While I agree with you, free will and materialism are incompatible. If all there is, is matter and the laws of physics, and the laws of physics govern everything then the decisions the brain makes are every bit as governed by the laws of physics which are entirely deterministic. That would mean your thoughts are deterministic and you have no free will.
This book is great up until he tries to explain how free will works, then I didn’t find his explanation satisfactory, but his philosophy and logic do illuminate the issues and incompatibility of free will and physics.
“We have found that for free will to be real, our thoughts must exert forces to change the motion of real matter. However, forces being created by momentum-free minds could lead to a violation of the conservation laws. Specifically, the conservation laws we are concerned with here ae the conservation of energy, the conservation of momentum and the conservation of angular momentum. These three conservation laws are part of the bedrock of physics, and any violation of these conservation laws would be wholly unacceptable to physics and to all scientifically informed readers.” Wayne Portwine, "Free Will is Real: A Theory of Consciousness, Sheridan: Kryghter LLC. location 390
There is a big issue I think needs answering. ‘Eternal Truths’ are in the eye of the beholder unless there is some reason to believe that the deity stating those truths is really the deity, that is, a real living god. For the ancient Carthaginians who worshipped Molech, it was an eternal truth that babies were to be burned alive as sacrifices to their God. Eternal truths of Commanche animism led to their belief that they would be protected in war,which they loved to engage in, raiding, kidnapping and mutilating other tribes and early settlers. For them this was their eternal way of life. And the Koran tells its adherents to strike infidels in the neck to terrorize them into belief. that is an eternal truth for them.
Thus, the question of which eternal truths should be believed depends in my opinion on whether the god can be believed to be real or not. To me, that means a God who claims to be creator and tells a false story about what happened at creation, isn’t a real god and his ‘truths’ are not eternal.
You could be right. Or perhaps any number of gods can be true for you but only if you let them be. Perhaps there is something in the way we are wired which locks the ‘eternal truths’ away from our conscious minds, but which can still reach us only when we value it enough to make room for it. Perhaps whatever it is can readily assume whatever cultural package is available. If that is right, then maybe the places, dates and names don’t really matter so much as the stories and the meanings it would like us to have.
I have always said, whatever God is like, He is God. If he is a Klingon war god then we have to deal with that. We don’t really get a vote on what kind of God we would prefer, we have to deal with what we have, assuming, of course that there is a god. I believe thee is. I certainly might be wrong, but even if I am wrong, I have had a blast working the theological problem I have been working–yeah it would be meaningless if God were a Klingon war god, but the fun can’t be taken away from me.
And that is why I believe it is important to look at all the major religious documents to see if thee is some way to get a handle on the issue. Most religions give no handle of observational possibilities. The Kiti I i’qan of the Bahai says if you leave copper in the earth for 70 years it becomes God. That was the only observationally testable statement in that entire book. Unfortunately the statement is false, which, in my mind disqualifies that god.regardless of how endearing the ‘eternal truths’ contained in the Kiti I i’qan are.
The Dhammapada, which is believed to have been written by Buddha, has great advice for living with one’s fellow man, but no observationally verifiable statements at all. I also didn’t find anything verifiable in the Koran either. Those religions are accepted totally on faith in that faith, with no hand holds of rational thought.
Maybe it’s good to have a choice which makes a claim to historicity since nowadays so many of us cannot imagine believing anything else. But the devil will be in the details since I don’t think all Christians believe the documentation is airtight enough to persuade all comers. For those looking for justification for going on believing as they do it is probably enough. But promoting the idea that any belief which cannot be proven should be rejected could backfire. I don’t advocate such a standard, but I find room to believe in more than what can be proven. Your position seems perilously close to scientism. Do you really think science is capable of being the measure of all things?
I don’t think anything will persuade all comers. That is impossible. I am, however, delighted that you now see the need for historicity, something so many claim is unnecessary. The problem is always one of models. David Rohl captures the enterprise of history, which is no different than the enterprise of finding oil–one takes a set of facts available and finds a model of the past which fits either historical data or geological data in my case.
"The answer to both of these scholars is, yes, the Conquest did happen…but not in the time when Finkelstein imagines it should have happened. And you really can look for the evidence of that Conquest, just as you can with any historical event which leaves its mark in the archaeological record. Thompson is convinced that the Bible is a myth in the first place, so he rejects any attempt to look for evidence of city destructions that may have been the work of Israelite invaders. He no longer possesses the open mind that must surely be he primary tool of any good scholar… which is sad… but somewhat inevitable given the lack of evidence for a Conquest of the Promised Land at the end of the Late Bronze Age, where Thompson and the others were undoubtedly looking. “But now we have a new timeline for the ancient world and a completely new way of viewing the Exodus tradition-through the sharp lens of the Middle Bronze Age when, as we have already seen, there is a remarkable pattern of archaeological evidence which is consistent with the biblical narratives. This is how you do it, Professor Thompson. You construct a history based on evidence and you test out a historical narrative, like the biblical text, by comparing the pattern of evidence from archaeology with the pattern of events described in the text. If there is a convincing match between archaeology and narrative, then you have constructed a reasonable history, if, on the other hand, the archaeological pattern is not consistent with the narrative (as is the case with the Ramesses Exodus Theory) then, of course, you have either produced an unreasonable and therefore false history, which rightly needs to be rejected, or the narrative is false. After all, it should be remembered that history–as constructed by historians–is not the past. The past is what happened, while history is just our best guess as to what happened.” ."* David Rohl, Exodus, (Thinking Man Media, 2015, p. 263
If a God is claimed to have interacted with humanity in history, there will be some evidence of that. This is why historicity is important–it is a foundation but it still doesn’t replace faith. Even if my views of historicity of scripture are true, that fact doesn’t prove that Jesus rose from he dead. That still must be taken on faith. But we can use evidence of how the disciples lived their lives afterwards as evidence at least that they believed what they spouted.
Not to burst your balloon, but the good I was alluding to was for those unable to imagine any other kind of truth. But I’m more flexible than that. Heck, I can even forgo the need to think that God is a unified, external being. I actually think what gives rise to and supports God belief is the way we are wired psychologically, which results in our identifying with these conscious minds with little direct awareness of what the rest (and vaster portion) of consciousness is doing. I think wholeness may require connectedness within, and God belief is the time honored solution. So I don’t recommend evicting God from anyone’s beliefs even though I’m willing to settle for something less defined for myself. I feel like even this much is better than taking a nothing-but stance toward anything that can’t be proven empirically.
As a scientist, factual events, history etc is important to me. I know people in things like philosophy, anthropology, and the letters, facts are less important. I will surprise you that besides having a minor in Math, I have a minor in Latin, and anthropology and of course a year’s grad work in philosophy of science, which actually increased my desire for factual things. Every new philosopher I would read, I would think this guy is on to something, then the next would basically rip that fellow apart and I would think yeah this guy is onto something, then with the next guy, the cycle would continue. But most philosophers are not as interested in historical fact as I a student of geologic history am.
Well geologic history is a great place for that sort of standard. But for looking at what we are from the inside … not so much. Glad you had your parachute.
lol, bubble bursted. but I have a parachute.