Albert Einstein said that he trusted in “the rational character of reality and in its being accessible, at least to some extent, to human reason:
But Einstein’s was a God of philosophy, not religion. When asked many years later whether he believed in God, he replied: ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.’ Baruch Spinoza, a contemporary of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, had conceived of God as identical with nature. For this, he was considered a dangerous heretic, and was excommunicated from the Jewish community in Amsterdam.
Einstein’s God is infinitely superior but impersonal and intangible, subtle but not malicious. He is also firmly determinist. As far as Einstein was concerned, God’s ‘lawful harmony’ is established throughout the cosmos by strict adherence to the physical principles of cause and effect. Thus, there is no room in Einstein’s philosophy for free will: ‘Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control … we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.
’Jim Baggott, “What Einstein meant by ‘God does not play dice’” at Aeon
At that point, the wheels come off. We are as aware of free will as we are of consciousness. Some say free will is an illusion but then some say consciousness is an illusion. But then science is an illusion too, as are rationality and human reason.
Einstein’s God is best kept in a glass case except during lectures.
Note: Jim Baggott is the author of The Quest for the Real Meaning of Quantum Mechanics – a Game of Theories
Mind Matters News offers a number of articles on free will by neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor including:
Can physics prove there is no free will? No, but it can make physicists incoherent when they write about free will. It’s hilarious. Sabine Hossenfelder misses the irony that she insists that people “change their minds” by accepting her assertion that they… can’t change their minds.
Does “alien hand syndrome” show that we don’t really have free will? One woman’s left hand seemed to have a mind of its own. Did it? Alien hand syndrome doesn’t mean that free will is not real. In fact, it clarifies exactly what free will is and what it isn’t.
But is determinism true? Does science show that we fated to want whatever we want? Modern science—both theoretical and experimental—strongly supports the reality of free will.
How can mere products of nature have free will? Materialists don’t like the outcome of their philosophy but twisting logic won’t change it
Does brain stimulation research challenge free will? If we can be forced to want something, is the will still free?
Is free will a dangerous myth? The denial of free will is a much more dangerous myth
Also: Do quasars provide evidence for free will? Possibly. They certainly rule out experimenter interference.
and
Can free will even be an illusion? Michael Egnor reiterates the freeing implications of quantum indeterminacy
Also, by Baylor University’s Robert J. Marks: Quantum randomness gives nature free will Whether or not quantum randomness explains how our brains work, it may help us create unbreakable encryption codes
It is my opinion that we have free will, but that is an opinion that is not based on overwhelming evidence. I admit that it is one based more on desire and hope (ego as well).
The question is, are we truly able to choose between two or more “options” or are they chosen for us by the chemistry in the brain? To truly test this we would have to control the millions of inputs that lead up to the choice (sensory inputs, all chemical reactions within our body leading up to the choice, etc). Unfortunately, we are not capable of doing this.
Ed:
An interesting video on the topic:
https://youtu.be/EXOX3RCpEbU
The denial of free will is the thread by which the Atheist’s entire worldview unravels.
First off, when the Atheist denies the reality of free will he, in the process, forsakes any claim that he is making a rationally coherent argument in the first place:
Yet, even though rationality itself depends on the reality of free will, atheists resolutely deny that it really exists. As the militant atheist Jerry Coyne stated, “Free will is an illusion so convincing that people simply refuse to believe that we don’t have it.”
Too funny, ‘simply refuse to believe that we don’t have it’, Coyne acts as if we could choose otherwise! 🙂
The reason why Coyne and other militant atheists are forced into denying the reality of free will is because free will is one of the main defining attributes of the immaterial mind and is therefore entirely a Theistic presupposition,,,
Thus it is entirely for a-priori philosophical reasons, logically self-refuting philosophical reasons at that, that the Atheist must deny the reality of free will. To concede the reality of free will is for the Atheist to, in effect, concede the necessity of the Mind of God in order to ground the reality of free will.
