Atlas Society, Free Will

 

Below is The Atlas Society Article online, expressing their view on free will, and I copied the article in full, and will comment on it.

 

Here is the article (A for Atlas): “

 

 

What is the Objectivist View of Free Will?

June 29, 2010

Question: What Is the Objectivist view of free will?

Answer: Objectivism holds that man has free will. In every moment, many courses of action are open to us; whichever action we take, we could equally well have chosen to do something else. Within the sphere of actions that are open to choice, what we do is up to us and is not just the inescapable outcome of causes outside our control. And this capacity for free choice is the foundation of morality. Because we are free to choose, we need moral standards to guide our actions and we can be held morally responsible for what we do.

 

Today, people who want to fly from responsibility are greatly aided by a view of man that attributes our actions to factors beyond our control. For example, a recent New York Times Magazine article absolved obese individuals from moral blame by accusing abundant and cheap food of causing people to overeat. But to take such a position seriously, one has to deny free will and accept its contrary, determinism. Determinism is the view that ultimately we don't control our actions, that the causes operating in us and on us compel us to act in one and only one way. You say you choose what to eat? For a determinist, you can't help yourself.”

 

My response: We all have free will, and as and if we maverize, we seek to strengthen our naturally existent but puny free will transforming it and us into a powerful, vibrant free will, a good will, morally virtuous in line with egoist morality and self-realization as a life plan.

 

A: “Determinism dominates social science, and it is popular with natural scientists and philosophers as well. Though the particular doctrines that embody it come and go, the basic outlook remains the same. In psychology, for example, we have seen a parade from Freudianism through behaviorism to computationalism and evolutionary psychology. Freud sought to explain human action on the basis of subconscious dispositions or urges. The conscious mind merely rationalizes what subconscious urges impel us to do. Behaviorism sought to explain human action on the basis of external stimuli and physical responses. Computationalism regards the mind as a computer, running an algorithmic program, no more choosing than does a random-number program on a PC. Evolutionary psychology holds that our genes dictate our patterns of thought and behavior. In none of these theories does any person choose anything by his own will.

Deterministic explanation dominates the social sciences because it dominates the natural sciences. The physical mechanics of Newton and Einstein, for example, provides us with laws that let us predict the motion of a galaxy, or of a ray of light, or of a ball. In biology, the discovery of DNA showed how, other things equal, an organism must develop into the forms it does. The laws of chemistry admit of no alternative events. Even the laws of sub-atomic physics, which reflect the apparently random behavior of the smallest entities yet known, do not propose choosing, purposeful agents as causes. This is powerful science, and it exerts a powerful influence as a model.

 

Many determinists see themselves as hard-minded advocates of the scientific worldview. But actually there is nothing scientific about rejecting free will. Science is, first and foremost, a set of objective explanations of observable facts. Science explains observable facts; it does not explain them away. And free will is, indubitably, an observable fact.

 

We observe it through introspection, the inward perception of our own conscious processes. As Ayn Rand explained, our free will resides, most basically, in our ability to direct our conscious attention. Rand called this ability "focus" and called the choice to focus "the choice to think." All of us can observe our ability to focus in operation.”

 

My response: If one is rational, conscious and deliberative, one must focus one’s conscious attention, and the thinking individuator transcends the determinism which much rules his bodily functioning.

 

A: “Consider your visual awareness of these words: You can examine the page or screen more closely, focusing your perceptual attention on the typeface or the spelling of a particular word. Or you can reduce your visual attention, gazing blankly as your mind wanders elsewhere. You choose which to do. You control your level of focus.

 

We can observe our choices to focus against the background of automatic mental functions. We don't choose whether to see the price of a new car, but we do choose whether to focus on the relation of that price to our budget. We don't choose to have emotional impulses, we choose whether to let them dominate our decision-making. We can raise or lower our focus on conceptual tasks, and broaden or narrow our range of awareness. One may focus on a narrow set of problem-solving techniques to pass a test. One may zero in on a ball to hit or catch it. Or one may imagine or "brainstorm," creatively extending one's imagination and seeing what the subconscious can generate.

 

Our ability to focus allows us to choose to some degree which antecedent factors have the most weight in our decision-making. Suppose someone rudely insults you. How will you react? If you were brought up to defend your honor, that could be a factor in your decision. If you see the need to avoid confrontation, that could be a factor. If you are surrounded by friends, that could be a factor. Which factors do you focus on? Which guide your response? Are you violent or peaceful, cutting or conciliatory? That depends, ultimately, on you.

 

Thinking is not a choice we have to make, however. In fact, many people avoid thinking by failing to focus on facts and on consequences. We can evade the truth, evade our needs, evade moral responsibility.

 

Free will is not only an observable fact, it is also inescapable. Whenever we use our minds, we are presupposing that we have the capacity to control our minds—to think about one thing rather than another, to go by the evidence and not be swayed by bias, to seek information when we need it, to examine our beliefs and weigh them against the facts. So it is self-refuting to argue against free will. After all, if free will is false, how can anyone choose to change his mind on an issue? Anyone convinced of determinism presupposes he has accepted his conclusion because it was true, not because he happened to be caused to accept it. Anyone trying to convince you of determinism presupposes you can focus your mind on his cogent logic and the facts in his favor.

But what about causality?”

 

My response Free will is an observable, objective fact at work in the community, as well as an internal, subjective perspective.

 

A: “Free will exists. Like all things, it cannot be causeless or literally magical. Yet how could it be subject to causality and remain free? This can seem like a big problem if one accepts the determinist model of causality as a relationship among events. Consider the action on a pool table. The blow of a cue stick on a billiard ball (event 1) causes the motion of the ball (event 2), which causes the ball to reach the pocket (event 3), where it falls into the netting (event 4). In this model, given the properties of the objects to be acted upon and a set of initial actions, the changes in the system that follow are a matter of actions and reactions, or in other words, a chain of events. To trace causes is to trace the chain. An event that cannot be traced back to preceding events is, in this view, an event without a cause.

 

And there's the rub for free will. After all, if a human being really acts by his own will, deciding his own course of action, then preceding events do not fully explain the course chosen. On this model, free will seems anomalous, sui generis, bizarre, unscientific. Hence determinism.

