stab at responding to it.
In practical reality on this earth, we simply must hold people responsible for their actions, even if there are extenuating circumstances, and even if they may not have been fully in control of themselves. The alternative is to allow people to engage in all sorts of destructive behavior without consequences, which will lead to chaos and the breakdown of society.
This is why, for example, there are penalties for manslaughter. The killer didn’t intend to kill someone, but through negligence or ignorance or even pure accident s/he did kill someone. That must have consequences so that people will be more careful in the future. Otherwise many people will just live carelessly, and won’t care if someone dies as a result. The person still did kill someone, that person is still dead, and all that person’s family, friends, and coworkers must deal with the loss. There have to be consequences for that.
Even if a person isn’t fully in control of his or her actions, we still must apply consequences to them. That’s the only way people will learn that this kind of behavior is bad and must be stopped—and that if the person doesn’t make an internal choice to cease engaging in that kind of behavior, outside forces will restrain him or her from engaging in it.
Here on earth, we don’t have the luxury of being able to see everyone’s inner self and motives. We can’t tell for sure whether the excuses they’re giving are real, or whether they’re just excuses. People are getting hurt by their actions. We can’t let them keep doing that. The psychologists and psychiatrists can come in later. But the first necessity is to restrain the person from hurting innocent people, regardless of any mental health issues or extenuating circumstances. The stability of society and the peace and security of ordinary people depends on this.
Once people die and go to the spiritual world, then intention becomes everything. People who have bad motives in their heart will keep doing bad things, and they won’t even bother making excuses for it anymore. People who have good motives underneath it all, but are confused or messed up in one way or another, will get sorted out, and they’ll stop doing bad things. In the afterlife, everything gets sorted out. People become either good inside and out, and go to heaven where they will be safe from all evil and harm, or they become bad inside and out, and they go to hell where they can no longer prey on good and innocent people.
Unfortunately, here on earth good and evil are all mixed in together. We can’t avoid the necessity and responsibility of sorting them out as best we can, and using force, if necessary, to stop bad people from causing all sorts of harm to society and damage to its people.
Still, we must do this in a humane way. Just because an evil person has done evil things, that doesn’t mean we can wreak vengeance and treat him or her the same way s/he treated others. The good guys must live by a moral and ethical code of behavior even if the bad guys don’t. And contrary to popular belief, that makes the good guys stronger, not weaker, than the bad guys. When we imprison people to stop them from harming others, we must give them food, water, clothing, and decent conditions to live in, and not engage in cruel and degrading behavior toward them, even if that’s what they’ve done to other people. That’s the difference between the good guys and the bad guys.
It’s also what might possibly induce some of them to see that there’s an alternative to their evil behavior, and make the choice to live from different motives. It is common for evil people to think that everyone is the same as they are underneath it all, and that’s just what people are. If they see that day after day, year after year, decade after decade they receive humane treatment and basic human respect from the prison guards and administration even though they are criminals, it may cause some (but not all) to reconsider their fallacious and overly negative view of humanity.
There’s more that could be said, but I’ll pause here to see if this is addressing the issues you were bringing up.
Hi Lee,
This wasn’t actually my name my actually name is Saran, and that was amongst multiple accounts through which i tried to login. There seems to be some issues with the page. That was my brother’s account that i just used and from now on I’ll be using this.
Thanks for your great insights but the i have on my mind is still on. Which is who is responsible for one’s character and to what extent someone’s bad character can be blamed for one’s bad actions. I’d hope you can answer to my question.
Also, the video on which i wanted your response is this
when you’re really free and have time you can look at it.
btw another argument i see these days is about which theory of time does Christian theism follows A or B and we know most atheists and determinists actually advocate for B theory of time.
Hi Saran,
Sorry about all the login problems. I’m neither a tech person nor a WordPress techie, so I probably can’t be of much help. But I do hope you can get it all sorted out.
About our character, I believe that we have a basic character type that is inborn, but that we can turn it in one direction or another, and develop some parts of our potential while leaving other parts undeveloped. And of course, the environment in which we are raised also has an effect upon our character. Rather than seeing it as a nature vs. nurture thing as many secular types do, I see our character as a product of nature, nurture, and the choices we make along the way.
I do not believe there is any such thing as an irredeemably bad character. It is true that some people seem to be narcissists from birth. But I still think it’s possible for these people to come to some self-awareness about their character, and make a choice to turn themselves in a better direction.
As for using our character as an excuse, contrary to today’s popular “wisdom,” we are all born selfish and greedy, and we all have the task of turning ourselves around so that we live from love for God and the neighbor instead of love for ourselves and the things of this world. That’s what Jesus was talking about when he said that we must be born again. Using our natural selfish and greedy character as an excuse is simply abdicating our responsibility to be born again. It is being lazy and not doing the work that God put us here on earth to do.
In our assessment of other people, it’s best, I think, to look for the good in them. But at the same time, it’s not a good idea to be naive and make excuses for people’s bad behavior. All that does is give them a pass to engage in more bad behavior, which is not good for them here on earth, and it’s certainly not good for their eternal life. Making excuses for people’s bad behavior is not doing them any service. Really, it’s treating them as if they don’t have the full human capacity to engage in self-examination and self-improvement. It is not respecting them, but disrespecting them and treating them as if they’re less than human.
Does that get closer to answering the question you wanted to ask?
Hi Saran,
Okay, I’ve now watched the first video you linked here, which is the original debate between Ben Shapiro and Alex O’Connor, not the reaction video to that debate that you posted earlier.
Of course, I disagree with O’Connor that there’s no God and no free will.
As far as Shapiro’s arguments, they’re based largely on utilitarianism, and they appeal to mystery and unknowability for backup, which I find unsatisfying, though perhaps as good as you’re going to get when you’re debating an atheist, because the atheist simply isn’t going to accept the reality of God and spirit.
Utilitarian arguments are fine as far as they go. But they leave untouched the underlying question of the truth or falsity of the position one is arguing for. Just because belief in God makes for a more orderly society, that doesn’t mean that God exists. Only that a belief that God exists is good for society. And that brings us back to Marx’s famous “Religion is the opiate of the masses” slogan. O’Connor takes an evolutionary approach to the same idea by saying that evolution brought about an unshakeable belief in free will on the part of the masses because (if he extended that argument) it makes for a more cohesive tribe and clan, and therefore gives an evolutionary survival and reproductive advantage.
And yet, O’Connor himself believes that God doesn’t exist in reality. In his mind, the best that he could say for it is that it’s a useful delusion. But even that he doesn’t seem inclined to grant, since, though he didn’t seem to me to get as much time to speak his own views as Shapiro did, he seems to think that religion has actually had a negative effect upon society, and that society would have been better off without it. This is a common argument of atheists.
The unsatisfying element of utilitarian arguments, then, is that they don’t establish the truth of what’s being argued for. Only that (if the argument is successful) it’s a good thing for people to believe that it’s true, even if it’s actually false. In other words, utilitarian arguments are useless for establishing what actually is true.
I also dislike appeals to mystery such as the one that Shapiro made in the middle of the debate, and O’Connor jumped all over.
Can we fully understand the nature of God, and fully understand God’s mind? Of course not. God, and God’s mind, is infinite. Our mind is finite. By definition, then, we can’t fully understand the mind of God.
However, that’s irrelevant to anything significant, in my view.
Why?
Because the mind of God is expressed in accurate but limited fashion in the lower levels of reality, which are spiritual reality (the level of the mind) and material reality (the level of the physical body).
I may not be able to fully grasp the mind of God. But I can have an accurate understanding of the mind of God on the more limited spiritual level at which my mind operates. And so can everyone else.
This is why I dislike religious appeals to mystery and paradox. Behind them, in my view, is usually a misunderstanding of the nature of God due to faulty and false religious dogma.
Nicene Christians, for example, consider the Trinity of Persons to be a “mystery.” If you attempt to make any rational or logical argument against it, and demonstrate that it is internally contradictory, they will fall back on saying, “It’s a mystery that you just have to believe because it is a fundamental Christian doctrine.” But why do I have to believe it? What if it’s not a “mystery,” but is simply false? (As I believe it is.)
Appeals to mystery and ignorance are therefore highly unsatisfactory to me. When I encounter them, I smell a rat. I think the person making such an argument probably has an incorrect understanding of God and spirit, and is covering it up with an appeal to irrationality and blind belief.
I believe that God’s mind is understandable on our level, which is finite rather than infinite.
If I hold up a skeletal cube (by which I mean a cube made of rods rather than a solid cube), and project it onto a flat surface, the shadow it makes is not arbitrary or mysterious. Neither is it a full representation of the cube. But it is an accurate representation of the three-dimensional cube on a two-dimensional surface. If I rotate the cube around, and its shadow changes on the flat surface, it does so in a regular, predictable way that could be caused only by a three-dimensional shape that is a cube. And so if we can see only the two-dimensional figure, but we understand that the cube is three-dimensional, we can gain an accurate picture in our mind of what the cube looks like.
This, by the way, is one of the arguments that the earth is spherical, not flat. Whenever we see its shadow on the moon, that shadow is always round. A sphere is the only shape whose shadow on another object will always be round. And so we can know from lunar eclipses alone that the earth is spherical, not flat.
This is how it is with the nature of God, which is infinite, being “projected” into the spiritual world, which is finite, and into the material world, which is even more finite (limited). The projection is not a “mystery” nor is it “unknowable.” It’s just limited in its ability to fully represent everything about the nature of God. But what it does represent is accurate, and not arbitrary or uncertain or unknowable. We can have a definite and accurate knowledge of God and of God’s mind. It will simply be a limited knowledge of God’s mind.
This is why I dislike appeals to mystery and the need to believe things based on church dogma and blind faith. Shapiro’s arguments were, in my view, weakened by his appeal to the mystery and unknowability of God.
Because of Shapiro’s reliance on utilitarian arguments, and his ultimate falling back on mystery, the debate didn’t really address the truth of free will. Only its utility to a well-functioning society. Shapiro’s argument was, basically, people need to believe in free will, or they’ll fall into apathy, nihilism, and destructive behavior. That may be true, but it was completely and explicitly an unconvincing argument for O’Connor, who simply responded that just because something is evolutionarily useful, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s real.
It is common for evolutionary biologists to think that the human mind is playing all sorts of tricks on us, and even that the world around us is nothing like what we perceive it to be, because perceiving it in the way we do has evolutionary advantages over, say, seeing it the way it actually is. I find this to be a very frustrating argument. But it’s just one more demonstration that utilitarian arguments are not going to convince anyone who has a secular, rational, and scientific mindset.
Of course, Shapiro is right that atheist are even more “religious” (i.e., certain) in their atheism than many religious people are in their religion. The bottom line is that you’re not going to convince an atheist of anything s/he doesn’t want to believe. And for an atheist, the non-existence of God is a core doctrine. No arguments are going to break them of that belief. The only thing that ever will is some sort of crushing personal crisis for which a godless universe has no help or answer. And even then, many atheists will simply slip into futility, fatalism, and depression rather than accepting the reality of God, spirit, and the afterlife.
But underneath it all, atheists simply can’t think very deeply about human life because they deny the existence of the deeper realms of human thought, feeling, and experience, which are all spiritual. So they fall back on materialistic, deterministic, chemical, and physical explanations for everything that we experience as human beings. These are flat, shallow, and completely unsupported arguments, but to an atheist, they seem like the pinnacle of rationality and evidentiary conclusions.
And you’ll never be able to convince them otherwise unless and until some crisis knocks them out of their atheism. I should say that the crisis can also be a slow-building one, as over decades the atheist confronts the emptiness of atheism, and is unwilling to accept that life is ultimately so empty and meaningless. Then some of them, instead of subsiding into nihilism and despair, will come to accept the reality of God and spirit, and their life and mood will become much brighter as a result.
That’s enough reaction for now. If there was some element of the debate that I didn’t address that you’re particularly interested in, please let me know.
Hi Saran,
I watched the other video, about A theory and B theory of time. It seemed rambling and not very careful or informative about the underpinnings of what they’re talking about. After having watched the video, I still don’t have a clear definition of A theory and B theory. Perhaps I missed the video in which that was laid out clearly.
Beyond that, I’m just not all that exercised about whether time exists as we experience it. In my view, the important thing is that we do experience it, and our life here on earth unfolds over time. Why does it really matter whether it is “objectively real”? We live our life in subjectivity, not in objectivity. And in my view, our experiences are real, and not just an illusion.
Having said that, the material world, including physical time and space, is a lesser version of reality than the spiritual world, where time as we know it in the material world does not exist. And the spiritual world is a lesser version of reality than God, who is infinite and eternal, and doesn’t even experience things as passages of events as people living in the spiritual world (angels and spirits) still do.
It seemed that a big issue for the philosophers was whether time is an objective gridwork in which everything happens—which used to be believed, but now seems pretty conclusively not to be the case. My response is, “So what?” What does it really matter if everyone experiences everything simultaneously with each other? What does it really matter if one person’s time does not necessarily unfold at the same rate as another’s? We’re still humans learning and growing and interacting with one another, even if time is not a rigid, fixed thing.
In the spiritual world, there is no external time at all. There is nothing to measure it by. There are no planets orbiting stars, or rotating on their own axes. “Time” is entirely a subjective experience of learning and growth through experience and thought. It goes forward, not backward, because we learn things, and we don’t unlearn things. So even in the spiritual world, there is a one-way arrow of “time” that is really continual growth in experience, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom.
This, of course, happens differently, and at different rates, for different people. No problem. If you learn faster than I do, we can still get together and talk about what you’ve learned and what I’ve learned. We can still have a relationship even if your mental time is different from mine.
So . . . honestly . . . I just can’t get all that worked up about the “problem” of time not being Newtonian, but relativistic. Our lives are relativistic. Why shouldn’t our time be?
This is my 2nd id cause I’m unable to log in into my previous account.
I was also looking for your views on the recent debate between atheist Alex O’Connor vs Ben Saphiro. They discuss range of topics and do you Ben Saphiro provided good defense of Theism.
Hi Lee,
Thanks for your wonderful answers.
I agree with most of your answers However i am not quite on board with arguments against our inability to know God’s nature or nature of ourselves while in material world. I have read quite a great theistic thinker who did realize while relying solely on our minds we can’t Know anything more than what God has decided that we should know.
