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 to be good, but are we really justified in making such an assumption? Again, let's look at the situation from Eve's point of view: she's just eaten the fruit. Her eyes have been opened, and she realizes that they're naked and that this is bad (Genesis doesn't actually say explicitly that being naked is bad, but it's strongly implied). Furthermore, the only way to get Adam to see that it's bad to be naked is to get him to eat the fruit. The only reason not to do this is God's order that they should remain ignorant. But the mere fact that God wanted them to remain ignorant is evidence that God is not good and hence should not be obeyed. Maybe that reasoning isn't correct but it seems to me to be defensible. The proposition that getting Adam to eat the fruit was "evil" seems to me to be far from a slam-dunk.
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.
That doesn't make any sense to me at all. For starters, we have a counterexample: humans create lots of things, but none of the things we create have free will because we don't yet know how. But even if we knew how it's far form clear that this would be desirable. Finally, free will seems to me to be logically incompatible with an omnipotent, omniscient deity (which I guess makes me a Calvinist :-)
qualia do not (and cannot) exist
This is an oversimplification of Dennet's position, which is that consciousness and qualia (and free will) are illusions, exactly analogous to optical illusions. Yes, you do perceive redness when you look at something red, but you also (if you are like most people) perceive motion when you look at this image despite the fact that there is no motion. In exactly the same way you perceive redness where this is no redness, consciousness where there is no consciousness, and free will where there is no free will. Yes, it's weird. You need to read Dennett's book to understand it. The bottom line is that just as you can look at an illusory image in a way that reveals the fact that it is in fact an illusion, so too you can learn to look at your qualia and consciousness and perception of free will in ways that likewise reveal them to be illusions. It's actually a useful skill to cultivate.
BTW, most of the time when people get into disputes over whether or not something exists it's because they are making a fundamental error by assuming that existence is a dichotomy. It isn't.
I certainly feel as though I have free will
Of course you do. So do I. It's a very compelling illusion. But it is an illusion nonetheless.
That's not clear. It's ambiguous whether these events in Genesis 3:6 are being recounted in strict chronological order.
Hmmm. It seems to depend on the translation; some translations are ambiguous about the chronology, and some are not. I have no idea how clear the chronology in the original Hebrew was.
Though this translation suggests that the interval between the two acts implied in the original was very short - perhaps in the range of seconds.
This one's interesting for the footnotes
...But even if we grant the premise that Eve ate first, by what standard
[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.