Event causation is a useful model for analyzing some kinds of actions, but it is not a satisfactory philosophical account. What is causality, after all? It is the way in which entities act. There are no events without entities, the underlying objects that do the acting. There is no explosion without the bomb that explodes. There is no breathing without the body that breathes and the air that is breathed. A causal explanation is an explanation of action in terms of the entity's capacities for action, arising from its properties and relations. Free will is simply a human capacity for action, one that we will understand better in time. A choice is not uncaused. It is caused by the person who chooses.”

 

My response: I like this characterization that free will is simply a human capacity for action—and choice I add—and it is not uncaused, but is caused by the agent exercising his free will.

 

A: “Ignoring free will has proven to be bad science. No scientist today would own endorse Freud's or Marx's literal theories, for example, and in this respect currently trendy determinisms like evolutionary psychology will have their day of shame as well. This is not to say that antecedent factors cannot influence our choices. People may be affected to varying degrees by subconscious urges, as Freud argues. Class does affect the way many people treat others, though not as rigidly as Marx would have it. Even social science firmly premised on free will would need to continue identifying such factors. But good science cannot avoid addressing the fact that antecedent factors are only part of the story in explaining human action. Indeed, by identifying such factors, we better enable ourselves to take account of them in making choices.

 

Determinist philosophers have also become wary of suffering embarrassment for denying the obvious. To avoid this, some have attempted to offer a third alternative to free will and determinism. This is "compatibilism," which holds that an action should be called "free" if it has mental causes, even if all mental factors have antecedent causes. Mental freedom is thus "compatible" with the event-causation model and deterministic science. Compatibilists don't deny that humans make choices. They just deny that our choices could turn out differently than they do

 

But the basic issue remains inescapable. If our actions are not up to us, then we have no moral responsibility for them. Compatibilism wants to shelter in a house whose foundations it has knocked aside. There can be no effective guidance of human action, nor a satisfactory scientific account of human behavior, without taking into account the inescapable fact of free will.”

 

Free Will Britannica

 

 

 

On 3/25/25 I copied and pasted the entire article from Encyclopedia Britannica onto an electronic page; I have done some minor editing to hold the piece together, and will comment on it when appropriate. The article is entitled: free will and moral responsibility—Encyclopedia Britannica. Here is the article:

 

Britannica (B after this): “

 

 

 

free will and moral responsibility

 

Article History

Also called:

problem of moral responsibility

free will and moral responsibility, the problem of reconciling the belief that people are morally responsible for what they do with the apparent fact that humans do not have free will because their actions are causally determined. It is an ancient and enduring philosophical puzzle.”

 

My response: We are overawed by the powerful, impressive and ever increasing evidence from neuroscientists like Robert Sapolsky that free will is an illusion, that as Robert suggests, we are controlled by nature and nurture and the interactions between the two.

My confident rejection of all of this very daunting, amassing evidence is that yes, you scientists are factually proving that so many factors studied do indicates that humans are externally controlled, but that that soley is amassing empirical evidence on the physical part of our existence: the angelic or spiritual side of our emerged consciousness, especially when it emerges as the individuated self, is infinitely rich and immaterially sourced, so all their fancy experiments, and sweeping claims, though interesting and rich, cannot capture the incalculable richness, the infinite possibilities latent within the consciousness of the simplest human soul out there.

 

We are both-determined and self-determined at the same time and in the same person, so the free consciousness of the creative individuator does field a free will that is not absolutely, limitlessly free, but it is quite far advanced along such lines. Physical facts, neuroscientfically gathered, do not apply to the human soul. The physicalist is not able to detect let alone disprove the metaphysical fact that one is free, a little as a nonindividuator, and almost totally of free will, if she were an impressive individuators, an artistic great soul long practicing her craft.

B: “Freedom and responsibility

Historically, most proposed solutions to the problem of free will and moral responsibility have attempted to establish that humans do have free will. But what does free will consist of? When people make decisions or perform actions, they usually feel as though they are choosing or acting freely. A person may decide, for example, to buy apples instead of oranges, to vacation in France rather than in Italy, or to call a sister in Nebraska instead of a brother in Florida. On the other hand, there are at least some situations in which people seem not to act freely, as when they are physically coerced or mentally or emotionally manipulated. One way to formalize the intuitive idea of free action is to say that people act freely if it is true that they could have acted otherwise. Buying apples is ordinarily a free action because in ordinary circumstances one can buy oranges instead; nothing forces one to buy apples or prevents one from buying oranges.

Yet the decisions people make are the result of their desires, and their desires are determined by their circumstances, past experiences, and psychological and personality traits—their dispositions, tastes, temperaments, levels of intelligence, and so on. Circumstances, experiences, and traits in this sense are obviously the result of many factors outside the individual’s control, including upbringing and perhaps even genetic makeup. If this is correct, then one’s actions may ultimately be no more the result of free will than one’s eye colour is.”

 

My response: Our natural and nurtured influences from inside and outside of us, our unconscious, our desires, luck, indeterminism, causal determinism, chance, and sheer randomness—they all influence us, but the self can and does still choose freely alternative options based solely on changing one’s mind at this particular moment, for sound reasons, for some whim, or by some instinct to change.

B: “The existence of free will seems to be presupposed by the notion of moral responsibility. Most people would agree that one cannot be morally responsible for actions that one could not help but perform. Moreover, moral praise and blame, or reward and punishment, seem to make sense only on the assumption that the agent in question is morally responsible. These considerations seem to imply a choice between two implausible alternatives: either (1) people have free will, in which case their actions are not determined by their circumstances, past experiences, and psychological and personality traits, or (2) people do not have free will, in which case they are never morally responsible for what they do. This dilemma is the problem of free will and moral responsibility.”

 

My response: I detect no dilemma: we have free will and accompanying moral responsibility, though we can sympathize and empathize, and try to understand and give the benefit of the doubt where possible. Extenuating circumstances do apply, but that does not absolve almost any of us for some, most or near complete blame for our sins and crimes committed.

B: “Determinism

Determinism is the view that, given the state of the universe (the complete physical properties of all its parts) at a certain time and the laws of nature operative in the universe at that time, the state of the universe at any subsequent time is completely determined. No subsequent state of the universe can be other than what it is. Since human actions, at an appropriate level of description, are part of the universe, it follows that humans cannot act otherwise than they do; free will is impossible. (It is important to distinguish determinism from mere causation. Determinism is not the thesis that every event has a cause, since causes do not always necessitate their effects. It is, rather, the thesis that every event is causally inevitable. If an event has occurred, then it is impossible that it could not have occurred, given the previous state of the universe and the laws of nature.)

