Free-will and Atheism

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Morality is not a tangible fact, yet emotions are a fact. Morality and emotions are entirely dependent on self awareness of an individual.



God hasn't communicated like that since before 6 B.C. So taking a machine gun to any mosque and shooting everybody praying inside would be that actions of an angry, sick, or demented person.

Your comment reminds me of the Brother's Karamazov. Jesus comes back with a new message and the church kills him because, "everything you needed to say has already been said". They fetishzed ye olde revelations and would not accept a new one.

There is no way to verifty which revelations are divine and which are just crazy talk. Even the early Church had to create a series of councils to sort it out. You may or may not believe they got it right but it's certainly not obvious.

Are you sure about that?

From his perspective. My perspective is different.

THANK YOU!! !! !! !! ! i have always believed that IF the Christian God exists i would prefer to go to Hell because thats where all the intellectuals and freethinkers are at so obviously thats the place to be! and besides in Heaven are Sanctimonious Holier-Than-Thou asses who i hate being around........yesterday i told my mom IF god exists me going to Heaven would be like a Christian going to Hell

You just have a wrong concept there. Don't worry, it will all become clear. And no foul either!

Just "pretty much"? This isn't a very reasonable answer.


I'm more concerned about making up my own mind and drawing my own conclusions. When you referred to "your [DCT]" I took you literally. I was unaware you were referring to a previously established theory. Quite simply, my position is if God is the author and creator over the universe and all things pertaining to it, then He can establish morality based on His nature/character and issue commands to that same effect.


Tough to respond to this one since we aren't talking about the same thing... I don't really conceive of "divine command" as what "makes morality" in a manner of speaking but rather the means of communicating that morality.

I would agree that classic DC is too arbitrary. The closest formulation to my own views would be this response (from Wiki):


I can follow this line up to the part in bold. My issue is that Duns Scotus (I'm assuming) is taking the source of necessity for granted. It's such a blatant omission that, quite honestly, I don't understand how someone like Scotus missed it. But, then again, he also was nuts about immaculate conception, which just proves nobody is perfect... Necessity in this instance is a consequence of who/what God is arising from His relational interaction with creation. So if objective morality is a result of necessity, then it is a necessity deriving from divine characteristics and is thus sourced directly from God anyway.

To use the Wiki example:

Well, if God is omnipotent, He certainly COULD have commanded us to murder and He COULD revoke his command. My response to this is that given several other divine attributes, such as being good and being perfectly good, God is not compelled to change if He knows He got it right the first time.

I was interested that the Wiki also mentions Richard Swinburne here. I found it fascinating because I happened to know Swinburne is heavily influenced by Aquinas, also mentioned.

Without doing any more homework--two things about Euth always struck me as suspect. Part of the problem is that the dilemma assumes a polytheistic worldview. It depends on it, actually, and I'll often cite Euth as support for monotheism since it brings out just how inconsistent polytheism is. The trap a monotheist ought to know better than to fall for is assuming somehow that Euth applies to monotheism--it DOESN'T, and a monotheist is doomed to failure trying to take one horn OR the other. It does bring up some pertinent issues, however, and no Philosophy 101 class is complete without it. For the monotheist, though, it's really just a pedagogical exercise for a lively discussion. Like, if I can ONLY choose one or the other, which one? I'd personally go with Swinburne if that were the case.

I take issue with "contingent morality," though, which sounds to me like just another way to say "arbitrary" without saying arbitrary. That's where they lose me. Either all of morality is contingent or it isn't, and it doesn't make sense to me to view God as a cherry-picker. I mentioned the plausibility of arguing for objective morality based on natural law and possibly even resulting from evolution, i.e. evolution dictates survival values and what we know as morals. You could attempt to make a verifiable claim to that effect and objectively show all moral laws as taking root in some evolutionary advantage. So you could then conclude that some aspects of morality are self-evident from nature--laws like murder that cannot be easily broken without severe consequences. But that's an insufficient explanation because it fails to explain other values that either are evolutionarily neutral or even pose a disadvantage. It makes better sense to say morality is ultimately absolute rather than some morality being ultimately absolute and other morality being contingent--or any morality being subjective and/or arbitrary (subjective=/=arbitrary).

Which leads to the other issue I have with Euth...WHAT DILEMMA??? If I HAVE to choose, ok... But I don't understand the necessity of choosing one horn or the other. If objective morality is the result of God's nature or essence, then God just has to depend on who He is to create or possess morality and His commands are only a consequence of His relationship with His creation. (Incidentally, I prefer "command" to the usual "demand." I think "demand" implies that there is no choice--that there is no recourse for the disobedient. A divine command, on the other hand, places mercy over the law and allows the sinner a wide degree of latitude in returning to a state of grace. Apparently patience really is a divine virtue...)

By the way, it is very important to realize that the instruction "not to murder" is, at least in judaism, not an instruction "not to murder". It is "not to murder another few". And if you read carefully the Bible or the Coran, you will find that it's about the same with christianity and Islam. The only difference is that they will try to convert you. So either you accept to be converted, and you will be protected by the "not to murder", or you d'ont accept to be converted, and thus you accept to be murdered if they feel that God wants it. Of course, standards of morality have evolved since then, so believers do not follow it anymore.