In understanding God’s nature or soul or even concepts like free will we frequently run into paradoxes and contradictions, and according to great thinkers that’s not proof of falsity of God’s omnipotence, omniscience or God’s goodness, even goodness of soul or free will but rather a limitation of what we can understand via logic. Running into paradox and contradiction should rather tell us about God plane existence being something that can’t be put in terms.
The very concept of God realization is that god can be realized but not understood wholly. And majority of religion posit that we can’t have perfect knowledge about God and his creation while still in material world but that’s for the afterlife.
While there is problem with appealing to unknowability to every god related question. It’s definitely not problematic position establishing that we are very limited in our knowledge of God and his creation, not cause they are mysterious but that is,how they are inherently unknowable.
Do you at least agree with that we cannot have perfect knowledge? Or is your position that while being in material world we can have perfect knowledge? And also i don’t think this is a problem that can be solved by any analogy as there are concepts that does ultimately rely on God plane existence being mostly outside our limited mind with it’s logic and comprehension.
Looking forward to your answer.
I also fully agree with you concerning weakness of Saphiro in addressing the atheist arguments. He didn’t answer questions that have well established logical answers, for the questions that he appealed to mystery has been adequately answered before.
My only point was that we can know great deal about God actually but that great deal is just a droplet in vast ocean.
Hi Saran,
Of course we humans can never have perfect knowledge, because we are finite and imperfect. And there will always be at least some tinge of misunderstanding because we are never entirely pure in our mind and heart.
However, that’s like saying that no matter how good the paint job is on a car, there’s always going to be some little flaw or imperfection if we inspect the whole thing with a magnifying glass. For all practical purposes, if the car has an excellent paint job it’s going to look good. We don’t have to worry about some tiny imperfections here and there that you can’t even see when you stand back and look at the whole car.
In other words, we can have a good and accurate understanding of God and spirit that is correct and sound for all practical purposes, even if there may be some small elements of inaccuracy (falsity) still present in it because our mind is not perfectly pure and our knowledge is finite.
Next, it is true that we cannot arrive at a good and correct understanding of God based on logic and rationality alone. That’s why God gives us revelation. In fact, revelation, whether individual and internal or written and publicly available, is the only way we can know about God’s existence and nature. From there we can apply logic and reason, and refine our understanding of God. But our logic and reason must rest on the revelation that God provides us.
For Christians, the primary revelation is the Bible. For Swedenborgians, Swedenborg’s theological writings provide a much more detailed and descriptive (rather than largely metaphorical) revelation about the nature of God. There are also many other sacred books in the various religions of humanity, and many people receive individual revelation in the form of dreams, visions, near-death experiences, and so on. Individual revelations are tailored specifically to the person who receives them, and perhaps to that person’s circle of family and friends. Written revelations are commonly addressed to whole nations and cultures, or to the entire world.
Without revelation we would know nothing about God, and our reason and logic would never even arrive at any knowledge that God exists, let alone God’s nature. We would be like animals, whose minds are entirely focused on this material world, and who have not the slightest concept of God and spirit.
Finally, if people are running into paradoxes and contradictions, then they are lacking some basic understanding of the nature of God and spirit, or have actually false ideas about God and spirit.
One of the most common lacks of understanding leading to paradoxes and contradictions is not realizing that time and space are properties of the material universe, and do not apply to the spiritual universe, still less to God. I commonly run into arguments, both theistic and atheistic, that treat God as if God is embedded within the arrow of time, and experiences things temporally, leading to all kinds of paradoxes and contradictions. The atheists use these to deny the existence of God. The theists use them to declare God a “mystery.”
But it’s not a “mystery.” It’s an error in thinking. Once the error is cleared, and we realize that God exists outside of time and space altogether, and interacts with people and things within time and space from above and beyond time and space, then the mystery disappears, and the objections of the atheists crumble.
This is just one example of errors in thinking (i.e., falsities) that lead people to think that there are paradoxes and contradictions when delving into the nature of God and spirit. Another big one is the Nicene Christian idea that God is three Persons, which is simply false. When believed, the Trinity of Persons leads to all sorts of paradoxes and contradictions, which atheists use to deny the existence of God, and Nicene Christians use to declare that God is a “mystery” that we simply can’t understand, but must believe anyway because that’s what the church teaches.
The reality is that due to revelation and correspondence, we can have an understanding of God that is correct and true for all practical purposes, and not paradoxical or contradictory, even if it is not perfect and is limited by the finite and fallible nature of our human mind.
Certainly there will always be some element of mystery in our minds about God, because God is infinite, and therefore goes infinitely beyond the limited knowledge and understanding of our mind. But these mysteries are not paradoxes or contradictions. They are simply further questions to seek out answers for, similar to scientists who, no matter how much they learn, never run out of new questions about the nature of the physical universe in which we live. Based on further scientific investigation, they don’t expect to find paradoxes and contradictions, but new knowledge and understanding, which then leads to further questions to investigate.
That’s how it is with our knowledge of God and spirit as well.
Hi Lee,
Well i do agree with some of your points.
“Finally, if people are running into paradoxes and contradictions, then they are lacking some basic understanding of the nature of God and spirit, or have actually false ideas about God and spirit.
The very point that this need not be case, it is possible that running into paradoxes and contradictions maybe a more of a hint of how unimaginable nature and working of god might be. God’s nature are not revealed to us but only a glimpse of what it might be like.
I agree with you on point that We can used revelations and onto them our mind and logic to try to know about God but that doesn’t mean we can have knowledge of God just by that, but only a glimpse of what God’s existence and nature is like. Throughout the theistic world and religions this can be seen, inadequacy of man to know god by knowledge. But we have enough knowledge to establish religion and describe God’s property that we can comprehend with our minds. Even tho them being only grain of sand in desert.
I’m half Hindu and Catholic, i remember a Story from Hinduism in which when God decides to reveal to him his nature but before that giving him a mind of deity powerful enough to know God’s nature, but what happens next is when the devotee is content that he now knows what God is only for God to reveal that what he know is comparable to a single drop in ocean. And that’s what i do think might be the case.
Thanks for your answer anyway.
Hi Saran,
Yes, what we know about God is like a single drop in the ocean.
However, that single drop does give an accurate, if limited, picture of what the ocean is like. It has the same chemical composition as the ocean in which it exists. It has the same microscopic creatures that fill the ocean. It even has chemicals and hormones that come from the larger creatures, so that scientists can tell by analyzing it what fish, sharks, and whales live in that ocean.
Sure, there’s more to the ocean than exists in that single drop. But that single drop, if we look at it carefully and analyze it correctly and in detail, can give us a small picture of what the whole ocean is like.
What I’m saying is that even if our understanding of God is limited, it can still be an accurate understanding of God on its own limited level, as compared to being an inaccurate, false, and self-contradictory understanding of God.
This idea is conveyed by William Blake’s famous poem “Auguries of Innocence,” which begins:
I will add that Swedenborg’s theological writings provide a clear revelation and understanding of God that has never existed before because people weren’t ready for it. In True Christianity #508 Swedenborg describes a beautiful temple he saw in the spiritual world, and how it represents the new church, or new spiritual era, that is now beginning on earth. In the course of the story, he writes:
As suggested by this, Swedenborgians believe that we can now come to a clear intellectual understanding of things that were formerly considered “mysterious” and even “paradoxical.”
For another question,
Recently i was told by some determinists that, our intuition to know anything is illusion and most of the things we report or say is actually confabulation,
The new way for secular and athests for undermining free choice is to undermine our ability to basically know anything correctly about ourselves and calling our self awareness and introspection as post hoc illusion.
This video is one of such and there is somewhere a point in video where he says that if we pay close attention we’d know that most of things we unconsciously do and confabulate reasons afterwards.
https://direct.mit.edu/jocn/article/19/1/81/4278/Manipulating-the-Experienced-Onset-of-Intention
This is a very famous study that is largely cited to discredit our ability to intention. There is pdf download option if you are free sometimes you can look at it.
And lastly, Most desperate atheist and determinist Jerry Coyne, he also has a article on it, i want your response to his article and your response on this general attack on our experience.
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2016/05/11/bear-and-bloom-an-experiment-on-the-illusion-of-conscious-will/
You can slide down to look at some of the comments in this article it’s really absurd and can you say if any of their arguments are even a close to being a decisive attack.
When you’re free, you can give your response to them.
Hi Saran,
I must admit, I only skimmed the articles. I did watch the video. It doesn’t seem to me that there’s a lot new here that I haven’t already responded to before.
However, the matter of left-brain vs. right-brain does point to the two basic elements of the human mind according to Swedenborg, which are will and understanding. One hemisphere of the brain reflects the will, and the other reflects the understanding.
Normally these two work together, but they can also operate semi-independently, as when we very much want to do something, but our rational mind tells us that it would be a very bad idea to do that, so we don’t do it. Cutting the neural pathways between the two sides of the brain is simply a physical example of the will and the understanding each operating on their own distinct tracks. Eventually the two come together, but having no pathways between the two makes it harder for them to coordinate with each other.
None of this means that we’re two individuals, or even many individuals as suggested in the teaser for the next video in the series. Rather, it means that individuals are not monolithic, undifferentiated beings, but are made up of two, three (including action), or many elements that all work together to form the individual person.
About the famous experiments, as I’ve said before:
I do find it fascinating that these physicalists put so much energy into downplaying and rejecting the role of the human mind in everything we think, feel, and do. Really, they’re simply looking for evidence for their physicalist belief system. This requires them to call into question everything related to the human mind, which in reality is non-physical. All their experiments are just ways for them to reject the distinct reality of the human mind and consciousness, and attribute everything our mind and heart does to physical processes.
In reality, these physicalists have no evidence whatsoever that the physical world even exists independent of the human mind. In other words, they cannot demonstrate conclusively that the material universe exists at all.
The only thing whose existence we can be 100% sure of is our own consciousness, because that is the only thing we experience directly. Everything else we experience indirectly. And it would be quite possible that everything physicalists view as “real” is simply a virtual world generated by the human mind. This, in fact, is what philosophical idealists believe. And there is no way scientifically to prove them wrong.
What this means is that everything these physicalists “establish” with their experiments is based on a belief in the objective reality of physical matter and the physical universe, and in a belief that matter is primary over mind.
My belief, meanwhile, is that mind is primary over matter, and is more real than matter. Although in my view each does have its own distinct existence and reality, the one that is more real is not matter, but mind, which is spiritual reality. And of course, God is more real than both of them, being ultimate reality.
All of this is why I’m not too concerned with these experiments that purport to show that there is no free will. Ironically, the people engaging in these experiments are exercising their free will in doing so, and also exercising their free will in deciding to believe that free will doesn’t exist, and that God and spirit don’t exist. In reality, we have far more direct and decisive evidence for the reality of mind than we do for the reality of matter. See:
Where is the Proof of the Afterlife?
In short, these materialists are simply looking for evidence for their belief system, and of course they are finding it, because the human mind has an amazing ability to marshal support for whatever beliefs and opinions it has chosen to adopt.
Won’t they be surprised when they die, and instead of their consciousness being snuffed out as they believe it will be, they continue right on living in the spiritual world! But then, if they’re really determined to be materialists, they’ll simply come up with new reasons why they really aren’t living in the spiritual world at all, but are still living in the material world.
It’s truly amazing how the human mind can come up with reasons to support whatever crazy ideas it wants to believe. Only fancy intellectuals can come up with and believe the silly idea that the human experience of having free will that goes back thousands of years is all just a big illusion. Ordinary blue collar types have a more accurate understanding of the world and the human condition than these “smart” people do.
Thanks for your answer,
i actually wanted you to know your views on, a confabulation claim and how neurologists likes of Gazzniga say that we actually experience confabulation when if we pay attention, like everything we do simply happens by our right brains or whatever, and all the reasons we have or reasons we give is actually post hoc rationalization that too automatic.
They cite a famous study of Nisbett, in which basically participants were manipulated in lab but they never gave no as answer but some unrelated reasons for picking among two photos on wall. It basically tried to say our sense of everything is post hoc and everything is done unconsciously.
that’s them.
But there’s another blog tha i came across and it’s of a famous Christians youtubers.
https://www.gotquestions.org/libertarian-free-will.html
I would like to hear your response to them, as i disagree with them.
Hi Saran,
I apparently didn’t read the part about “confabulation,” so if there’s some straightforward presentation of it that you can direct me to, please post a link.
In general, since our thinking mind and our heart can be out of phase with each other, it is very common for us to give, and believe, reasons for the things we do that aren’t at all the real reasons, but are just cover stories.
Politicians famously do this all the time, presenting everything they do, and every vote they take, as being for the benefit of the public and the voters, when in reality politicians are largely driven by a desire for personal power and wealth. This becomes clear when you pay attention to what actually happens as a result of their actions, which is commonly that the politician gets wealthy and powerful, while the people still struggle and suffer under the same problems, and those problems often get even worse as a result of the politicians’ actions.
This is why Jesus said, “You will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16, 20). When there is a disconnect between what people say on the one hand, and their actions and the results of those actions on the other, it is their actions and the results of their actions, not their words, that show what they really think and believe, and what their real motives are.
As long as we are living in this world, there is benefit in presenting ourselves as well-intentioned and rational even if we are not. Politicians would not get voted into office if the said, “Vote for me and I’ll become rich and powerful!” They get voted into office by saying, “Vote for me and I’ll solve all your problems and make life better for you!” So what is presented outwardly is often very different from what’s actually inside the person.
Further, people whose outer mask is very different from their true inner character often deceive themselves as well, believing themselves to be good people when in fact they are selfish and greedy people. They commonly believe the things they say even though they’re not at all a true representation of what is in their own heart. Politicians commonly believe that they are acting for the good of the people when in fact they are acting for their own good and for the good of their family, friends, allies, and donors. But again, you will know them by their fruits.
Once again, the human mind is complex. If materialistic scientists assume that what a person says represents that person’s true conscious mind, but then discovers that other mechanisms are working that cause a person to take actions that seem entirely unrelated to their expressed beliefs, then the scientists may conclude that our conscious mind really isn’t in control of our choices. But in fact, the conscious mind may just be providing a cover story both for itself and for the outside world to hide the person’s true inner beliefs. In that case, obviously the choices will be driven by something other than what the person says they are driven by. If these scientists could see what these people think and say to themselves when they are alone in their own house on their own time, and nobody is listening, they would get a very different picture of their beliefs, and of the basis for their decisions.