Philosophers and scientists who believe that the universe is deterministic and that determinism is incompatible with free will are called “hard” determinists. Since moral responsibility seems to require free will, hard determinism implies that people are not morally responsible for their actions. Although the conclusion is strongly counterintuitive, some hard determinists have insisted that the weight of philosophical argument requires that it be accepted. There is no alternative but to reform the intuitive beliefs in freedom and moral responsibility. Other hard determinists, acknowledging that such reform is scarcely feasible, hold that there may be social benefits to feeling and exhibiting moral emotions, even though the emotions themselves are based on a fiction. Such benefits are reason enough for holding fast to pre-philosophical beliefs about the existence of both free will and moral responsibility, according to these thinkers.”

My response: There are of course social benefits to be maintained if we assume people are free and morally responsible for their choices and actions, though they are robots, but I fear that if we tell people they are robots, they, still fielding free wills however undisciplined by self-restraint, will not develop into morally and spiritually good persons, knowing God is keeping a list, checking it twice to see who is naughty or nice.

To teach the young that they are robots is to teach them a lie, and it is to set loose these basically evil monsters upon society with no moral prohibition, self-enforced, to curb their misbehavior. There is no quicker way to set up hell on earth and treating people like robots or pieces of clay as Eric Hoffer warned, is to set up authoritarian dispensations in every country, and that is to increase needless suffering in the world.

B: “The extreme alternative to determinism is indeterminism, the view that at least some events have no deterministic cause but occur randomly, or by chance. Indeterminism is supported to some extent by research in quantum mechanics, which suggests that some events at the quantum level are in principle unpredictable (and therefore random).”

.

B: “Libertarianism

Philosophers and scientists who believe that the universe is indeterministic and that humans possess free will are known as “libertarians” (libertarianism in this sense is not to be confused with the school of political philosophy called libertarianism). Although it is possible to hold that the universe is indeterministic and that human actions are nevertheless determined, few contemporary philosophers defend this view.

Libertarianism is vulnerable to what is called the “intelligibility” objection. This objection points out that people can have no more control over a purely random action than they have over an action that is deterministically inevitable; in neither case does free will enter the picture. Hence, if human actions are indeterministic, free will does not exist.”

My response: One can take a peripatetic gendering through all the natural factors (indeterminism, chance, quantum theory, chaos theory and luck), and these generally could be considered as evidence in favor of human free will existing and being operative in each agent, but, still this intelligibility objection shared shows that  even these “favorable” conditions—perhaps necessary but not sufficient conditions for free will to exist—are not enough to prove we have free will, but, ultimately, as a epistemic moderate and as a metaphysical moderate, I deny that humans can prove for sure that we have free will, or that determinism or randomness are our only behavioral outcomes possible.

That the majority of humans subjective feel that they are free, and that God exists, and I propose that the near universality of these beliefs is empirical if subjective evidence that God, free will, and the spiritual world are axiomatic concepts to be accepted on faith at face value, and such a resolution will help clear up this thorny issue of human free will.

How do molecules and subatomic particles come together as primitive cells, lead to the introduction of life in the world? It seems miraculous or magical to me that life is sparked purely from an accidental or chance mixing of elementary particles, but I cannot say for sure that it did not happen that way, or that it did, or that God exists or does not exist.

I view human consciousness as the ghost in the machine, and the skeptical neuroscientist can pile up all the daunting, impressive, perhaps irrefutable evidence that we have no free will, but these experiments, tests and observations with very fancy technology does not study the nature of the individual soul, our divine spark accompanied by God’s grace, and that is affiliated with though separated from God’s consciousness, which is infinite,. Thus, I am neither rattled nor too concerned scientific tests disproving free will, for our consciousnesses are connected to infinite power and infinite spiritual power and life force, and that cannot be pushed aside by materialistic, mechanistic, reductionist experimenting, no matter how impressive and substantiated by other independent tests.

 

B: “The German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), one of the earliest defenders of libertarianism, attempted to overcome the intelligibility objection, and thereby to make room for moral responsibility, by proposing a kind of dualism in human nature. In his Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Kant claimed that humans are free when their actions are governed by reason. Reason (what he sometimes called the “noumenal self”) is in some sense independent of the rest of the agent, allowing the agent to choose morally. Kant’s theory requires that reason be disconnected from the causal order in such a way as to be capable of choosing or acting on its own and, at the same time, that it be connected to the causal order in such a way as to be an integral determinant of human actions. The details of Kant’s view have been the subject of much debate, and it remains unclear whether it is coherent.”

My response: As a staunch defender of Objectivist epistemology, I have some real reservations about Kant generally, but I like what is said about his dualism—interactionist dualism?—in human nature. We are, at the same time, half-beast and half-angel, so we are biological, material animals, and rational/angelic spirits in our consciousness, and that depiction of human nature may not be pat, simple or even coherent, but it is the human reality, no more, no less.

B: “Although libertarianism was not popular among 19th-century philosophers, it enjoyed a revival in the mid-20th century. The most influential of the new libertarian accounts were the so-called “agent-causation” theories. First proposed by the American philosopher Roderick Chisholm (1916–99) in his seminal paper “Human Freedom and the Self” (1964), these theories hold that free actions are caused by agents themselves rather than by some prior event or state of affairs. Although Chisholm’s theory preserves the intuition that the ultimate origin of an action—and thus the ultimate moral responsibility for it—lies with the agent, it does not explain the details or mechanism of agent-causation. Agent-causation is a primitive, unanalyzable notion; it cannot be reduced to anything more basic. Not surprisingly, many philosophers found Chisholm’s theory unsatisfactory. What is wanted, they objected, is a theory that explains what freedom is and how it is possible, not one that simply posits freedom. Agent-causation theories, they maintained, leave a blank space where an explanation ought to be.”

My response: We cannot explain what freedom is or what it is to the satisfaction of the mechanistic determinist because these ontological facts about human nature are primary, and just are, so concepts and words cannot capture their essence. If they are infinitely expansive in the properties they are comprised of, and in how the soul-in-the-body interacts with others in the world is not explanatory (at least for now) I think there is enough evidence provided by Objectivists that we do wield free will as we focus our rational abilities to make sense of the world.

