The Free Will Theodicy

"God gave us free will, and allowing us to use that free will without fear of divine intercession justifies all the agony and suffering." Thus the free will theodicy in a nutshell. In the course of tackling that idea, we'll encounter figures such as John Wilkes Booth, Todd Friel, Ursula K. Le Guin, Abraham Lincoln, Christopher Nolan, Eleonore Stump, and Richard Swinburne, along with a handful of amateur apologists, a time-travelling DJW, and -- once again -- Satan and his minions.

NOTE: The correct spellings at 6:06 are "Incompatibilism" and "Compatibilism." Mea culpa.

THE ARGUMENT FROM EVIL REFERENCE

(E1) Lightning strikes a tree in a forest, causing a forest fire. A fawn is caught in this fire, and suffers intense agony for an extended period of time before finally dying.

(E2) A five year old girl is, by her mother's boyfriend, severely beaten, raped and strangled to death.

(P) No good state of affairs that we know of is such that God, by bringing it about, is justified in permitting E1 and E2.

Therefore, it is likely that:
(Q) No good state of affairs is such that God, by bringing it about, is justified in permitting E1 and E2.

Therefore, it is likely that:
(R) God does not exist.

Background art by DJW

0:00 "My Dear Unbelieving Friend..."
1:12 Omniscience and Free Will
2:21 Booth Was Framed, Man!
4:34 Retrocausation (or, Noitasuacorter)
6:03 Compatibilism
6:56 The Ones Who Walk Away
8:42 Natural Evils and Satan
11:01 Get Your Traps Off My Lawn!
13:40 Conclusion (For Now...)

[DeconvertedMan]

Booth vs Lincoln - and me - a time traveler. I care about life, and do not want it to be ended, I will do my best to stop Booth from ending Lincoln. Perhaps I can sit Booth down, long before he goes to do this and try to reason with him, maybe even reveal I'm a time traveler, and Booths fate should he carry this out, that in the end whatever Booth was wanting to gain from this, was not gained, upon seeing that, Booth can make an informed choice, he still *could* choose to do it anyway, or he could now decide not to. I've not negated his free will by this - or even if I have, I've done so for the overall benefit to life.
Its simply unloving to sit and watch some tragic event play out and do nothing when you could stop it or do something, the freewill argument doesn't negate god's non-action. It also negates someone's free will anyway - Lincoln did not have the choice of dying or not that day. He didn't get to decide that the bullet would kill him. So what about HIS free will? It gets worse when what the reward/punishment system that god has is tossed into the mix. Booth might get rewarded - not for his actions, but for his BELIEF in regards to the god. His sin is forgiven, thus his action is NOT punished. At all. There IS no justice in that system. Other god systems might be better or worse. But, god is unloving and/or unpowerful in all of them.

[DeconvertedMan]

I go back and forth with trying to figure out if free will is a thing or at what level it is. Like - here is a plate of poo. Do I have the will to eat it? No. I do not. I will not eat it, I can not eat it, it will make me sick trying to do so, and I am not even going to try. With zero pressure applied to get me to do this - I will always say no to it - so then I do not in fact have the ability to do this.

There are things I want to do, but can not - I'm limited in my free choices - I can not decide to fly without some sort of contraption that enables me to do so. Taking flight is not a thing my body can do on its own, so I simply do not have a choice in that matter at all.

I seem to be able to stay awake - my body will fight me but I can force myself awake - yet there are consequences and it might be that I do fall asleep or pass out. I can't hold my breath for as long as I want - I will pass out and begin to breath. I can not decide to not dream or to dream.

So at best I have very LIMITED free will.
But do I even have that? How many of my choices are decided by my dna the mood I'm in or whatever else? No idea.

[godlessqueertheywarnedyouabout]

Back when I was a Christian fundamentalist, specifically a Calvinist, I was taught that God's knowledge of the future didn't violate free will or mean that he caused people's future decisions, and *at the time* I bought that argument. HOWEVER, I still concluded that, if God created every aspect of your mind/"soul" and your material body and also knows everything down to the positions and velocities of every individual atom in the universe, which Calvinism consistently teaches he does, then we have no more free will than an advanced, artificially intelligent robot that is (1) programmed to act and react in ways its creator knows perfectly, (2) able to learn and reason, albeit imperfectly, and the creator knows these capabilities and their shortcomings perfectly, and (3) put through a series of situations and tests that are totally within the creator's knowledge and control. With such a level of knowledge and understanding, and such control of the beginning of the series of events put into motion, the creator of such a robot doesn't need to see the future to know how the robot will perform in a series of tests—yet at the end, the robot's creator still decides to reward or punish the robot. Or, put more simply, it's like God has perfect knowledge of physics and is setting off a Rube-Goldberg mechanism before rewarding or punishing the components involved.

[bowlsallbroken]

Am I the only one who wants a "Satan of The Gaps" T-shirt?

Btw I remember watching your videos like 10 years ago. Welcome back!