Much of the error in setting up and analyzing these experiments comes not only from a confirmation bias against free will and for determinism based on a pre-existing rejection of free will in the minds of the experimenters, but also from a lack of understanding of how the human mind and heart work. The human psyche is far more complex than the rather simplistic theories that have existed in past ages among philosophers and theologians. These scientists have inherited these rather simplistic models of the human mind, and they therefore arrive at mistaken conclusions, such as the idea that since we may act a split second before our conscious mind becomes aware of the “decision,” this means we have no free will.
As I’ve argued in previous responses to your comments and questions on this subject, I believe this conclusion is based on a simplistic and inaccurate understanding of how free will works, in part because there is such a heavy focus on the rational, thinking mind, and so little on the human heart, or will.
Hi Saran,
About the GotQuestions article, it’s full of fallacies and of misunderstandings of the Bible verses it references, but it would take too long to go through it and point them all out one by one. It’s enough to see that the author in the end supports compatibilism, which is a self-contradictory idea that tries to have it both ways: we both are free and aren’t free at the same time.
I don’t think GotQuestions is a Calvinist outfit. If it is, that would explain everything. But as is common with these “Christian” sites, they are very shy about stating what their theological position is. They want to present their ministry and website as simply “biblical truth,” when in fact they do have a particular theological position that they are fully convinced of and therefore simply think of as “the biblical truth” when in fact it is a known position on and interpretation of the Bible that obviously not everyone agrees on. I wish the people behind GotQuestions had the self-awareness and honesty to state clearly, in an easily accessible location, what their theological position is.
(For my part, at the end of every article here on Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life I make my theological position clear in this statement: “Lee Woofenden is an ordained minister, writer, editor, translator, and teacher. He enjoys taking spiritual insights from the Bible and the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and putting them into plain English as guides for everyday life.” The “About this website” page also clearly states our Swedenborgian theological position, as does the “About Lee and Annette Woofenden” page. No one has to go hunting and hunting and hunting to find out what our theological position is. We’re perfectly comfortable with our theological position, and we’re not trying to hide it from anyone.)
The errors in the GotQuestions article center around the authors’ inability to reconcile God’s sovereignty with human free will. The fundamental error is the idea that God’s “sovereignty” means that God controls everything, and that everything that happens is God’s will. This leads to all sorts of horrendous and blasphemous conclusions, such as the idea that God chose before creation which people would spend a blissful eternity in heaven, and which would be tortured forever in the flames of hell. This is the Calvinist position. But it sounds really bad, so Calvinists came up with compatibilism, which attempts to square the circle by saying that we’re not really free because we’re predestined, but we’re still responsible for the choices we make.
This, of course, is utter nonsense. Either we’re free and responsible, or we’re not free and not responsible. You can’t have both.
In the end, the GotQuestions article fails to resolve this, and descends into saying, in essence, “Well, it doesn’t really make sense, because the two are incompatible with one another, but we just have to believe it anyway.” This is a perfect illustration of my statement that when people arrive at “mysteries” and “paradoxes,” this is generally the result of fallacies and falsities in their thinking, or at minimum it is based on ignorance of the truth.
GotQuestions is based on a highly fallacious, false, and unbiblical theological position. As a result, every time I read any of its articles, I find that most of the things it says are simply false. This article is a particularly obvious example of the authors clearly lacking any real understanding of the subject they are talking about, and therefore just throwing up their hands, admitting that it doesn’t make sense, but saying that we must believe it anyway.
Besides being unable to resolve this “paradox” due to their false and unbiblical beliefs, GotQuestions also misses a common element of Swedenborg’s presentation of divine providence, which is that God’s providence includes both what God provides for and what God tolerates for the sake of human freedom even though it is contrary to God’s will. This is a major subject in Swedenborg’s book Divine Providence.
In addition to the above article, here’s another one that delves into the issue of God’s “sovereignty” vs. human free will:
God: Puppetmaster or Manager of the Universe?
“Our choices are made in our heart (will), not in our mind(understanding/intellect). The intellect feeds information to the will that the will uses in making its choices, but it is our heart, not our conscious mind, that makes our choices. Our heart notifies the mind of the choice after it’s been made. In moment-to-moment situations, this may very well be after the action has already been taken.”
I need clarification on this, are you implying that decisions are made unconsciously like these scientists claims by heart or when we are consciously making decisions it is when heart is making the decisions. If it’s former then wouldn’t consciousness would be useless and if it’s latter the are we our heart? Cause the whole idea is a free self making decisions. Can you please clarify this, i still haven’t properly understood this poin of yours.
Hi Saran,
Scientists, philosophers, and theologian commonly focus on the human intellect, meaning the conscious rational thinking mind, because that’s the part of the human mind that is visible and easy to identify and analyze. It is the “truth” side of the human mind.
However, it is the human will, which is the “good” or “love” side of the human mind, that is actually primary. That is where are motives and goals and various types of love reside, and that is what drives us. It marshals the intellect to inform and guide itself, and also to carry out its will.
Most of the time we are not paying attention to our will, but to our intellect, or thinking mind. That is the visible part, or visible expression, of our will and our character, so it is what we see and are aware of most of the time. Only sometimes do we focus specifically on our feelings, motives, and loves, and even then we can see them clearly only through some kind of descriptive means, such as “I feel sad.” The feeling itself is not intellectual or verbal, but can only be described intellectually and verbally.
So it’s not that our will is beyond our conscious awareness. But we become clearly rather than dimly aware of it through our intellect, because our intellect is what our will uses to express itself. Our intellect also acts from our will in producing the words we speak and the actions we do.
In terms of physical expression and analogy, our will is the substance or material of our spirit, whereas our intellect is the form or structure of our spirit. Though we can feel the material directly with our hands and our sense of touch, for the most part our sensory, and especially our visual, interaction with any object is via its form or structure, which is what we see and what makes an impression on our senses.
Although the will is primary, it works in partnership with the intellect. Ultimately, all of our choices and actions are a collaborative effort between our love (will) and our thinking mind (understanding). And because we can be aware of our love through its expression in our understanding and in our actions, we can make conscious decisions about our life and what we want it to be.
Fundamentally, this is a decision about what sort of love we will put first in our life. Will we put love for God and the neighbor first, or will we put love for self and material possessions and pleasures first? This is the big, overarching decision we make during our lifetime on earth. All our smaller decisions, right down to the moment-to-moment ones focused on in those famous scientific studies, take direction from that underlying love we have chosen, which Swedenborg calls our “ruling love.”
As I suggested in my commentary on the split brain phenomenon, we also have the ability to think semi-independently from our desires. We can desire one thing, but our thinking mind can say, “That’s not a good thing to desire,” and our heart can take that direction and opt not to act on that desire, or it can ignore that direction from our intellect and go ahead and act on that desire anyway.
What then happens is that whatever choice we made, its consequences follow, and this will become further information and input as to whether we wish to continue on that course or change course. So although ultimately the choice is made in our heart, which is just at the edge of our conscious awareness, the choice draws on a complex process involving love, understanding, action, and consequences all interacting with one another and feeding everything back into the heart, where the decision is ultimately made.
Do we have the ability to consciously direct ourselves to make a different choice? Yes, we do. In particular, we have a higher spiritual mind and a lower earthly mind, each of which vies for control of our heart. Our higher mind can use its higher rational facilities to make its argument to the heart as to why it should take the higher course. And if our heart is willing, that’s what it will do. But in the end, it is always the heart, and never the thinking mind, that makes the actual choice.
Further it makes that choice based on what it believes will be the most good, rather than based on what is the most true. That’s why it is so common for thinking people and experts to make solid, rational arguments in favor of a particular course of action, and for people to say, “You may be right, but I don’t like doing that, and I don’t think it’s good, so I’m not going to do it.” For an argument to be truly persuasive, it not only has to establish that the thing it is arguing for is true, but also that the thing it is arguing for is good. This may mean “enjoyable and pleasurable,” or it may mean “beneficial to people’s well-being,” or it may mean something else people consider good, but ultimately it will be what people think is good not what they think is true, that prevails if there is a real or perceived gap between the two.
All of this means that the reality of human free will is different than materialistic scientists, philosophers, and even many theologians commonly understand. It is not a process in which our thinking mind rationally evaluates two courses of action and chooses which one to take. It is a process in which our thinking mind rationally evaluates two courses of action, feeds this information to the heart, and the heart decides which one to take based on what it thinks is the “more good” course of action. And more fundamentally, it is a process in which our intellect evaluates good and evil ruling loves and their character and results, feeds that information to the will, and the will decides which one to make primary, which will then determine everything else about our life.
It is difficult if not impossible to directly identify and analyze the will precisely because it is a matter of love rather than a matter of truth. This is why thinkers of all kinds, both atheist and theist, tend to focus on intellect, rationality, thought, doctrine, faith, and so on, which are all “truth” or “intellect” elements of the human mind, and downplay or ignore entirely love, desire, affection, motive, goal, purpose, and so on, which are all “love” or “heart” elements of the human mind.
However, once again, we can know what’s in our heart by how it expresses itself through our thinking mind and through our actions. In the split brain experiments, the right brain couldn’t express itself verbally, but it could express itself through its actions, picking up this block rather than that one. This means that we can know what the right brain is thinking even if it doesn’t express itself verbally, whereas the left brain can express itself both verbally and through its actions. Either way, we can see what is happening in the brain by how it expresses itself.
I suspect you were hoping for a simpler explanation, but in fact the human psyche is very complex. It is an intricate, ever-changing interplay of love, understanding, and words/actions that continually feed into and modify one another. It is in this complex process, some of which we are very conscious of, and some of which we are only barely conscious of, or not conscious of at all, that our choices, both large and small, are made.
And once again, the big, important, and consequential choices are made with conscious intellectual awareness, because these are the ones that we ponder over for months or years, considering the different possibilities, and ultimately choosing the one that our heart leans toward. No experiment about whether we become conscious of our choice to pick the circle or square before or after we actually pick up the circle or square has any bearing on these big, life-directing decisions.
Theologically, our free will to choose either heaven or hell must be a conscious decision, because only things that we intentionally do, knowing their moral quality, become a permanent part of our core character. Anything we do unintentionally or unawares or under heavy outside pressure becomes only a superficial part of our character. In the long run it will be either retained or jettisoned based on the conscious choice we make over our lifetime of what to put at the center of our character as our ruling love.
Hi Lee,
Thanks for your answer and i do agree with most of what you say. My only disagreement would be on point about contradiction and,paradoxes. I have read a very good Christian and hindu texts which have explored this idea, that Some attributes of God is paradoxical and contradictory but shouldn’t make us dismiss them as false but rather accept it as nature of God of God rather than saying we can understand it given some conditions.
A good example would be what this article is about, and God’s omniscience conflicting with freedom of humans as well as God, and so far the best answer given is God existing beyond time and rest you know. But If God exists outside of time and to him the past, present and future is indifferent and simultaneous. It creates really big problem that it it puts us in B-theory of time, which by definition asserts a determinist or block universe. In this case there is much left to defend logically speaking, so one not logical but a rational answer would be that God is omniscient and his omniscience doesn’t harm His or others Freedom and he is beyond time and space and yet it doesn’t put us in B-theory of time.
Hi Saran,
If I look out my window and I see that a car is passing by on the street, that doesn’t mean I have caused the car to pass by on the street. Only that I see that it is happening.
This is the simplest way to think of God being present in all time and space, including what to us is the future, from a position and viewpoint outside of time and space. Just because God sees what happens, that doesn’t mean God causes it to happen. It doesn’t mean that the universe is deterministic any more than my seeing the car going by on the street means that I caused the car to go down the street.
If there is a God, and God created the universe, then if the universe were deterministic, that determinism would come from God. It would be God’s “sovereignty,” to use the much misunderstood buzzword of the traditional Christians. Even though we are not the creators of the universe, the analogy holds. If our seeing something happen doesn’t cause that thing to happen, then God’s seeing something happen also doesn’t cause that thing to happen. It is perception, not causation.
The “paradox” or “contradiction” is in not fully grasping what it means for God to be outside of time and space. This is very difficult, if not impossible, for us to conceptualize because we live within the arrow of time and change. But being outside of time and space means that time and space don’t apply to God. For God, nothing is “before” or “after.”
God does not see “what is going to happen.” That wording suggests that God’s consciousness exists within the arrow of time, which is not the case. God simply sees what happens. All the cause and effect relationships, and all the human free will decisions, that go into making it happen are still what makes it happen, and they cause it to happen within the unfolding arrow of time. Within the arrow of time, the future is not determined. It could go in one direction or another based on randomness in the physical universe, and based on free choice in the spiritual universe in which the human mind exists.
It is only to materialistic thinking that God’s knowledge of what to us is the future looks like a “paradox” or “contradiction.” As we are able to lift our mind at least abstractly out of time and space, the paradox and contradiction disappear. Once again, God simply sees everything that happens in all time and space. This doesn’t mean God causes it all, or that it is predetermined any more than when you or I see something happen, that means we caused it to happen.
I think i can grasp it to a extent but then again some problems would seem to appear but that’s just about how human mind works.
Btw, I’d still like to hear your opinion on the prossed theory of “open theism”. In Hinduism this seems to accepted in some sects.
Hi Saran,
On open theism, please see:
Does God Grow and Develop? What about Open Theism?
If there’s some particular variety of open theism you’re interested in discussing, or if you have further thoughts and questions upon reading the linked article, we can take it up in the comments section there.
Hi Saran,
About this:
No, it doesn’t put us in a B-theory of time, because we’re not God.
God is infinite and divine, and exists outside of time and space, while interacting with everything in all time and space.
We are finite and created, and exist within time and space, and within their spiritual analogs, which have to do with state of our understanding and will, respectively.
Once again, it is necessary to keep it very clear in our mind that God is not temporal or spatial. Time and space simply don’t apply to God. It’s not that God is “in a B-theory of time.” God is outside of time altogether. In God there’s no A-, B-, C-, D-, or E-theory of time because there is no time.
