"Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message
news:494### [at] sanrrcom...

> The existence of "free will" negates the argument that God must have
created
> the universe as a "first cause".
>
> The "first cause" argument is that every effect has a cause, and hence for
> the universe to exist, something before the universe must have caused it,
> and hence God exists.[1]
>
> On the other hand, either our decisions are caused by what's in the
> environment, or some aspect of our decisions are not subject to prior
> causes. In the first case, it would be unjust to blame someone for not
> believing in your religion if such disbelief is entirely the fault of
> external circumstances. In the latter case, many decisions have effects
> without precedent cause, and hence the requirement for God to have created
> the universe disappears.
>
> Thoughts?

Free will negates itself, as you note. Only a will that is not dependent on
its environment is truly free, but that also implies a will that's
indifferent to its environment, hence essentially random. Neither a
deterministic, nor a probabilistic will is thus appealing. What's more, no
amount of mixing the two yields one that is appealing either. How "free" a
will depends on how ignorant we are of the process. We can say that the will
of someone under the influence is not so free precisely because we know how
his decision making process is affected by an outside (well, by now, inside)
agent that we can readily identify. To a lesser extent, someone who has
consumed a lof of coffee or sugar arguably has less "free will" than someone
who has not. But of course when we say a "normal" person has free will, it's
our ignorance of the precise biochemical processes speaking.

As to the first cause argument, one can simply note that human will is not
enough to create anything out of nothing, much less a universe. After all,
humans are not omnipotent. Thus, whether humans have free will or not does
not affect the "neccessity" of a first cause for the universe. And special
pleading then "answers" the question of the cause of God. If the free will
of humans is bothering one, he can simply turn that into a special pleading
as well, as in: "everthing except human will has a cause", followed by
"human will is not enough to create a universe", both of which seem
reasonable from a distance, so that the first cause argument remains
"intact".

The bottomline is, despite what the likes of Anselm, Aquinas, Pascal.. etc
attempted, religion has little to do with logic or reason. One can always
tailor the "axioms" to fit the agenda.

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