What is free will? It's obviously not the ability to do anything, since my inability to levitate or to leap over a building is not a violation of my free will. Free will just means that amongst the options we have available, we are free to choose.
So here's my hangup. Imagine our options for a particular choice are a collection of fruits:
- An apple.
- An orange.
- A pear.
- A grape.
God could have also given us the option of a pineapple and a kiwi (and an infinite array of other alternatives), but he didn't. Free will just means that we get to choose from within our palette of available choices.
On their own, none of these fruits are inherently bad. Sin isn't something that existed before god came around and god just happened to be powerless to do something about it. Even something like lying with man as with woman (gasp, anal sex!) isn't inherently bad until god decides he doesn't like it. No, god decides what is sinful. So one day, for whatever reason, he decides that chowing down on the apple is a sin and that he's going to punish whoever does it.
Rather than remove the apple from the list of options (or just leaving it as an ambiguous option in the first place), he leaves it there. Taking away the apple as an alternative would not violate our free will, just as my inability to levitate doesn't violate my free will. We would still have options to choose from.
So what motivation could there possibly be for tainting the apple and leaving it? The only real possibility is to trip us up all the way into eternal torment, and that's a pretty mean play on god's part.
So when the skeptic asks, "Why does god have to give us all these fun, harmless options that he deems sinful?," the answer can't be because he loved us so much that he wanted us to have free will - we can have free will without the malignant options. Seriously, can't we trade the ability to eat shellfish (Leviticus 11:10-12) for the ability to fly? How cool would that have been? That's some free will I could get behind.
Unless god decides he doesn't care for flying either. How fun can heaven really be hanging around this dude?
* Disclaimer: I believe we live in a deterministic universe. Choices are the result of a particular brain state, and your brain is surreptitiously connected to all other matter in the universe. So from the get-go, I think the idea of free will is only true in the sense that we recognize options. However, for the sake of the following argument, I'm treating the idea of free will in the fashion that most religious people view it.
Comments (29)
Sorry again for the 20 questions -- I learn people's views by asking lots of questions, just how I operate.
A hypothetical question: What if God decides what is and isn't sin judging on whether acts line up with order or chaos?
For example, thus far, I've been leaning toward the conclusion that homosexuality is an evolutionary malfunction (that is the most non-offensive way I can think of to word that :-o). If evolution goes hand in hand with survival and furthering the species, then I would think homosexuality actually contradicts that, and therefore, is more of a chaotic thing, and therefore...sin? It's one possibility I've considered. Curious to hear your thoughts on it.
@The_James_Blog - If you'll see my comment policy, you'll see that I do not get terribly in depth in comments (I often do not respond to them), especially when a small amount of research will produce the answer. However, I'll go ahead and answer this one.
I'm going to skip over the problems with thinking that there can be a malfunction in evolution. It doesn't really work that way.
If you're asserting that "sin" is something that doesn't seem to produce a survival advantage, fine. Of course, this includes many things that produce a tremendous amount of happiness with no drawback whatsoever. Sin would include piercing one's ears, playing video games, eating ice cream (and we even know the pattern of evolution up through previous hominids that make us crave those types of sugars, though today they are positively horrible for us). "Sin" in the sense you're throwing it out is a very meaningless term, and certainly one that has nothing to do with morality.
Conversely, evolution has seen to it that human men have a desire to procreate consistently and with lots of people so as to take the best of the gene pool. This is why so many marriages end with people cheating (and how many more don't ever get caught?). So you can chalk monogamous marriage up to sin, using your definition.
JT
@Zerowing21 - Fair enough. Thank you then for taking the time to give a response, I appreciate it. I overlooked your comment policy, so I'll go back and pick that up so I'm playing by house rules.
On research -- I'm a big believer in research, but you have to keep in mind...in this case YOU are my research. Ya gotta start somewhere.
That said, the more research sources I can get pointed to, the better. Such as the apparently obvious holes in my "malfuctioned evolution" question...The more research, the better. And yes, I make addictive use of Google.
Thank you! Your responses have been very enlightening. I will definitely be giving them thorough thought and exploring further.
/edit -- And, of course, your comment policy is at the top of the front page for all to see plainly. I'm a retard.
@Mad_Ass_Hatter - On the monkey -> man:
Consider this:
Evolution is the means by which the planetary organism adapts to changes in its environment. If there is more heat from the sun, then the life forms of the planet must be able to adjust their relative population in order to compensate and lower the temperature.
The Daisyworld thought-experiment:
A single species—the daisy—occupies the whole face of the planet. When the sun grows too hot, the white daisies grow to reflect the light back into space, and when the sun grows too cold, dark daisies grow to absorb the light and hold it as heat. The point, however, is that there must already have been dark daisies, even when the light daisies were dominant, and light daisies when the world was covered with darkness. Evolution can’t produce new species on demand. It is creating new species constantly, as genes drift and are spliced and broken by radiation and passed between species by viruses. Thus no species ever ‘breeds true.’ As long as the whole species is together, interbreeding constantly, individuals never drift too far, genetically speaking; their genes are constantly being recombined with other genes in the same species, so the variations are spread evenly through the whole population with each now generation. Only when the environment puts them under such stress that one of those randomly drifting traits suddenly has survival value, only then will all those in that particular environment who lack that trait die out, until the new trait, instead of being on occasional sport, is now a universal definer of the new species. That’s the fundamental tenet of gaialogy—constant genetic drift is essential for the survival of life as a whole. A world with absurdly few species, and no possibility of genetic drift because of any force constantly correcting any changes that might come up, could not only not evolve, but also would be impossible for life to continue to exist—they couldn’t adapt to change.