Free Will Skepticism & Christian Theology (Dr. Derk Pereboom)

Dr. Pereboom is a professor of philosophy at Cornell. One of his main areas of research is on free will and moral responsibility. Interestingly, Dr. Pereboom thinks that humans do not have free will. In this interview I will ask Dr. Pereboom the following questions:
1. What is your view of human freedom?
2. What are some reasons to think this view is true?
3. What are some objections to your view, and how do you respond?
4. What are the implications of this view for Christian theology?

For more on Dr. Pereboom check out his website linked below.

Check out my interview with Dr. Taylor Cyr offering a basic introduction to the topic of free will.

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[Venaloid]

42:20 - But if free will skepticism is true on the grounds that we've covered so far, that would seem to pose a serious problem for the idea that God uses suffering to reshape our will: free will skepticism would suggest that God could have simply given us the correct will from day zero, so why would God instead make our will flawed, and then beat and abuse us in order to change it?

[TeamoJr]

Great content as always! Please for future content can you apply captions.
It makes it much easier to take notes as the transcript would be available.
Thanks

[gingrai]

Molina’s views on Middle Knowledge provide a basis for God’s providential ordering while preserving free will. In addition to providing a mechanism whereby nothing happens apart from God’s will or approval Molina’s views preserve the conditions for genuine libertarian freedom.

[Adam-ueig]

In the Scripture text it also says that Pharoah hardened his own heart and in terms of reprobation I think this makes sense of Romans 9 "vessels of wrath fitted to destruction" in that they are fitted unto themselves.

[gingrai]

“No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.” -1 Corinthians 10:13

Paul seems to think and teach that at least some have the capacity to fall into, or alternately, to choose the way of escape for any temptation…

[gingrai]

Regarding physics and free will… it would seem that our uniform and consistent experience should provide strong grounds for believing that physics has not eliminated free will. I would say that our uniform and consistent experience coupled with the common understanding that we do not understand what the correct interpretation of quantum theory is sufficient to remain skeptical of pronouncements that physics rules out free will.

More on this… exactly what sort of physical change would be required to bring it about that I wear a blue shirt instead of a red shirt? It seems quite conceivable that this sort of physical change might be so very small that we might never see physical evidence of the actual moment or point in space time where the change occurred?

[robb]

I'm way more convinced of incompatibilism.

[Adam-ueig]

Acts 4:28 They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. Regarding the crucifixion of Jesus the Scripture says that they crucified him yet God the Father determined it. This and the story of Joseph brothers selling him into slavery (What you meant for Evil God meant for good) seem to me to be very strong cases for Compatibilism.

[gingrai]

Good to hear that he thinks compatiblism does not allow for morally responsible agents😎

[gingrai]

~5:40… maybe reconsider your views in light of Romans 1:32 which says, “Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.” Note the language of deserving punishment.

[fallsshine]

Hello Analytic Christian :)
I've just stumbled onto this video and your channel for the first time.
I have my own model of reality formed and I am looking for someone to break it.

I have seen a video documentary, whether true or not I cannot be sure.. but basically it was saying that the translation for Yahweh was more accurately found in the phrase "existence itself".

So... my model.
God is existence itself. The bible is a combination of metaphorical teaching, myth, philosophy, some fraud and the foundations of western(and many Eastern courts through the British empire) law.

The universe is deterministic, but it hasn't fully finished this current run.
God is not personified in my model.
Humans and animals do not have free will, because in a deterministic environment, where causation is king, or Lord... that would mean that the will is detached from the universe. And then I would have to have a second universe where the will resides and jumps into ours to cause a humans decision making to change from what might have been, if it had been left to be determined.

With regards to moral responsibility, we can insert morals into the functioning of the human body and it's other social norms, as it interacts on the social level with other living creatures, or even objects if that is the case for some.

I have decided that the word "responsibility" is a misnomer.
It should be considered in my model as "response-ability", that being the ability to respond.
If a deterministic "agent" is influenced by it's experiences in life, then it can only respond in the ways that it has the ability to.
For example, if I am blind and an object happens to be moving towards my face, I may not have the ability to respond to that collision before it happens. It is not my responsibility.
The same goes for murder and rape. if an agent experiences or has a certain brain chemistry/structure and life in a certain way, they may do these things and find themselves unable to prevent it. Even knowing it's wrong.