Moreover, empirical science itself could care less that atheists are forced into the logically self-refuting position of denying the reality of their own free will. As Dr. Egnor pointed out, “an objective review of the neuroscientific evidence unequivocally supports the existence of free will.”
Moreover, besides evidence from neuroscience, recent advances in quantum mechanics have now also confirmed the reality of free will.
Although there have been several major loopholes in quantum mechanics over the past several decades that atheists have tried to appeal to in order to try to avoid the ‘spooky’ Theistic implications of quantum mechanics, over the past several years each of those major loopholes have each been closed one by one. The last major loophole that was left to be closed was the “setting independence” and/or the ‘free-will’ loophole:
And now Anton Zeilinger and company have recently, as of 2018, pushed the ‘free will loophole’ back to 7.8 billion years ago, thereby firmly establishing the ‘common sense’ fact that the free will choices of the experimenter in the quantum experiments are truly free and are not determined by any possible causal influences from the past for at least the last 7.8 billion years, and that the experimenters themselves are therefore shown to be truly free to choose whatever measurement settings in the experiments that he or she may so desire to choose so as to ‘logically’ probe whatever aspect of reality that he or she may be interested in probing.
The implications for individual human beings, via their free will, being brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level,,,
The implications for individual human beings, via their free will, being brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level are fairly profound. First off, we have a very deep role in determining what type of reality gets presented to us in our future. As leading experimentalist Anton Zeilinger states in the following video, “what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”
Although free will is often thought of as allowing someone to choose between a veritable infinity of options, the reality of the situation is that in a theistic view of reality that veritable infinity of options all boils down to just two options. Eternal life with God, or Eternal life without God.
As C.S. Lewis stated, “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.”
Moreover, just as would be expected under Christian presuppositions, we find an ‘infinitely’ destructive, i.e. hellish, eternity associated with General Relativity and we find an extremely orderly, i.e. heavenly, eternity associated with Special Relativity:
The destructive power of black holes is illustrated rather dramatically in the following quote by Kip Thorne:
Whereas the creation of the universe, which is associated with the creation of light itself, i.e. associated with Special Relativity, is found to be an extremely orderly eternity:
Further notes:
Again, the implications for individual humans, via their free will, being brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level, to put it mildly, are fairly drastic. We, with either our acceptance or rejection of God and what He has done for us through Jesus Christ on the cross, are choosing between eternal life with God or eternal death separated from God:
Supplemental note:
Another very profound implication in allowing Agent causality, specifically the Agent Causality of God, ‘back’ into physics, as the Christian founders of modern science originally envisioned,,,, (Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Max Planck, to name a few of the Christian founders),,, and as quantum mechanics itself now empirically demands (with the closing of the free will loophole by Anton Zeilinger and company), by rightly allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics then that provides us with a very plausible resolution for the much sought after ‘theory of everything’ in that Christ’s resurrection from the dead provides an empirically backed reconciliation, via the Shroud of Turin, between quantum mechanics and general relativity into the much sought after ‘Theory of Everything”. Here are a few posts where I lay out and defend some of the evidence for that claim:
Verse:
I personally am sympathetic to this sentence from the OP: “When asked many years later whether he believed in God, he replied: ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.’ ”
However, I think current understandings of quantum mechanics (and chaos theory) undermine Einstein’s support of determinism. Despite Einstein’s famous saying, probability is at the heart of every single quantum event, and in ways beyond our understanding (at least for now) trickles up into the macro world.
If there is a god who knows everything that’s ever going to happen, then the future is by definition determined, and free will is an illusion.
>If there is a god who knows everything that’s ever going to happen, then the future is by definition determined, and free will is an illusion.
It seems that way when we reason from what we know, here in the material realm. But if there is a God, and a higher realm in which he exists, then the relationships between time, the future, and knowledge might not be as clear-cut as they seem when we think about them from our perspective.
