this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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I think you can have this same dilemma as an atheist as well. I'm personally agnostic as I don't have the knowledge to make a decision.
If we are all just atoms moving/reacting, surely everything we'd ever do would be predetermined by the initial reactions/vectors/forces at the big bang. I know there's quantum randomness and stuff, but it's possible that's all calculable and we simply don't have the means to calculate it. If that's the case, IMO we still have freewill because we can't predict the future, and it's still worthwhile to move forward doing our best to be good people.
It's "free will" vs determinism (or other options).
The problem is that our entire violent society is based on the pseudo-scientific, religious concept of "free will". It's what has justified prisons, etc. since the dawn of the christian fascism.
Scientifically the problem is that there's not much evidence for "free will". It's largely an illusion of consciousness.
I don't think believing in fate (or a plan) is strongly correlated with atheism
My take is that there is no free will, but that this fact is irrelevant and we're all better off just behaving as though we do.
Yeah. It's a fair take, and this is generally what I was getting at.
John Calvin approves.
At least here in the US, a person's zip code of birth is a huge indicator of their success and life trajectory. That, to me, would seem to indicate that free will is bullshit.
why would that be a problem for free will?
all it shows is that we cannot freely choose everything, it does not prove that we are not ever able to freely choose.
Not sure that's true. Free will doesn't mean anyone can do anything. It means any decisions a person makes are truly decided by them, and they actually could have made a different decision.
People who don't believe in free will believe that the physical laws of the universe are deterministic. That leptons and quarks behave in ways determined by their state. That this is true even inside your brain, and thus decisions you make are actually just the result of particles interacting. Even quantum effects, though random, are not consciously decided and thus do not affect free will.
The circumstances you are in change the inputs to those equations, but they don't change the fact that the equations exist.
Hmm almost as if free will isn't some magical ability to remove yourself from any disadvantageous situation, but a fundamental liberty to choose how you act in response to said situation and see in it a metaphysical meaning that transcends cultural ideas like success? Damn, wouldn't that be crazy. If only that was true, could you imagine?
Or in other words, “free will” is a macroscopic effect arising from the fundamental laws of the universe. Like most everything else we deal with.
Like… temperature doesn’t really exist, it’s really just an average of kinetic energy of particles. But that doesn’t stop it from being a useful concept!
I reckon we are so incredibly complex, are integrating so much information that from inside it's hard to see if you're deciding or selecting by rule your preferred path given what you know
You can call the complexity free will, we're all so different having had different parents, different childhood experiences, different education, different opportunities so each has their own solution that rises to the top in any situation
But also brain scans have demonstrated that for minor stuff (like raising your hand) action precedes "deciding" to take the action.
Robert Sapolsky wrote a whole book on this based on this called Determined. I really enjoyed it and pretty much agree
Why are we better off behaving that way? Under that outlook, it seems like free will is a trap to hold people accountable for things they wouldn’t actually be responsible for.
If you're a complex machine whose action could be perfectly predicted (with full knowledge of everything you ever experienced) it's still reasonable to punish you for breaking rules - the risk of punishment goes into your programming as part of the (deterministic) calculation of what action to take
Because one of the many inputs to people's actions, if we assume that their actions are deterministic, is their knowledge of how other people will respond, and how they have responded to similar things in the past.
It's also very often used as an argument against rehabilitation in prisons:
If free will exists, then crime is a choice. If you choose crime, you are a bad person, and punishment is the only way forward.
If you commit the crime again, it's because the punishment didn't work, and/or because the person is simply bad, so a longer punishment is needed, and infinitum.
It's also used to justify the death penalty, which would not make any sense in a deterministic universe.
This isn't a problem for athiests, I am a determinist athiest, we have no free will and the idea is silly in a place governed by physical laws. It honestly doesn't matter at all to me and I don't see any reason to care.
it's a problem for theists because this is supposed to be a big test, god is checking if we belong in heaven. If we have no free will the test makes no sense at all.
not a christian, but it is a problem for atheists depending on your framework of morality
traditionally, determinism is not compatible with moral responsibility since all actions are predetermined and it is not obvious that one can be held morally responsible for them. you have to do some mental gymnastics with either the nature of causation (see hume), or the nature of morality (see error theory), or the nature of what exactly 'freedom' is (see john stewart mill) to resolve this incompatibility
to the problem of the theist test, standard christian doctrine is that your fate in heaven is predetermined and individuals have been pre-chosen by god (theological term is 'the elect'). in that sense, your worldly life is not a 'test', but the idea is that the holy spirit reveals god to those who have been selected.
