Philip wrote:Jac; every free choice you have ever made, etc.
Who made your free choices possible? Who made YOU, a person who could make choices? And can you fly? Can you de-materialize and walk through a wall? No! So these abilities were created with hard parameters - randomness has PARAMETERS! And those parameters are locked - they are not unlimited. So both the things with randomness and their allowed parameters were ultimately caused, and they are all ultimately inherent and derivative from some first thing that previously did not exist.
Every point you made is incorrect, Phil. But unless you want to get into a significant conversation about universals and how they are to be best understood (e.g., nominalism, realism, moderate realism) and then particularly how that plays out with what kind of existence mathematical objects can be said to have (e.g., realism and its versions, formalism (and then psychologism vs conceptualism), absolute creationism, or classical platonism; arealism (aka conventionalism); or anti-realism (and then free logic, figuralism, neutralism, fictionalism, pretense theory, modal structuralism, etc.)--so a lot of highly technical stuff there) which in turn would require a discussion of ontological commitments involved in various existentially quantifying statements . . . yeah, I don't think we want to do all of that.
No, I want to just address the point you've made here, because I think it's the one we can talk about in a meaningful way without getting too technical.
Let me just make a blanket statement to help you see why this isn't merely academic. You're argument proves too much. If free choices have causes in the sense you are saying they do (by insisting everything has a real cause (though I presume you exempt God . . . note the special pleading) then
there is no such thing as free will at all, which is to say, your argument necessarily entails absolute determinism. Since I know you don't want to give up free will, I'm going to ask you to reconsider the position you are taking. Not only is it dangerous in the way just stated, but while your intentions are good--you're trying to preserve an important argument for God's existence--the entire enterprise is wholly unnecessary. As I just said to hugh, God's existence can be proven on a much looser (and, perhaps a bit ironically, more precise) understanding of "cause."
Anyway, so much for preamble. Let me just address your point directly.
Just because I am the one who makes the choice, it does not follow that there is an absolute cause as you are insisting. Let me try to offer something of a visual illustration. In a "normal" cause/effect relationship, A directly causes B, such that B is determined by A. We could "draw" it like this:
Imagine a cue ball hitting a billiard ball, a hammer driving a nail, the gravitational force exerted upon some object given all the related variables (mass, distance, velocity, vector, etc.). That's all pretty standard. These are what we would call
determinate effects. The effect is completely and totally determined by the cause.
But on the other hand, think about
indeterminate effects. We can visualize them like this:
in this case, A may cause B, C, or D. The cause is
not determined to the effect. Free choice works exactly like this. You could choose to respond to this post of mine or not. Your will is the cause (A) and one effect is a post your write (B) and another effect is you not writing a post at all (C). So A could cause B OR C. So this is where we get into probability theory. In a standard determinate effect, the probability of some effect given some cause is 1. With an indeterminate effect, the probability will be less than 1. It may be 50/50 (or in proper notion, .5/.5, if you care to get technical). There may be more options--say four options, each with an equal chance of being the result (25/25/25/25). Or some may be more or less probable than others (50/10/15/25).
Now this is
really important. I know this post is long and boring,
but please get this. Suppose you have four possible choices, and the probability you pick B is 50%, C is 10%, D is 15%, and E is 25%. That means that given 100 instances of making that choice, you'll choose B 50 times, C 10 times, D 15 times, and E 25 times (on the average). Notice this is
indeterminate. So you can certainly say that you yourself are the cause of choosing B, C, D, or E.
But that misses my point. Look at this closely:
What caused you to choose B? You can't say "I did!" because now you're just causing yourself, and you can certainly see that is self-refuting. Notice the language of the question: "what caused
you to choose B?" B obviously didn't cause you to choose it, because the effect can cause itself. So what did?
The final answer is, "nothing." And it has to be. If you say that something caused it in the standard (deterministic) sense, what you are actually saying is that B had a 100% chance of being chosen given certain conditions. But if you will choose something 100% of the time given certain conditions, then when those conditions are present, you will necessarily and always make that choice. But then that's no "choice" at all! You're just left with strict determinism. No free will.
All of that applies to everything I already said. I know this is all a bit technical, but I hope you can see the point I'm trying (ineloquently) to make.
fakeedit:
For those who survived that post and don't believe in free will, then I invite you to consider all of the above with respect to the probability wave of a quantum particle. Exactly the same argument.
