The Rejection of Free Will is Flawed & Baseless | What's Wrong with Determinism Ep. 1 

Tbh I don’t know if you can change people who think that stuff mind, it’s not biblical so you can try to start there but he might think challenging his beliefs about God makes him upset God. God can account for free will into his plan in the same way we do when we make plans that involve people.

@@Alis_volat_propiis I think what this other person said in reply to your comment will probably be helpful. I think a good example is the concept of original sin. It is strongly implied that God gave man free will and put the fruit in the garden as a choice. Often, the creation of sin is attributed to man by virtue of defiance to God’s will. So, it is incredibly bizarre to say that free will does not exist because then God would be responsible for sin. And, for example, Deuteronomy 30:19-20 explicitly asks us to “choose life,” which would be difficult if choice didn’t exist. So, in addition to that, i think your best bet is a combination of bringing up these verses & discussing compatibilism. Some of the earliest theories of compatibilism developed in the medieval period as a resolution to the very dilemma you seem to be caught in where you understand that free will exists, but your friend thinks that God has a deterministic plan. Christian philosophers who tried to reconcile free will with God’s role as the first mover include saint Augustine of Hippo & Thomas Aquinas. Augustine makes a good point, and, if I remember right, it’s something even this other comment brought up as well. What follows is not necessarily the same argument Augustine gave, but if God is transcendental, then he is beyond time. I would say this allows God to trivialize the concept of choice, being beyond it. It’s like if you were a two-dimensional being & you drew a tree diagram of every possible choice you could make & then I told you I could predict what choice you would make because I, being a 3D being, could just step to the side of your drawing where it looks like a line, like starring down the edge of a sheet of paper. I would look to the top of the line & say, “there, that’s where you end up.” So, if your friends issue is not being able to reconcile God’s future-sight with free will, a variant of that tends to be the answer. Through some form of compatibilism, we could say that God does see the future as your friend infers from the idea that the Bible mentions that God is all-knowing & has plans, but we can also point out that verses like “The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps.” (Proverbs 16:9) imply that man has his own will (way) that he acts on, but that God either influences him or establishes the means by which he will be given choices (but not what choice he makes). Likewise, John 7:17 says “if anyone’s will is to do God’s will...” which again, like the verse from Deuteronomy, proves that the Bible explicitly states that we make choices & have a will that is our own.

determinism and moral responsibility are compatible moral responsibility does not require PAP it's not just Christians (ironically, many try to use free will/PAP as a theodicy) but many atheists too deny free will

Tell him to prove his God exists ask his God to move something or make it rain idk something along that line 😂

⁠@@nickolasmelonballersomeone ask how old this person is. @Johnathan950 ☝️

Yeah, it’s blender (a program). I draw in black & white, add a modifier so it draws over time, and then I add a chalk filter in compositing.

Laplace's Demon doesn't "compute the outcome of your choice". It says that hypothetically, if every event preceding your choice could be known by some entity, the next event (you making the choice) could be calculated. So is your choice really a free choice if some entity knows it before you make it?

@@ddarog What, in your opinion, is the difference between "compute" and "calculate" ? And yes, even if somebody or something knows my choice in advance, it doesn't change the fact that I'm the one making that choice. My mom knows before I do where I'll toss my jacket when coming home. I'm still the one choosing to toss it.

​​@@SickegalAlienthe point of the thought experiment is saying that if taking every event before your choice can determine what your choice will be, then despite looking like you are making a free choice it's actually determined by all the prior events. You could not have chosen otherwise, if this is true, making the "choice" not a choice at all. No more than how a rock "chooses" to fall if you release it from your hand.

​@SickegalAlien she does not know for certain. If she did, the choice would not be free.

@@oddkris9256 It’s something I did a tiktok video on a while back: he starts out by giving his argument very blatantly false authority by virtue of the Law of The Excluded Middle, which he uses to pretend that he can make whatever “either or” statement he pleases. He can’t. That’s not what LEM is. LEM is formal, not informal, and so statements must be properly formalized, first, which means arguing the content & context of the argument first. In effect (at least in what I saw from the one debate he had with Ben Shapiro) his entire argument is predicated on a false dichotomy that never even acknowledges compatibilism such to legitimately rule out free will. Another thing I remember is that he gave a pretty bad excuse of the soul argument where he waved it off by claiming that anyone who brings up the soul is just (paraphrased): “arguing the nature of choice, not where it terminates” to which he then gave the argument he gave throughout which is (paraphrased): “if choice terminates in the self, then what causes the self.” This argument is profoundly awful for two reasons: One, as I mentioned, his reasoning leading up to this was a false dichotomy, so he never actually substantiated why the self must have a cause, which, if you think about it, is actually laughably bas because he’s basically saying (not a quote): “if the self is caused externally (the premise), then the self is caused externally (the conclusion of determinism.” So... that’s circular... and just really bad... And then, two, it is only made worse by his rejection to even represent the soul argument with any degree of intellectual honesty. The soul argument is a metaphysical stance, and, so, the nature of choice that it changes is that it makes choice metaphysical, and, by virtue of that, there is no need for a physical cause. In other words, the indeterminist libertarian position is that the self is uncaused, and he, once again, was essentially arguing (not a quote): “Well, if it’s uncaused, that doesn’t mean much because we still have to ask what caused it.” So, like, if I had to give it a rating, it is one of the worst arguments I have ever heard.

​@@nickolasmelonballer I watched your video on tiktok and read this comment. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

@@nickolasmelonballer cosmic skeptic made a video called “compatibilism debunked” or something along those lines. Any chance you could create a video discussing his points? I would like to hear your thoughts.

@@nickolasmelonballeror if you could summarize in the comment section for me. I’m new to this debate and want insight because I couldn’t grasp his points well.

Note, a supernatural choice, in regards to spirits and libertarian free will, falls outside the categories of causeless effect and caused effect.

Note, B theory, which is 100% deterministic, doesn't assert anything about choice or free will - a simple way to understand B theory is, to paraphrase: the future is as true/real as the past; an analogy for B theory is looking at the marks on a ruler as representing points in time, the middle mark can represent the present, and the marks on the right can represent the future, which are as real and true as the marks on the left, which represent the past.

10:54 The series of events is caused by the series of events, in that every event in the series is caused by another event in the series, though I may understand that there's a "meta" question about why or the necessity for the series of events - in the case of real-world synthetic propositions, it's a brute fact; even if unappealing, a brute fact is still a fact. An analogy can be made to the simple analytic proposition 1+1 necessarily = 2, where after explaining why such is the case "linearly", there could be a "meta" question about why the necessity for such - even if I cannot answer to one's satisfaction, the fact is still true, and this "meta" question doesn't quite make sense, though I understand the perspective; in the example of why a Higg's Boson gives mass, note that such isn't a causal event, and ending in a brute fact isn't equivalent to a causeless-effect event.

14:30 My rebuttal is sort of the "cop out"; the original event isn't equivalent to the event modified - the person is given knowledge, this is an action, which influenced his decision, such would be a [part of a] cause, but, and this may be where there's contention, there would be no modified event, because there's either timeline 1, where the person chooses not to calculate, or timeline 2, where he chooses to calculate, cause in a fully deterministic universe he's fated to not choose, or choose, to calculate.

If the person is the Laplace Demon, and minds are processes, note that to perfectly predict his own mind would require a more complex mind, which is impossible for him, so he can calculate an incorrect prediction about his future decisions.