We can say they are morally culpable, because we are humans and within this deterministic universe, morals are a function of most humans bodies as a social adhesive.
So yeah they would be guilty and morally corrupt in my view, and i might hate them too.
But I must also admit, that this was always going to happen this way. That just is how it is...
Now maybe we capture a murderer and try to reform them and succeed, and they become what society calls "good"(ie. good for society). They only became "good" because of determinism and causation, because they happened to be in the right place at the right time to be captured, and happened to be placed somehwere that happened to be able to reform them, and so their fate in the end was to be good.
Not fault of theirs where and how they were born or raised and how that childs personality and character shaped the rest of their experiences and interactions.

This model also works with quantum mechanics in mind.
A quantum particle is said to be able to pop in and out of existence. I make the claim that the inverse space is full of potential, and as this deterministic material universe calls for a particle at a particular place and time, a particle is taken from the inverse unlimited potential, then engaging with the material world and turning from wave to particle.

This also means that free will appears to exist, but in reality, or so my model goes, all that has happened is causation carrying on and it is grabbing particles as it needs them.
We interact with things inside this system, like measuring a quantum particle. I'ts a particle because it is interacted with, upon measuring, or any kind of contact we can detect here.
But it's really a wave. And when we let it go, it acts like a wave, but out the other side of the double slit experiment where we measure again, it's obviously going to be a particle. it may not even be the "same" particle, just A particle that is needed there.

I probably missed a lot of other things, as I am just winging it as I explain this visual model I have in my "mind"

In addition, I am questioning the existence of consciousness and mind as being anything real.
in this model I am considering that they may be an illusion of the body on itself.
"consciousness"/"mind" or the "I", could just be the bodies way of navigating externally and internally.
The body is me, but the "I" is not the body. It's an illusion required for the body to navigate with other sentient beings.

I am unable to find a way to break this model, and I fear even if I did, it won't take long to consolidate it again.

[AlexADalton]

Hopefully this view and the Calvinism that seemed to be the impetus for it in his life, fade out of existence soon.

[CACBCCCU]

I'll explain free will soon enough, but the need for some physics deprogramming advice comes first... I'm not going to say Einstein and his followers enjoy looking like intoxicated monkey short-bussed derelicts blindly worshipping gravity-independent light-speed as an accident of birth, but it is what it is. I know nothing ever bothers blob's chosen people anyway. The blind-spot there disappears in considering the pivotal difference between curved space-time and gravitationally-moderated light-speed.

Spacetime curving is supposed to be gradual over gradual gravitational change, so gravitational frequency-shifts should be gradual over gradual gravitational change, yet textbooks suggest this shift happens at the source and is preserved on the way to observation. Opposite to every creepy standard textbook demanding space and time are red-stretched in closeness to mass instead of blue-compressed, in the gradual approach blue-shift observation starts with a redder signal in weaker gravity gradually blue-shifting as it approaches an observer in stronger gravity.

Two super-simple notions are all it takes to replace curved space-time with gravity-controlled light-speed:

1.) Light waves act much like moving rumble-strips that appear to oscillate faster when detected in increased gravity.

2.) Gravity fields fundamentally flow, and will naturally produce a reversed riptide sort of pull gradient near a mass.

These two simple notions allow gravity clock variations and falling-rate variations to move in the same direction as shifted frequency rate (not to mention lightspeed variations) instead of blindly following stupidly-opposing directions.

Nothing else in space bends under gravity anywhere near the way light bends under gravity, nothing, zip - the minimum possible path difference there is off by a factor of two. Still, no one wants to say there should be one space-time for light and another for matter. Inverse-square law for gravity still perfectly fits the simplest cases, is still flow-based and so still calls for a quantized basis of exchanged flows. Newton was lazy about flows, or over his head at that point, or told to keep quiet. Nobody knew the faintest thing about the dihedral angle in H2O molecules or even heard of H2O or proton ions, atoms were purely plausible philosophical concepts in Newton's time.