[DeconvertedMan]

The ones who walk away - okay David, you did it, you proved your a kindred spirt to me - I've lost track of how many times I've told people about that story/poem/mini-epic - its perfect - it SO good. Its so right! Ah man!!! We must talk soon! <3

[Lancefh_ENV]

'Natural disasters and Plagues are God's department, we're tired of taking the blame for those events.'- The Devil's Advocate (Hell's premier HR Department)

[BillGarrett]

Booth’s choice is causally upstream of your decision to travel to that time. Whether you have the same kind of foreknowledge as God in that scenario depends entirely on how God perceives reality. But it’s hard to imagine God-as-time-traveler while still granting him total omniscience. So I find it hard to be convinced by that particular analogy

[AphexTwin]

The quickest, and easiest way to refute the free will theodicy is this. "Does God have free will"? ...."Yes of course he God course not, he's perfect" So then why didn't God just create us with the same free will he has, where you have it, and cannot sin?

[weirdwilliam]

Is there free will in heaven? Is there evil in heaven? If yes, then why go to heaven, and if no, then god doesn’t need evil in order to enable free will.

[Boris]

The best way to refute any “free will” argument would be to ask the person that mentions it to differentiate a truly free-willed person and a “robot” that is convinced he has “free will”!

That’s actually a great question because it makes us think on what even is “free will”. If when you react to external sources you’re not executing your free will but rather acting as a preprogrammed robot then what is free will and do you ever use it in your life?

[jursamaj]

Regarding Swinburne's argument: Before God created everything else, he could not have known about the consequences of evil actions, therefore, per Swinburne, he wouldn't have known how to be good. But I doubt you'll ever get a theist to admit that.

[Cat_Woods]

It's such an infuriating argument it drives me nuts. My response is always: why does God give unlimited free will to child rapists, including the freedom to rape children, and no free will to their victims, not even freedom from being violated? To me it absolutely disproves the existence an all-powerful all-loving God. An all-powerful monster is still possible.

[calebdod]

I love the series so far and hope to see more soon.

[tertiaoptio]

you’re probably my favorite atheist youtuber

[DenisLoubet]

Thoughts on free will:
That which is not deterministic is random. That which is not random is deterministic. That covers everything. No room for free will.
Everyone that talks about the omniscient god and free will seems to forget that the god is also credited with *creating* the universe while knowing all events within that universe. That sort of says flat-out that the god decided all events within the universe it created. No free will found in that scenario.
The god's omniscience constitutes a list of all the god's thoughts and actions.
If the god is uncreated, eternal, and unchanging, then the list is uncreated, eternal, and unchanging.
If the list is uncreated then the god did not create it.
So the god is a robot executing a list of instructions from an unknown source.

I love this shit.

[MCP]

What is the Eleanore Stump _reference?!_ What journal? What's the name (title) of the article?

[elliejohnson]

I have a few thoughts about free will that have evolved over the past month or so, and I think I'd like to share them since I feel they're relevant:
First, thought experiments involving time travel feel irrelevant to me. Time travel in any form outside of linear progression of time seems to be categorically impossible. I'm not sure how it would even function.
Second, so far as I can tell, everything in this universe is physical. I've yet to see any convincing arguments that use convincing and real evidence that convinces me otherwise.
Third, so far as I can tell, everything in the universe that is physical follows physical laws. That is, specifically, they follow laws that are necessarily deterministic and that IF you know every single value or attribute about a particular object, you could determine how it would behave by applying a mathematical interpretation of those laws.

So, lastly, I conclude that IF those two initial statements are true ("Second" and "Third"), and they seem to be to me, then the world is necessarily deterministic. Hence, free will doesn't exist.

If a god that is all-knowing exists, then he implies determinism as well, since he already knows what you will do... necessarily implying that the outcome of your actions is pre-determined.

Not only is my non-religious perspective ironically compatible with the idea of their god without even requiring their god, but it also directly contradicts their idea of free will. I've only ever asked a single human if they believe in free will, and their response was "Yes. It obviously exists". Doesn't seem to be a concept that many people I know of think about, honestly.

[RiiDii]

One solution to the free-will and all-knowing-god problem, which I don't have an answer to, is what I call the "clay and..." solution. God made our free will like clay. We are free to mold anything we want from it, a horse, a car, or a tree. This is an example of "clay and [something else]." That's the part a god leaves to our free will, but that all-knowing god has some set of parameters the qualities of clay implies. A similar concept would be a fence around a field for horses. The rancher allows the horses to roam freely within the fenced area, so the rancher knows where the horses will be despite their free will to roam.

While we're alive, this solution seems to allow for a duality of free will and predestination. For the afterlife, there is a solution I've come up with, but it is indirect. The problem comes with the reward or punishment of the afterlife. Hell would be like the rancher putting the fence over a cliff so the horses could wander off the cliff to die on the rocks below. No rancher in their right mind would think this is a good idea, so there's little reason to believe that a tri-omni god would think that's a good idea.

[calebrichards]

There is nowhere in the Bible (to my knowledge) that says God gives us free will. Now there are several instances where God violates humans free will in the Bible.

[saxbend]

It doesn't address the main question, involving God (his omnipotence is an insurmountable stumbling block, ironically), but supposing the conditions of free will were such that either everyone had to have free will or no-one could, then the benefit to the five year old girl of her abuser having free will would be her also having free will. This assumes we've established that it's a benefit to have free will, but that's being argued for anyway by theists.