there are philosophical problems with all of these, but just wanted to make the point that both theist and atheist philosophers have been debating this for hundreds of years and it is not at all actually obvious accepting hard determinism solves everything.
this is nonsense. You're still making choices, just because you would've made those choices no matter what doesn't mean your choices aren't punishable or your fault. It's not that you didn't have a choice, it's that you would've made that decision no matter what based on the laws of physics. These are not incompatible ideas, and I don't get why people struggle with this. It's very straightforward.
this is also nonsense, the point was that it was a test, god should already know who's going to be selected, if there's no free will, this is still all pointless. Why does god need the holy spirit to do all that nonsense if it isn't a test? If it's predetermined, why did god make all these evil people that were just going to be miserable in hell anyway?
in your view, what is the difference between having a forced decision and not having a choice? and why exactly would this forced choice be punishable in the same way a free one would be?
a calvinist would not agree that the point is a test. read up on the 'doctrine of unconditional election' if you are curious. in brief, god makes decisions about who is saved and who isn't not based on conditions they follow in their life, but based on his own purposes and goals.
this is the problem of evil, there are numerous responses and the literature is extensive. again, a calvinist would probably say that he created evil people for his glory and grace. notably, jesus dying on the cross for humanity's sins as a display of god's grace does not make sense without the existence of evil.
In determinism, you still have free choices, it's just you would've made that choice if time was reversed and played again, nothing changed so why would the result be different? You compared all the options, and decided to make that choice, and if we reversed time, and played it back, you'd still make that decision... but it's not like the universe compelled you to make that decision, nobody FORCED you to make that choice, you still made a decision all on your own, even if we reversed time and you would've made the same one, that changes precisely nothing of importance.
then he's just a dickbag putting us all in a world to suffer for fun, when he could just make us all in heaven.
yeah it doesn't make any sense. that doesn't actually make it make sense, that's just a vague set of words. So god is a dickbag that needs worship why? Quite frankly like, any decent human being is better than this god, he's just evil.
incidentally, i agree with all this. but what a theist would probably say in response is that if god exists, he defines what evil is. what you perceive as evil is just your perception and can be wrong.
its not a bad argument, but i believe contrarily we have deep moral intuitions and can generally rationalize them in a kantian way, i believe we can make moral judgements independently of god.
There's no way to make babies having cancer moral. There's no version of that god that is any good. If this isn't a test, why give babies cancer?
there is a bit of a shifting of goalposts here with respect to how you define making a 'choice' with regard to logical and physical possibility/impossibility.
suppose i place a marble on a slope and let go. the marble rolls down due to gravity. did the marble 'choose' to roll down? it does not seem so.
is it possible for the opposite to occur, that is, the marble to roll up?
the logical possibility that the marble can roll upwards does not mean that it is a free will choice. replace the marble with an agent 'choosing' between options A and B, supposing the agent 'chooses' B. because you claim to be determinist, i take it you believe physics completely dictates the universe's events, thus it is physical necessity that the agent 'chooses' B. however, it is logically possible for the agent to 'choose' A as choosing A does not entail anything logically contradictory.
what is the difference in the case of the agent vs. the marble? or do you actually believe the marble 'chooses' to roll down?
The agent made its decision based on knowledge, reasoning, experience, the risks, the morals. A marble doesn't have knowledge, humans do, even if we're deterministic, we can make decisions, it's just that the decision will be made no matter what. That doesn't free us from the responsibility of our decisions.
Just because the agent would've never made a different choice, doesn't mean these things don't matter anymore, it's wholly irrelevant to whether or not we should punish them.
i do not make claims about punishments for actions, but instead i am talking about moral responsibility. consider a cat knocking over my cup, compared to a child who does it on purpose. your inclination is to hold the child morally responsible but not the cat. though you may punish the cat, you would not think that the cat is capable of the type of moral reasoning a child is capable of.
it may help to consider the example of a tree falling accidentally by gravity and killing a person. is that tree morally responsible for murder?
if you haven't noticed by now, im an incompatibilist (i do not believe determinism is compatible with free will)
we fundamentally disagree on what a 'decision' is. you believe that logical possibility is enough for free will, i don't.
i argue that if you accept determinism, this is an illusion. you believe you are making a decision based on free will because it is logically possible that you can take any of the available options, but it in actuality it is no different than the marble, you are physically bound to a specific outcome.
