The capability to sin

[Willum]

Are there any other applications of freewill other then to sin?
Without freewill, we would be living God’s will.

Making freewill a very dubious gift indeed.

So, in God granting freewill, was there any other opportunity or benefit to it, other then the capability and eventuality of sin?

If you could choose to live in God’s will, without freewill, would you?

[Miles]

[Replying to bjs1 in post #21]

So apparently I’m going to have to repeat this and repeat this and repeat this.

But doing good is one thing, but it is not exclusive with singing. If there was one sin, it from Adam, it condemned humanity.

So what good was it?

You may repeat that endlessly; it doesn’t change the fact that an answer has been given you have not addressed it.

The “good” is the ability to do good. Without free will we can never do anything good.

This suggests that without free will everything we did would be bad. EVERYTHING! No good whatsoever.

Let me try one more way of explaining this. Without free will we are, morally speaking, like stones. A stone is neither good nor evil.

Which is why some religions seemingly need the concept of free will so badly, so they have reason to blame.

A stone can be used to build a hospital and it can be used to bash a man’s head in. The stone is has done nothing right or wrong in either case.

BINGO! Although the stone (person) should never be credited or blamed. Sounds about right to me.

Without free will we would be like that stone. We would not be able to do anything evil, but we would also not be able to do anything good.

Why? Why need it be evil and not good that you would have to do? . . . . . . Ah, yes, the fiction to keep the troops in line. No need to give any reason, simply pronouncing it evil is adequate. Why? Because it's what the church has declared. PERIOD! End of discussion. .. (Although, to tell the truth I don't think this is anything the church thought up, but something you have.)

If you don’t care about doing what is good then that’s fine. However, if morality matters then free will is a necessity.

But WHY? You keep making the claim but refusing to explain the why of it. Why couldn't we do good even if we lack free will?


.

[William]

[Replying to bjs1 in post #48]

The problem with bringing morality into the argument is that it supposes that the will is related to notions of good and evil.
Those notions came after the fact of the will.

Indeed, it was the will which brought the notions of good and evil into the mix, whereas your argument appears to branch from the premise that it was the other way around.

That good and evil existed before the will did.

Actually, I would describe them as interdependent. Morality cannot exist without free will. Free will is meaningless without morality.

This is one of the reasons that Christians often talk about “moral freedom” instead of the more general “free will.” The language points more explicitly to the connection.

Moral freedom doesn't say anything different, because morals are specific to human will and human will is specific to the constraints the environment places upon human beings.

Therefore will and morality are interdependent upon the environment which dictates the terms and conditions.

The idea that human beings evolved into the knowledge of having will and shaping morals is aligned with the environment, whereas the idea that humans were instructed by a creator- entity not to do something which would gain them knowledge of how to survive in said environment, is counter-intuitive and unhelpful for that.

The story itself has more to do with the idea that human beings are observed to do things with their wills which attempt to defy truthfulness, the results of which are also observed to be - usually - counter-productive.

Having the ability to understand good from evil is moral-based and evidently useful in human survival.

Essentially this means that without the ability to form morals, human beings can not survive in the environment.

This contradicts the story that has it that the knowledge itself meant that humans would not survive.

After all - the gods of the story had the same knowledge, and by all accounts they did not suffer death because of the knowledge. [Genesis 3 - 22]

So - in relation to the knowledge, the will can chose how to apply the knowledge, but the knowledge itself appears to be subject to the shifting winds of morality.

It is therefore not full knowledge, [known instinctively and rationally] but learned knowledge and as such, aligns with what we know about how things actually evolved on this planet, rather than going along with the idea that extraterrestrial beings terraformed the planet and seeded life into it, and then instructed a pair of humans on what they should and should not do with their wills.

[William]

[Replying to Miles in post #51]

Why couldn't we do good even if we lack free will?

The question you asked is still based in morality.

If we lacked will, we would not be a part of the life that exerts its will into the environment.

Since we are part of that life, our will is defined through the experience, just as our morals are.

How can we 'do good' if we don't know what 'doing good' means?

How can we know what 'doing good' means, if we do not have will?

The robot argument falls to this idea, because to be a programmed thing, one can be programmed to do good things, but one is not aware one is doing good and thus has no will to do anything differently 'just because'.

The idea that a programmed robot has 'will' but that the 'will' is not 'free' [because of the program] is silly. The robot has no will, nor self awareness, and as soon as it does, it becomes something other than a robot.

The idea that human beings were created in the manner the garden story suggests, whereby the humans were not robots to begin with - in order to 'go forth and multiply' and 'subdue the earth' under the ruling instructions of a creator-being has one questioning why the being didn't just make robots for the task in the first place - self replicating non-self aware machines beholding only to the programs which ran them.

Indeed, from the perspective of good sensible management, robots should have been the first and only choice.

That they were not, brings a cloud of suspicion over the story - a cloud which is absent of suspicion if the more natural idea that we evolved free from guilt until knowledge overtook us and we began to create morals in order to try and catch up.

