On Brain Dumps

From a discussion on free will and the existence of a god. I really stepped it up here with the longest post yet...

You can't call your god knowing everything about you and everyone else a "guess", even if you call it a completely certain one. It's not just that he "knows you so well". He made the entire universe, knowing everything to come, right? He's making you do what you're doing right now, and there is no question about it. You ARE coerced into your choices in life, if you believe a god exists who created the universe. You are influenced by everything that you experience and the combinations of every person and event, natural or human. Your god made me reach the state I'm in now, where I will reject him until sufficient evidence is provided for his existence. For this, of course, I deserve eternal hellfire. Forever. Is he just stupid, or evil?

I don't think, if you really take a step back and look, that you could possibly think that free will and omnipotence are compatible. Let's approximate your claim with rats, cheese, and a maze, shall we? Let's say you've got hundreds of rats and run a test where the animals must navigate a maze to find the lovely food. Let's say you've done thousands of trials to know to that rats of certain characteristics will consistently find or not find the cheese. Obviously, a god doesn't need to run trials, but I want to make this comparable to the universe at large.

Now let's say you put in a rat that you know will fail. You watch it search, search, search, and it doesn't find the cheese. It fails. Here's the question: who are you frustrated at? Are you mad at the rat? Are you mad at the maze? Of course not. You should be mad at YOURSELF for wasting your time testing a rat that you knew would fail.

There are two things I would like to draw from this. The first is the idea that your god controls all variables. In this experiment, the scientist controlled most, but the rat could have had a good day or a lucky turn. Your god is not afforded that luxury by his definition: he absolutely knows the outcome. All unknowns are off the table. The mouse/person can't have a good or bad day and beat the odds, because the scientist/your god knows everything. Your god knows how the good and bad days and people and events are going to add up to put you where you'll be in 20 years.

The second thing I'll like to bring up is that, in the case of your god, he should feel ashamed at his actions. This naturally comes up from the described situation. He should be ridiculed for putting the blame on the rat, for condemning the rat to eternal hellfire for failing to find the cheese. The rat should not be responsible for not living up to godly expectations.

And now I'm mixing metaphors and have beaten this to death. Moving on...

Now you say that we don't understand your god because he might exist on some plane where this all make sense, that potentially defies our logic. If you are actually going to fall back on that argument, I can't talk with you. By saying this, you can justify anything and everything, and there's no room for discussion.

Consider if I proposed a new theory on magnetism that conflicted with out basic understanding of magnets and how they worked. Consider if I used the argument, "Well, it actually makes sense on a level that we don't understand." ...And that was my justification. You would rightfully laugh at me. If I was really serious about it, you'd ask for evidence.

And now we're back to extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence. Only now you've dug the hole deeper by justifying an immensely complex god with an equally complex additional plane of existence. I shouldn't even have to mention Occam's razor.

Either you have an argument for how this isn't paradoxical or you say "God is beyond our comprehension." You can't do both. You can't try to explain it and at the same time throw your hands in the air and say it can't be explained. Still, I've explained how both are unreasonable here.

"It’s true that seeing people exercise free choice doesn’t prove free will, but I think it makes free will a more satisfactory explanation than having developed in a way to make it seem that we have choice."

The first half of that sentence is all that needs to be said. The second is unsubstantiated, and I confronted this idea in my last post. Just because you think or have intuition that you have choice doesn't make it so. Intuition tells me the sun goes around the Earth by just looking at the sky. It's a more satisfactory explanation that living in a universe that just makes it SEEM that the sun goes around us, so it must be right.

As for your last two questions...

1. "Random" is a name we give to something that has so much variance that we can't predict its outcome, at least in this context. That doesn't mean it's immune to the single path all particles take if the Big Bang made everything on a set trajectory (like I talked about in earlier posts).

2. This is actually called "non-overlapped magisteria", or NOMA. I'll quote Dawkins here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-overlapping_magisteria#Criticisms

"[I]t is completely unrealistic to claim, as [Stephen Jay] Gould and many others do, that religion keeps itself away from science's turf, restricting itself to morals and values. A universe with a supernatural presence would be a fundamentally and qualitatively different kind of universe from one without. The difference is, inescapably, a scientific difference. Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims."

The question is simple: what other path to truth is there but science? Science is just using your eyes, ears, and brain, after all. Either your god is detectable in this way or he is not. If he is not, then he is indistinguishable from his non-existence.

Also, on the brain topic...