Sam Harris’ “remarkable” statement is incoherent. It is like saying… If 2 were 3 then 2+2 = 4 would be false. Ultimately it is an attempt to annihilate the “I” and say there is no such thing – only matter. This kind of thinking is a result of buying into the greatest delusion of modern times that one can live purely as an objective observer. The result is no life at all. For how can there be life if there no “I” to be alive. The delusion is in the denial of its incoherence. And when it comes to incoherent rhetoric like this the only meaning to look for is in the effects on action… the ability to justify doing anything. It is the Nietzsche liberation from morality. There is no greater evil.
It may not be a huge difference but there is a difference. With God there is a bias in favor of the good. The point of both is that we cannot take too much personal credit, for indeed a great portion of what we have become is indeed circumstances beyond our control. Nevertheless, I agree with you that it is still an exaggeration annihilating free will – saying that the ONLY difference between people is circumstance – which simply isn’t true. Different people respond to the same circumstances in different ways. We are of course dispensing with the nonsensical logic above, “if 2 were 3 then 2+2=4 would be false” replacing it with the more sensible notion of circumstance to say that if 2 were in a different equation such as 2+3=4 then it would indeed be false.
Aye! Which made Oliver Saks review comment all the more funny. Oliver wrote: "“Brilliant and witty—and never less than incisive—Free Will shows that Sam Harris can say more in 13,000 words than most people do in 100,000.”
Psalm 130.
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!
O Lord, hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!
If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?
But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning,
more than watchmen for the morning.
O Israel, hope in the Lord!
For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is plentiful redemption.
And he will redeem Israel from all his iniquities.
Of course that begs the question: how can any of us know we are hooked into the real McCoy? As you know I think what supports God belief is on board and probably fully capable of being interpreted as whatever local deity is culturally given. But believe me, if I was already attuned to experiencing this something more as the Christian God I’d be quite happy to go on doing so. But I have prior commitments now to understanding it another way and my feeling is don’t fix it if it ain’t broken. I’m content.
Because, when I first tried to entitle it: “What is luck?”, Biologos wouldn’t allow me to do so, because thread titles must be > 14 characters, or was it 15? So I tried to think of something else to add to the basic question and make it longer.
“that all our swains commend her” was the best that I could come up with on the spur of the moment. Source: William Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen from Verona.
Who is Silvia? what is she,
That all our swains commend her?
Holy, fair, and wise is she;
The heaven such grace did lend her,
That she might admirèd be.
Is she kind as she is fair?
For beauty lives with kindness.
Love doth to her eyes repair,
To help him of his blindness;
And, being helped, inhabits there.
Then to Silvia let us sing,
That Silvia is excelling;
She excels each mortal thing
Upon the dull earth dwelling;
To her let us garlands bring."
This thread is an off-shoot of my even less exciting thread “Monergism versus Synergism” [Which I’ve considered entitling: “Monergism versus Synergism (The XXX-rated version)” or “Monergism, Synergism, and Sex”] in the hope of attracting more viewers. One of the things that I learned from posting that thread is that there is either a paucity of Calvinists around here or the few who are here don’t understand what “Total Depravity” implies. Are viewers of that thread following the link to the “Table of Main Christians Concerning Salvation and Grace?” Give it a gander.
To idle atheists passing by this thread: I have the distinct impression, from reading Harris’ book Free Will that Harris and other reprobates are unaware that there are some Christians who firmly believe in the principle doctrines of Christianity [e.g. Original Sin; the historical, incarnated, crucified, resurrected, and ascended Jesus] but not in “free will”. IMO, somebody ought to break the news to Richard Dawkins, Samuel Harris, and their ilk. Don’t worry about Christopher Hitchens. He knows, … now.
OK, I goggled it too. It is interesting how theology, like every field of study has its own special language, and even if you have gone to church all your life, you have no idea what it those words mean.
In case you are thinking this can make sense because we could change the symbol used for 3 to that of “2” in which case 2+2=4 would indeed be false using that symbol. But then Sam Harris’ statement becomes…
I have to admit that if I were to trade names with one of these men, letter for letter, my name would be his: Then since it is unlikely that name alone would change his behavior, there is no part of the result which would see the world differently or resist the impulse to victimize other people.
