From her point of view the situation is symmetric. How is she supposed to know that the Voice of God is good and the snake is evil? God has specifically forbidden her from acquiring that knowledge!
Hmmm. Yet, she then gives the fruit to Adam. Adam's situation at the time is analogous to Eve's - he has no knowledge of good and evil. But, at this point, Eve does have that knowledge, and she chooses to use it to tempt Adam, an evil act. (Exactly what Adam did, after eating the fruit, before being expelled from the garden, is a matter of conjecture).
But I really don't see how you get from free will to God. Maybe you have an argument I haven't heard?
Well, the basic idea is that, if the universe is created, then it makes sense to give any intelligent agents in that universe free will. (Any that don't have free will are basically a complicated computer, and it must be easier to create a computer than to create a computer inside a universe that takes a few billion years to produce said computer). So a universe created by a deity which includes intelligent agents is very likely to have free will.
On the other hand, a universe not created by a deity won't be subject to the above argument. A mostly deterministic universe is likely to come up with, if anything, mostly deterministic life. So, it seems that the number of non-created universes containing intelligent life and free will must be much smaller than the number of non-created universes containing intelligent life.
Therefore, a universe containing intelligent life is more likely to have been created by a deity if it also includes free will.
Personally, I subscribe to the free-will-is-an-illusion school of thought. This is a corollary to the belief that consciousness itself is an illusion, for which there is quite a bit of evidence.
I have never read Dennet's book, and merely seen the wikipedia summary you linked to. However, one thing strikes me in it:
One of the book's more controversial claims is that qualia do not (and cannot) exist.
This is a surprise to me, as I do perceive redness when I look at something red, and that is a quale, as I understand it. And I know that either my "red" quale or my "green" quale must be very different to the analogous qualia of a red-green colourblind man. So they clearly do exist (unless Dennet has a definition of "qualia" which is very different to mine).
Assuming that our definitions are not in conflict, I can accept the possibility that Dennet's mental landscape does not include qualia, and his argument thus follows from the typical mind fallacy. Different mental landscapes have been shown to be startlingly different before, after all.
But, whether our disagreement on qualia is a matter of definition or fallacy, the fact that he makes such a claim does leave me deeply suspicious of his conclusions. (Doesn't make them wrong, but does cause me to discount him as a credible authority on the matter).
As to free will being an illusion - hmmm. I don't really have an answer for that. I can say that will seems to act exactly as if it was free in many ways. I certainly feel as though I have free will, but I have no firm proof that that quale corresponds to the actual reality of the matter.
Eve does have that knowledge, and she chooses to use it to tempt Adam, an evil act.
That's not clear. It's ambiguous whether these events in Genesis 3:6 are being recounted in strict chronological order. It's possible that Eve "took" the fruit and gave it to Adam first, and they both ate it together. Gen3:7 sure sounds to me like they were both enlightened simultaneously.
But even if we grant the premise that Eve ate first, by what standard do you classify Eve's tempting of Adam to be evil? The only way you can get there is by assuming God t...
[Originally published at Intentional Insights in response to Religious and Rational]
Spirituality and rationality seem completely opposed. But are they really?
To get at this question, let's start with a little thought experiment. Consider the following two questions:
1. If you were given a choice between reading a physical book (or an e-book) or listening to an audiobook, which would you prefer?
2. If you were given a choice between listening to music, or looking at the grooves of a phonograph record through a microscope, which would you prefer?
But I am more interested in the answer to a third question:
3. For which of the first two questions do you have a stronger preference between the two options?
Most people will have a stronger preference in the second case than the first. But why? Both situations are in some sense the same: there is information being fed into your brain, in one case through your ears and in the other through your eyes. So why should people's preference for ears be so much stronger in the case of music than books?
There is something in the essence of music that is lost in the translation between an audio and a visual rendering. The same loss happens for words too, but to a much lesser extent. Subtle shades of emphasis and tone of voice can convey essential information in spoken language. This is one of the reasons that email is so notorious for amplifying misunderstandings. But the loss in much greater in the case of music.
The same is true for other senses. Color is one example. A blind person can abstractly understand what light is, and that color is a byproduct of the wavelength of light, and that light is a form of electromagnetic radiation... yet there is no way for a blind person to experience subjectively the difference between red and blue and green. But just because some people can't see colors doesn't mean that colors aren't real.
The same is true for spiritual experiences.
Now, before I expand that thought, I want to give you my bona fides. I am a committed rationalist, and an atheist (though I don't like to self-identify as an atheist because I'd rather focus on what I *do* believe in rather than what I don't). So I am not trying to convince you that God exists. What I want to say is rather that certain kinds of spiritual experiences *might* be more than mere fantasies made up out of whole cloth. If we ignore this possibility we risk shutting ourselves off from a vital part of the human experience.
I grew up in the deep south (Kentucky and Tennessee) in a secular Jewish family. When I was 12 my parents sent me to a Christian summer camp (there were no other kinds in Kentucky back in those days). After a week of being relentlessly proselytized (read: teased and ostracized), I decided I was tired of being the camp punching bag and so I relented and gave my heart to Jesus. I prayed, confessed my sins, and just like that I was a member of the club.
I experienced a euphoria that I cannot render into words, in exactly the same way that one cannot render into words the subjective experience of listening to music or seeing colors or eating chocolate or having sex. If you have not experienced these things for yourself, no amount of description can fill the gap. Of course, you can come to an *intellectual* understanding that "feeling the presence of the holy spirit" has nothing to do with any holy spirit. You can intellectually grasp that it is an internal mental process resulting from (probably) some kind of neurotransmitter released in response to social and internal mental stimulus. But that won't allow you to understand *what it is like* any more than understanding physics will let you understand what colors look like or what music sounds like.
Happily, there are ways to stimulate the subjective experience that I'm describing other than accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Meditation, for example, can produce similar results. It can be a very powerful experience. It can even become addictive, almost like a drug.
I am not necessarily advocating that you go try to get yourself a hit of religious euphoria (though I wouldn’t discourage you either -- the experience can give you some interesting and useful perspective on life). Instead, I simply want to convince you to entertain the possibility that people might profess to believe in God for reasons other than indoctrination or stupidity. Religious texts and rituals might be attempts to share real subjective experiences that, in the absence of a detailed modern understanding of neuroscience, can appear to originate from mysterious, subtle external sources.
The reason I want to convince you to entertain this notion is that an awful lot of energy gets wasted by arguing against religious beliefs on logical grounds, pointing out contradictions in the Bible and whatnot. Such arguments tend to be ineffective, which can be very frustrating for those who advance them. The antidote for this frustration is to realize that spirituality is not about logic. It's about subjective experiences that not everyone is privy to. Logic is about looking at the grooves. Spirituality is about hearing the music.
The good news is that adopting science and reason doesn’t mean you have to give up on spirituality any more than you have to give up on music. There are myriad paths to spiritual experience, to a sense of awe and wonder at the grand tapestry of creation, to the essential existential mysteries of life and consciousness, to what religious people call “God.” Walking in the woods. Seeing the moons of Jupiter through a telescope. Gathering with friends to listen to music, or to sing, or simply to share the experience of being alive. Meditation. Any of these can be spiritual experiences if you allow them to be. In this sense, God is everywhere.