B: “Compatibilism

Ancient and medieval compatibilism

Compatibilism, as the name suggests, is the view that the existence of free will and moral responsibility is compatible with the truth of determinism. In most cases, compatibilists (also called “soft” determinists) attempt to achieve this reconciliation by subtly revising or weakening the commonsense notion of free will.”

Objectivists from The Atlas Society by 2010 had firmly refuted compatibilism, because it disallows robust, libertarian properties to a free will, accepted and experienced by each agent, in her personal life, and billions of people subjectively experiencing this commonsense notion of free will as operating in their minds is powerful reminded that reality is not what the neuroscientists claim that it is counterfactually and counterintuitively.

I know we are part determined and part-free naturally, but as we individuate, our intelligence, language and concept-wielding grows and expands, and we can focus our minds so we become more and more free willing, while the automatic and more instinctually functioning systems in our bodies and minds still govern themselves unconsciously by rules we may not understand or identity, but exist in and operate beneficially inside us. This moderate compatibilism exists, I believe as we go from being mostly caused by deterministic events, to increasingly and then mostly are self-determining as the causal agent and originator of our choices and actions as individuators.

The Objectivist dislike more typical compatibilism as unnecessarily restrictive of human enjoyment of their free willing possibilities and ends, and discount it as true or realistic, as not being how humans think, choose or act.”

 

B: “Compatibilism has an ancient history, and many philosophers have endorsed it in one form or another. In Book III of the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle (384–322 bce) wrote that humans are responsible for the actions they freely choose to do—i.e., for their voluntary actions. While acknowledging that “our dispositions are not voluntary in the same sense that our actions are,” Aristotle believed that humans have free will because they are free to choose their actions within the confines of their natures. In other words, humans are free to choose between the (limited) alternatives presented to them by their dispositions. Moreover, humans also have the special ability to mold their dispositions and to develop their moral characters. Thus, humans have freedom in two senses: they can choose between the alternatives that result from their dispositions, and they can change or develop the dispositions that present them with these alternatives. One might object that the capacity for self-examination and reflection presupposed by this kind of freedom implies the existence of something in humans that is outside the causal order. If this is so, then Aristotle’s compatibilism is really a disguised form of libertarianism.”

My response: This weird libertarian compatibilism that the writers at Britannica are attributing to Aristotle seems attractive and plausible to me, and it might be the kind of compatibilism that would appeal to a metaphysical libertarian such as I am.

We are born determined and enslaved by reality and our natures more than we are born free and/or self-determining and free-willing, so the telos for human maturation is to individuate and live as a free-willing maverick, as fully and best as one can, so we can strengthen our shrunken free will to make it robust, not unlike how a puny 20-year old can lift weights to become powerful and bulked up. We were born other-caused, and as we maverize, increasingly are we the originator and source of our will choices, so we grow in self-causation.

 

B:   “For medieval Scholastic philosophers, free will was a theological problem. If God is the prime mover—the first cause of all things and events in the universe, including human actions—and if the universe is deterministic, then it seems to follow that humans never act freely. How can humans do other than what God has caused them to do? How then can they be morally responsible for their actions? An analogous problem obtains regarding God’s omniscience: if God, being omniscient, has foreknowledge of every choice that humans make, how can humans choose other than what God knows they will choose?”

 

My response: God is square with us, and would not deceive us, lie to us, or torture us. Based on these presuppositions, I must take it on faith that God has foreknowledge and omniscience, but not where his smart beings are given the gift of free will by De so that they are free and make moral choices, so they are responsible for their actions. How this contradiction be justified, I know not, but this is how the world sems to work.

 

It could be that God made the world so that those with free will, that their part of reality remains unknown to God who is otherwise omniscient, and that God places this imposition upon Deself as a gift to humanity that they are free to choose how to choose live and which way to turn, without divine foreknowledge wiping out their free will or responsibility. To be free is a gift of love, and God may play dice sometimes with the universe, but God is faithful and trustworthy and allows people a zone of privacy wherein their choices are made by people and not known in advance by anyone. I accept this on faith in God’s kindness, square-dealing, and sense of fairness.

 

 

B: “In the late 4th and early 5th centuries, St. Augustine played a key role in combining Greek philosophy with Christianity; his attempts to reconcile human freedom with Christian notions such as divine foreknowledge are still cited by theologians. According to Augustine, God—a perfect, omnipotent, and omniscient being—exists outside the realm of time. Temporal directionality does not exist for God, as it does for humans. Hence, it makes no sense to attribute foreknowledge of human choices to God.:’’

 

My response Perhaps St. Augustine was correct, that God’s foreknowledge does not apply to the temporal human world.

B: “Nearly a millennium later, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) grappled with the same problems. Like Augustine, he lived during a major turning point in Western intellectual history, when the relationship between philosophy and religion was being freshly examined and recast. In his Summa theologiae (1265/66–73), Aquinas wrote that if humans do not have free will, all “counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards, and punishments would be in vain”; such a conclusion is simply inconceivable. In response to the apparent conflict between freedom and God’s role as the prime mover of human wills, Aquinas claimed that God is in fact the source of human freedom. This is because God moves humans “in accordance with our voluntary natures.” “

 

My response: God is the source of human freedom because there can be no spiritual, moral or ontological goodness without conscious entities possessing free will, so they may extend God’s realm in the world, extending God’s rule as far as possible, so humans therein possess freedom of will, freedom of action, freedom of conscience, free speech and free thinking; these godly freedoms are not absolute, but are close enough, for God does move us in accordance with our human natures.

B: “Just as by moving natural causes God does not prevent their acts being natural, so by moving voluntary causes He does not deprive their actions of being voluntary.

Because humans are created by God, their wills are naturally in harmony with his. Thus, God’s role as prime mover need not get in the way of free agency.”

My response: I disagree with Aquinas when he states that because humans are created by God, their wills are naturally in harmony with his. God created us with natural depravity built into us, so there is no automatic, easy way for our wills to be in harmony with God’s will. The harmony can be achieved but not without persistent, tough human effort. That harmony is an achieved harmony established between humans and Gld. This harmony is and unstable fragile and unstable pact, rebuilt and honored daily.

