Is Christianity compatible with Determinism?

[Skip]

I know exactly what each of you is going to do and say, feel and think, every moment of your pathetic tiny lives. I know which of you are imbued with grace and which are pre-condemned to eternal suffering. But I'll just make you all go through the motions of living and choosing.

I know how many will declare for Jesus as their personal saviour (all the ones who are already saved) and how many will reject him (the ones that are already lost) and how many will hear his name and say "Who?". But I'll make him suffer crucifixion anyway and throw in the crusades as a bonus.
Because I can.

[thedoc]

"Omnipotent" is not inconsistent with the ability to create free agents, .

Wrong. Being all powerful is also the power to know. Knowing what character a person is in the act of creation, necessitates foreknowledge of their success or failure as "Christians", or whatever religion you wish to saddle them with. If god has made me the way I am then he will have know since the beginning of time that I shall die a sinner.

In any event a "free agent" is a contradiction. To be free-will is to be free of your agency, and a denial of experience, learning, volition and the ability to choose. A choice not determined by experience is pure capriciousness, and useless.

There seems to be a problem with the term "free will" and "free agent" and each person has their own peculiar definition and they refuse to accept or acknowledge that another persons definition may be just as valid.

Being all knowing is not the same as causing something to happen. The question about God being Omnipotent, "can God create a stone that is too heavy for God to lift?" is a meaningless question as it only relates to Human experience and not to God's experience or abilities. Too many people confuse "can do" and "will do", the capacity to do something does not translate in the willingness to do it, and the unwillingness to do something does not translate to the inability to do it. If God is God, God chooses what and how to do things, and people do not tell God what to do or when to do it.

[Immanuel Can]

There seems to be a problem with the term "free will" and "free agent" and each person has their own peculiar definition and they refuse to accept or acknowledge that another persons definition may be just as valid.

I'm not sure there CAN be much of a problem, thedoc. After all, "free" is not being debated, just "agent." The standard definition of agent does not specify "free" or "determined." For example, Webster's says an "agent" is simply "one that acts or exerts power." Oxford says, "The doer of an action, typically expressed as the subject of an active verb or in a by phrase with a passive verb." Wiki says, "the participant of a situation that carries out the action in this situation," and so on.

No dictionary specifies that the term "agents" can only be used of predetermined actors. The common use of the word simply does not entail that. So where's the controversy? And what would need to be conceded as "valid" about a very straightforward misunderstanding the word?

Being all knowing is not the same as causing something to happen. The question about God being Omnipotent, "can God create a stone that is too heavy for God to lift?" is a meaningless question as it only relates to Human experience and not to God's experience or abilities.

It's worse than that, actually: it's a self-contradiction. The question itself employs both the "can" and "cannot" postulates of the same referent, and thus obviously articulates a self-contradiction. It's literally a nonsense question. And, as C.S. Lewis has so astutely said, "Nonsense is always nonsense: even when one uses it to apply to God."

Anyway, no knowledgeable Christian is going to be so ill-informed as to suggest that "omnipotent" entails, "the ability to do nonsense," or "the ability to do that which is contrary to one's own character and purposes." Moreover, the Bible actually claims there are several things that God, however powerful He may be, simply does not do. He does not lie, according to the Bible, He does not sin, and He does not deny Himself, for instance. That's why your point below is well-taken:

Too many people confuse "can do" and "will do", the capacity to do something does not translate in the willingness to do it, and the unwillingness to do something does not translate to the inability to do it. If God is God, God chooses what and how to do things, and people do not tell God what to do or when to do it.

Indeed. Even an Atheist would have to recognize that IF there were a God, He would certainly be in control of His own volition -- analytically, He would have to be, or else not be the Supreme Being, and hence not God...so that would be definitionally obvious. It's just that the Atheist would have to say no such Being exists.

[thedoc]

There seems to be a problem with the term "free will" and "free agent" and each person has their own peculiar definition and they refuse to accept or acknowledge that another persons definition may be just as valid.

I'm not sure there CAN be much of a problem, thedoc. After all, "free" is not being debated, just "agent." The standard definition of agent does not specify "free" or "determined." For example, Webster's says an "agent" is simply "one that acts or exerts power." Oxford says, "The doer of an action, typically expressed as the subject of an active verb or in a by phrase with a passive verb." Wiki says, "the participant of a situation that carries out the action in this situation," and so on.

