Ken's comments on free will presuppose the nature and existence of a certain deity...in a thread concerning atheism, I think that bears a little closer scrutiny.
Assuming that the Christian god exists, and that that god is omnipotent (as is traditionally assumed), any so-called free will is necessarily conditional. If God can grant free will, he can also suspend it.
1 (And, he can create the illusion that it exists, or the illusion that it does not!) If God doesn't want something, he can most certainly put a stop to it, if he chooses. Then again, it's an open question why something that he didn't want would even exist, because he had the power to preemptively prevent it.
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Originally Posted by Ken Wittlief
I can program my computer, so that everytime I turn it on it writes on the screen "I love you Ken, Im so thankfull for all the things you have done for me, and I cant tell you how happy I am to be your computer!" do you think I would get a warm feeling every morning when I hit the power button?
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To quote Captain Kirk, "What does God need with a starship?" Similarly, what does God need with a warm feeling every, or any morning? God, by virtue of omnipotence could create such a feeling without going to the trouble of creating a world and people to frolic upon it. This doesn't clarify anything.
But what does God value the most? Freedom? Justice? Benevolence? Happiness? Ken assumes that there is something that God likes about us, that supercedes other considerations (like suffering)—but isn't it a little bit strange to assume that such a thing exists, but not know what it is? This reeks of wishful thinking; that there must be a purpose to all this suffering and these misdeeds, lest the Christian worldview be tarnished. I phrase this like a self-fulfilling prophecy, because in a very real sense, it is. The endemic unwillingness to deal with the thought that the complex structure of God and free will might be a fantasy leads people to believe in the comfortable explanation—that it's all part of God's plan. Of course, it
could be so—but wouldn't it be nice if we could actually prove it?
Furthermore, if our free will is linked to this greater purpose, as Ken suggests, are we implying that our actions are taken with the implicit consent of an omnipotent god? Once again, maybe we should endeavour to know more about the morality of God—because it seems that it may not exactly agree with the traditional definitions of good and evil.
But since this is a thread about atheism, I'll stop counting the angels dancing on the pinhead, and note that while many people believe in elaborate structures of religious belief, any given set of such beliefs with which I am familiar, taken as a whole, is ultimately unfounded; many beliefs are laughably incorrect, many are hopelessly unprovable, and (I would be remiss to not point out) some are quite reasonable. The mere fact that
some religious ideas work well in society is not a reason to expect
every such idea to be good. Similarly, it is not a reason to take these religious ideas at face value (such as the more-than-ten commandments)—these stand or fall on their own merits, irrespective of whatever mythology exists around them.
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Originally Posted by Ken Wittlief
I think part of the problem young people have with understanding religion in our time is that so many people interpret or simply make-up their own version of what it means to be a christain, or how other religions are followed - its a real mess.
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In the spirit of disbelief as a default position, I wonder what gives anyone the monopoly on determining what it means to be Christian (or another similar religion, as the case may be). I know—let's wait for God to lend an opinion! I think that a problem with most religions is that they necessarily evolve over time, making concessions to slightly different interpretations, enduring a schism or two, and eventually end up with a mess of different beliefs that are only marginally self-consistent. By conducting your own "spiritual search", you might find something that you like, but who's to say that it is even remotely correct?
When dealing with religious belief, it all comes down to the lack of evidence; much is wholly conjectural, and all is built upon the shakiest of foundations. From that, we note that any argument based on the purported truth of some religious tenet must be irrevocably tied to the case for that belief's accuracy. This is the real question—whether or not God permits suffering has no bearing on anything, if God himself is a fiction. And is he? Well, nobody has managed to answer that in any conclusive fashion, without resorting to other unproven beliefs. In essence, this is the core of atheism: it makes no sense to believe in something that can't be supported with a substantial body of evidence, because there are an infinite number of such situations, each of which are supported by the same quantity and quality of evidence; which are true?
In the end, we can't prove or disprove much when it comes to omnipotent deities themselves, but there's certainly a lot that we can consider rationally, as far as religion goes.
1Let's leave the postulation that God can create a stone so heavy that he can't lift it out of this, and assume that he can undo whatever he does. If this postulation were true, we would end up dealing with Aquinas' farcical redefinition of omnipotence—meaning "not quite all-powerful, when convenient".