The problem with free will, as I see it, is that people have the wrong impression of what it means.  Free will is not all it’s cracked up to be but there’s no doubt we have a modest form of it.  I prefer to call it “self-determinism”.  This self-determinism is empirically proven every time we conceive and execute a plan. I’ve found this is hard to explain because so many people assume that any free will must contradict causality and, thus, determinism.  I claim that the only free will we have is actually self-determinism and that it isn’t in conflict with causality: in fact, it’s a product of human intelligence interacting with causality.  I’ll try to explain . . .

I maintain that “free will” is an awful term to express the independent agency humans possess to define purpose for themselves and pursue it. Our choices aren’t free in a libertarian sense: they’re free within the constraints of our heredity and experience (which are both products of causality).  Perhaps Arthur Schopenhauer summed it up best: “Man can do what he wills but he can not will what he wills.”  We can do, in the present, whatever our experience has prepared us for.

Experience represents the past.  Experience — what we’ve learned — is all we know.  With the exception of instinct and reflex, I believe it’s virtually impossible to think or act beyond our experience.  Even inspiration comes from experience. Where the rubber meets the road is in the present.  This is where our human brains interact with the world around us to form the conceptual continuity of consciousness: our identity.  Experience influences us so much because it’s been layered into our identity just as the present will be.  THAT is the self in self-determinism.

Don’t get me wrong . . . causality rules.  We might think we’re in control until that fire or disease or earthquake or tsunami or accident or economic crash changes our lives.  Causality is the ultimate big dog.  We can make choices to maximize security but we can never be sure we’re secure.  We can’t anticipate everything.

So how do you explain the fact that, despite the pervasiveness of causality, we can still map out our own futures and achieve our plans (if they’re any good)?  How do you explain how we, for the most part, hack our own paths into the future?

Feedback.

Mental feedback is the key.  Without it, we could not have memories or analyze problems or learn or make plans because stimuli and events would simply pass right by (through?) us.  We reflect via mental feedback — it's the mechanism through which self-awareness and future-awareness emerges.  Without it, we could not understand causality or anticipate it.  Intelligence and consciousness itself hinge on mental feedback.  Mental feedback gives us a temporal advantage over causality by allowing us to anticipate it and plan for the future accordingly. THAT is the determinism in self-determinism.

It lacks the flourish and romanticism of unbridled, libertarian, free will but self-determinism has its own beauty revealed in the paradox of independent agency in a clockwork universe. Causality determines the scope of our abilities and actions and we use those abilities and actions to hack our own paths into the future.  We’re so good at it, we’re getting cocky. But we’re not masters of causality . . . merely expressions of it.

This article, by Jim Ashby, was originally posted at AtheistExile.com

Copyright © AtheistExile.com. All rights reserved.

This satirical piece challenges Christians to take a serious look at their dogmas and doctrines.

God tells Adam and Eve not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. If this was the only way they could understand the difference between good and evil, how could they have known that it was wrong to disobey God and eat the fruit?" ~Laurie Lynn

Have you ever done something you regret? If so, how does that compare to eating a fruit from the “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil”? If all sins are the same to God and all sins are disobedience to God, then eating the apple was, by God's own terms, a pedestrian sin.

Yet God condemned all of us to death because of a single sin: the first sin ever sinned. Are you guilty of Eve’s sin? Of course not! No more so than for Hillary Clinton’s sins or for mine. Right off the bat, common sense tells us that the Bible, in Genesis, is preaching a twisted morality. It puts us in opposition to ourselves by claiming our nature is sinful.

I'm no genius but I know a scam when I see one. Biblical sin is God's heads-I-win-tails-you-lose con game: it's a sham used to manipulate and control us via fear and guilt. I reject the neurosis of biblical sin: I believe our nature is basically good but we sometimes make mistakes. Hell, if we believe we're not good, we probably won’t be.

But that’s definitely not what the Bible preaches, is it? We’re ALL unworthy, wretched, sinners.

The Bible says God created the universe and everything in it, including Adam and Eve. He did this in 6 days; executing his allegedly perfect plan on schedule and without a hitch (except that Eve was an afterthought). Adam and Eve were pure and sinless: they had all eternity, in Eden, to bask in God’s glory.

Unless, of course, they pissed him off.

And it doesn’t take much to piss off God. No sir! And second chances? Forget about it. One mistake and you’re history. By the way, all of your offspring, forever, will also be cursed with death. How do you like them apples?

Because of Adam and Eve, we’re all born guilty of “Original Sin”. So much for God’s perfect plan (let’s call it, “plan A”). In fact, Original Sin made the human condition so intractably degenerate that God had to wipe out all life (human or not) with a catastrophic flood so that Noah’s family could start humanity anew, from scratch. This was God’s idea of plan B.

