Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
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"Free will" is an ambiguous term. The sort of free will you've argued for here could be paraphrased as "not being God's puppets", but I hope it's obvious that that can't be evidence of God's existence. But you listed "free will" as something you can explain with God better than without!
I really don't think the fact that people sometimes do things a god should be expected to disapprove of can be evidence for that god's existence. Do you?
(Perhaps the argument you have in mind makes essential use of the fact that humans engage in a kind of cruelty "that is absence from the laws of nature". But I don't see how that can work. We should expect human behaviour, even if entirely derived from the laws of nature, to have features that aren't apparent when looking at the laws themselves -- just as, e.g., in Conway's "Game of Life" there are phenomena like gliders that aren't apparent from the almost-trivial rules of the game.)
Ah, let me elaborate, then.
Whether God exists or not, one can postulate a universe in which people are puppets - philosophical zombies, moving and acting according to some purely deterministic set of rules.
In the atheistic universe, those beh... (read more)