God’s foreknowledge that man would sin does not equate to God being the cause of sin. Man, via his own free will, was the cause. i.e. Foreknowledge does not equal strict determinism!
DerekDiMarco commits the fallacy of imparting all agent causality that exists to God alone.
Further notes:
To Hazel@5,
I think the problem of free will is even deeper that the “who controls the random number generator of quantum mechanics” question. In other words, are the decisions we’re making all follow “mechanically” (that is, they are perfectly computable) from the moment the corresponding wave functions collapse somewhere in our brain (skipping for simplicity the problem of how and why these wave functions collapse there), or our decision making process is “above and beyond” the random number generator of QM?
of related note:
Moreover, to repeat, Anton Zeilinger and company have recently, as of 2018, pushed the ‘free will loophole’ back to 7.8 billion years ago, thereby firmly establishing the ‘common sense’ fact that the free will choices of the experimenter in the quantum experiments are truly free and are not determined by any possible causal influences from the past for at least the last 7.8 billion years, and that the experimenters themselves are therefore shown to be truly free to choose whatever measurement settings in the experiments that he or she may so desire to choose so as to ‘logically’ probe whatever aspect of reality that he or she may be interested in probing.
i.e. As far as empirical science itself is concerned, the reality of our free will is an established fact.
If atheists want to argue for ‘super-determinism’, i.e. that our actions were somehow predetermined by God prior to the Big Bang, as DerekDiMarco is apparently trying to do, then all I can say is welcome to Christianity. Calvinists have been arguing for ‘super-determinism’ for centuries.
Materialists keep attacking Free Will instead of noticing that Determinism is DEAD as far as we know from Quantum Mechanics. And, since Randomness cannot account for what looks like our Free Will, they currently have no viable alternative to Free Will.
http://nonlin.org/free-will/
Derek:
That doesn’t follow.
Why is the universe intelligible? This is a fundamental question– one of the so-called Big Questions. Notice that this question is not a scientific question. The universes intelligibility is something that a scientist must assume a priori in order to do science. In other words, if the universe was not intelligible science would not be possible.
Einstein thought this was an important question. Famously he observed:
But what might account for its comprehensibility or intelligibility? Einstein tries to give an answer:
And,
Was Einstein a theist? He appears to have said so on more than one occasion. For example he wrote:
And,
But on the other hand, in a letter to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein (1929), he wrote:
From this quote some people have argued that this makes Einstein a pantheist, since Spinoza appears to have been a pantheist. However, they don’t seem to realize that he had been asked, at least once, what he was and he answered:
Of course there are others who will argue that Einstein was only using God as a metaphor. God, in other words, was shorthand for the laws of nature or nature’s mystery or something like that. Personally, I don’t think that’s a tenable explanation. Einstein’s thinking shows too much insight. He describes a basic form of theism (at least relating to the intelligibility question) better and more elegantly than any theist I have ever read. The late Anthony Flew quotes Einstein extensively in his book, There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, where he relates his “conversion,” late in life, from atheism to a non-religious (“deistic”) form of theism– very much like what Einstein appears to describe.
Naturalism has nowhere close to the explanatory power in answering this question that theism has. What better explanation is there for intelligibility than intelligence?
Oxford University’s professor of mathematics, John Lennox, explains it this way:
http://www.logosapologia.org/?p=2874
BA77
I don’t think that DDM is attributing causality to this. Knowledge that something will happen is not the same as causing something to happen. I know that the sun will rise at 6:57 am tomorrow (my time). Nobody would argue that my knowledge of this is causing the sun to rise.
I believe that all DDM is saying is that if God, or any being for that matter, knows with certainty what somebody will do at a specified time in the future, then that person’s free will does not exist. At least not with respect to that specific action.
Ed George:
And just saying so doesn’t make it so. Did Biff’s owning of a sports book from the future determine the outcome? No.
Any being that “knows with certainty what somebody will do at a specified time in the future”, does so because said being has been or is in the future and knows what has already happened (in that time).