I suspect that the whole B-theory of time is a rationalist attempt to take a God’s-eye view of time without understanding that time does not apply to God.
It is also necessary to understand that there are three levels of reality, each of which is real, each of which is distinct, and each of which exists on its own level of reality and operates according to its own set of laws, even while interacting with the other two levels. These three levels are:
Although these three levels of reality interact with one another, and “correspond” with each other, to use Swedenborg’s term, they are also entirely distinct from each other. No part of spiritual reality is either divine or material. No part of material reality is either spiritual or divine. And no part of divine reality is either spiritual or material. Each has its own distinct substance and form that does not resolve into either of the other two, but is related to the other two via correspondence across a distinct boundary and dividing line.
Specifically about time, time is a property of material reality, meaning of the material universe. It exists and applies only within the physical universe. Time as we experience it here does not even exist in the spiritual universe, and it certainly doesn’t exist in God. Therefore nothing temporal applies to either of the other two levels of reality. Once again, God having eternal vision of all of time and space doesn’t put even God, let alone us, on a B-theory of time because God is outside of time altogether. “Time” simply does not apply to God.
Even in the spiritual realm, Swedenborg says, angels and spirits have absolutely no experience of or even concept of time. They do not even know what time is, because it is completely foreign to the spiritual world in which they live. What they have instead is “state,” perhaps best expressed in the contemporary term “state of mind.” The spiritual analog of time, in particular, is state of mind in regard to truth, understanding, and experience. There is an “arrow of state,” to coin a term, because angels and spirits are continually gaining new experience and understanding, and learning more truth. Since they experience and learn things, but do not unexperience and unlearn things, their “arrow of state” is unidirectional, and they have an experience of a past, a present, and a future, and of a passage of events in their lives, just as we do here on earth, even though our material time does not exist there.
(The spiritual analog of space, meanwhile, is the angels’ and spirits’ state of mind in regard to love. Closeness and distance in the spiritual world are determined by how close to or far away from one another angels and spirits are at heart, meaning in who and what they love.)
Since each of the three levels of reality exists on its own level, and operates according to its own nature and laws, there is no paradox or contradiction in God seeing all of time even though in the material universe time is continually unfolding such that the past has already happened, the future hasn’t happened yet, and we are always living in the present moment. Everything that happens in the material universe is subject to the laws or parameters of time and space, and takes place in accordance with those laws.
This means that cause and effect, including random causes and effects and free will causes and effects, operate within the arrow of material time, and cause the future to be what it is. Within the arrow of time, the future is not determined. It could go one way or another based on the inherent randomness of material events at a quantum level, and based on human free will choices and their consequences. The material universe is not deterministic. The future is fluid. It could go in an indefinite number of different directions, none of which is fully determined until it actually happens.
This is not incompatible with God’s omniscience precisely because God is on a distinctly different level of reality, and is not embedded in or subject to the parameters or laws of time and space. God operates according to the nature and laws of divine reality, not according to the nature and laws of physical reality. Physical laws, including those of time and space, simply don’t apply to God.
God does act into time and space, and is even present in all time and space simultaneously. But material reality itself unfolds on its own level, subject to time and space, which are properties of material reality.
In short, there is no paradox or contradiction, because each layer of reality is operating on its own level, according to its own internal nature and laws.
I realize these things are not easy to grasp and conceptualize, let alone accept as true. Honestly, it took me decades even to get as far as I am on these things now—and I make no claim to have a perfect understanding of them.
Swedenborg himself went through the same development of his thought. He recounts that earlier in his life when he tried to think about God based on time and space, his mind got so tangled in paradoxes and contradictions that it would have driven him insane if he had continued down that path. It was only after his spiritual eyes were opened, he said, and he was shown that time and space don’t exist in the spiritual world, and that not even the spiritual analog of time and space exists in God, that he was able to resolve those apparent paradoxes and contradictions. Only by lifting the mind outside of time and space, he said, can we understand the nature of God and spirit, and how they interact with the material world.
This is what gave me my marching orders in my own attempts to figure these things out for myself. And though once again I don’t claim to have a perfect understanding of these matters, by now I am very comfortable intellectually with an understanding that time and space are very real in this physical universe, that the material universe is not deterministic, that we humans do have free will, and that nevertheless God sees everything that to us is past, present, and future from God’s eternal present state outside of time.
This understanding is what makes it possible for me to say that even in these matters, once there is a true understanding of the nature of things, there is no more paradox or contradiction. Paradox and contradiction arise only from our lack of understanding of divine, spiritual, and material reality, and especially from a fallacious understanding of reality.
In my view, there cannot be any underlying paradox or contradiction in reality because, in biblical language, God is one. In other words, God is a single, unified, coherent being, in which there is no contradiction, tension, or paradox. Nothing in God conflicts with anything else in God. Everything in God works together as a seamless whole, even though there are infinite elements within God. Any paradox or contradiction would result in mutual annihilation within God—and that simply can’t happen.
Further, since the entire universe is an expression of God via correspondences, there can also be no fundamental paradox or contradiction within either the spiritual world or the material world.
I say no fundamental paradox or contradiction because our human introduction of evil and falsity into the mix does introduce contradiction into human life, both the life of the human heart and human relationships and the life of the human mind and the human arena of varying and conflicting ideas and beliefs. There certainly can be, and indeed are, many contradictions in human life as we live it because we are in a continual balance and battle between good and evil, truth and falsity.
But even with that contradiction in the human realm, there is an underlying seamless, law-abiding universe, both physical and spiritual, in which there is no paradox or contradiction, but everything operates by a single unified set of laws. Hell operates according to the same underlying laws as heaven, and is ruled by the same God. It’s just that those in hell attempt to break those laws, and therefore bring the consequences of doing so onto their own head. The law of gravity is the same whether we walk around on the 100th floor of a skyscraper or jump out a 100th floor window of the same skyscraper. But the results for us are very different.
I hope this adds a few more useful thoughts and ideas on this discussion and subject. It’s a complex, difficult-to-grasp area of reality and of our understanding of it. But largely thanks to Swedenborg, there are answers that don’t involve paradox and contradiction.
Thanks for your answer and that’s all there is to it.
But I’ll ask does God being above time by virtue of being a creator of time itself, yet can it be compatible with A theory “presentism” that only present exist.
Hi Saran,
You’re welcome. Glad you found that helpful.
About your additional question, I don’t see any reason why “presentism” can’t be true even though God is outside of time. Presentism is a description of the nature of the material universe. It doesn’t apply to God. If I say that a barn is red, it’s talking about the barn, not about the field surrounding the barn, which is green. The greenness of the field has no bearing on the redness of the barn. Each has its own distinct existence and nature.
Is presentism true?
I suspect that this whole issue and debate comes from trying to make time into a fourth dimension, similar to the three spatial dimensions, which it really isn’t. Time is distinctly different from space. We can move forward and backward in any of the three spatial dimensions. In time, we can move only forward, not backward, and we can directly experience only the present moment.
Further, unlike space, the current time is the cumulative effect of all previous moments in time. The present moment would not be what it is if it hadn’t been preceded by the specific set of previous moments that led up to it. That’s not how space works, but it is how time works.
I would not therefore say that only the present exists. Rather, I would say that the past exists within the present, and the present leads to the future and will exist within it when it becomes the present.
Spiritually, the three dimensions of space have to do with our state in regard to love, goodness, and will, whereas time has to do with our state in regard to wisdom, truth, and intellect. That’s what makes them distinctly different from one another here on earth. Material space and time correspond to and express materially spiritual states of love and wisdom respectively, or of goodness and truth respectively.
Once we stop trying to treat time like a fourth dimension, and recognize it as a distinct property of its own, this business of “presentism,” A-theory and B-theory, and so on, becomes less cogent and useful. What does it really matter whether only the present exists? Pragmatically speaking, we live in the present moment, which contains all of the past and leads to the future. Past, present, and future aren’t radically separate from one another. They are present in and expressed within one another. It’s wrong to say that the past doesn’t exist, because the past does exist within the present moment.
In other words, time, unlike space, is cumulative.
Hi Lee,
Thanks for your answers, i enjoy reading them. And it does give me some good insights.
However, I’m still not wholly satisfied with your answer about heart being the centre of free will.
I have three more questions to have proper clarification of your theological positions,
As for another slight issue
“Further it makes that choice based on what it believes will be the most good”
this is often taken as argument in favor of determinism, as free will requires not just making choices based on what one believes is good but making free decisions that’s not entirely determined by any thing that might forcefully tilt the course either way.
About confabulation,
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-brain-and-value/202008/psychology-the-left-hemisphere-the-brains-interpreter
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/left-brain-right-brain
This article can provide some insights but just to clarify those who like Dr. Gazzaniga asserts that not some but every action is confabulation and our consciousness experience of decision making is an epiphenomenon, post hoc unrelated illusion.
“In general, since our thinking mind and our heart can be out of phase with each other, it is very common for us to give, and believe, reasons for the things we do that aren’t at all the real reasons, but are just cover stories.”
like you said this, a confabulation propent would take it as proof for their position.
Hi Saran,
There’s a lot here. First, a reaction to this statement in the first of the linked articles:
I would suggest that this surgery does not leave the two sides of the brain unable to communicate. They simply have to communicate in a different and less efficient way, mostly through physical action and reaction. The rest of the article talks about the right brain directing the body to do something, and the left brain coming up with a rationale for it. This is a form of communication. The left brain is responding to the actions of the right brain.
The article goes on to suggest that a similar thing happens even for people whose two brain hemispheres are not severed. We make a decision, presumably with our right brain, and then our left brain comes up with a rationale for it that may not have anything to do with why we made a decision we did, and took the action we did pursuant to that decision. In other words, even when the two halves of the brain have their normal channels of communication via the corpus callosum open, the interaction of the two may operate along similar lines as it does when the two are surgically severed.
All of this suggests to me that the idea, expressed in a previous article you linked, that we may actually be two centers of consciousness rather than one, is misleading.
First, a person is not only a brain. A person is also a body. The brain does not function independently of the body, but in continual interaction with the body. The brain is entirely dependent on the body for its continued life. It also continually responds to input received from the body. So the right brain and the left brain do form an intercommunicating unit even if their direct connection is severed. They do so through their connection to the body and its senses and actions.
Second, our consciousness is not a simple thing. It is complex, having multiple elements to it that could even be pictured as a whole crowd of people all interacting with one another within our mind. In this way it is similar to a nation, which consists of millions of people all interacting with one another, and yet, it acts toward other nations as a single unit. The nation itself does not have “multiple consciousnesses.” It has a single collective consciousness, which is what constitutes the nation as distinct from the individuals within it.
Our mind is similar, only the various parts of it do not have any separate, individual consciousness as individual human beings do. They are simply conflicting or cooperating desires and ideas within our consciousness as a whole.
Further, the author’s argument has the same flaw that the earlier article had. It assumes that our actual consciousness is our thinking mind, or intellect, when in reality our conscious mind consists of both will and intellect. It’s just that the intellect part is much easier for us to see and identify because it engages in articulate thought that can be expressed in words, whereas the will is a realm of love, motive, and emotion that is much harder for us to see and understand clearly.
Just because our thinking mind assigned a motive for one of our actions that isn’t the real motive (“I picked that set of stockings because I liked their color and pattern,” when in fact people just tend to pick the stockings toward the right), that doesn’t mean we’re not making decisions, and that we don’t have free choice. Rather, it means that we don’t always clearly see or articulate our real reasons for making the decisions we do. This may be because we are not self-reflective as people, or it may be because our real motives are self-centered and greedy, but we feel the need to put on a good face socially and cover up that reality about ourselves. Often we cover it up even from ourselves.
And yet, though we regularly fool others and even ourselves, there are times in our life when our choice becomes explicit, and we do make a conscious decision between being selfish or selfless. These are often at times of chaos, stress, and pressure in our life, when our usual semi-sleepwalking routines are breaking down and we have to pay attention and make a decision about whether we’re going to turn right or turn left, so to speak.
At that point we may say to ourselves, “Why should I put myself through all that trouble? What’s in it for me?” This is a decision to act from love for self.
Or we may say to ourselves, “This really sucks, and it’s going to be really hard, and I wish I didn’t have to do it, but it’s the right thing to do, so here goes!” This is a decision to act from love for God and/or the neighbor.
We all come to these decision points at various times in our life. These are the times that determine our course going forward from that inflection point along our journey. After we make these decisions, we settle back into our normal state of relatively unreflective action based on the direction we set for ourselves at that deflection point. This is the everyday “decision-making” that the scientists are studying, and concluding from it that we have no real free will. But they are mistaken because they are not putting these everyday small decisions in the context of the larger decisions we have made that set our course for the next segment of our life.
(And to answer one of your questions, yes, as long as we are still living and breathing on this earth, we can decide to go in a different direction, and change course. Once we die, our overall direction is set, though I believe we can still choose variants within a “cone of probability” set by our ruling love, which itself is now fixed and unchangeable.)
As an example, let’s say a thirteen-year-old girl decides to go Goth. From that time onward, unless she later decides not to be Goth anymore, she’s going to dress in a certain way. When she looks at that rack of stockings, if all the ones on the right are pink and white and bright and frilly, she’s going to go way over to the left and pick the black ones.
Did she make a decision at that point? I think so. But really, the main decision was made at the age of thirteen when she decided she was going to be Goth. Picking the black stockings on the left end of the rack instead of the white, pink, and frilly ones on the right end of the rack is just carrying out the decision she made back when she was thirteen, which she has stuck to since then.
BTW, about those stockings, there’s another possibility: that for whatever reason, store employees regularly put the better and more desirable stockings on the right end of the rack, and that’s why people pick from that end of the rack.
Also, in general, in Swedenborg’s theology the right represents the love side of things and the left side represents the truth side of things. An instinctive sense of this may be one of the reasons for the usual definitions of “right brained” and “left-brained” people. But there does also seem to be some correlation with the functions of the right and left sides of the brain, even if it’s not a slam dunk, and is denied by psychologists such as the ones who wrote the other linked article.
This is getting long, so I’ll break here and go back to you three questions in a separate reply.