B: “Modern compatibilism

Following the rediscovery of Classical learning during the Renaissance, philosophers sympathetic to compatibilism shifted their focus from the divine back to the individual. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) argued that the only condition necessary for free will and moral responsibility is that there be a connection between one’s choices and one’s actions. In his Leviathan (1651), he asserted that free will is “the liberty of the man [to do] what he has the will, desire, or inclination to do.” If people are able to do the things they choose, then they are free.”

My response: Free will is freedom of mental choice, not ensuing freedom of action to take action.

B: “The Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711–76), another staunch compatibilist, maintained that the apparent incompatibility between determinism and free will rests on a confusion about the nature of causation. Causation is a phenomenon that humans project onto the world, he believed. To say that one thing (A) is the cause of another thing (B) is nothing more than to say that things like A have been constantly conjoined with things like B in experience and that an observation of a thing like A inevitably brings to mind the idea or expectation of a thing like B. There is nothing in nature itself that corresponds to the “necessary connection” thought to exist between two things that are causally related. Since there is just this kind of regularity between human choices on the one hand and human actions on the other, it follows that human actions are caused by human choices, and this is all that is needed for free will. As Hume claimed in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), “By liberty we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will.” “

 

My response: Causal relations may be a necessary connection between causal events and object effected events, or but a weaker relationship.

B: “The British philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–73) was the major champion of compatibilism in the 19th century. He proposed that a person is free when “his habits or his temptations are not his masters, but he theirs.” Unfree people, in contrast, are those who obey their desires even when they have good reasons not to. Mill’s position is situated at an interesting turning point in compatibilist thinking. It echoes Kant in its reliance on reason as the vehicle of freedom, but it also anticipates contemporary compatibilism in its notion that a free person is one whose internal desires are not at odds with reason.”

 

My response: There is a free will to choose alternate choices and there is living in a state of political, moral, or spiritual freedom, free from sin and tyranny, tyranny imposed by oneself, externally by a political oligarchy, or if the Devil is calling the shots for one.

One has free will to decide if his desires, his habits,or his temptations rule his choice selection, or if he rationally firmly decide how to choose or act in line with his moral code, to preserve his honor, his state of virtue, his reputation, his good will, his good character and his standing with the good deity whom he worships.

My recommendation that the wise and moral person would be more guided by her right reason than her sentiments or moral sense, but she would listen to both sources of suggestion before rationally, consciously making her choice between alternative routes of action.

Her internal desires or external pressure may or may not coincide with her enlightened best interest, but she normally will listen or enforce only those desires consistent with her moral standard. This she wields freely, this power to choose among alternatives.

B: “In his Ethical Studies (1876), Mill’s countryman F.H. Bradley (1846–1924) argued that neither compatibilism nor libertarianism comes close to justifying what he called the “vulgar notion” of moral responsibility. Determinism does not allow for free will because it implies that humans are never the ultimate originators of their actions. Indeterminism does no better, for it can imply only that human decisions are completely random. Yet it is intuitively obvious, according to Bradley, that humans have free will, and no philosophical argument in the world will convince anyone otherwise. He thus advocated a return to common sense. Given that the philosophical theory of determinism necessarily conflicts with people’s deep-rooted moral intuitions, it is better to abandon the former rather than the latter.”

My response: I would suppose that libertarianism would be the proper stance for Bradley on free will, because we intuitively or subjectively know we are free willing, and thus it is common sense that the strong but not absolute personal capacity of free willing is the coin of the realm.

B: “Contemporary compatibilism . . .”

 

B: “Notwithstanding Bradley’s argument, compatibilism remained popular among 20th-century thinkers. The Cambridge philosopher G.E. Moore (1873–1958) attempted to reconcile determinism and free will through a conditional analysis of freedom. To say that one has acted freely, according to Moore, is simply to say that “I should” have acted otherwise “if I had chosen” to do so, or “if I had performed a certain act of will, I should have done something which I did not do.” The fact that one may not have been in a position to choose otherwise does not undermine one’s free agency. But what does it mean to say that one could have done otherwise? In “Freedom and Necessity” (1946), A.J. Ayer (1910–89) maintained that “to say that I could have acted otherwise is to say that I should have acted otherwise if I had so chosen.” The ability to do otherwise means only that if the past had been different, one might have chosen differently. This is obviously a very weak notion of freedom, for it implies that a choice or action can be free even though it is completely determined by the past. It is an open question whether Ayer’s account provides a satisfactory explanation of the intuitive notion of free will. Supporters maintain that this is the only type of freedom worth wanting, while detractors believe it does not come close to providing the kind of free agency that humans desire, in part because it does not imply that humans are morally responsible for their “free” actions.”

 

My response Again, this is weak tea. We have an intuitive sense of free will, and it is ontologically real, and is so universal among people that that is an objective fact that the universal experience of the same subjective intuition renders having free will actual, and thus people are responsible for what they do and choose.

B: “Other contemporary compatibilists have attacked the hard determinist’s argument at a different juncture. In an influential paper, “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility” (1969), the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt questioned whether the ability to do otherwise is truly necessary for freedom. Suppose that John is on his way to a voting booth and is undecided about whether to vote for candidate A or candidate B. Unbeknownst to him, an evil neuroscientist has implanted in John’s brain a device that will, if required, fire a signal that forces John to vote for candidate B. But John decides to vote for candidate B on his own, so the device turns out to be unnecessary. The device does not fire, so John acts freely. But John could not have acted otherwise: if he had shown the slightest inclination toward candidate A, the neuroscientist’s device would have made him change his mind. This “Frankfurt-style” counterexample has proved to be quite powerful in contemporary debates about free will. It demonstrates that being able to do otherwise is not necessary for free agency.”

My response: Really? we have the ability to do and choose otherwise, though nomological determinism much dictates how our body functions.

B: “If the ability to do otherwise is not necessary, what is? Like Hobbes and Hume, Frankfurt locates freedom solely within the self. In “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person” (1971), he proposed that having free will is a matter of identifying with one’s desires in a certain sense. Suppose that Jack is a drug addict who wants to reform. He has a first-order desire for a certain drug, but he also has a second-order desire not to desire the drug. Although Jack does not want his first-order desire to be effective, he acts on it all the same. Because of this inner conflict, Jack is not a free agent. Now consider Jack’s friend Jill, who is also a drug addict. Unlike Jack, Jill has no desire to reform. She has a first-order desire for a certain drug and a second-order desire that her first-order desire be effective. She feels no ambivalence at all about her drug addiction; not only does she want the drug, but she also wants to want the drug. Jill identifies with her first-order desire in a way that Jack does not, and therein lies her freedom.”