For crying out loud, sheesh,,, again, as far as empirical science is concerned, the reality of our free will is an established fact (posts 3,4, and 10). If you want to argue that you don’t have free will then argue with the empirical evidence not with me.
Atheists, since they pretend to care about science so much, would do very well to pay attention to what the empirical evidence actually says.
As Feynman himself, (one of the main founders of Quantum Electrodynamics), stated,
Humorously, since the empirical evidence, (as it always does), disagrees with what the atheistic materialist would prefer to believe beforehand, (i.e. that he has no free will), the atheist is forced to ignore what the empirical evidence is clearly telling us, and is forced into the ‘philosophical weeds’ of trying to claim that God’s omniscience prevents us from having free will.
That is to say, the atheist is reduced to the absurdity of arguing from Theological premises, not materialistic premises, that he has no free will.
That IS A THEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT for crying out loud!
And as I said before, if atheists want to argue from Theological premises for ‘super-determinism’, i.e. that all our actions were somehow predetermined before time began and coerced on to us by God, then all I can say is welcome to Christianity. Strict Calvinists have been arguing for ‘super-determinism’ for centuries.
Moreover, according to original sources, Calvin’s view of free will turns out to be far more nuanced than is often portrayed in debates on the internet these days.
Thus even Calvin, although having a very high view of God’s sovereignty, did not strictly deny the reality of free will in man in regards to man’s salvation.
As a Christian, I can live with Calvin’s nuanced view of free will. A nuanced view that, whilst not completely denying the reality of free will, does respectfully have a very high regard for God’s sovereignty over creation. i.e. Regardless of what ‘evil’ and/or sin that a man may choose to do in contradiction to God’s perfect will for his life, never the less “God causes all things to work together for good”.
BA77@16, if you can provide me with a link to a study that has controlled for all possible inputs to a human decision (sensory input, associated chemical reactions within the body, etc) then I will accept free will as a proven fact. Until then, the best we can say is that we think (Hope, desire) that free will exists.
And I am saying this as someone who is almost certain that we have true. free will. Free will, like how life originated, is something that we are unlikely to be able to prove one way or the other. And I am fine with that.
It is not on me to satisfy your self-serving and biased criteria as to whether you will personally accept the empirical evidence as sufficient or not. You certainly are not the final arbiter of the empirical evidence. I only have to show, to the unbiased reader, that the overwhelming weight of evidence evidence supports the reality of free will.
So again,
Thus, the unbiased reader can judge for themselves what the empirical evidence actually says.. Personally for me, the evidence. especially the recent evidence from quantum mechanics, for the reality of free will is overwhelming.
Of note: the only piece of evidence that the atheist thought he had going for him, i.e Libet’s experiments, as was referenced above, has now been overturned. (Moreover, Libet himself disagreed with the atheistic interpretation that atheists tried to force on his experimental results:)
BA77
And it’s not on me to satisfy your self-serving and biased criteria as to whether you will personally accept the lack of empirical evidence as sufficient or not. But, I don’t post thousands of words trying to do so. Me thinks thou dost protest too much.
As to: “I don’t post thousands of words trying to do so”
LOL, that’s because you have no evidence whatsoever that you can reference that shows that free will does not exist! LOL! 🙂 Too friggin funny.
Moreover, on top of the overwhelming neuroscentific and quantum evidence for the reality of free will, I can also reference the creation of new information as evidence for the reality of free will. As Douglas S. Robertson has shown, “Creating new axioms and free will are shown to be different aspects of the same phenomena: the creation of new information.”
And as William Dembski and others have shown, the universal limit for the creation of new information, via all the probabilistic resources of the entire universe, is 500 bits,
To clarify how the 500 bit universal limit is found for the creation of ‘structured, functional information’:
Thus, every ‘new’ sentence that has ever been written, and/or ‘created’ by humans, that contains over 500 bits of information, (since the entire probabilistic resources of the entire universe are exhausted), confirms the reality and necessity of free will.
