Denis Loubet wrote:

<keithj43@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1107674655.828083.141050@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...

Denis Loubet wrote:

<keithj43@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1107443264.133177.134090@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...

Denis Loubet wrote:

<keithj43@yahoo.com> wrote in message

(snip)

And the god determines those essential properties.

IMO that contradicts the properties being essential to you; it;s

like

how God couldn't make a square circle roundness is essential to a
circle.

The god does not have to make a square or a circle, it makes whatever

it

wants. It assigns whatever properties you possess, essential or not.

Yes, but if some being makes a circle it makes the circle round; it can
only avoid roundness by not making circles at all.

LIkewise, if God
makes you he makes you with whatever properties are essential to you,
and theonly way he can avoid those properties is by not creating you.

The "you" you're talking about is whatever the god wants, and it

defines

"you" by specifying the essential qualities necessary for the "you"

the god

has determined you to be.

All this essential property stuff is just an attempt to shift things

back a

step and obscure the core argument.

I assure you that my comments about essential properties is not an
attempt to shift anything; it is my opinion about the metaphysics of
properties.

(snip)

That's irrelevant since the god determines the essential

properties.

IMO that's no more true that that God made it so that a square has

4

sides.

The god does not have to make a square. It makes whatever it wants,

and

whatever it makes does whatever the god made it to do.

Quite. And God doesn't have to make you, but if he make syou he makes
you with your essential properties.

You're saying you have special essential qualities that define you as

you,

and if they were different, you wouldn't be you. Fine, but I fail to

see how

this affects the supposed fact that the god determines the essential
qualities that define you. YOU certainly didn't determine them.

They are essential to me,

similarly to how roundness is essential to a
circle.

God didn't decide that circles would be round, and he didn't
decide that I would have the properties essential to me.

(snip)

I am. If an omniscient, omnipotent creator god exists, then it

alone

determined your specific attitude. It designed you to do the

things

you do.

IMO it doesn't follow that IF God creates you he chooses the

attitude

that you have.

How does it not follow?

Because if he created a being who lacked attidtudes essential to you,
the being wouldn't *be* you.

Essnetial properties are analogous to roundness in a
circle and God doesn't decide that circles are round--that's part

of

what makes it a circle.

If the god wants a circle, then it makes something with the

appropriate

roundness. Now the god has a circle, exactly as it wants. And the

circle

will do exactly what the god created it to do.

Creating the circle entails actualing *all* the properties essential to
the circle; the same is true for creating anything else as well.

If God
decides to create you he is stuck with all of your essential properties
even those properties he doesn't realy want.

His choice is to create
you and accept those undesirable properties or not create you and do
without the properties he wants.

You can't write a program without writing something that will

compute. The

program requires essential properties like proper syntax, structure,

etc.

But that doesn't make it any less a completely deterministic program.

Any

less a machine.

But it does make it a different program that a program with other
essential properties.

If a programmer wanted *this* program and not a
different program, he couldn't rewrite anything because that would be
producing a different program.

I don't see why a programmer would care
abuot anything accept whether or not theprogram did what he wanted it
to do--there isn't any intrinsic value to a specific program.

Similarly, God doesn't choose your essential
attitudes.

Then where do they come from?

The god has to choose your essential attitudes because it's the only

thing

that can create them.

What God does is create you; necessarily you have those properties
essential to you.

(snip)

It would be a different cog in the machine, but a cog is all any

of

us are.

The universe is a big machine, and we're just cogs within it. Cogs

have no

free will.

But it wouldn't be you.

I said it would be a different cog.

I don't see why I should think a world without
you would be a better world than the one with you.

Irrelevant. A cog is a cog.

A cog is surely a cog, no dobt about that. But I don't see how my above
comment is irrelevant to the issue *we* are discussing. You believe
that we are just cogs, I believe we have intrinsic value. A point of
disagreement.

(snip)

Ok, fine. It's not even a decision. It's just an inevitable result

of

the

mindless Pachinko machine of the universe.

And IMO that doesn't describe our decisions.

Why? Because you don't like it? Because it doesn't feel like it?

I can't accept those reasons as objections.

It isn't because I don't like it. It *is* because it seems to me that
we do make decisions;

in fact the idea that our actions are just the
result of matter following the laws of physics seems as silly as
solipsism IMO.

I suppose we cuold
agree on the term "morally significant decision" (MSD). With

that

terminology did I get your view right?

Well, I'll go with your definition and say that a decision hasn't

even been

made. That what we think of as our decisions are not actually

decisions.

Then you
say the problem is the same when you consider us to be matter

behaving

according to the laws of nature. IMO the reason they are the

same

is

that *both* view us as mechanisms, not free agents.