Well guess what? God’s plan B was all for naught. A few thousand years later, humanity had repopulated itself from Noah’s incestuous Ark and – surprise, surprise – was no better than before. I guess that’s what inbreeding gets you. You’d think God would know that.

Time for plan C.

This time, instead of genocide, God chose suicide. He came to Earth personally, as Jesus, to act out a script he divinely inspired, in biblical prophesy, that ended with his own trial, crucifixion, resurrection and ascension back home to heaven.

Why did God do this? Original Sin. Because of Original Sin, we can never be innocent enough for eternal life. We must be forgiven before heaven’s gates will open for us. If you know your dogma, you know Jesus sacrificed himself on the cross so that we may be redeemed from sin (and have everlasting life). Because God eternally cursed mankind with death, he had to provide some means for our redemption. The alternative was to abandon us. Quite a conundrum God put himself in, no?

Basically, God had to “save” us from the curse he imputed upon us to begin with. I’m amazed that so many people don’t see through this preposterous charade. Perhaps the pretzel logic is too tangled for most to unravel. The Bible would have us believe – and doctrine upholds – that we are all miserable wretches who will be granted eternal life only if we love Jesus. Of course, this assumes we can trust God not to resort to a plan D or E or whatever. After all, God is perfect and all-powerful: who’s going to stop him from tossing out plan C if he decides, yet again, that he still hasn’t gotten creation right?

God must regret cursing mankind with death. God is perfect, so we can’t say he makes mistakes; I prefer to say he has regrets. Anyway, I suppose God was hot-headed in his youth; the Old Testament clearly depicts him with a short fuse. So once he imputed death upon us, he couldn’t “un-impute” it. I mean, he’s God! Right? His word is law and immutable. What kind of self-respecting God would change his mind? If God is love, then I guess it’s true that, “love means never having to say you’re sorry”.

Eventually, God found a loophole in his own immutable law: leave mankind cursed but offer individuals an exemption by redemption. Yeah, that’s the ticket! For Christ’s sake – why didn’t God think of plan C before plan B? After all, if redemption is a workable plan, God flooded the Earth and wiped-out humanity for nothing. I hate when that happens!

From Original Sin to redemption, the story twists a pretzel-logic plot of servile spiritual entrapment, with a theme of self-loathing morality.

You know, the more I think about it, the more I think the Supreme Being should be an elected position. Surely we can put somebody with more compassion and foresight onto the throne of the Ruler of the Universe. At least, if we elect poorly, we can vote for a replacement next time.

© Jim Ashby, AtheistExile.com

Over on Facebook, a Christian, named Shawn, attempted to challenge my atheism. He said: "The way I look at it you have a 50/50 chance of being right. So what happens if you are wrong? I will even ask you this: what happens if you are right?" The following is my reply . . .

You're paraphrasing Pascal's wager, Shawn. According to Wikipedia . . .

Pascal's Wager (or Pascal's Gambit) is a suggestion posed by the French philosopher, mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal that, even though the existence of God cannot be determined through reason, a person should wager as though God exists, because living life accordingly has everything to gain, and nothing to lose.

First of all, the odds are NOT 50/50. After all these millennia, if there's still no concrete evidence of God (or anything else supernatural), the odds are vanishingly small that any exists. As for Pascal's wager, it's already been debunked a long time ago. Pascal’s wager assumes that one can choose to believe. That is not the case. As Arthur Schopenhauer pointed out, "Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills." If there is a God, does anybody really think we can hoodwink him into thinking we believe in him when we don't? It's not necessarily delusional to believe in (a cosmic) God but thinking you can fool him is just plain nuts. Then there's the matter of subordinating your life to fear. If you act as if you believe in God because you're afraid of the consequences of not believing, then the core of your identity is wrapped around fear. It is far better to get off your knees, stand upright and seek answers. And finally, I’ll turn Pascal's wager around. What if there's NO God and this is the only life you'll ever have? Will you surrender your quest for truth and understanding to the authority of a single religion? After all, there's thousands of them. NOW what kind of odds are we talking about, Shawn? If I'm wrong and there really is a personal God who will condemn me to eternal torture in hell, then I'll be proud to have lived my life without paying homage to such a monster. I'll have all eternity to mock him. If I'm right and there really is no God, then my purpose in life won't have been wasted on an imaginary sky daddy. I will have lived without surrendering my quest for truth. And trust me, believing in impossible things (God, heaven, miracles, angels, etc.) IS surrendering your quest.