A Sense of Free Will: the consciousness quagmire (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 18, 2015, 20:54 (3079 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: The misunderstanding continues. I have been trying to explain to Romansh that there are different approaches to the subject of free will. You brought up dualism - a very important aspect of your own belief in free will - but I wrote that I wanted to avoid it because it will inevitably lead to God and religion, with all the attendant convolutions. Not YOUR religious ideas, but those that have had theologians tying themselves in knots over the centuries, trying to prove that even though their God knows in advance what they are going to do, they still have free will. And now I'm talking about the very subject I particularly wanted to avoid in this context! (Happy to discuss it under “Difference in degree or kind”.)-DAVID: You wouldn't have to avoid it, if you would stay away from religious theology completely in philosophic discussion, like I do.-Once you express a belief in God, I would suggest to you that it is impossible to separate philosophical discussion from religious theology. All your “philosophy” is coloured by your faith. Your God is within and without everything, and there is purpose in all that he does. You cannot contemplate the possibility that he didn't know what he was doing when he started the process of evolution, or that he might have left his invention to follow its own course. Why? Because you attribute a very specific plan to him: the production of humans, though you don't like us asking why he would want to create humans. Extinctions and “nature red in tooth and claw” are all part of the great plan, vaguely associated with something called “balance of nature” and “tough love”. Your scepticism towards some aspects of organized religion is itself an expression of your personal theology. “Theos” means god, and rejecting concepts of gods is as much a part of theology as accepting them. You are of course free to follow or reject different concepts of God and his work as you please, but let's not pretend that your religious beliefs are “completely” separate from your philosophical discussions.