No dictionary specifies that the term "agents" can only be used of predetermined actors. The common use of the word simply does not entail that. So where's the controversy? And what would need to be conceded as "valid" about a very straightforward misunderstanding the word?

I should have added "Just as valid to them." there seem to be some on this forum who do not share as clear a definition of terms as you. Hence there is disagreement in the dialogue.

PS, sometimes in my effort to get a thought typed and posted, I neglect to finish the thought.

[Immanuel Can]

PS, sometimes in my effort to get a thought typed and posted, I neglect to finish the thought.

Ha! I think we all do this. Fair enough.

And I concede your point: "to them." Quite so. But it helps us avoid a lot of misunderstandings if we can agree on the terms with which we hope to furnish our premises.

[Hobbes' Choice]

Wrong. Being all powerful is also the power to know. Knowing what character a person is in the act of creation, necessitates foreknowledge of their success or failure as "Christians", or whatever religion you wish to saddle them with. If god has made me the way I am then he will have know since the beginning of time that I shall die a sinner.

Well, I hesitate to point it out, but that's actually a non-sequitur. God might fully know what you would do. It wouldn't automatically mean He made you do it.

You area not really thinking this through.
God made me; thus he made me to do what I do. He has to know that.

Foreknowledge isn't determinism.

It is for a God. In fact they are inseparable.

That's the kind of distinction that even the Calvinists recognize. However, they think that both determinism and foreknowledge are true, even though they can see that the latter doesn't entail the former in any necessary way. They fully recognize what non-Calvinists are saying: that God foreknows which choices will be made, but does not force us to make them. They just think that's wrong.

You area being ridiculous. As a new born I am created by God into a world of his choosing, with characteristics of his choosing. God needs no force, the die is cast.

To illustrate, I'm sure when you saw a reply from me, you already knew I would disagree. We have had sufficient prior conversations to give you foreknowledge of that. But did your knowing make me disagree? Or did the fact that you were clearly able to predict my future action constitute any cause of why I did it? Clearly not, as I'm sure you recognize.

And if I foreknew, at this precise moment, that you would be upset with this answer, and if I knew you would soon respond, would my knowing what you will do have any efficacy in making you do it? I think you'd be quick to say no.

In any event a "free agent" is a contradiction. To be free-will is to be free of your agency, and a denial of experience, learning, volition and the ability to choose. A choice not determined by experience is pure capriciousness, and useless.

It's not, actually. "Determined choice" is certainly a contradiction in terms, I'll grant you that; but "free-will" and "free agency" are essentially synonymous. One can use either term safely.

An "agent" refers simply to someone who performs an action. "Free" or "determined" are merely two contrary adjectives used to describe the cause of the action: i.e. was it the agent's own volition, or was it the material preconditions of the agent that made him do what he did? There is no bias in favour of one or the other inherent in the word "agent" itself.

Choices have to be determined, else they are meaningless.

[Immanuel Can]

You area not really thinking this through.
God made me; thus he made me to do what I do. He has to know that.

"Know," yes: "make," no. Consider what happens when one makes a child. One is 100% the proximal cause of the child's existence. What's more, together with one's spouse, one is 100% the source of that child's constitution. But once that child is born, it starts to make some decisions for itself.

Foreknowledge isn't determinism.

It is for a God. In fact they are inseparable.

That's the Calvinist position, alright.

It's also the Atheist position. Consider that if there are no entities in this universe but natural laws and materials, whether chemicals, energy and so on, then the Atheist's own volition is also an illusion. His decisions are all merely products of purely material causes, commencing with whatever impersonal force or law created the Big Bang.

But honestly, I don't think anyone really lives consistently with that...whether Calvinists or Atheists. Because if they did, they would not bother debating volition. After all, it's an illusion, to them.

Likewise, what a person "believes," whether he is a Theist or Atheist, is nothing but the end of a long chain of purely material causes and physical laws. It is merely incidental what one happens to believe at any time. Thus it cannot be genuinely changed. The Atheist who stays an Atheist was predestined to do so. The Theist who stays a Theist likewise. But the convert from one position to the other was also predestined to convert. He or she did not choose anything.

If so, what are we discussing? Neither you nor I can possibly change our minds, except in ways that we were predestined to appear to "change" them anyway.

So everybody who debates, everybody who does philosophy, is, by his or her actions, denying determinism. He or she is acting as though choice exists, arguments can make a differences, and minds can change. If he or she didn't assume that, he or she would simply be irrational to undertake to argue at all.