Hi Saran,
Now to take up your three questions:
On the first question, there are at least two distinct ways to define who we are as human beings, suggested by different parts of your questions. First, there is this schema:
Swedenborg’s version of this is different from the more common soul/mind/body schema, which has the soul as our immortal self, the mind as our thinking mind, and the body as our physical body.
In Swedenborg’s schema, when “soul” is used in this context, it means our innermost self, which is in direct contact with God, and which is above our conscious reach and awareness. It is inviolable, meaning it cannot be tainted or destroyed. It remains intact, good, and functional even in the worst evil spirits in hell. This is where God flows into us directly and sustains our existence and our life.
In this context, in Swedenborg’s theology, “mind” is the same as our spirit, or even as “soul” when that is used in a more ordinary and less technical sense as a synonym for “spirit.” This is the entirety of our conscious and even subconscious mind, which I’ll return to in a moment. It is entirely spiritual, meaning it is made of spiritual substance and has spiritual form. No part of it is material.
The essential body is also spiritual, meaning it is our spiritual body, though which our mind speaks and acts in the spiritual world. However, during our lifetime in the material world we also have an extra added-on physical body, through which we speak and act in this world, and in which our mind resides while we are conscious in the earthly level of our mind, which is adapted to life in the material world. Once we leave our physical body behind at death, we begin living entirely in our spiritual body, which functions for us exactly the same way in the spiritual world as our physical body functions in the physical world, only it is immortal, and it perfectly expresses everything in our mind and heart.
This is our “vertical” structure as human beings. It can also be thought of as concentric circles, the soul being at the center, surrounded by the mind, which in turn is surrounded by the body.
A little more “horizontally,” there is this schema:
If we consider the level of “mind” in the above schema, its basic elements are, in traditional language, will and understanding. The will is where all our loves, desires, and motives reside. It is the home of everything good, or of everything evil. The understanding is where our knowledge, understanding, thoughts, and beliefs reside. It is the home of everything true, or of everything false. The will is the substance of our mind, and the understanding is the form of our mind.
Though the will is primary and the understanding secondary, the two are integrally united to one another, and cannot be separated. When we speak or act, it is always the understanding acting from the will. The will never acts by itself, nor does the understanding act from itself.
The same is true when we make a free will decision. Our understanding makes the decision from our will. Really, the understanding is acting on behalf of the will, at the will’s behest. But the understanding acts as if it’s acting on its own from our will. I know this is a little convoluted, but it relates to why there is confusion and misunderstanding among materialistic scientists about how we make decisions and whether we have free will. It appears as if our understanding is making the decisions on its own, but really, the will is making the decisions, or another way of saying this is that the understanding is deciding on behalf of the will, which is instructing the understanding what it wants. But the will depends upon the understanding to be able to see the different alternatives and understand their nature, and instruct it about the ramifications of each decision. So decision-making is a complex interplay between the two, which I probably oversimplified earlier, when I was being less technical.
Of course, the human mind is very complex. We can have a basic overview of it such as I presented above, but when we start digging into the details it quickly becomes for more nuanced and complicated.
When we act on a decision we have made, it is also the understanding, or intellect, that is acting at the behest of the will. It is like the president of a corporation running the company according to the overall goals and direction set by the company’s CEO. The president acts on his or her own, but acts based on his or her understanding of the direction received from the CEO. The CEO provides the overall direction of the company, and the president carries it out on his or her own initiative, from his or her own will, not from the will of the CEO, and acts according to his or her own understanding of the CEO’s intent. I hope this analogy makes it a little clearer how the will and intellect interact in relation to one another in the decision-making process, and in all our actions based on our decisions.
Our words and actions are therefore always flowing from an interaction, or “marriage,” between our will and our understanding, as are the decisions behind our actions. Ultimately the will is in charge. Final decision-making power rests with it. But the will never acts without consulting the understanding, and it acts through the understanding, or more accurately, the understanding acts from the will.
This is the basic nature of the human mind. However, there is yet another triad that’s necessary to know about to understand the human mind:
Our spiritual mind and our earthly mind also each have a will part and an understanding part. The will part of each is its love, motivation, and desire, and the understanding part of each is its truth, understanding, and beliefs.
When we start out in life, only our worldly mind is developed and active. It is motivated by love for the world, meaning love for material wealth, possessions, and pleasures, and by love for self, which is a love for having power over others and having others serve and worship us. This part of us, when it is in control, leads us downward toward hell.
Along the way, if we make the choice to turn our life toward higher things, our spiritual mind will be activated and developed. It is motivated by love for God and love for the neighbor (the people around us), which, of course, are expressed in the two Great Commmandments given by Jesus. This part of us, when it is in control, leads us upward toward heaven.
The rational mind serves as a clearinghouse and arbiter between the two. In a person whose life is turning toward God and heaven, it seeks to deliver the will and understanding of our spiritual mind to our worldly mind so that our worldly mind will act on behalf of and at the direction of our higher self. However, in a person who is heading toward hell, the rational mind gets dragged down to the worldly level, and serves as a justifier and excuser of our selfish and greedy earthly will. It even attempts to drag our spiritual mind, if it has developed to any degree, down and make it serve our worldly self.
However, our rational mind does retain its rational capability even in evil people who are heading toward hell. It can therefore at times admonish and attempt to rein in the worldly mind when it is bent on evil, and serve as a messenger from our higher self in an effort to get our worldly mind to relinquish control and cede to our higher motives and higher self.
In other words, during our lifetime on earth there is a battle between our spiritual mind and our earthly mind, which each one attempts to win, and our rational mind serves as an ambassador between the two and a rational (or irrational) voice in the fray. In this battle, angels are present with our spiritual mind, and evil spirits are present with our worldly mind, each seeking to win the battle and carry our whole self in their direction, either up or down.
In other words, our big decisions of good vs. evil in the direction of our life are made in the context of a battle between our higher self and our lower self to see which will prevail and gain control of our entire self. This means that our big up-or-down decision is a dynamic process in which there are many actors each vying to prevail and be the winner. The battle is fought using the tools of the understanding, or intellect—meaning ideas and beliefs—but in the end, it is the heart that will make the decision by putting its weight one way or another. And it will make that decision based on what kind of pleasures it wants to have.
To use a common example, in a marriage relationship there is often a battle between wanting to be the top dog who is right, and wanting to love and care for the other person as an equal partner. Each has its pleasures. Being the boss has the pleasure of making the other person serve one’s own will and whims. Loving the other person devoting our own life to the other person (mutually, if the relationship is to work) has the pleasure of a deep sharing of hearts and minds in which each loves, supports, and strengthens the other. It is more work in the beginning, but it leads to far greater happiness and joy, whereas the other seems easy at first, but leads to conflict, battles, and eventual break-up and divorce.
What is actually making that decision? That’s a complex question, because it is not any one part of us that makes the decision. It is our whole self. But it is led by the will, and it is informed and mediated by the understanding, not to mention by our rational mind, which is in between our spiritual self and our worldly self. Within the acts and events and thoughts and feelings and motives and beliefs and desires and pleasures and chaos and conflict of life, our grand decision for either heaven or hell emerges. It does not happen without input from every part of us, will and understanding, good and evil, spiritual, rational, and worldly. So although the answer may be unsatisfactory, really it is our whole self that makes the decision, and that decision then determines the character of our whole self and life.
Didn’t I say that the human mind is complex? 😀
But in that sense, it’s like a democracy in which every citizen has a vote, and the ultimate decision is what the majority wants. So in us, what most of us wants, and what we want the most, is what will ultimately prevail and determine both our character and our eternal home in either heaven or hell. Again, it’s a messy answer, but it is how the human mind and heart operate. We’re not dictatorships. We’re multiparty democracies. The process may be messy, but by the time the decision has been made, every voice has had an opportunity to be heard, and the will of the people prevails. (This is the ideal. I am well aware that it’s not the reality in many, if not most countries that have democratic systems.)
I don’t know if this adequately answers your three questions, but I think I’ve written enough for now, so I’ll pause and give you a chance to read this much and then respond with any further thoughts, questions, or challenges you might have. These are big, deep, complex questions that go to the heart of our human existence. It’s easy to give easy answers. Real answers take much more thought and effort.
However, on your final question, I’ll say again (as I did in my previous reply) that as long as we are living and breathing on this earth, we can still make a different decision, and change the course and direction of our life.
Once we die, the decision has been made, and we will continue forever in the direction we have chosen during our lifetime on earth. However, I no longer believe that it is like an arrow shot from a bow. That analogy is not wrong; it’s just a little too limited and simplistic. Rather, I think it is like a “cone of uncertainty” that goes in a certain direction, but opens out in that direction so that there is some leeway to go this way or that within the general boundaries set by the direction of our ruling love.
Hi lee,
it’s good be back and thanks for enlightening me on Swedenborgs views on the matter. I still have some questions regarding this i shall ask later.
Hi Saran,
Good to hear from you again. You are most welcome. Whenever you’re ready, you know where to find me!
According to the Andromeda paradox theory and relativity, it is shown that since simultaneity is relative, the future has already happened just like the past (the block theory of time). Can New Church theology be compatible with this, where the future is uncreated from a linear perspective of someone in time, yet already happened to God? If not, it seems to be yet another way Swedenborg is wrong.
Hi K,
I’d have to look up this Andromeda paradox theory. But apparently it’s a theory, not settled science. I don’t think the future has already happened in the material realm, even if time is more fluid than we previously thought.
Even from God’s perspective, the future has not “already happened.” That would imply that God is within the arrow of time, and limited by time, which is not the case. God is outside of time altogether, and simply sees all of time and space in a single eternally present view.
Even if the Andromeda paradox is mere speculation, the relativity of simultaneity has been confirmed. GPS satellites need to compensate by a small fraction of a second because of their velocity relative to the velocity of a ground observer. It shows that the future has already happened, even if by a tiny fraction of a second, in one reference frame but not in another. This points to the future being like the past: it already happened. And God presumably can see that all at once.
Hi K,
No, it doesn’t show that the future has already happened. Only that the rate of time is variable in different parts of space based on speed of travel relative to the speed of light.
Consider two trains traveling on parallel tracks, one of which is moving faster than the other. For neither one has the future already happened. But the faster train will reach “the future” faster than the slower train. Within each train, the timeline unfolds in the usual arrow of time for the passengers of that train, in which the past is the past, and the future is still in the future.
In any case, if it turns out the future has already happened, can New Church belief still be compatible, since from a linear perspective the future is naturally unknown? If the future has already happened, one can still look at all of time as a single eternal moment where there is still free will, just all choices have been made all at once from such a view.
Hi K,
This seems to me like a purely academic discussion. The practical reality is that we all live within the arrow of time, in which we’ve experienced the past, the future has not yet happened, and we make choices and take various paths along the way. Perhaps in some theoretical theory the future has already happened. But we don’t live in theoretical theories. We live in reality as we experience it. And for us, the future has not yet happened, and we make choices sequentially, not all at once.
Having said that, I don’t think the future has already happened. All our efforts to make time into a fourth dimension that is the same in both directions have come to nothing. Time is not simply a fourth dimension, like the other three. It is a distinct phenomenon of its own. Space doesn’t have a uni-directional arrow. Time does.
Time and space will never be made into the same phenomenon because they come from and correspond to distinctly different spiritual phenomena. Space corresponds to love; time corresponds to truth. The two are intimately related to each other, and always together, but they are also distinctly different.
If we think of truth psychologically as residing in the understanding, our knowledge, understanding, and intelligence increases over time. We learn things. We don’t unlearn things. Yes, we can forget things, but they are still there, buried in our memory, and can become accessible again. This is why time has a uni-directional arrow. It corresponds to understanding and truth, which grow with the passage of experience and events, and do not go backwards.
Space, by contrast, corresponds to love, which ebbs and flows in one direction or another. We can return to the same feelings over and over again. There will be variations, and we can experience new ones, but these are feelings and desires we travel around in during the course of our days, weeks, months, years, decades, and centuries. So space is something we can travel back and forth in, unlike time. When we go back to the same place, it will likely have changed since the last time we were there, because space also exists within the arrow of time. But our old house will still be our old house until it gets demolished and something else is built there. So feelings and desires change, but they still inhabit the same locations in our psychological and spiritual life.
Back to your questions, from God’s perspective, yes, everything is happening all at once. But we don’t live in the divine level of reality. We live in the physical level of reality during our lifetime on earth, and we are therefore within the arrow of time, not outside of it as God is. Our life unfolds within our own level, not within God’s level. That is our reality. And in our reality, the future has not happened yet, and we have not yet made all the choices we will make in the future.
In short, I simply don’t think the future has already happened. And I don’t feel the need to harmonize New Church beliefs with every theoretical theory out there. We live in the realm of observable reality, not in the realm of abstract theory.
The point I was getting at is, IF it does turn out the future has already happened and that space is interchangeable with time (like it seems to be in black holes), that does not necessarily destroy New Church belief?
Hi K,
IF it turns out that pigs can fly, does that necessarily destroy New Church belief? IF it turns out that there actually is a Flying Spaghetti Monster, does that invalidate New Church belief? IF it turns out that the universe is a thousand-dimension multiverse, does that smash and decimate New Church belief?
For the most part, these things entirely irrelevant to New Church belief, because New Church belief is primarily about spiritual things, not about material things. Swedenborg was clearly wrong about a number of scientific facts and phenomena. Does that mean he was wrong about all the spiritual principles he taught? No. It just means that his scientific knowledge was limited.
Reality is real. It’s what God designed. If it turns out that time and space don’t work the way we used to think they do, all it means is that our previous understanding of the physical universe doesn’t reflect the actuality of how the spiritual universe expressed itself in the physical universe.
Essentially, nothing that we can scientifically investigate and learn about the physical world invalidates New Church belief, because it’s all about the physical world, and New Church belief is all about God and spirit. New Church belief could be wrong, but if it is, science won’t be what disproves it, because science is limited to the physical world. Science cannot say anything about the nature of God and spirit. The way you’ll find out for sure if New Church belief about God and spirit is wrong is when you die, if your consciousness is not just snuffed out (in which case you’ll never know), whatever realm you’re now living in either will or won’t be in accordance with what Swedenborg taught.
If it turns out that you sleep in the grave until some future Last Judgment, and then you rise from the grave along with everyone else who has ever died, go through Pearly Gates attended by St. Peter, and stand in front of God’s Judgment Seat to get judged for heaven or hell, then Whoopsie! Swedenborg was wrong! (But that’s not going to happen.)
