Why compatibilism and materialism are incompatible

 As I see it, materialism has three components. One is the causal close of the physical. The second is the mechanism of the physical, that there are no mental states in the supervenience base. Causation occurs without purpose at the basic level. The thrd is the supervenience of all other states on the physical. The second is the tripper for materialist who wants to be a compatibilist. An action caused by a desire is not mechanistically caused. The brain state that is the desire might cause the brain state that begins the action, but not because of the content of the desire. Think of this. Suppose an opera singer were to tell someone 'Look at that glass window. I will tell it to shatter, and it will listen to me and shatter. She sings 'Shatter now" and it shatters. But the shattering has nothing to do with the content of the words she sings. Hence compatibilist free will, which requires causationb by desire, is impossible on materialism.

Marginal utility

 

In order for our money to do the most good, should it go to those who have the least? 

Socialist idea? 

Does culture determine ethics?

 Does culture determine ethics? Are there human rights that exist regardless of what the culture says? The culture of the antebellum South approved of slavery. Does that mean that slavery was OK for Southerners and those who sought to abolilsh it were wrong to do so?

The consequences of determinsm

 Determinism is the view that given what happened in the distant past (which you and I had nothing to do with) the future is inevitable. Such past events can simply be the positions of the material particles in the universe as of, say, July 13, 1950 at 12:13 AM Pacific Daylight Time. Or the set of past event could include choices God might have made to predetermine that such and such will happen. Whether it's physical or divine, given that past state, the future is inevitable. If you play a CD with Ariana Grande's music, you will hear her songs the same way every time you play it, and you won't hear Demi Lovato instead. It's predetermined.

Let's call the set of events over which you had not control X.

The argument against moral responsibility might be stated this way.

1) You are not responsible for X. (It happened before you were born).

2) Necessarily, if X occurs, Y occurs (Y is some action you performed. Think of the worst thing you ever did. Make that Y).

3) Therefore, you are not responsible for Y.

See. you're off the hook.

How did the argument from evil get to be strong?

 From C. S Lewis; 

It would be an error to reply that our ancestors were ignorant and therefore entertained pleasing illusions about nature which the progress of science has since dispelled. For centuries, during which all men believed, the nightmare size and emptiness of the universe was already known. You will read in some books that the men of the Middle Ages thought the Earth flat and the stars near, but that is a lie. Ptolemy had told them that the Earth was a mathematical point without size in relation to the distance of the fixed stars—a distance which one mediæval popular text estimates as a  hundred and seventeen million miles. And in times yet earlier, even from the beginnings, men must have got the same sense of hostile immensity from a more obvious source. To prehistoric man the neighbouring forest must have been infinite enough, and the utterly alien and infest which we have to fetch from the thought of cosmic rays and cooling suns, came snuffing and howling nightly to his very doors. Certainly at all periods the pain and waste of human life was equally obvious. Our own religion begins among the Jews, a people squeezed between great warlike empires, continually defeated and led captive, familiar as Poland or Armenia with the tragic story of the conquered. It is mere nonsense to put pain among the discoveries of science. Lay down this book and reflect for five minutes on the fact that all the great religions were first preached, and long practised, in a world without chloroform.

stable laws

 If God did not exist, would the universe have stable laws. Minds prefer order, so we should expect stsble lsws if theism is true. But why doesn't the law of gravity quit on us ast some point? Since the laws are stable, doesn't that suggest a Bayesian argument for theism? 

From Facebbok

Yesterday my kids asked what the world would look like if God did not exist.

What would you say?