Choices have to be determined, else they are meaningless.

Actually, if they are predetermined by impersonal forces or forced upon us by the Supreme Being, they are not genuinely "choices" at all. We didn't make them. They're not any kind of product of our decisions. And thus, determined choices are meaningless...they're not even "choices."

That's the truth.

[Obvious Leo]

I'm not very interested in the argument but I have a useful contribution to make to it nevertheless. Some of you guys are conflating determinism with pre-determinism as if these were synonymous constructs but they aren't. Determinism simply means that effects must be preceded by causes in an orderly and self-generative fashion but pre-determinism means that this cause and effect relationship is being determined according to some over-arching plan.

If I walk out into my garden and a tree branch falls on my head it might very well break my skull. There will be an entire chain of causes responsible for this event but the fact that my skull is broken is simply because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. My fractured skull was caused to occur but this doesn't mean my head was busted open for a reason.

Consider the weather. It might rain tomorrow and it might not. It it rains tomorrow then it rains because the weather patterns are such that this event has been caused to occur. However whether or not it rains tomorrow is utterly impossible to predict beyond a finite order of probability. This is not because the weather is not completely deterministic but because the cascade of causes and effects which will determine tomorrow's weather are utterly unknowable in advance. The truth about determinism is that reality just makes it up as it goes along. We live in a "shit happens" universe.

[Skip]

I very much doubt any believers will buy the idea that God doesn't have an agenda.

[Obvious Leo]

I very much doubt any believers will buy the idea that God doesn't have an agenda.

This is why the Christian fundamentalists are so justifiably freaked out about evolutionary theory. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever why homo sapiens should have won the chocolates in the race to the top of the tree of sentience on planet earth. In the "shit happens" universe we just happened to be in the right place at the right time and the rest, as they say, is history. This leaves precious little wriggle-room for a creator with an agenda which homo is supposedly a part of.

This is an analogy which I often use in refutation of the Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle (CRAP), a logical fallacy still beloved by many physicists. The existence of skip is an event of the most astonishing unlikelihood. Of all the human beings who Mr and Mrs skip could have conceived in their long-ago act of love do you find it remarkable that it was YOU who came into existence, rather than some other person, or are you perfectly satisfied that there's nothing in the least bit remarkable about this because that's just the way it happened? Is your existence a phenomenon of such staggering improbability that all the human beings who you are NOT must also exist somewhere in a parallel universe just so your own existence in this one can be accounted for.

For some inscrutable reason this logic seems to be beyond the grasp of many physicists. Although the number is on the decline there is still a considerable clique amongst the priesthood who hold the CRAP as a canonical doctrine. The only possible way to account for the fact that the universe is the way it is rather than some other way is to assume that all the universes which this universe is NOT must also exist somewhere. Therefore the god-folk are not the only ones who manage to conflate determinism with pre-determinism.

[thedoc]

I very much doubt any believers will buy the idea that God doesn't have an agenda.

This is why the Christian fundamentalists are so justifiably freaked out about evolutionary theory. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever why homo sapiens should have won the chocolates in the race to the top of the tree of sentience on planet earth. In the "shit happens" universe we just happened to be in the right place at the right time and the rest, as they say, is history. This leaves precious little wriggle-room for a creator with an agenda which homo is supposedly a part of.

This is an analogy which I often use in refutation of the Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle (CRAP), a logical fallacy still beloved by many physicists. The existence of skip is an event of the most astonishing unlikelihood. Of all the human beings who Mr and Mrs skip could have conceived in their long-ago act of love do you find it remarkable that it was YOU who came into existence, rather than some other person, or are you perfectly satisfied that there's nothing in the least bit remarkable about this because that's just the way it happened? Is your existence a phenomenon of such staggering improbability that all the human beings who you are NOT must also exist somewhere in a parallel universe just so your own existence in this one can be accounted for.

For some inscrutable reason this logic seems to be beyond the grasp of many physicists. Although the number is on the decline there is still a considerable clique amongst the priesthood who hold the CRAP as a canonical doctrine. The only possible way to account for the fact that the universe is the way it is rather than some other way is to assume that all the universes which this universe is NOT must also exist somewhere. Therefore the god-folk are not the only ones who manage to conflate determinism with pre-determinism.