E=mc^2 doesn't require c to be a vacuum constant everywhere, it ignores gravity. Maxwell's equations don't require c to be a vacuum constant everywhere, they ignore gravity. Permittivity and permeability don't require c to be a vacuum constant everywhere, they ignore gravity. Special Relativity would like c to be a vacuum constant everywhere, but it ignores gravity. Magnets, atoms and electrons will not implode if c is not a vacuum constant everywhere. Nuclear power will still work if c is not a vacuum constant everywhere. What requires c to be vacuum constant everywhere is Einstein and his privileged over-weighted do-nothing prize-winning bent-space buddies who show no sign of understanding how GPS actually works.

If you want to avoid quantizing gravity correctly, but insist on doing it blindly or the same as light quantizes, you use an "Effective Field Theory" or "Conformal Field Theory" to complicate things for no non-personal reason other than to have equally-religious farming animals look at you funny, or you parrot dimwit extinction recipes inspired by the likes of Feynman and Bronstein because with names like those they must be super-genius science-schmuckers and all-around superior guys operating safely in the sporting kinsmanship of superiorly-weighty knightly good faith, and so you happily give up and go limp, cluelessly entangled in paying for the biggest exotic particle pyramid-building towering-psych-op big-bang collider-ring dark-sector testicular-gravitas entropic emergent black-hole spell-spinning budgets.

Simple secret to beginning to quantize gravity correctly: Quantize gravity complementarily to light. The smaller you suppose gravity quanta to be, the less energy they must have - opposite to light.

Gravity is negative energy, at least in contrast to zero-point vacuum, so quantizing it is key to appreciating how profoundly it can hold entropy at bay and support the evolution of consciousness and growth, however a demystification of such things is bound to be seen as profoundly anti-religious. So arises a massive authoritarian social control problem.

One approach toward maintaining the anti-intellectual status quo involves a lot of people paid to interfere with the natural course toward quantization. Simple constructive entanglement concepts reveal gravity experts are at best relentlessly-territorial tentacles of an overbearing group pride re-inflating itself regularly in the news with nothing actually coherent and new to add to their mantra. Tracing their support funding back would show it passes through thuggish supporters of perverse religious and fascist political institutions, all doing whatever it takes to sell their dizziness-inducing magical memory-erasing swill.

In possibly the latest example of slimy Einsteinian evangelism, researchers claim simulations show roughly-diamond-shaped rubble-pile asteroids lack a new gravity physics basis. No doubt they started their sims with convenient uniformly-sized diamond-shaped grains emerging miraculously out of pseudo-intelligent cosmic design, but of course the press release lacked enough useful details to hold promise of anything but GIGO from the polishers of their lord's ancient dog-poop pyramids.

No one seems to know how to handle the idea that gravity energy bound up in cold matter naturally follows neuromorphic learning rules using quark triplets cooling into shapes like balloon-covered volume-minimized orthogonal triple-ring wire-forms fully capable of behaving as retroreflective dynamic negative-energy-focusing surfaces. It's not only anti-relativity in its emergent freedom of flow networks, it's like the thought of simple gravity properties supporting nature forming extended focused multi-molecular gravitational associations with reflective memory is too deeply anti-religious to register.

On the neuromorphic freedom of flow possible with entanglement in gravity's cold focus, exposed bound protons are ideal warmer-temperature progenitors of emergent retroreflection-based quantum gravity, each may carry a distinctly different freedom of entangling network flow, each may carry multiple distinctly-re-ordered perceptions of nonlocal space. Focused gravity is extendedly-stronger gravity, stronger gravity is faster gravity - gravity flows leverage on themselves. Focused gravity creates focused extensions of the matter wavefunction at its source. Flow freedom in entangled networks means decision thresholds are joined and easily influenced with profound consequence chains possible, decisions simply present practically no truly-localizing connections. Consciousness can be adept at parallel multiverse-type reasoning extending far beyond any basic conceivable unconscious uncoordinated low-count atom-level multiverse extent. The brain is highly quantum-leveraged, a quantum computer. Free will can fit brain complexity, in other words.

[harryperebooms]

You funny, but not funny enough to carry "perebooms" as last name