My response: Free will is the ability to do otherwise, and is located in the self: self-origination, but I like Frankfurt’s idea that we have 1^st order desires (often temptations), and we on a 2^nd order of willing, give in to them or withstand them. I see this as a sign of libertarianism not compatibilism.

B: “In “Freedom and Resentment” (1962), the British philosopher P.F. Strawson (1919–2006) introduced an influential version of compatibilism grounded in human psychology. Strawson observed that people display emotions such as resentment, anger, gratitude, and so on in response to the actions of others. He argued that holding agents morally responsible for their actions is nothing more than having such feelings, or “reactive attitudes,” toward them. The question of whether the agents act freely matters only insofar as it affects the feelings toward them that others may have; apart from this, freedom is beside the point. Moreover, because people cannot help but feel reactive attitudes, no matter how much they may try not to, they are justified in having them, whatever the truth or falsity of determinism. (This is not to say that the specific reactive attitude a person may have on a given occasion—of blind rage as opposed to mere annoyance, for example—is always justified.)

Yet it is far from clear that people are always justified in having reactive attitudes. Pertinent information can drastically change one’s feelings toward an agent. For example, one might become less angry with a driver who ran over a cat if one discovers that the driver was rushing to the hospital with a desperately ill child. One may even lose the anger altogether. Given the enormous influence that everyday factual information has over what reactive attitudes people have and whether they even have them, it seems unwise to treat them as accurate barometers of moral responsibility.

Conclusion

Although the central issues involved in the problem of free will and moral responsibility have remained the same since ancient times, the emphasis of the debate has changed greatly. Contemporary compatibilists in the vein of Frankfurt and Strawson tend to argue that moral responsibility has little if anything to do with determinism, since it arises from people’s desires and attitudes rather than from the causal origins of their actions. Humans may not be free to as great an extent as the intuitive notion of free will suggests, but there is no other freedom to be had. Addressing the problem of free will and moral responsibility requires establishing guidelines for holding people accountable, not lunging after some impossible notion of free will.”

My response: I do not find the arguments of Frankfurt and Strawson to be appealing or convincing. People are free-willed so the deterministic but real, impactful force impinging upon them, and people’s desires and attitudes also influence choice, but, despite all prior causal inputs, the person retains to the power, at least in part, to choose to do otherwise, and this is when and how his free will comes into play.

B: “Contemporary libertarians in the vein of Chisholm, on the other hand, continue to maintain that moral responsibility requires a certain kind of robust free will that compatibilism does not allow for. Their prime concern is to untangle the metaphysical issues underlying the intelligibility objection and to make room for free will in an indeterministic world.”

My response: As a near-zombie sort of second-hander existence (Ayn Rand’s term) as a selfless, groupist nonindiviudator, even that sleepy robot has a modicum of residual, stunted free will, but robust free will is had, needed, own and demanded by an accomplished individuators cooking on all burners.

If the monists and atheists deterministically or even indeterministically deny that free will is the reality for each human being, give me a chance to train 5 million children to maverize, and that would be powerful, transformative, empirical proof that they are free, choosing otherwise as they wish, and are robustly free.

It is easy for the skeptics about free will to deny its existence, and the existence of God, when 94% of people stumble around sleepily and incoherently every day as nonindividuators, barely able to put two sentences together let alone plan and run their own individual lives.

B: “How much of human behaviour is determined by past events, and how much does this matter—if it does matter—for free will and moral responsibility? In the end, the important question may be not whether the universe is deterministic or indeterministic but whether one is willing to accept a definition of free will that is much weaker than intuition demands . . . .

 

G.E. Moore G.E. Moore, detail of a pencil drawing by William Orpen; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.”

 

My response: As a dualistic and free will anti-skeptic, I renounced any attempt to offer a water-down version of free will, which exists in the life on joiner/nonindividuator with a stunted personal consciousness, but, robust free will is her potential and telos if she wills it to be made creative, original, brilliant, artistic and powerful--if she elects to actuate her potential and an individuating loner, with her consciousness made smart, strong, vibrant and ever-developing, and she cares not, as an individuator, brushing aside any flimsy intelligibility objection, that both determinism, indeterminism, chance and luck all rule her, that her will is never free not matter the preceding or current inputs. Her life of successful, self-directed beautiful personhood as a great soul gives the lie to all this nonsense. She is free because she knows that natural and social forces, some deterministic in nature and some indeterministic in nature, some forces without cause, some that are stochastic and some that are lucky for her, they all influence her, but she as she grows as a living angel, is a moral, powerful consciousness in the world, and she is the source of her choices and actions, and she is willful enough to be causal and make her intentions heard, all inputs to the contrary.

B: “determinism

determinism, in philosophy and science, the thesis that all events in the universe, including human decisions and actions, are causally inevitable. Determinism entails that, in a situation in which a person makes a certain decision or performs a certain action, it is impossible that he or she could have made any other decision or performed any other action. In other words, it is never true that people could have decided or acted otherwise than they actually did.

Determinism in this sense is usually understood to be incompatible with free will, or the supposed power or capacity of humans to make decisions or perform actions independently of any prior event or state of the universe. Philosophers and scientists who deny the existence of free will on this basis are known as “hard” determinists.

In contrast, so-called “soft” determinists, also called compatibilists, believe that determinism and free will are compatible after all. In most cases, soft determinists attempt to achieve this reconciliation by subtly revising or weakening the commonsense notion of free will.”

 

My response: Determinism and free will are never entirely incompatible, but they are proportionately incompatible with the human child (at birth, being mostly other willed in natural and social inputs, but latently, modestly free-willing from birth); the child or nonindividuating, group-living, altruist morality driven, group-identifying adult submersed in the herd is determined mostly. His latent, robust free will remains suppressed under the weight of all the forces holding him back an down in darkness, slavery, superstition, evil and self-loathing.

Free will and determinism and free will and indeterminism (His will gets freer, stronger, and faster as he maverizes.) can all be made compatible, but his will gets freer, faster and deeper under indeterminism than under the pressure exerted upon him by deterministic forces.