This short sentence, “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” is calculated by Winston Ewert, in this following video at the 10 minute mark, to contain 1000 bits of algorithmic specified complexity, (i.e. functional information), and thus to exceed the Universal Probability Bound (UPB) of 500 bits set by Dr. Dembski
Thus every sentence ever created by man that contains over 500 bits of information, such as “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” is proof that man has exercised his free will over and above what the universe is capable of explaining.
Since free will figures so prominently in the creation of new information, perhaps that is why God holds ‘every careless word ‘ that we may speak with such high regard
Around the 20 minute mark of the following Near Death Experience documentary, the Life Review portion of the Near Death Experience is highlighted, with several testimonies relating how every word, thought, deed, and action, of a person’s life (all the ‘information’ of a person’s life) is gone over in the presence of God:
BA77
But can you reference any evidence where free will has been demonstrated while controlling for all other inputs to decision making? Including all sensory inputs and chemical processes within the body? If not, bye bye.
I have referenced one experiment where they controlled for noise, but will not rereference.
BA77
WTF?
As someone who has helped build massive chemical plants in Texas, where it was my job to set up and accurately calibrate all sorts of instruments that measured for many different types of physical parameters, I am very impressed with the level of sophistication in the experiments, that I have listed, that have confirmed the ‘common sense’ fact that we have free will. Both the neuroscientific and quantum experiments that validated the reality of free will are, in my experience with testing, very impressive as to the level of sophistication that went behind them.
That Ed George would pooh pooh the experimental results, apparently without taking the time to read and understand what they actually did, (if it is even possible for him, on the technical level, to understand what they actually did), and without appreciating the level of sophistication behind what they actually did, (again, if it is even possible for him, on the technical level, to understand the level of sophistication behind what they actually did), is par for the course for him.
Ed George has a history on UD of being very disingenuous towards the evidence. As Upright BiPed noted recently in his exchange with Ed George on the Barr thread,
Anyone who is interested can read through the entire exchange for themselves and see how disingenuously Ed George weaves and dodges the direct questions from UprightBiped, just so as to avoid ever having to deal with the evidence honestly, and therefore having to accept the direct implications for ID forthrightly. In short, Ed George is a troll who could care less for the truth and is only here, as far as I can tell, to obfuscate and distract.
Anyone that does not believe free will exists has never looked closely at our history. You may want to start with Dietrich von Choltitz.
Einstein was a lifelong pacifist, except when he wasn’t. (In a letter to FDR he advocated development of the atomic bomb during the early stages of WW II.) But what’s the point of pacifism if you are also a believer in determinism* which denies the existence of free will. Whose mind are you really going to change?
https://www.ias.edu/ideas/2015/ghodsee-einstein-pacifism
Determinism also makes morality an impossibility. Ought implies can. If there is no free will then it’s really impossible for anyone to do what they ought to do. Evil is simply inevitable.
[*Like Spinoza, Einstein was a strict determinist who believed that human behavior was completely determined by causal laws. For that reason, he refused the chance aspect of quantum theory, famously telling Niels Bohr: “God does not play dice with the universe.”]
John_a_designer@ 26
The problem for Christians is that evidence from the Bible supports determinism:
But later:
Peter was warned specifically that he would deny knowing Jesus three times but, in spite of the warning, he was unable to do anything different.
Determinism. No free will.
So apparently Sev has converted from Darwinian atheism to Christian Calvinism
No, just reminding you that your own Bible provides evidence for a lack of free will, which would have to be the case if there exists an eternal and omniscient deity. So at least in that respect, the Bible is consistent.
LOl. you REALLY need to take your atheistic blinders off.
Thus even Calvin, although having a very high view of God’s sovereignty, did not strictly deny the reality of free will in man in regards to man’s salvation.
seversky:
That doesn’t follow and you could never actually make that case.
seversky:
He wasn’t warned. He was told to deny Jesus 3 times and he followed those orders.