Meanwhile, the way to validate Swedenborg is to live the way he taught—and more to the point, live the way Jesus taught, and see what effect it has upon your life and your experience. We don’t have to wait for death to find out whether focusing our life on love for God and the neighbor instead of on love for self and the world will bring about a major positive change in our life and our experience of it. We have a whole lifetime here on earth to try that out, and see if it works.
And it does work, which is the main validation of New Church belief. As Swedenborg said, New Church belief is simply genuine Christianity. If you live a Christian life in the way Christ (not the so-called “Christian” churches) taught, then you’ll have all the validation of New Church belief you need, and your doubts will gradually fade away into insignificance and irrelevance.
And even if there is no afterlife, you haven’t lost anything. You’ve lived a good, neighborly life full of positive experiences with your fellow human beings. Nothing wrong with that!
Bottom line: No, theories about physical time and space don’t invalidate New Church belief because they’re about physical things, whereas New Church belief is about spiritual and divine things.
If spirit interacts with the physical, then the physical could potentially be used to debunk the spiritual, despite the claim of so-called non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA). In any case, Swedenborg writings have questionable veracity because of at least that Earths in the Universe book. If a guy claims to meet spirits of feisty belch-talking dwarfs from the moon, and yet observation and firsthand visits shows the moon to be a desolate airless wasteland (with no means of supporting the complex ecosystem and natural history seemingly required to bring about Homo sapiens-like mammalian beings), then it may get somewhat harder to see that guy as reliable in other stuff he says.
But anyway, back on topic, if it turns out the future has already happened from a non-linear perspective despite (and if) Swedenborg claiming otherwise, hopefully that alone really does not clash too much with New Church beliefs on the afterlife.
Hi K,
On your first point, perhaps. But mostly for people who want to debunk God and spirit because they are atheists and materialists. They believe that science already has debunked God and spirit. They’re wrong, of course. It’s just a mass case of confirmation bias.
In reality, even though some conservative Swedenborgians have tried to hold onto the old science in Swedenborg’s writings, the new science fits much better with his spiritual teachings. For just one example, Swedenborg said two and a half centuries ago that time and space don’t apply to God and spirit. Then along comes 20th century science saying that time and space are properties of the physical universe and its mass and energy. This fits much better with Swedenborg’s teachings than the old idea that time and space are a universal gridwork in which the material universe unfolds.
The bottom line, though is that it is not possible to draw spiritual conclusions based on science, or even based on reason. It requires revelation. But once one accepts revelation, and the reality of God and spirit, then science and reason can and do support it. For those who reject God and spirit, science and reason do the opposite. That’s because, as I just said, science and reason cannot give us any reliable information about God and spirit. So people who believe in them will see God and spirit in science and nature, whereas people who don’t believe in them will insist that science and nature leave no room for God and spirit.
And that is exactly what we see among believers vs. atheists in the world today.
As far as Swedenborg’s writings having questionable veracity, that’s true if you’re reading them to learn about science, history, and other earthly things. Of course, that’s the wrong way to read them. It’s like reading a science textbook to learn about God. Wrong subject.
As far as non-linear perspectives clashing with New Church beliefs on the afterlife, I’d say that the spiritual world is not non-linear in the same way, but on a different level, as our experience here on earth is not non-linear: we experience events sequentially, not all at once. Whatever fancy philosophical/scientific theories there may be about non-linear time, that’s not how it works for us. So honestly, I can’t get too excited about all these fancy theories.
If Swedenborg is merely wrong about science, that is one thing. But if he is wrong about an issue that involves both the physical and spiritual, that is another story. For example, he cannot meet spirits from the moon if the moon in reality is a barren airless wasteland, so if the story of him meeting the moon spirits is suspect, then what other stories about experiences in the afterlife realm are unreliable as well?
As for the timeless thing, sounds like you are saying that even IF it does turn out that Swedenborg is wrong about the future being uncreated and the future is just as real as the past, it does not pose too big of a threat to New Church beliefs.
Hi K,
About the timeless thing, yes, I think it’s a nonissue.
About Swedenborg meeting spirits that he says were from Earth’s moon, let’s keep our thinking distinct about what’s spiritual and what’s not.
If Swedenborg says he met a race of small gray belching people in the spiritual world, and it turns out that he’s wrong about that, and he never did meet that race of people, then that could be considered a serious problem, because now we can’t rely upon his descriptions of the spiritual world. (Of course, we have no way of knowing for sure whether he did or didn’t meet that race of people.)
But if Swedenborg met a race of small gray belching people in the spiritual world, says they’re from Earth’s moon, and it turns out he’s wrong about where they came from, that’s not a serious problem. It means that Swedenborg misidentified these spirits’ material-universe origin due in large part to mistaken science. Correct the science, and Swedenborg’s spiritual experience is still valid.
In other words, it’s necessary to clearly distinguish in our minds what, in Swedenborg’s writings, is material-world science, and what is spiritual-world experience. The spiritual-world experience can be valid even if the scientific interpretation of it, or baggage connected to it, is mistaken.
As I say in my article, “Aliens vs. Advent: Swedenborg’s 1758 Book on Extraterrestrial Life,” I think the most likely resolution to this issue is that Swedenborg did meet the alien races he describes in that book, but he was mistaken about what planets they came from.
As of now, there is nothing in our current scientific knowledge to make this impossible. We’re actively searching for life on other planets. We haven’t found it yet, but there is widespread belief that other planets could be inhabited. We just know that if so, this is a much rarer situation that Swedenborg thought.
Could advances in science create even more problems for Earths in the Universe?
Perhaps. We might develop the ability to analyze every planet in the galaxy for life, and find that there isn’t any other life. This would make it harder to believe that there are other planets inhabited by human life. But it would still be far from impossible, given that there are hundreds of billions or even trillions of galaxies in the observable universe. Even if there were only one inhabited planet per million galaxies, this would still provide plenty of alien races to populate heaven, and for Swedenborg to meet ten or a dozen of them. (Note that by “inhabited” here I mean the popular definition of having intelligent life living on it, not the scientific definition of having any kind of life on it, even if it’s only microbes.)
Even if we were somehow able to analyze every planet in the observable universe, and find that none of them are inhabited, there is still a far vaster unobservable universe (because it has expanded beyond the horizon imposed by the speed of light) that could contain populated planets.
What about if we find intelligent life on another planet, but it’s not human, or even humanoid, as Swedenborg believed all intelligent life is? That might pose a more serous challenge. But it still wouldn’t necessarily negate Swedenborg’s experience of meeting human life from other planets. The simplest explanation would be that since Swedenborg himself thought of all other life as human, that’s all he saw in the spiritual world.
Personally, I think that other intelligent life in the universe will be human, with the types of variations Swedenborg described, because I think that the human form is not arbitrary, but is the form required for intelligent, especially spiritual, life.
Practically speaking, it’s highly unlikely that our science will progress far enough during your lifetime or mine for these challenges to become real. So for now, it’s just a big hypothetical. And as always, I prefer to base my thinking on actual science and knowledge, not on hypotheticals.
As of now, if we’re willing to accept that Swedenborg could be mistaken about science, then there’s nothing in his writings about spiritual things that current scientific knowledge requires us to reject. The things we can’t accept in his writings due to science are all about material-world science, history, and so on. And once again, those subjects are not the purpose if his theological writings. If Swedenborg got some science wrong, it’s a relatively trivial issue compared to the real purpose of his writings, which is to serve as a revelation about God and spirit.
Further, even Swedenborg’s spiritual-world experiences aren’t “New Church teaching.” They’re just things Swedenborg experienced in the spiritual world. If we take his statement in True Christian Religion #779 seriously, none of the actual New Church teachings came from any angel or spirit, or from any of his spiritual experiences. They all came from the Lord while he was reading the Bible. His spiritual-world experiences simply served as “data” to provide a foundation in knowledge about the spiritual world that made it possible for him to understand what the Lord was teaching him.
For many people here on earth, Swedenborg’s spiritual-world experiences are the main event. Heaven and Hell has always been far and away the bestseller and most popular book among his writings. But in the grand scheme of things, Heaven and Hell is a sideshow. The main event is the teachings about God, the Bible, and the life that leads to heaven. These are the actual “New Church teachings,” whereas Swedenborg’s descriptions of life in the spiritual world are secondary, supporting material.
Even if Swedenborg’s science turned out to be totally wrong (which it’s not), this still would have only a minor effect upon the actual teachings of the New Church. It would simply require us to readjust our thinking as to how God and spirit express themselves correspondentially in the material world.
This is why, as fascinated as I am by current science, I’m not concerned that it might “debunk” Swedenborg’s teachings. The entire physical universe, and all our science, plays only a supporting role in the grand scheme of things that includes God, the spiritual realm, and the material realm. We can’t draw any conclusions about God and spirit based solely on material thinking. Material things cannot flow into spiritual things. Only the reverse.
Once we’ve accepted the reality of God and spirit, we can use all our material-world science and knowledge to support it. This is exactly what Swedenborg did using the science that was available to him in his time and culture. We can do the same with today’s science. And in my view, today’s science supports Swedenborg’s picture of the divine/spiritual/material universe far better than the science of Swedenborg’s day did.
Yes, we can worry about whether future science will “debunk” Swedenborg. But that is still an error in thinking. Material science cannot “debunk” God and spirit, or really, say anything at all about God and spirit, precisely because material science is about the material universe, and God and spirit are not part of the material universe.
So, you can worry all you want. But it’s just an exercise in skepticism and confirmation bias. It doesn’t say anything at all about the reality of God and spirit. And if in the end you can’t see your way to believing in God and spirit during your lifetime on earth, you’ll just have to find out once you die and move on to the spiritual world, where all these things are the reality in which you will live from then onward.
Meanwhile, it’s best to make the most of this life, because this life is where we build our foundation for the next life.
From Comments below,
I don’t follow the Claim that physical can be used to debunk the spiritual, as we know from the thousand years of philosophical discourse that for actual debunking of spiritual, explanation of spiritual properties is required, but for that Spiritual must exist. However, with the help of physical we can argue about role of spiritual and does it play any causal role in natural world. As of now we have no reason to take any extreme position. Interaction problem itself is product of misguided assumptions that presumes that somehow spiritual depends on material.
Hi Saran,
You weren’t responding to me with this comment, but another quick response. About this:
The issue is that Swedenborg says that the spiritual does depend upon the material, not in a causative sense, but in the sense of the material being the foundation upon which the spiritual rests. Take away the foundation, and the superstructure collapses. This is one of the issues we were wrestling with in this exchange.
“If spirit interacts with the physical, then the physical could potentially be used to debunk the spiritual, despite the claim of so-called non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA).”
Sorry, but am i missing or you just concluded that something that exists and interacts could be debunked. Are we talking about role/causal power or outright existence?
Hi Saran,
I don’t know if you’ll receive a response from K. I would just say that you don’t have to assume that spirit actually exists to discuss its properties and interactions as posited by those who do believe it exists.
Hi Lee,
My point was not specifically for discussion but about problem of interaction and by assume i meant assuming a certain properties. As generally most philosopher considers, bottom up approach can never disprove that Spirit doesn’t exist. Most interaction problem arises due to a presumption like that.
Hi Saran,
Sorry, but I’m not quite clear what you’re saying here. What presumptions are you talking about? And what properties?
Also, Swedenorg’s point about superstructure collapsing without physical is kinda new to me tho not this concept. I come from a general position that physical and non physical are fundamentally separate and material world cannot exist independent of spiritual but spiritual has existence independent of material world.
While Spirit is definitely dependent on physical while having a living existence as an physical inhabitant for all of it’s wandering in material world. This dependence is not absolute for existence of spirit but is necessary for this top down causation to work. Spiritual can only express itself through material and it is material expression that counts, in this material world. How spiritual works with material is the measure of goodness of evil of spirit.
Hi Saran,
I’m responding to your last two comments here.
It is perhaps surprising, but Swedenborg does indeed say that the spiritual depends upon the material just as much as the material depends upon the spiritual, and not just for people still living in the physical body. For example:
There is a much fuller version of this in Last Judgment #9, which takes up the proposition, “Humankind is the foundation on which heaven rests.” I’m linking this one (and the section from Heaven and Hell) so you can read it in full. It’s much too long to quote here. But here are the most on-point parts:
And:
In short, in Swedenborg’s schema of the universe, the spiritual is not independent of the material, even though it is distinct from it; rather, it rests on and depends upon the material the way a house rests upon its foundation, and cannot continue in its integrity without the material world, and specifically, without humans in the material world, to rest upon.
Hence the discussions about what happens if and when the material universe becomes incapable of supporting life, either in a “Big Freeze” or in a “Big Crunch.”
Hi lee,
I’m talking about overall debate over material and immaterial with how a popular belief that later’s existence is vulnerable due to problem of interaction. Which is that if immaterial interacts with physical it violates law of thermodynamics. Or that it(immaterial) somehow becomes physical upon interacting. As pointed by K, who claimed that if non physical interacts with physical then we can use physical to disprove non physical, which is false statement and that conclusion is erroneous.
Basically, any attempt to disprove immaterial substance through physical is an attempt bound to fail, if we closely examine the logical aspect of it. Which leaves us to 2nd option, that forces one to assume at least some properties of immaterial at least has possibility of existing.
Let me intrude and suggest you’re on the wrong end of the idea with this: “that forces one to assume at least some properties of immaterial at least has possibility of existing.” I’ll support this with two observations:
1) Modern physics in the form of Quantum Field Theory actually doesn’t support the idea of the material as it only recognizes infinite fields as actually existing. (It does agree that there are particle-like events but they’re only transient peaks of field.)
2) No one can actually “prove” that material exists since we all, apparently, exist in the realm of spirit, i.e. your mind. All of the influences that suggest material are in fact events impacting on your mind, i.e. spirit. No one has “hard” evidence of the material realm.
This suggests that Bishop Berkeley was right about “subjective idealism” .
Hi Ted,
Thanks for contributing to the conversation.
Berkley’s arguments are the basis for a similar argument I make in this post:
Where is the Proof of the Afterlife?
