Theism Supports Free Will Better than Materialism Does

Lee · 12 Oct 2014, 12:25 · from 2014-October.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee)
Date: Sun, 12 Oct 2014 08:25:27 -0400
Subject: (urth) Theism Supports Free Will Better than Materialism Does
Message-ID: <BLU175-W32E25693B72BBE2D54000FCFAF0 at phx.gbl>

>David Stockhoff: I happily concede that 100% free will as philosophy frames it 
>is a pernicious myth, and biology presents all sorts of arguments 
>against it.

Heh. I've seen the unpredictability of sub-atomic physics as an argument for free will.

I don't think our behavior choices boil down to that level (biochemistry seems sufficient)

but hey, its an argument.

>Marc Aramini: I am sure Wolfe believes in free will

I think the question is the nature of it. Are there degrees? Does an ape have it? A bacterium? 

A rock?

And from what perspective? What about God's? It is a logical fallacy to say He knew Adam and

Eve would eat forbidden fruit but they still had free will. If God constructed them, molecule by

molecule in such a way that they would eat the fruit. then they cannot be said to have free will.

Marc, I didn't see that you weighed in on the question of whether God has free will. What is your

opinion?

I get the sense from Wolfe's work that he recognizes how choices become more and more restricted

as one approaches godhood.  Various Wolfean characters start human (or something) and 

as they approach godhood, become less able to make evil/human choices.

>Gerry Quinn: There's also the issue of Master Ash, who says he thinks his future is 
>improbable, but clearly his existence suggests that the future of 
>Severian's world is not cast in stone.

Master Ash, for all his wisdom, is the product of one timeline. Severian eventually surpasses that.

When Severian travels the Brook Madegot, I think the answer is revealed. This river of time only

branches as you travel forward in time, not backward. But since there are branchings, Master Ash's 

and The Green Man's future both exist.

The structure of Brook Madregot demonstrates that choices always pertain to moving forward to the 

future.  The path of your  past is fixed. Thus I would argue that the Increate, who can see all paths 

simultaneously, is denied the "freedom" of choice. He can't choose a left or right path on Brook 

Madregot. For Him,  everything just IS.  

Unlike Master Ash, The Increate can't  just can't travel to the left or to the right in time (to frozen Urth or 

sunny Ushas). He is constantly aware of the existence of both.  Perhaps the Increate actually embodies

 both. Somewhere in BotNS it is implied that the infinite complexity of the universe(s) IS the very substance 

of the Increate.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net