• hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    27·
    7 days ago

    Paraphrasing a quote I heard somewhere and can’t attribute to the person

    I got no clue if free will exists, but if we stop believing in it we’ll be fucked bad

    • NotEasyBeingGreen@slrpnk.netEnglish
      11·
      7 days ago

      I heard a philosopher on a podcast who argued the opposite. His position was that the illusion of free will causes us to focus on vengeance as a moral philosophy, which interferes with making the world a better place.

      • emeralddawn45@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        3·
        7 days ago

        But if there is no free will, we can’t help that or change it, so what difference does it make? Although if that’s true it means we can’t help but discuss it either, since such a discussion has clearly already happened and is happening now as well. If there’s no free will there is no such concept of focus though. If you can’t change or influence your actions that means you must not be able to influence your thoughts either, so someone doomed to a life of philosophy in that kind of world is just suffering endless torment that’s doomed to amount to nothing. That’s how I feel sometimes. At least most people who believe there’s no such thing as free will get to believe there’s some magic man in the sky guiding everything.

        • NotEasyBeingGreen@slrpnk.netEnglish
          4·
          7 days ago

          Free will is more important to religious people (at least folks who follow Abrahamic religions) than to atheists. It is crucial to unraveling the Gordian knot of God being good, omnipotent, and omniscient (Calvinists being a notable exception).

          • emeralddawn45@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            1·
            7 days ago

            Actually imo the idea of free will is one of the major flaws with religion. If God is omniscient, that means he knows the outcome of every situation. Why would he create people he knows will ‘sin’, even if it’s their choice, and then doom them to suffer for those ‘sins’. If God is the creator of everything and also all knowing, then he must be intentionally creating doomed, flawed people just to watch them suffer. If free will doesn’t exist, religion becomes much more palatable. Sure, fucked up things happen all the time. But if you can believe that it’s all in service of some eventual greater good, at least that gives some meaning to it. Otherwise God is just a sadistic bastard. This line of reasoning is what broke me away from organized religion. Still not sure where I stand on free-will.

              • emeralddawn45@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                1·
                7 days ago

                I’m well aware it’s not an original thought, but as a 13 year old many years ago I was incredibly surprised to find it was one that none of the adults in the church had ever apparently considered or had a response to. The common one was ‘free will exists because God is testing us’ but no one could explain why God would need to test anything when he should already know the outcome, or why he would continue to create people who he knew would fail the test.