But that would be assuming ones conclusion.

Or it would be stating one's presupposition:-)

Rewording it doesn't make it less of a fallacy.

Stating a presupposition isn't a fallacy; it'd only be a fallacy if

you

thought that stating a presupposition was a good argument in favor

of

your claim.

Then why did you mention it?

You mean why did I mention your presupposition?

Because IMO it needed
mentioning; IMO your mechanistic view of human nature isn't something
you derived from reason but is rather a presupposition you use to
derive other conclusions from.

When an atheist presupposes people as fancy machines, he is
not guilty of a fallacy even though it's just his presupposition.

No, I have to assume that you agree we are made of molecules. If I'm

wrong

in that assumption, you may correct me now.

I believe that *we* are body and spirit; we are not reducible to
molecules in motion, IMO.

.If you DO agree that we are made

of molecules, then that is a SHARED premise that we both agree on.

The

argument proceeds from there. You don't have to agree that we are

only

machines or that molecules are all we are, but if you're suggesting
something else, you have to support it. My contention that we are

machines

is supported by the fact that we are made of molecules, and that

there's no

evidence to suggest anything else.

To say that we are machines *is* to say that we are only molecules,
IMO. There is no evidence for such a view.

(snip)

IMO the input comes *from* the free agent; that's what makes it his
decision.

Are you suggesting decisions occur in a vacuum? Without input from an

external source, how can you have options to decide between?

I don't see that I suggested any such thing.

We examine options and
choose from those options. I am suggesting that you cannot reduce our
decision making to chemistry.

The external source provides the input. Your essential properties,
determined by the god upon your creation, process the input and yeild

the

result the god intended when it created you.

Here you are suggesting that God could have made you with a different
set of essential properties.

That contradicts the definition of
essential properties.

IMO there's no reason to think that a free being would choose
differently if we reran the universe since he would be facing the

exact

same circumstances the 2nd time around.

Which indicates you are unable to do otherwise. It is impossible for

you to

do otherwise.

IMO it suggests no such thing.

We chose what we wanted to choose the
first time; why think we'd want different the next time?

Does that suggest a free being?

(snip)

I have no alternative that I can justify.

I don't see that you can justify the one you offwered either. It

seems

to me that we have an undefeatable intuition that we are free.

Are you seeking to disallow hard evidence?

Not really. IMO nobody's offered any hard evidence that we are just
machines, nor can there *be* any such evidence (this is also my
opinion, but if I see i was wrong about that I'll freely change my
mind:)

No, I cannot prove that we are just machines. But I cannot support

any other

position without evidence.

Then yuo take the machine view as the default. I don't see any
particular reason to make that decision.

If we are made of molecules, and molecules are just gears and levers,

then

we're machines. That is, unless you have hard evidence to the

contrary.

You are of course free to hold to whatever presuppositions you like

I can only go with what the best evidence indicates. To go beyond

that would

be to Make Stuff Up.

The evidence doesn't say that we are just machines,

the evidence
doesn't say that all our actions can be described as molecules moving
according to the laws of physics,

nor can it say such.

(snip0

Ah, you ARE seeking to disallow evidence into this discussion.

We'll

stop

this discussion right now if you wish.

I don't see that I am trying to disallow hard evidence. I *believe*

we

can trust our own thoughts; IMO it's your view that leads to the
self-defeating conclusion that we cannot.

Odd, I have not mentioned the word trust in relation to our thoughts.

IMO distrust of your thoughts follows from the machine view you
advocate; I explained why I think so already.

That our thoughts might be completely deterministic is no reason not

to

trust them. We trust all sorts of information generated by machines.

We only trust it because *we designed* the machine to produce right
answers.

We don't think the machine knows the right answers itself--the
machine just does what it does.

(snip0

Never suggested that. We can't trust our intuition. Intuition is

not

the

same as thinking.

IMO there can be no thinking without intuition; maybe we are

contruing

intuition differently. I am using intuition to be that "a ha"

feeling

we get when we recognize that something is true.

So your definition does not paint intuition as a source of

information. It's

just a subjective mental reaction to a discovery.

Ok, so?

Without the intuition you don't kave knowledge,

it is intuition that
takes the truth and sticks it into your head (to speak metaphorically).

If you cannot trust your intuition then you cannot trust what ended up
in your head, which means yuo cannot know anything to any degree of
accuracy.

If yuo never had that
feeling you'd not have any degree of knowledge at all, it seems to

me.

But there's nothing stopping you from realizing that intuition is

just a

biased and subjective mental carrot to reward thinking, and go where

the

evidence leads regardless of your intuition.