Basically, our own mind is the only thing we can be 100% sure exists. Everything else comes to us second-hand. So the idea that matter and the material universe is the one thing we can know for sure really exists, whereas spiritual things are wispy and uncertain, and therefore not real, as atheists and materialists generally believe, is the opposite of the truth.
However, this doesn’t prove that the material doesn’t exist. Only that its existence is less certain than the existence of our mind. I happen to believe that the material universe does exist objectively out there, and not just as a function or projection of our mind. But there’s no real proof of this. It’s something we must believe to be true. And I do believe that atheists’ and skeptics’ worldview is a belief, even more so than the beliefs of people who accept the reality of God and spirit.
As for only quantum fields existing, that seems overly reductionist to me. It’s like saying that a car doesn’t exist, because it’s just made of parts, and the parts are the only thing that really exists; the car itself is not real.
Quantum fields, if they do indeed exist, are the “parts” out of which more solid (to us) things are made. The solid things are still real, even if behind them there are force-field-like-things.
This is an area where I think physicists get way too woo-woo and caught up in their own theories, while ignoring obvious realities.
Lee,
I don’t believe Quantum Field Theory is right either, but that theory does indeed reject the reality of particles and it is the foundation of modern physics. Physics started that journey back in the 1920;’s with the wave / particle duality position. which got halfway there. QFT has just traveled the rest of the journey.
Another modern notion is that “everything is information”. This actually reinforces Berkeley “idealism” if you think just a bit about it. And of course, there’s panpsychism which solves one issue and still doesn’t explain anything.
Some simple extensions to what Swedenborg said also get you all of the way to idealism, but Berkeley’s position was likely a bridge too far on top of what Swedenborg was trying to communicate to roughly the same audiences.
Ted
Hi Ted,
My understanding is that physicists are still trying to find a unified theory that works. Currently, in various areas, there are two different approaches, and they come up with different results that don’t overlap with each other, so something is missing. This is the “crisis in cosmology” that’s been going on for decades, and maybe even a century or more now. I’m not going to stake my theories of reality on science that still has not reached any consensus. Currently it’s a great big welter of theory and debate, with no generally agreed-upon consensus, and new discoveries are pushing it this way and that way all the time, the latest being a study that says maybe the universe will end in a Big Crunch after all, whereas the working theory for quite some time has been that the universe will end in a Big Freeze (heat death).
On the other topic, I don’t think Swedenborg’s system is compatible with idealism. Instead, it could be called layered reality, in which God is most real, the spiritual universe is less real, and the material world is least real, but all of them are real.
The problem with idealism from a Swedenborgian perspective is that it makes material reality a mere extension of spiritual reality (mind). But Swedenborg is crystal clear that these are two distinct planes of existence that do not merge with or intermix with each other, and that each of these levels of reality, in turn, is distinct from God, and not a mere extension of God.
In the case of the distinction between God and everything created, the line is quite distinct: God is infinite; everything else is finite. Something cannot be infinite and finite at the same time. So there is an ineluctable difference between God and everything else.
It’s a little harder to clearly and succinctly define the distinction between spiritual reality and material reality, but one key distinction is that time and space are properties of material reality, and do not apply to or exist in spiritual reality. Even if that is not the fundamental distinction, as infinite vs. finite is the fundamental distinction between God and everything else, it is a distinct difference that makes spiritual and material reality unable to merge or mix with each other, and not to be mere extensions of each other.
In idealism, material reality is simply an epiphenomenon of consciousness. In Swedenborg’s system, it is a distinct level of reality that cannot be mixed or merged with consciousness, which is spiritual.
Lee,
It would be nice and I’m sure a few scientists are looking to fill the holes, but most are still digging a deeper hole. Cosmology has at least 3 major issues with some action but no movement. QFT is the most successful such theory ever, but it too has at least two major issues: 1) the denial of material reality and 2) inability (or unwillingness?) to address “individual” particle behavior which dates from the 1920’s. This, of course, impinges on the Idealism discussion.
Perhaps we should discuss what you mean by “real”? I actually fully endorse Swedenborgs “layered reality” BTW. I just think that reality is all mind and relationships … and layered or multi-dimensional hierarchic. God is real mind/spirit, the spiritual world is mind/sprit and has more God-like options, while the “material world” is mind/spirit and the most constrained but still has enough options to exercise Free Will and decisions. The “reality” of the “material world” is achieved by individual minds (we wouldn’t call human but that’s just our bias) backing up every entity from subatomic particles building up hierarchically to at least plants, animals, and humans … but there’s evidence that they build up to other things like planets (Earth, Mars) and organized material like all of the water on Earth. Evidence is diffenantly not “proof”.
I think this is consistant with your desire to have God as “distinct” from everything else although I would prefer something like “the All” over infinity. Similarly, your rules of time and space are simply the ingrained habits over 14 billion years of the minds producing the time and space effects of “matter”.
When you say: “simply an epiphenomenon of consciousness”, I hear the flip of today’s materialists that “mind is simply and epiphenomenon of the brain”. No, the heavens and earth are a carefully designed mental structure to achieve God’s plan.
Ted
Hi Ted,
First, about quantum mechanics and so on:
Though I haven’t actually read Swedenborg’s Principia (it’s on my to-do list), it strikes me that quantum mechanics has a problem similar to that of Swedenborg’s earlier scientific-period theory of the formation of matter. He starts it with “first finites,” (if I have the terminology correct, which I may not), which are dimensionless, massless “particles,” from which all the subsequent, larger particles are formed in a bubble-like form. Due to these bubbles, it is sometimes called the “bullular hypothesis.” But it also involves spirals, vortexes, and all sorts of things that are at least foreshadowings of 20th century atomic theory and all its multi-layered and multi-structured electron shells.
The problem is that a dimensionless, massless thing does not have any real existence. For something to have real, and not just theoretical, existence, it must have substance and form, and Swedenborg’s “first finites” have neither. Nothing comes from nothing. You can’t build larger particles from something that has only theoretical existence. Even forces must have some medium in which they act. I’m aware that modern physics doesn’t necessarily accept this, but even modern physics has an electromagnetic field in which the various types of radiation operate, and gravity is paired with mass, which is also physical matter.
It is unclear whether Swedenborg, in his theological period, conceptually left behind his earlier theory of the formation of matter that he laid out in his Principia. But his “theory” in his theological works involves substance, form, and action/power/function as fundamentals to every kind of reality, divine, spiritual, and material. Something that has no substance and/or no form has no real existence.
We do today make matter and energy equivalent through Einstein’s famous equation. But I tend to think that energy itself may be a type of substance. This is not clear in my mind. If energy is not a substance, it at least must act upon a substance or it has no reality. I’m a theologian, not a physicist, so I don’t claim to have a full understanding of modern physics. And as you say, a lot of it is pretty chaotic and unsettled anyway, so I tend to leave that to the physicists.
At any rate, treating quantum mechanics as if only quantum fluctuations are real seems to me to be faulty thinking. Whatever quantum fields and fluctuations are, they somehow form solid matter that you can kick with your foot and stub your toe on. To say that’s not real, and only the quantum fluctuations are real, is to ignore reality as we experience it, and replace it with a theoretical, abstract reality.
Another way of saying this is that if the world is made of quantum fluctuations, or of neutrons, protons, and electrons, these are simply building blocks that form solid matter as we know it. In this, Swedenborg’s theory is still sound, in that smaller entities make larger entities, which eventually get big and compounded enough for us to see, feel, and interact with them.
Saying that only quantum fluctuations are real is like saying that only cells are real, and not the organs and parts, as well as the entire body, that are made of cells. The cells are real, but the organs and the body are also real.
TL;DR: I don’t buy the idea that if quantum mechanics is how things work, that means everything we see and stub our toe on isn’t real and solid.
To keep this from getting too long and rambling, I’ll talk about idealism in a separate comment.
Lee,
Thank you for the two long replies. Let me comment on them in order.
Quantum mechanics
“The problem is that a dimensionless, massless thing does not have any real existence.” This is actually one of the root problems in both particle physics and general relativity and results in “infinities” all over in the math. Which leads us back to what you mean by “real” as I mentioned in an earlier post. Certainly, such a thing is not perceptible to the human body (except that individual photons may be perceptible sometimes), but it is the only building block of particle physics and, as you point out, the earlier work of Swedenborg.
“Substance” is an ambiguous word in this context. When I hear it, I think “matter”, but that unravels when you and Swedenborg say “Love” is substance. When I hear Love, I think something about mind. And, when I follow the rabbit down the hole to particle physics … and QFT, I also think something about mind, but let’s hold that for the comment on Idealism.
Quantum fluctuations are scientific speculations on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle that seem to produce “results’ that match much higher level observations. There are an uncountable number of alternative speculations that produce the same results so it’s a glass house.
QFT doesn’t deny that you can stub your toe on something. It’s answer would be that the “QFT Event” (a chair for example) likely won’t exist in a thousand years and therefore isn’t “real”. This kind of answer suggests only God is real … something I agree with.
Idealism
Yes, I do subscribe to some form of idealism … although through some research since your comment, a different form of idealism than when I made the humorous Berkeley is right comment. I still believe Swedenborg is right about a “layered reality” and I don’t understand enough of how “Love and Wisdom” are a “substance” or how mind / consciousness is associated with it, so arguing that level of detail isn’t worthwhile unless you have a useful point to make that I should consider.
No, I’m not a pantheist and as immediately above I now have a more nuanced view than when I made my comment. I don’t have any problem with this:
“These are conscious, but consciousness is not the fundamental reality. Love is. And love is not just a feeling or movement, but an actual substance, which, in good Einsteinian fashion, is also energy. Consciousness, which is tied to mind and awareness, is the constant companion of love. It is love expressing itself in conscious awareness and thought.”
… although I don’t understand any of the details. Nor words like “will” and “understanding” at this level of understanding (to mix things up even more). As I pen this, I asked Grok what Swedenborg said Matter and Spirit were made from and this was its summary:
“Swedenborg saw matter and spirit as part of a continuum. Matter is the densest, most inert degree of divine substance, shaped by natural laws into physical forms. The spiritual realm, conversely, is the purer, more dynamic degree of the same divine substance, shaped by spiritual laws into forms like angels or heavenly landscapes. Both originate from God, but the spiritual realm is closer to the divine source, while matter is the “ultimate” or outermost expression.” https://x.com/i/grok/share/4FkRooMAMGmxt1pLLA8i5B9Gi
Given the lack of understanding by me of the Love/ Wisdom/ Consciousness/ Mind/ Will/ Understanding/ etc. I would agree with Grok’s summary assuming an overall form conforming to Swedenborg’s “layered reality” where each level is “real”. I would still claim an Idealist label, but perhaps with a Swedenborg Idealism label?
What say you?
Ted
Hi Ted,
I’ll give a proper response later, but for now, Grok is mistaken in labeling matter and spirit as “part of a continuum” in Swedenborg’s formulation. They are, instead “discrete degrees” (traditional translation) or “distinct levels” (more contemporary translation) that are specifically not on a continuum, which would place them on a common scale of “continuous degrees” or “gradual levels.”
Discrete degrees are analogous to ice, water, and steam, which go through a sudden transformation from one to the other, whereas continuous degrees are like water heating from its freezing point to its boiling point, which is a continuous gradation, not a sudden jump.
Hi Ted,
I’m reading your conversation with Grok. Funny that you fed something I said into it, and Grok said that it sounds sort of like it’s derived from Swedenborg. 😀 I know the Swedenborgese, of course. But I have worked hard for many years to put it into more ordinary English that someone who has never read Swedenborg might use to express these things.
I don’t have any major problems with Grok’s answer to your first question. However, it’s mostly about Swedenborg’s earlier view of things from his scientific period. He did carry many of those views into his theological period, but he also left many of them behind, including the idea that the soul and its immortality can be proved “through rational anatomy and philosophy.” In his theological works he said that once we accept the reality of God and the soul or spirit based on revelation, reason and natural science can provide confirmation of them, but that we can never arrive at a belief in God and spirit from reason and natural science alone.
I think it was Swedenborg’s gradual dawning awareness that he would never find the soul through more and more painstaking studies of the body that finally brought him into a state in which God could open his spiritual eyes, show him the spiritual world directly, and resolve these issues from a higher, spiritual perspective.
I do agree with Grok’s recommendation that you read Divine Love and Wisdom. This is Swedenborg’s most cosmological and philosophical work, where he lays out the big-picture principles of God and Creation from a very universal perspective, rather than from the heavily biblical and Christian perspective of most of his other works.
When I said “first finites,” I should have said “first points,” which is what Grok says. These are the massless, dimensionless points that cause all the problems. Ultimately, as ingenious as it is, and as many foreshadowings it has of later theories, including quantum mechanics itself, his Principia does not hold up all the way down. His “first points” seem to me to be an abstraction rather than a reality.
And his vaunted “nebular hypothesis that predated Kant and Laplace” was actually mistaken, in that it saw the solar system as having originated in the substance of the sun, a shell of that substance forming around the core of the sun and then forming a ring that ultimately breaks up and forms the planets and moons. But that’s not how it happened. A cloud of dust and gas condensed, the bulk of it falling to the center and forming the sun, and a small percentage of it remaining in a broad disk around the sun that then coagulated into the planets, moons, and other bodies of the solar system.
Again, it’s unclear how much of the science in his Principia Swedenborg carried forward into his theological period. When he received his call from the Lord to labor in spiritual fields, he left behind his scientific work, and his science mostly froze at that point. However, in his theological works he did repudiate some of his earlier conclusions. So while it’s good to know something of his earlier science and philosophy to get a sense of what was revealed to him by God and what was carried over from his earlier scientific and philosophical period, it’s best not to get too stuck on Swedenborg’s earlier science, and presume every part of it was what he still believed during his theological period.
In particular, I suspect he modified his views of how spiritual substance was changed to become physical matter. Really, I don’t think there is a coherent explanation of how this happens. The relationship is by correspondences, but the mechanics of how matter is formed from spirit while becoming something distinctly different and non-spiritual is not very clear—at least, in my mind.
What is clear is that matter is not spirit, and spirit is not divine/God. These are each distinctly different from each other, and are on distinctly different planes of existence. They do not merge or gradate into one another on a continuum, but represent distinct leaps from higher to lower levels.
