An atheist can't believe in free will
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Fellow Unbelievers,
There’s something that no one here is considering: Everything the human species has ever done in the past 2.5 million+ years to live, thrive, and survive has been in defiance of both genetic and environmental circumstance.
This is true for getting to a place of shelter out of harmful elements and off of an earth which can suck the heat out of a human body in night time temperatures as high as 60° Fahrenheit and as little as 3 hours.
This is true of finding and making potable water, when lack of unsalinated water can cause kidney failure and death by thirst in 3 days.
This is true of finding and preparing the right balance of protein, carbohydrates, fiber, fats, vitamins, minerals, and trace elements when the lack of them for 30 days cause the body to eat itself and die from starvation.
This is true of making tools to procure and prepare shelter, water, and food, as well as making and harnessing fire to provide light, warmth, and energy to provide all of these needs.
This is true of doing all this in the face of disease from the tiniest of microbes and insects, from predation by the biggest, bloodthirstiest of predators, and in the face of crime, enslavement, war, and genocide by larger groups of our own species.
This is true of moving to places where survival and thriving is easier and where unknown prospects may be better, from the Olduvai Gorge in Southern Africa, to the Sahel and Sahara, through to the Levant, Europe, and the steppes and frozen tundra of Siberia, down to South Asia and across the Ocean to Australia, across the ice-covered Bering Strait to North, Central, and South America. And now to Antarctica and the vacuum of space and the very beginnings of exploring other worlds.
Every bit of the the human condition is one big defiance of circumstance. This is as big a refutation of Determinism as it gets, and all perfectly within the Natural Universe with no recourse to the Supernatural.
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This reply was modified 1 year ago by
TheEncogitationer. Reason: Eliminating a redundancy
Hypothesis: All this talk about free will amounts to nothing more useful than intellectual masturbation. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. It’s been fun for me too. But with all those conversations invested in being so sure there’s a way to prove that free will exists or doesn’t exist… why does it matter so much? Other than as part of some kind of story about how a god gave it to us, and will reward or punish us for our behaviors. And then religious experts get to tell others how to behave. And judges get to decide how responsible we should be held, while guesstimating how we were or weren’t acting with free will.
How do you think your cat feels about it?
The discussion of free will matters when people act on it, which is when they decide conduct deserves punishment rather than to be controlled. We can take an offender out of society because we can’t trust their behavior or we can subject them to 50 lashes or even the death penalty.
It seems you’re arguing that the very concept of free will came along when we developed the linguistic capacity to use the third person in regards to oneself. “Can I blah blah blah?” “Should I blah blah blah?” “What will they think if I blah blah blah?” (I realize that a grammarian would say that those are first person not third person, but I’m looking at it as third person when you think/talk about yourself as though you are someone else.)
My cat has a limited capacity to conceptualize and think about anything but the most immediate consequences of her actions (she lives “in the moment,” as they say), so if I did believe in free will (which I can’t, because I can’t even imagine what it would consist of), she probably couldn’t have it.
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This reply was modified 1 year ago by
Unseen.
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This reply was modified 1 year ago by
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