I tend to think of "wisdom" and "smartness" as somewhat but not entirely correlated
Well, they are. Maybe "mental faculties" would be a better translation. But it's neither here nor there.
the ignorant man is still being punished
That hardly seems fair. That means that if Adam and Eve had not eaten the fruit then they would have been punished for the sins that they committed out of ignorance.
education is still important to reduce sin
Indeed. But God didn't provide any. In fact, He specifically commanded A&E to remain ignorant.
then there's the question of why there was a several-billion-year wait
Huh? I don't understand that at all. Your claim was that any designed entity "cannot do or calculate anything that its designer can't do or calculate". I exhibited a computer that can calculate a trillion digits of pi as a counterexample. What does the fact that evolution took a long time to produce the first computer have to do with it? The fact remains that computers can do things that their human designers can't.
In fact, just about anything that humans build can do things humans can't do; that's kind of the whole point of building them. Bulldozers. Can openers. Hammers. Paper airplanes. All of these things can do things that their human designers can't do.
I can think of quite a few arguments that time travel is impossible, but this is a new one to me.
Actually, that's not an argument that time travel is impossible. Time travel is indeed impossible, but that's a different argument :-) Time travel and free will are logically incompatible, at least under certain models of time travel. (If the past can change once you've travelled into it so that you can no longer reliably predict the future, then time travel and free will can co-exist.)
[if] someone, somewhere, might know with certainty what I will decide in a given set of circumstances is logically incompatible with the idea that I might choose something else.
Exactly. This is necessarily part of the definition of free will. If you're predictable to an external agent but not to yourself then it must be the case that there is something that determines your future actions that is accessible to that agent but not to you.
Just because I could choose something else doesn't mean that I will choose something else.
But if you are reliably predictable then it is not the case that you could choose something else. That's what it means to be reliably predictable.
but nowhere is it explained what that means
Sorry about that. I tried to write a pithy summary but it got too long for a comment. I'll have to write a separate article about it I guess. For the time being I'll just have to ask you to trust me: time travel into the past is ruled out by quantum mechanics. (This should be good news for you because it leaves open the possibility of free will!)
the quale of free will (along with many other qualia, like the quale of redness) can be and has been directly observed, and therefore does exist
Yes!!! Exactly!!! That is in fact the whole point of my OP: the quale of the Presence of the Holy Spirit has also been directly observed and therefore does exist (despite the fact that the Holy Spirit does not).
that seems to be the case when you are not using the skill of being certain that your free will is an illusion
Sorry, that didn't parse. What is "that"?
the idea that you are doing so deliberately implies that you not only have, but are actively exercising your free will.
Well, yeah, at root I'm not doing it deliberately. What I'm doing (when I do it -- I don't always, it's hard work [1]) is to improve the illusion that I'm doing things deliberately. But as with classical reality, a good-enough illusion is good enough.
[1] For example, I'm not doing it right now. I really ought to be doing real work, but instead I'm slacking off writing this response, which is a lot more fun, but not really what I ought to be doing.
a vector space?
Yes. Did you read "31 flavors of ontology"?
But if you are reliably predictable then it is not the case that you could choose something else. That's what it means to be reliably predictable.
The word "could" is a tricksy one, and I think it likely that your disagreement with CCC about free will has a lot to do with different understandings of "could" (and of its associated notions like "possible" and "inevitably").
[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.