Both deterministic and indeterministic stimuli can become more compatible as he individuates (His strengthened free will, so self-determining and powerful now, takes the lead as he molds deterministic inputs to suit his will and free choices. His consciousness/soul/mind grows and gets smarter and more original thinking and self-causal; his free will is now compatible with the deterministic indeterministic and random influences bombarding him as he reacts to them as they influence him. He chooses how he will react, live and what goal he shall creatively, morally forcefully impose upon reality in response to all these felt influences.

 Robust free will becomes compatible with determinism, as the individuator comes to control his influences. He shapes, redirects, and unnaturally repositions such inputs to make the world, as far as he can, be how he wants it to be—he does alter reality that is always altering him, and the sometimes cooperative and often competitive clash of opposing forces allows him to create love grow and innovate and that is his response and action in reaction against incoming deterministic and random influences.

 

 

 B: “Contemporary soft determinists have included the English philosopher G.E. Moore (1873–1958), who held that acting freely means only that one would have acted otherwise had one decided to do so (even if, in fact, one could not have decided to do so), and the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt, who argued that acting freely amounts to identifying with or approving of one’s own desires (even if those desires are such that one cannot help but act on them).

 

The extreme alternative to determinism is indeterminism, the view that at least some events have no deterministic cause but occur randomly, or by chance. Indeterminism is supported to some extent by research in quantum mechanics, which suggests that some events at the quantum level are in principle unpredictable (and therefore random). Philosophers and scientists who believe that the universe is indeterministic and that humans possess free will are known as “libertarians” (libertarianism in this sense is not to be confused with the school of political philosophy called libertarianism). Although it is possible to hold that the universe is indeterministic and that human actions are nevertheless determined, few contemporary philosophers defend this view.

Libertarianism is vulnerable to what is called the “intelligibility” objection, which points out that people can have no more control over a purely random action than they have over an action that is deterministically inevitable; in neither case does free will enter the picture. Hence, if human actions are indeterministic, free will does not exist.”

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Brian Duignan.

Philosophy & Religion Philosophical Issues . . . “

 

B: ‘free will

free will, in philosophy and science, the supposed power or capacity of humans to make decisions or perform actions independently of any prior event or state of the universe. Arguments for free will have been based on the subjective experience of freedom, on sentiments of guilt, on revealed religion, and on the common assumption of individual moral responsibility that underlies the concepts of law, reward, punishment, and incentive. In theology, the existence of free will must be reconciled with God’s omniscience and benevolence and with divine grace, which allegedly is necessary for any meritorious act.”

 

My response: Free will is the power or capacity of humans to make decisions or perform actions sometimes independently of any prior event or state of the universe—especially if individuating agent displays an impressively powerful, ingenious free-willing ability--, sometimes the power is weaker and less free if the person is less individuated or self-causal, and sometimes the person is so insensate and low-functioning as a primitive, conformist nonindividuator that  her free-willing capacity is reduced right down to the minimal free will spark which she and all have at birth, a spark never developed any farther by her, though it is not utterly snuffed out in theory or practice, but the next thing to it. As a blighted zombie, she will react to more than interject her will upon incoming inputs.

 

 

 

 

B: “A prominent feature of existentialism is the concept of a radical, perpetual, and frequently agonizing freedom of choice. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), for example, spoke of the individual “condemned to be free.””

 

My response: I like this exceptionally robust or radical freedom of choice so popular among existentialists, but it is likely only or usually possessed and wielded by rational individuators.

B: “The existence of free will is denied by some proponents of determinism, the thesis that every event in the universe is causally inevitable. Determinism entails that, in a situation in which people make a certain decision or perform a certain action, it is impossible that they could have made any other decision or performed any other action. In other words, it is never true that people could have decided or acted otherwise than they actually did. Philosophers and scientists who believe that determinism in this sense is incompatible with free will are known as “hard” determinists.

In contrast, so-called “soft” determinists, also called compatibilists, believe that determinism and free will are compatible after all. In most cases, soft determinists attempt to achieve this reconciliation by subtly revising or weakening the commonsense notion of free will.”

My response: I will call myself a libertarian compatibilist. My first presupposition is that human nature is dual: part material/biological/determined (we are mostly determined, especially in our nonindividuated state, our natural state at birth) and part spiritual/mental consciousness, free or self-determining (mostly an achieved status of a robustly held and fielded free will, acting upon the world while it acts upon oneself).

The soft determinists promote a misleading compatibilism in which they reconcile a pathetic, wimpy personal free made compatible with nomological determinism by weakening the commonsense notion of free will.

I retain the powerful sense of free will, and make determinism/indeterminism/chance compatible with the free will by having the self-consciously, innovatively, deliberately and fearlessly receive and acknowledge these incoming influences and then self-determine how to respond in new new and meaningful ways so choices taken and actions undertaken reveal the will of the responder as he operates in the world, remaking it in his own image—as long as this image is coherent with God’s image of Deself and how the world should evolve.

B: “Contemporary soft determinists have included the English philosopher G.E. Moore (1873–1958), who held that acting freely means only that one would have acted otherwise had one decided to do so (even if, in fact, one could not have decided to do so), and the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt (born 1929), who has argued that acting freely amounts to identifying with or approving of one’s own desires (even if those desires are such that one cannot help but act on them). . . . “

 

B: “The extreme alternative to determinism is indeterminism, the view that at least some events have no deterministic cause but occur randomly, or by chance. Indeterminism is supported to some extent by research in quantum mechanics, which suggests that some events at the quantum level are in principle unpredictable (and therefore random). Philosophers and scientists who believe that the universe is indeterministic and that humans possess free will are known as “libertarians” (libertarianism in this sense is not to be confused with the school of political philosophy called libertarianism). Although it is possible to hold that the universe is indeterministic and that human actions are nevertheless determined, few contemporary philosophers defend this view.

Libertarianism is vulnerable to what is called the “intelligibility” objection, which points out that people can have no more control over a purely random action than they have over an action that is deterministically inevitable; in neither case does free will enter the picture. Hence, if human actions are indeterministic, free will does not exist. See also free will and moral responsibility.”