But one should remember that when he goes back to the Bible to say : hey see it is written "not to murder", in fact, he goes back to a very primitive order "not to murder those in your own group".

As defined as omnipotent, and perfectly good, this god cannot exist. He, by definition, cannot do other than perfect good, thus is not omnipotent. There are an infinite number of not good things he is unable to do by the very definition of what he is.

Why is that not obvious to theists with the claim that a god entity is omnipotent and perfectly good? The definition removes the entity from being understood through coherent thought.

The characteristics cannot exist within one being or are inconsistent with the world itself.

Wrong. Even with the attribute of being perfectly good, God has the ability or the capability to do evil, still be perfectly good, and still be omnipotent. Being perfectly good is not a limit on God's abilities. It is a limit on what God chooses to actualize. Just because God CAN do something, it doesn't mean He actually WILL. The evidence that God really is good and perfectly good lies in the choices He makes.

Is God the only factor in determining what goes on in the world itself?

That depends entirely on how you personally elect to define god. Since you capitalized it, I can only assume you're speaking of the Christian one to which I offered a fairly extensive refutation in This thread

If you are talking about some personal, subjective perception of a god then it becomes more complicated, but if God is the creator of the universe, omnipotent and omniscient (as he is according to the Bible) he would have known exactly what would take place today when he created the world, thus he is the singular cause of everything.

OK, but you've completely ignored that all these objections have been answered--and some of the answers go back 1,000 years or more. You've not really contributed anything new to arguing against God.

And this doesn't really answer the question. Dodges it, actually. After God finished His initial creative work, was He the sole determining factor in creation? Or does God give creation a degree of self-determination?

Depends on who you ask, really (try getting a Calvinist to give you an answer that makes sense sometime), but I think it really, truly begs a much more important question - why isn't God held morally accountable for his actions? And, please, don't start on this 'God is the ultimate good' line, because it's just not going to hold water here. Even ignoring the Old Testament, which is chock full of examples of divine pettiness, injustice, and cruelty (I mean, seriously, sending an army of bears to eat the kids teasing his prophet? Really?) you run into the more general problem of disproportionate response.

Two attributes are normally attributed to God with regards to morality - that he is infinitely just, and infinitely merciful. To both of these, I call rank BS most foul. Can we all agree that justice might be best defined as 'the legal/moral redress of harm done by one party to another' and mercy can be equated to forgiveness and the abdication of punishment? With those definitions in mind, justice and mercy tend to be mutually exclusive; it's difficult to redress a wrong at the same time that you're abdicating any punishment for it. Obviously tempering justice with mercy is possible (such as laws that permit for circumstances beyond a criminal's control), but we're talking about infinite justice/mercy here - traits that are supposed to run beyond human comprehension.

And yet...they don't. Forgiveness is offered only to the faithful; the remainder suffer the lash of punishment. And this 'justice', for sins against God's personal laws (laws which, incidentally, he determines - laws that he, as the ultimate lawmaker, has the power to change) completely lacks any sense of proportionate response. You suffer the same death and/or hell (depending on who you ask) for failing to repent hocking a quarter as you do for failing to repent murdering sixty people, and even ignoring that aspect you run into the issue where any sin is inherently finite, but the punishment for that sin (whether it's death, oblivion, or hellfire) is infinite. Limitless redress for a limited crime is the essence of injustice, because there's no way to make it proportionate to the crime. It would be injust for me to shoot a man because he stole a dollar from me, yes? Debate rages as to whether or not it's even just to kill a man for actually killing someone, precisely because of this issue - there's no taking it back, no making it go away. When you kill someone, they are dead Fo Evah, and it's more-or-less impossible to justify doing that to someone.

So whether or not God set up the universe as a clockwork puppet show for his own amusement (determinism) or is watching us scurry around like ants (free will), the ultimate point is that according to Christian theology, he is the lawmaker. He is the judge, the jury, and the executioner, and our fate is supposed to be in his hands after our death - but instead of exercising any mercy at all, he supposedly only ever asks the one question: how much did you love me?

Does that sound just or merciful to you? Because from where I'm standing, it kinda sounds petty, arbitrary and selfish.

If anything, I can relate to Pantheism. Which, to me, is no different from atheism.

What's problematic about atheism is that you are assumed to disregard moral concepts by some people. Or that atheism means you don't believe in anything. Not believing in "God" doesn't mean you don't believe in anything.

The Protestant Church even put up adverts in my university town and it read, "For those who do not believe everything". Which, to me, was odd. Why would I want to restrict my view of the world? Is it better to relate to specific dogmas rather than what you personally believe?

I think religion is designed to restrict your mind. Organized religion, that it is. Because it dictates you what you should believe. I don't mean this in an offensive way, it's just how I feel about it. I think it is weird to be part of organized religion if you don't fully believe in it.

I don't think atheism has anything to do with free will. It's not even decided whether there is anything such as free will. I don't even think free will is all that important. I do think though that whenever you feel something is not what you want, you should consider opting out.

It doesn't matter why we decide what we decide. I like the science aspect of it. What science has done for finding out why we make certain decisions is huge.

I do not doubt that what free will refers to exist, I just think it is diffult to think of it in terms of "free will".

Manipulation exists everywhere and you can never be sure whether your view of the world is realistic, you can just try to work towards it. Free will is just an ideal. We are influenced mostly by the outside world, so free will only exists in our minds.