We told ourselves and each other we were guilty and then proclaimed we had learned this from a GOD.

[bjs1]

The “good” is the ability to do good. Without free will we can never do anything good.

This suggests that without free will everything we did would be bad. EVERYTHING! No good whatsoever.

Not at all. I stated that without free will nothing we do would be bad or good. No good whatsoever, but also no bad whatsoever. No credit and no blame.




The remainder of this post has me thoroughly confused. First you agreed with the concept that we could not do good without free will and even restated that same idea in your own words. You wrote:

A stone can be used to build a hospital and it can be used to bash a man’s head in. The stone is has done nothing right or wrong in either case.

BINGO! Although the stone (person) should never be credited or blamed. Sounds about right to me.

But then you asked:

If you don’t care about doing what is good then that’s fine. However, if morality matters then free will is a necessity.

But WHY? You keep making the claim but refusing to explain the why of it. Why couldn't we do good even if we lack free will?

You asked "WHY" after you agreed with and restated the "why." Please explain your meaning.

[TRANSPONDER]

This is why I posted on the mechanics of Free will and the meaning of morality.

If we accept that morality exists of itself (apart from what humans or even a god thinks about it) then, yes we can do good (or evil) even as programmed robots, either responding to a divine will or following programmed instinct. Which is of course what animals do when they engage on acts of evil. We can do Good (or evil) whether or not we know about it. This is evolved instinct, not thinking about morality.

On the other hand, humans (t least) can reason about our situation, and even if reciprocity, Empathy and co-operation exists in animal instinct, humans (perhaps alone) can think about this stuff. As I've said before, Philosophers struggled with morals and ethics and the religious frankly had no clue. It took evolutionary science to help us to understand what in fact morals and ethics even were. What it were was not the edicts of a celestial dictator; that one should be discarded as soon as possible, and any churchman telling us that it is that should be thrown into the metaphorical street.

[theophile]

This is why I posted on the mechanics of Free will and the meaning of morality.

If we accept that morality exists of itself (apart from what humans or even a god thinks about it) then, yes we can do good (or evil) even as programmed robots, either responding to a divine will or following programmed instinct.

If by 'programmed' you mean we follow preset routines / rules with predetermined outcomes, then I would suggest that any good done by such a programmed being would be coincidence and nothing more, and insufficient to achieve any sort of ultimate good.

But to get to that answer, I think we're missing a key part of the problem. There is (1) the moral being, which may either be programmed (per above) or have freewill. But there is also (2) the system that moral being is acting within and (morally) compelled to bring to an ultimate state of good.

The more important question to unlocking the value of freewill, IMO, is whether the path to good is achievable through a set of rules if perfectly followed. If yes, then programmed robots could do it, and you are right. If no, then we require something like freewill to navigate and achieve the desired end, and any good a robot does is coincidence.

On that decisive point, I would say that while the system we are in has rules that govern it (e.g., laws of motion), it also has an element of chaos and unpredictability, which therefore necessitates freewill if we want to bring it to an ultimate state of good. (One could point to quantum mechanics, for instance, where the best we can do is probabilistic analysis. My more typical instinct though is to point to life itself as an inherently chaotic system.)

[Willum]

Yes everyone, freewill is also the ability to do good.

But it doesn't exclude sin.

The problem is doing good is unrewarded, but sinning ONCE, according to the myth, sent the entire human race on a trajectory to Hell.
So, now that I have reiterated that dead horse, that should allow better comments and insight, I hope.

[Willum]

Also, all evidence points to freewill.
All conjecture has pointed to a lack of it.

I don't care to discuss "but what ifs," and "maybes," or wise-sounding circolocutous paths that arrive at answers that there MAY not be freewill.

I observe freewill on myself all the time, from a gross to arbitrary level, you all do to, so until you can come up with something CONCLUSIVE why there IS NO freewill, evidence overrules you, and you should participate in the topic, or start your own silly one about how I my choice to lose weight or eat a doughnut is part of God's plan, or whatever.

[theophile]

Yes everyone, freewill is also the ability to do good.

But it doesn't exclude sin.

The problem is doing good is unrewarded, but sinning ONCE, according to the myth, sent the entire human race on a trajectory to Hell.
So, now that I have reiterated that dead horse, that should allow better comments and insight, I hope.

That is incorrect. Sin and doing good both follow the same extraordinary logic. See Romans 5 where Paul explains this. Verses 18-19 where it gets encapsulated:

"Just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people. For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous."

You are misusing the concept of original sin.

[nobspeople]

Yes everyone, freewill is also the ability to do good.

But it doesn't exclude sin.

The problem is doing good is unrewarded, but sinning ONCE, according to the myth, sent the entire human race on a trajectory to Hell.
So, now that I have reiterated that dead horse, that should allow better comments and insight, I hope.

That is incorrect. Sin and doing good both follow the same extraordinary logic. See Romans 5 where Paul explains this. Verses 18-19 where it gets encapsulated:

"Just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people. For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous."

You are misusing the concept of original sin.

What is the concept of original sin and how should it be used?