Do you think knowledge, reasoning, experience, and risks do not play any role in our decisions?
Sure, it is inevitable that we will make the decision we make, but it's not that the marble will fall down every time that makes our choices significant, it's the fact that we don't arbitrarily make decisions.
If, because you know about determinism, you stop bothering to learn about the world, there will be a different outcome, even if that was inevitable, that's how you influence the world. Free will doesn't mean anything and isn't important.
Even if there was free will, those things would be vastly more important than it. Free will is totally unimportant.
if you accept physical determinism, then knowledge, reasoning, experience, etc. are part of the physical system (ie. your brain) which makes the decision. they only play a role in that they influence the physical system for the decision making. the problem remains that you are forced to make a certain decision according to physics. the knowledge, reasoning, etc. are significant insofar as they influence the physics.
in determinism: you change the physics, you change the outcome. knowledge and reasoning changes the physics (the state of your mind), which changes the outcome. their influence on your decision making process does not imply free will.
i gave an example of a tree accidentally falling and killing someone in the other comment, it is hard to imagine free will has nothing to do with why you don't hold the tree morally responsible.
anyway, i am going to stop replying, my original reply was just showing that the free will problem is very much an issue for any deterministic position. there are potentially good ways to salvage determinism and i give references to three in my first comment, but the point you put forth is not convincing.
That's not a dilemma for atheists because atheists aren't the ones claiming there's an omnipotent being guiding everything.
Also, you can be both an atheist and an agnostic. They cover different things. I'm fairly certain you'd consider yourself an atheist in regards to the sun god Ra.
I'm mostly agnostic to it almost all of it. For all I know, the ancient Egyptians were spot on.
I'm convinced it's impossible for us to determine whether there are two gods or not.
I'm a diagnostic.
Damnit, I just finished watching Alien Romulus and that's a dad joke worthy for the android in it.
I'd like to hear your opinions on how you think so (truly). The way I see things, Atheism is only the answer to a single question: do you believe in any gods? If "yes," you're a theist or deist. If "no; I don't know; not currently; maybe one day," then you're an atheist. It's not a philosophy or a comprehensive worldview, and it can't possibly answer deeper questions.
What you're referring to in the latter half is Determinism and Compatibilism (Determinism + free will). Science is currently leaning pretty strongly towards Determinism, but since Compatibilism doesn't add much more to the idea, it's also still a candidate possibility.
It's very likely you could calculate every chain reaction from the Big Stretch up until now and maybe even into the future. Whether we have the ability to affect or disrupt those chains might be a matter of philosophy.
God having a plan vs. everything being calculable to us is practically the same thing, no? Either way, it's still best to act within your moral framework, religious or atheist because it's just better to be a good person. I think me calling it a dilemma for either side is a stretch.
No. A supernatural conscious agent with intent (e.g. a god) planning and orchestrating every quantum-interaction is not the same as humans documenting or even predicting extremely complex chains of physical reactions.
Agreed. Whether Determinism is true only gives credence to philosophies like cosmic nihilism, and being a cosmic nihilist myself, it doesn't matter that much whether my actions have purpose beyond now. It feels good to be kind, I know how it feels to be hurt, and so I try to do as much of the former and as little of the latter as possible.
That's not how predetermination works. Just because there is an explosion does not mean that every particle has a preset location it must reach to enact a grander outcome of the combustion. Atheists don't suffer from a need to have decisions rendered by an omnipotent being or a universe that is some stand-in for that being. There is no grand plan. The Big Bang was not some kick off for a well thought out schematic.
I never meant to imply it was. I was simply stating that with a hyper advanced understanding of chemistry it's possible that everything in the universe could have been predicted up to this point by an infinitely well programmed/powerful computer or whatever. Because in my head, that's theoretically possible, it's also possible everything is predetermined, not by some grand scheme or designs, but just predetermined by random chance.
Apologies if I'm using the incorrect phrasing.
I don't think we know enough about the universe yet to be sure that cause/effect is 100% the be all end all. It sure seems like it is from where we're standing now though, that's for sure.
But did you choose which atoms make up you? I think there is no free will because we're don't choose out of all options what atoms we get, we are just thrown into a random atom combination.
True true, but if there is genuinely quantum randomness, then the reactions those atoms go through aren't predetermined, so the initial conditions could be on an individual basis, but not the long term.