Without the intuition you'd not know whcih way the evidence *did* point
IMO.

But I know you didn't say you couldn't trust your thoughts, but if

we

can be fooled about something so basic as our being free then IMO
there's no reason to trust anything our mind tells us.

That's why we try to abandon biased subjective intuition in favor of

logic

and evidence. Rules and principles we can apply fairly to distance us

from

our biased and subjective intuition.

But we'd have no reason to trust our belief that we even had evidence
or that we could tell which way the evidence points.

I think you are
underestimating the degree of radical skepticism required by the
mechanical view of consciousness.

My argument
would be that since there IS good reason to trust some things our

minds

tells us then we properly conclude that we are indeed free.

There is no solid evidence, which is what I trust, that indicates we

have

free will. My biased and subjective intuition says I do, but so what?

It's

biased and subjective, there's no reason to trust it.

Then there'd be no reason for you to trust that you even have evidence,
IMO.

then we couldn't trust our thoughts about what we
had had hard experiences of, it seems to me.

You can retreat to solipsism at this point if you wish. I would

prefer to

carry on.

I really must not have beeb explaining myself well. MY argument is

that

we CAN trust our thoughts about what we've had hard experiences

about

What is a "hard experience"? Is it anything like hard evidence?

By that I meant our experiences of hard evidence.

THEREFORE we properly trust our sense that we are free.

No. There's no hard evidence of that. There is plenty of biased and
subjective experience of that, but that's not HARD evidence.

If you were consistent you'd not believe you even have hard evidence
IMO.

Children have the intuition that they're indestructable, and will

live

forever. I don't think they can trust that, do you?

No. I never said our intuition couldn't be wrong. My point is that the
view that we cannot ever trust it is self-defeating.

It's the fact
that we DON'T retreat into solipsism that refutes the mechanistic

view

of consciousness IMO.

Why?

As I argued, that's because the mechanistic view entails we are not
justified in believing that any of our experiences have anything to do
with the real world.

(snip)

(snip)

Which is exactly as self-defeating as your mystical one, where in

we

are

just cogs in a deterministic machine called the universe designed

by

an

omniscient, omnipotent, creator.

IMO my view is *not* that we are just cogs in a deterministic

machine

designed by God. God gave us freedom and we exercise it.

You assert that, but the definition of the god character in question
contradicts any possiblity of freedom.

I don't agree with that conclusion at all.

Except I don't seek to contradict mine by saying we have free

will.

Neither do I seek any contradictions. IMO your view *leads* to a
contradiction though.

In what way?

IMO I already explained that prior to this post.

(snip0

Actually it was Peter. But the story doesn't present Peter's

will

as

being thwarted, it presents his vow being broken. But in the

story

it

was broken voluntarily.

How do we know that?

IMO it;s because the story presents Peter as morally failing; iot's

not

a moral failing if you didn't choose to do it.

All I know is what's in the story, and what it suggests. It clearly
indicates that Peter's "free will" decision was irrelevant to the

outcome of

events.

How did it suggest that Peters free decision to deny Christ was
irrelevant to his denying Christ?

(snip)

not acting freely IMO.

But with the clear example of the pharoah, we can no longer

consider

any

decision we make as untainted by the god's control, thus no

decision

can be

said to be free.

IMO that doesn't follow.

It only doesn't follow if you can place controls in the way of the

god's

will.

How do you figure?\

Can you?

I wouldn't even try:-)

That God might *sometimes* control our actions
doesn't imply we ought always assume that our actions are

controlled.

Why not?

Why on earth would it? That seems no more justified than concluding
that it's always raining from the the fact that it sometimes rains.

IT seems to me that we are justified in assuming we are generally
choosing the things we think we are unless we have a good reason to
think differently.

Sorry, no, the very admission that the god can control a person AT

ALL is a

good reason to place instant suspicion upon each and every thought

and deed.

You can never know whether it's the god doing the thinking, or you.

I don't agree.

That seems just as unreasonable as thinking that because
I sometimes make a mistake adding numbers therefore I ought always
think my math is wrong.

This is the kind of corner you can paint yourself into when you try

to

support the supernatural.

IMO there's no corner.

(snip)

Intent is irrelevant. The stories, by their very existence,

indicate

in no

uncertain terms that our will has no effect on the outcome of

events.

IMO that doesn't follow. It could be that the prophecy implicitly
includes the accurate foreknowledge of what our *will* will be,

thus

accurate prophecy doesn't imply that our wills are irrelevant.

Our wills, in the case of prophesy, seem to be merely a formality to

the

outcome of events.

You are of course entitled to your opinion about how things seem. I
don't see it that way.