I have heard this sort of argument about the improbability of life developing in this Universe or on this planet. The fact is that there may have been many Universes and only one of them needed to have the right conditions for life, just as there are many planets orbiting many different stars and any one of them, or several of them could have the right conditions for life. We just happen to be on this one, nothing special, just the luck of the draw. So when someone quotes the odds of how improbable life is on this planet and isn't it extraordinary, just laugh at them because they probably wouldn't understand that life was inevitable, somewhere.

[Lacewing]

I very much doubt any believers will buy the idea that God doesn't have an agenda.

This is why the Christian fundamentalists are so justifiably freaked out about evolutionary theory. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever why homo sapiens should have won the chocolates in the race to the top of the tree of sentience on planet earth.

And it seems beyond all reason for humans to think that any god... or cosmic truth... or all-that-is could POSSIBLY be in any limited/specific form (or have any limited/specific agenda) based on human-specific limitations and understanding. It's like ants thinking that god is a giant ant, and dotes only on them. And yet, humans create such elaborate fabrications of that very kind, claiming to know the unknowable... and defining the undefinable... all based on their own narrow, primitive scope. It seems so belittling and child-like to bring it all down to human terms, which essentially glorifies ourselves more than anything else.

[Skip]

An omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent ultimate deity made the whole universe, or maybe lots and lots of universes and let me be born on this improbable planet against those staggering odds, then the whole enterprise has to be about me. Obviously.

[Immanuel Can]

The fact is that there may have been many Universes and only one of them needed to have the right conditions for life, just as there are many planets orbiting many different stars and any one of them, or several of them could have the right conditions for life. We just happen to be on this one, nothing special, just the luck of the draw. So when someone quotes the odds of how improbable life is on this planet and isn't it extraordinary, just laugh at them because they probably wouldn't understand that life was inevitable, somewhere.

This argument is premised on a mathematical error, though, thedoc.

It presupposes a universe of unlimited size and variety (which we shall accept, since it isn't all that unreasonable a postulate, even though we still need to explain universal expansion; but let that be) coupled with a limited set of ways in which that unlimited universe can be.

It has to postulate the situation this way, because if it doesn't, then the massive size of the universe does not do anything statistically to make any one outcome any more likely to occur or recur. But if, as an unlimited universe makes necessary, there are unlimited variable qualities within that universe, then the size of the universe ceases to help with probability issues of life existing -- every outcome is just as unlikely as every other...and all are (mathematically speaking) infinitely unlikely.

That puts us back to square one, and we again have to ask why we have the variables we do, since there are an infinite set of other ways we could have been.

In other words, no life need have existed anywhere at any time. So again, we have to ask why any exists here.

[thedoc]

The fact is that there may have been many Universes and only one of them needed to have the right conditions for life, just as there are many planets orbiting many different stars and any one of them, or several of them could have the right conditions for life. We just happen to be on this one, nothing special, just the luck of the draw. So when someone quotes the odds of how improbable life is on this planet and isn't it extraordinary, just laugh at them because they probably wouldn't understand that life was inevitable, somewhere.

This argument is premised on a mathematical error, though, thedoc.

It presupposes a universe of unlimited size and variety (which we shall accept, since it isn't all that unreasonable a postulate, even though we still need to explain universal expansion; but let that be) coupled with a limited set of ways in which that unlimited universe can be.

It has to postulate the situation this way, because if it doesn't, then the massive size of the universe does not do anything statistically to make any one outcome any more likely to occur or recur. But if, as an unlimited universe makes necessary, there are unlimited variable qualities within that universe, then the size of the universe ceases to help with probability issues of life existing -- every outcome is just as unlikely as every other...and all are (mathematically speaking) infinitely unlikely.

That puts us back to square one, and we again have to ask why we have the variables we do, since there are an infinite set of other ways we could have been.

In other words, no life need have existed anywhere at any time. So again, we have to ask why any exists here.

I think you missed the one point, and that is that we don't know that other Universes do or do not exist parallel to our own, nor do we know that other Universes did or did not exist before this one. In an infinite regress there could have been any number of Universes prior to the one we are in, and each could have had slightly different properties. Given the infinite number of possibilities it is all but inevitable that a Universe would arise with just the right conditions for life, and in that Universe, a planet in just the right location relative to it's Sun. I am not suggesting that this Universe has many different conditions and some are suitable for life, but that this Universe has the conditions that allow life to exist and may have been preceded by Universes that were not suitable for life to exist.