 

My response: My response: God made each of us in De’s image, so this divine spark in us is our hint from God to emulate God by assuming the godly role and responsibility of living as a Creator/Individuator/Self-Determining Cosmos Builder and Maintainer—that is our God-given telos on earth. Such an accomplished winner human being is rather robustly free willing and adept at dealing with and sublimating her determinants into love, art, logic, invention, and mathematics, expressing her reaction to all indeterministic and deterministic nudges. It matters not whether the intelligibility objection holds water or not, she as a developing maverick dominates or strenuously, atavistically strives or does imposes her will upon all incoming influences, not vice versa, be they necessitated or random.

 

 

B: “The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Brian Duignan.

Philosophy & Religion Religious Beliefs . . .”

B: “problem of evil

theology

Written by

 

problem of evil, problem in theology and the philosophy of religion that arises for any view that affirms the following three propositions: God is almighty, God is perfectly good, and evil exists.

The problem

An important statement of the problem of evil, attributed to Epicurus, was cited by the Scottish philosopher David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779): “Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?” Since well before Hume’s time, the problem has been the basis of a positive argument for atheism: If God exists, then he is omnipotent and perfectly good; a perfectly good being would eliminate evil as far as it could; there is no limit to what an omnipotent being can do; therefore, if God exists, there would be no evil in the world; there is evil in the world; therefore, God does not exist. In this argument and in the problem of evil itself, evil is understood to encompass both moral evil (caused by free human actions) and natural evil (caused by natural phenomena such as disease, earthquakes, and floods).

Most thinkers, however, have found this argument too simple, since it does not recognize cases in which eliminating one evil causes another to arise or in which the existence of a particular evil entails some good state of affairs that morally outweighs it. Moreover, there may be logical limits to what an omnipotent being can or cannot do. Most skeptics, therefore, have taken the reality of evil as evidence that God’s existence is unlikely rather than impossible. Often the reality of evil is treated as canceling out whatever evidence there may be that God exists—e.g., as set forth in the argument from design, which is based on an analogy between the apparent design discerned in the cosmos and the design involved in human artifacts. Thus, Hume devotes much of the earlier parts of his Dialogues to attacking the argument from design, which was popular in the 18th century. In later parts of the work, he discusses the problem of evil and concludes by arguing after all that the mixed evidence available supports the existence of a divine designer of the world, but only one who is morally neutral and not the God of traditional theistic religions.”

My response: I confess that if God is all-powerful, all-loving, all-good, all-knowing, and omnipresent, it is hard to explain why evil exists, and yet people have free will and are responsible for their sins.

Part of the answer is that there may be logical limits to what an omnipotent being can or cannot do as listed above. I could argue that Fate is all good and all evil, all-knowing and all-evil; consequently, that is the source of that evil exists (It may not satisfactorily explain why evil exists.); despite suffering in the world, somehow people  are more responsible than not for their choices and actions.

I believe we are free, and that that is not just a subjective, mass hysteria of self-deluding by 7 billion human puppets. I know we are free but I cannot prove it—this mystery is what I say it is-- and the free will skeptics cannot disprove it, so I will act as if God exists, and does not play games with humans, and that we are free, accountable and will be held to account in this world and the next for how we choose and act. That we are free and that God allows us to be free with no tricks and no mind-games going on is an article of faith for me; that is the best I can construe of the ancient paradoxes, and I may not every make any headway beyond this dissatisfying conclusion It would be rewarding to know for sure if people have free will or not, but I feel quite deeply that they are.

B: “. . .

Theistic responses

Religious believers have had recourse to two main strategies. One approach is to offer a theodicy, an account of why God chooses to permit evil in the world (and why he is morally justified in so choosing)—e.g., that it is a necessary consequence of sin or that, as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz claimed, this is the “best of all possible worlds.” The other approach is to attempt a more limited “defense,” which does not aim to explain God’s purposes but merely to show that the existence of at least some evil in the world is logically compatible with God’s goodness, power, and wisdom. Many philosophers and theologians have rejected accounts of the first kind as inherently implausible or as foolhardy attempts to go beyond the bounds of human knowledge to discern God’s inscrutable purposes.”

 

My response: The Father and Mother encourage us to speculate about wildly open-ended metaphysical questions, including devising theodicies of various degrees of plausibility.

I caution that people should be respectful and good deities and not blasphemous when trying to create a story that explains these ultimate issues.

It seems as if God’s purposes remain somewhat inscrutable to us, and somehow that the presence of evil in the world is compatible with God love of goodness, moral and spiritual goodness/

B: “A variety of arguments have been offered in response to the problem of evil, and some of them have been used in both theodicies and defenses. One argument, known as the free will defense, claims that evil is caused not by God but by human beings, who must be allowed to choose evil if they are to have free will.”

My response: It is silly to think that humans, a created and sinful creature by nature, could create or cause evil in the world, though when sinning and filled with malice, we do often create, cause, and expand evil in the world during our short lives, but evil is a primeval, eternal force which was here before humans were created, and will be here to belabor future intelligent beings with free wills and moral accountability burdens long after humans have vanished from the face of the earth.

Either evil always was, or it was created by a powerful gods, and that may be Satan and Lera, but Fate is the world and chief deity beyond good (The Father and The Mother) and beyond evil (Satan and Lera). These deep metaphysical questions are such that we cannot atomistically or collectively or definitively answer at this point.

 

 

 B: “This response presupposes that humans are indeed free, and it fails to reckon with natural evil, except insofar as the latter is increased by human factors such as greed or thoughtlessness. Another argument, developed by the English philosopher Richard Swinburne, is that natural evils can be the means of learning and maturing. Natural evils, in other words, can help cultivate virtues such as courage and generosity by forcing humans to confront danger, hardship, and need. Such arguments are commonly supplemented by appeals to belief in a life after death, not just as reward or compensation but as the state in which the point of human suffering and the way in which God brings good out of evil will be made clear.”

 

My response: It seems as if both the presence of natural evil and malevolent evil in the world do teach the good and just be better themselves morally and spiritually, if they stay at it, but beyond that simple beneficial presence of these evil, they grow violence, suffering hatred and destruction in the world, and benefit no one.

 

 

B: “ Since many theodicies seem limited (because one can easily imagine a better world), and since many thinkers have not been convinced by the argument that the reality of evil establishes atheism, it is likely that future discussions will attempt to balance the reality of evil against evidence in favour of the existence of God.”