This no longer sounds so preposterous and since the atoms of the person have no part of the name, then perhaps this is the only rational way of interpreting Harris’ statement.
The bigger questions is, where do we draw the line between the person and the circumstances. Sam Harris makes it out that there is no line at all (except in what we call it) – that there are only circumstances and there is no person (except perhaps the name) separate from that. Sam’s way is a strange way of looking at people, don’t you think? I think most people would draw a very different line between the person and the circumstances, even without inventing anything supernatural.
It reminds me of music… I don’t “speak the language” of academic music theory, but I appreciate my friends that do. But as far as real life goes, all the jargon doesn’t really impact me and I’m not missing out on anything by not knowing it. I sometimes feel that way about aspects of theological study.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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They mean that Protestantism doesn’t get it. Even worse than Roman Catholicism.
Pierre Delbet’s work La science et la réalité, published in 1913: “Chance appears today as a law, the most general of all laws. It has become for me a soft pillow.
It is logically impossible to ascribe any power to ‘chance or luck’ whatsoever. If chance exists in its frailest possible form, God is finished. If chance existed, it would destroy God’s sovereignty. If God is not sovereign, he is not God. If he is not God, he simply is not. If chance is, God is not. If God is, ‘chance’ is not. The two cannot coexist by reason of the impossibility of the contrary.
Chance or luck can do nothing as it is not an entity. Non-entities have no power.
As to free will, we do possess it within limits, set by God.
I sympathize with your comments, and find them in line with the Proverb that states we cast the dice but God controls the outcome, To me, it still leaves room for God using random chance as we define it to determine the outcome. Perhaps you are saying random chance is not random, but would you allow God to use randomness to achieve his purpose? Or would you limit him in that way?
I would appeal to the wonderful mystery of God’s providence (you may have seen this before* ), that the Bible teaches that God is absolutely sovereign and the rules of probability hold – it’s both/and and not either/or. We have free will and God inscrutably elects, we are responsible for our choices and God chooses them. There is an instantaneous dynamic between the living omnitemporal God and the linear (most of the time ) sequential time of the cosmos that we cannot possibly get our heads around.
*That was of course facetious – of course you’ve seen it before.
How would that work? Would God Himself engage in random acts, in which case, I’d think, it’d be hard to trust Him? Or would He tolerate and endure random human acts, weakening and/or blocking those that lead to any end that He doesn’t want?
Who or where is the “random act” generator? In God’s hands or humanity’s?
I’m not sure why it is so hard to see that something apparently random to us, is not necessarily random to God. In fact I can demonstrate it to you right here: tails, tails, heads, tails
There. I’m here to tell you that as far as you are concerned: that string of heads/tails results is entirely random. But to me … well … you have no way of knowing whether I carefully selected and wrote out that sequence (in other words, not random at all to me) or whether I actually flipped a coin four times just now to generate that (which would effectively make it random even to me). But you’ll never know unless I tell you, because that sequence isn’t long enough for statistical analysis to generate reliable probabiities on the question.
All we know is that, statistically speaking, a lot of stuff in nature happens in a way that we can see meets the criteria for being a stochastic process (what we call ‘randomness’). Us observing that fact in no way rules one way or the other about how God sees it.
I would think God allows random acts, rather than acting randomly himself. You can look at the parable of the sower to see how that might work, with the sowing of seeds being random but a harvest growing out of the uncertainty and chaos of scattered seeds landing here and there. God works purposefully using a random process.
It’s not hard at all, to me, to see that nothing is random to God. I was just being charitable and giving Phil a choice, … and adding that I’m adverse to choice #1 in which God is a “random act generator”. That said, I remain a hard-boiled Determinist: i.e. from where I sit, humanity loves to imagine, vanity of vanities, that it’s filled with two-legged random act generators, which I am currently of the opinion aren’t except in their imagination. And God appears to tolerate and endure the nonsense when, in fact, He’s merciful.
), that the Bible teaches that God is absolutely sovereign and the rules of probability hold – it’s both/and and not either/or. We have free will and God inscrutably elects, we are responsible for our choices and God chooses them. There is an instantaneous dynamic between the living omnitemporal God and the linear (most of the time 