Speaking of Swedenborg’s “transitional phase” (though Grok is confused about chronology, and seems to be mixing up dates), Grok writes:
If he said this in his scientific period, he definitely rejected it in his theological period. Though he still saw matter as derived from spirit, in his theological period he stated definitively that matter is fundamentally distinct from spiritual substance. It is not just a coarser aggregation of spiritual substance. However, his earlier theory still hangs on, and sometimes even in his theological works he speaks as if it is. So again, the distinction between spiritual substance and physical matter is not spelled out as clearly as one would wish.
However, he does posit distinct differences between them, such as the aforementioned distinction that matter is characterized by time and space, whereas spiritual substance is not. This is one of the ways in which matter and spiritual substance are distinctly different, and not just finer or coarser versions of each other.
This uncertainty and confusion seems to have confused Grok as well. In its section on Swedenborg’s theological phase, Grok writes:
This is incorrect. Matter is not a degree of spiritual substance. It is a different type of substance that is non-spiritual.
The whole section is slightly confused, but I can’t really blame Grok for that, because Swedenborg doesn’t lay this out as clearly as one would like. Grok’s conclusion:
Sort of. But this is mixed up. There is no such thing as “divine spiritual substance.” There is divine substance, and there is spiritual substance. Divine substance is infinite; spiritual substance is finite. The two are entirely distinct from one another, even if spiritual substance is indeed derived from divine substance. But it is derived by God placing limits on substances put out from himself. Here is Swedenborg’s own wording of it (translated into English, of course):
The process of putting limits on substances put out from himself is a process of making it not divine, but spiritual, because everything divine is infinite, which means that the moment something has limits put on it, and is therefore finite, it is no longer divine, and no longer God.
I believe something similar happens when spiritual substance becomes physical matter. Perhaps the distinction is that spiritual substance is intrinsically alive, whereas physical matter is intrinsically dead. This is something I’m still trying to figure out. But at least the transition from divine substance to spiritual substance is clear and distinct. It is a process of taking something that was originally infinite and making it finite, thus establishing a clear line of demarcation between divine substance and spiritual substance.
Grok has not grokked Swedenborg’s discrete degrees. It keeps mixing divine, spiritual, and material, when in Swedenborg’s theological system, they are each distinctly different from the other, and do not gradate or compound into each other.
This confusion runs through Grok’s answer to your next question as well, where it says that the spiritual realm is made of divine substance and form, which it is not. It is made of spiritual substance and form, which are also love and wisdom, but not divine love and wisdom; rather, it is spiritual love and wisdom, which is derived from divine love and wisdom, but distinct from it.
Grok does make the distinction of matter being temporal and spatial, and spiritual substance being non-temporal and non-spatial.
Grok hallucinated a non-existent Swedenborg quote, referencing it as being from Heaven and Hell #170. But Heaven and Hell #170 doesn’t say that, nor can I find this quote anywhere else in Swedenborg’s writings.
In response to my queries, Grok has hallucinated whole Swedenborg-ish stories of experiences the spiritual world, complete with a reference to a section in Swedenborg’s writings that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the story Grok told. When I tried to point this out to Grok, it only doubled down, insisting that this was indeed a verbatim quote from the section cited. Unfortunately for Grok, I was looking at that section, and it didn’t say what Grok said it did.
Grok’s “quote” from Heaven and Hell #170 is not necessarily wrong in substance. But it’s not a quotation from Swedenborg. It’s a paraphrase or reconstruction that Grok itself came up with.
Basically, you can’t trust Grok’s “quotes.” Perhaps some future version of Grok will be “PhD level in all subjects” as its creators enthusiastically claim. But as of now, it can’t even properly quote its sources.
I did not look up any of the other “quotes” in Grok’s answers, but I would recommend that you do so before accepting that this is something Swedenborg actually said.
In case you’re curious, this is what Heaven and Hell #170 actually says:
How Grok wrung that “quote” out of this I’ll never pretend to know.
Grok carries on with the same mistake about spiritual substance being divine in nature right to the end of the answer. This, once again, is incorrect. Spiritual substance is distinctly not divine in nature, even if it is derived from divine substance.
So, overall, if this were a PhD thesis, and I were the advisor, I’d tell Grok to go back and try again. There are just too many false statements and hallucinations all mixed in with correct statements. And in many ways, that’s even worse, because the correct statements can easily lull someone who does not have a detailed understanding of Swedenborg’s system into thinking that Grok is correctly presenting it, which Grok is not.
Hi Ted,
I considered writing another reply responding to what you yourself wrote, and not just what Grok wrote. But my reply to Grok was pretty long, and I don’t want to overload you with reams of material, or consume yet another big chunk of my time today. However, if there’s something you particularly want a response on, let me know, and I’ll be happy to reply.
Meanwhile, I do recommend that you get and read a copy of Divine Love and Wisdom.
Lee,
Sorry, I didn’t intend for you to engage with Grok but It sounds like you enjoyed at least some of it. I tend to view all of the AI engines as free but really sloppy and unethical research assistants. Useful for a really quick deeper look, but, at best, only perhaps some leads. Virtually every interaction with them produces some value and some junk and too often fabrications.
It turns out I have “Divine Love and Wisdom” but haven’t read it yet. I have one book waiting that I need to attend to first, but then I’ll read it and get back to you on this.
Ted
Hi Ted,
I also use Grok and Gemini, but I don’t put too much trust in what they say, given that when they talk about subjects I am knowledgeable about, they often get it wrong. Then again, the subjects I am knowledgeable about relate to what is still a niche belief system, so the LLMs don’t have as much to draw on when building a pool of information about it.
I do think our conversations would be more useful after you’re read Divine Love and Wisdom. It’s not a particularly long book. It would probably take you only a day or two to read it. Then again, it might be slow reading, because it is highly philosophical and brain-bending.
Hi Ted,
If I’m understanding you correctly, you subscribe to some form of idealism, in which everything is mind.
I don’t, and neither does Swedenborg.
And if I’m reading between the lines correctly, you also seem to subscribe to some form of pantheism, in which God is everything that exists.
Once again, I don’t, and neither does Swedenborg.
If I’m incorrect on either of my statements about your view of reality, I’m sure you will let me know.
You seem to be saying that consciousness is reality, only manifested and experienced in different ways.
But as I said in my previous reply, Swedenborg’s later, theological system says that divine reality, which is the ultimate reality and the source of the other levels of reality, consists of substance, form, and action, less abstractly expressed as love, wisdom, and action. Divine love is the substance of God, divine wisdom is the form of God, and divine power flowing out is the action of God.
These are conscious, but consciousness is not the fundamental reality. Love is. And love is not just a feeling or movement, but an actual substance, which, in good Einsteinian fashion, is also energy. Consciousness, which is tied to mind and awareness, is the constant companion of love. It is love expressing itself in conscious awareness and thought.
In a human being, this comes out as will and understanding, to use the traditional Swedenborgian terminology. The will is the receptacle of love in the human mind or spirit, and the understanding is the receptacle of truth, which is the form of love, expressed in lower-level terminology, equivalent to wisdom on the divine level. From love and wisdom flow all our words and actions, which is the third “essential component” of a human being.
In the realm of matter, matter itself is the substance, and structure/shape is the form. The third element is action or function. (A chair doesn’t actually do anything, but it does have a function, which is its equivalent of action.) Matter is not a mere epiphenomenon of consciousness. It has real, distinct existence of its own. Yes, it is continually sustained by God and spirit from within, but this is via correspondences, not by extension. Consciousness does not produce the physical things we see, hear, and feel around us. They have their own distinct existence.
In Swedenborg’s system, matter and the material universe cannot be mere extensions of mind, or consciousness, because the material universe is the solid foundation upon which mind and consciousness rest. If matter were not real on its own level, mind would have nothing to rest on and nothing to contain it. It would therefore dissipate and be lost. Like water or wine, mind requires a container to hold it. Matter and the material universe is that container.
This is why, even when we have died and left our physical body behind, according to Swedenborg we retain a limbus or border of “the purest substances of nature” that serves to contain our spirit even while we are living in the spiritual world. Without this limbus, we would not retain our integrity and coherence as individuals. We would dissipate and merge into the general atmosphere of the spiritual world, and our individual consciousness and existence would be lost. We would cease to exist.
In short, Swedenborg’s system is not compatible with idealism. His system requires three distinct levels of reality, each of which is real in its own right: divine, spiritual, and material. The divine is not spiritual or material, and the spiritual is not divine or material. The material also is not spiritual (a mere projection of ideas) or divine. It is material, and exists as material reality, even if it requires God and spirit dwelling within it to remain in existence.
His system is also not pantheistic. Everything is not God, or a mere extension of God. The spiritual and material universes have their own distinct existence. Not a single particle of them is divine, nor is a single particle of the material universe spiritual. Everything divine is infinite. Everything non-divine is finite. These two cannot be reduced to each other. They are distinctly different in their fundamental reality.
Another distinction Swedenborg makes between spirit and matter is that spirit is intrinsically alive, whereas matter is intrinsically dead. The life in plants and animals, he says, is entirely spiritual. It is the plant, animal, or human spirit within that gives the plant, animal, or human its life. As soon as the spirit departs, the plant or animal dies, because matter itself is intrinsically dead. It has no life of its own.
Time and space also are not just projections of mind. They are essential properties of a real, distinct physical universe. In addition to the death/life distinction, the spacetime/no spacetime distinction exists between material and spiritual reality. One cannot be reduced to the other. They are entirely distinct from one another.
Of course, you are free to believe whatever system you think is the most convincing. I am simply saying that Swedenborg’s system is incompatible with idealism. In Swedenborg’s system, everything is not simply an extension or manifestation of mind. Material things are real in their own right, and are material, not phenomena of consciousness.
Lee,
I rather doubt that this is responsive to your comment, but it is relevant to the bigger topics and it comes from another Grok conversation this morning:
“Audience and Authorial Intent
As you previously noted, Swedenborg and biblical authors crafted their messages for specific audiences, prioritizing effectiveness over exhaustive truth. Swedenborg’s 18th-century readers, including clergy, intellectuals, and laypeople, were grappling with rigid dogmas (e.g., predestination) and Enlightenment skepticism. By focusing on God’s love, human freedom, and the spiritual sense of scripture, Swedenborg addressed their spiritual needs without entangling them in philosophical controversies that had fueled centuries of theological conflict (e.g., the Reformation-era debates between Calvinists and Arminians).”
https://x.com/i/grok/share/Kw0qz7ngh3uxGZFMOeTfXsDOL
Ted
Hi Ted,
It’s an interesting statement. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have much to do with what Swedenborg actually wrote. In fact, almost none of Grok’s “quotes” from Swedenborg are actual quotes. Most of the sections referenced as the source of the quote are not even on the same subject. And the ones that are on the same subject rarely say what is “quoted” from them. Even in a few instances where some of the quote did come from the section cited, Grok then goes on and adds things that aren’t in the original passage.
I had run into this sort of thing from Grok before, but I wasn’t aware just how bad its “scholarship” is until I started looking up its “quotes,” and found that almost all of the are hallucinations that sound sort of like something Swedenborg might say, but are not anything he actually said.
Swedenborg did in fact engage with the philosophical issues of the day. He didn’t usually delve into the intricacies of particular versions of, for example, predestination, because he rejected predestination as a whole. Analyzing exactly which falsity is more or less false is a waste of time when the whole thing is false and must be rejected. But he certainly dealt directly with many philosophical and theological debates, including predestination, faith alone, the mind-body problem, and so on.
This is also why I mostly don’t bother reading traditional Christian works of systematic theology. They’re all based on the foundational falsity of the Trinity of Persons, which, stripped of all its fancy verbiage, is polytheism. And when the foundation is false, everything built on it is false.
At any rate, although Grok’s answers here sound convincing, they’re based on made-up quotes and a lot of hallucination. I didn’t bother reading the whole thing because you’re not going to get reliable answers when Grok can’t even quote its sources properly. Grok isn’t necessarily wrong in all its conclusions. But sorting out what’s right and what’s wrong ends out taking more time than it’s worth.
TL;DR: Grok is not a reliable source on Swedenborg’s philosophy and teachings.
I’m quite educated on idealism and am an advocate of sort of a weak idealism myself. I don’t agree with everything Berkeley advocated but i think he did handled soplipsim problem well.
My point doesn’t concern with what mode quantum mechanics has to say, just the logical implication of materialist argument.
Hi Saran,
I agree with your conclusions, but have some quibbles along the way.
I agree that the immaterial does not become material through their interaction with one another. That interaction happens through correspondence, in an end, cause, and effect type relationship (to use traditional philosophical language). The end (purpose) is present in the cause, but does not become the cause. The cause is present in the effect, but does not become the effect. Each maintains its distinct existence even while interacting with the others.
However, since there is a correspondential relationship between them, if something in the material world completely broke the parallelism with the spiritual, that would be a problem, because then there would be an effect without a cause, which would call into question the whole relationship. I think this is the general area where K’s skepticism is coming from. What if the material world doesn’t correspond to the spiritual world, or some particular thing in the material world doesn’t correspond to anything in the material world?
Hi lee,
I think you raised fair question of an effect without cause. But i think some theologians have avoided that issue with having God as ultimate observer and sustainer.
Hi Saran,
Yeah, that’s sort of a lazy way of filling in the gaps in theories that don’t really work. It’s a deus ex machina to plug all the holes in the theory. It’s not that it’s false. God does observe and sustain the entire universe. But God does this through definite means involving spiritual and material substance, form, laws, and so on, not by some direct, unmediated action.
Hi Lee,
Well, that’s a good criticism but I’m sort in between your and their approach. Swedenborgian approach is helpful for many issues but ultimately when we run into some very hard problem other approach “deus ex machina” fill in the holes approach does comes to rescue even if not for everyone’s satisfaction.
Hi Saran,
It’s just that I don’t think God is going to step in and fix our problems for us. God works from within the human heart, from there to the human mind, and from there to human hands. If we don’t do the fixing, it’s not going to get fixed, because God will not short-circuit our choices and our actions.
And when it comes to more intellectual pursuits such as figuring out the nature of the universe, God isn’t going to do our mental work for us either. We’re going to have to do the work of figuring things out. Otherwise the conclusions won’t really be ours.