Nobody ever experiences free will

Religion rests a lot on the doctrine of free will.

It is a secular teaching and assumption.  Religion has overlaps with history, ethics and psychological theory and it makes these items religious where applicable.  For example, a historian might think Jesus was alive after the crucifixion as a secular presumption.  But religion can make it a religious one as well.

So religion turns free will into a religious concept in itself.

It builds religious doctrine on it.  Without it it is impossible to believe that an all-good God would allow so much suffering not to mention allow us to think we are free when we are not. Religion gets God off the hook for evil by arguing that we made evil of our own free will.  So the whole human race is accused by religion and religious people and they even say God accuses!  So much for innocent until proven guilty!

And it is cruel to blame evil and suffering on free will if they have little or nothing to do with it.

Christianity argues that the abuse of free will is sin and Jesus had to die on the cross to forgive sin and pay for it.  So sin is murder.

And if you die without repenting sin you go to suffer everlasting punishment in Hell and there is no way out.

Those doctrines are evil simply because most experts who believe in free will do not believe it is free enough to be that bad and to deserve all that.  They are evil for the religious version of free will is tied to the idea of a good God so the person ends up accused on religious grounds and often solely or mainly on religious grounds which is worse.  The fact remains that there is no reason to turn free will into a religious thing or make it about God or spiritual.  There is no right and no evidence to support doing so.  Religious free will then is intrinsically degrading.

The non-religious version allows for punishment but that is not as bad for it thinks that it is evident people really do deserve punishment.  It thinks it is evidence based not faith based or religion based.  Free will even if it is a good doctrine is corrupted by religion both in content and in its results which could explain why believers in God always seek to oppress when they get a free pass to do so.  It is a passive-aggressive interpretation of free will.

Our consciousness is not a cause of anything but just an experience. Experience can’t happen without an experiencer. Nobody ever experiences free will but they experience the sensation that they are autonomous. Autonomous will is not the same thing as free will. Autonomous will is the feeling you get when you act without being obviously forced. It is autonomous will that the feeling of being free comes from. You are the experience you have and you are not having the experience. You are not merely observing the experience - you are involved and you are the experience and the experience is you.

The feeling that you are inside your body and having an experience from inside it is an illusion. The feeling that you had to act the way your brain wants would be unpleasant and prevent happiness so even if the brain is doing it it has to hide it. Our experience tells us nothing but lies or half-truths if you prefer. It prioritises opening the door to happiness over truth.  That is why we are so susceptible towards religious lies.  That is why we would kill for happiness even though it may not come when we work for it or try to let ourselves be happy.  We would kill for the chance of happiness.  It is true to say we do kill for the chance and it is wrong to say we kill for happiness.  We kill for the chance.

Religion by making more of free will than it needs to and making it out to be a gift when it is more like a gift of a venomous snake is a catalyst for the evil.

Even if we have free will it does not mean as much a religion makes out.  We have no free will to make our experience tell us the truth. We have no free will to change our experience. You cannot make yourself perceive the disgusting medicine as a lovely refreshing drink.

We are not free to increase our feeling of freedom.  We are not free to improve our freedom by making our cognitive function, most of which happens behind the scenes outside the reach of our awareness.  We are not free to make it more than the paltry low percentage it is. When we reason for example this is a small part of the reasoning our brain has already done. Most of it is unconscious . We end up with, “I reason consciously but am very unaware of what is happening in my head behind all the reasoning."

We don’t have the free will to make sense of free will. Nobody can explain the how.  Therefore even if we have free will nobody has the right to judge what we do.

Most of what is involved in a decision we make is out of our control. We cannot even tell ourselves what to think or feel in two minutes time.

Experience does show that if we have free will it is overrated and overstated.  But it does not show we have free will.

Is that not trying to tell you something?

To argue that we have free will for we experience it is a trick. Why? If experience can show it exists it might show at least for some that it is inconclusive or may not exist. You have to admit that possibility.  It is not experienced the way you would experience cold weather.  What you really experience is a perception that SEEMS to say free will is real.

To argue that experiencing free will shows we have it is arguing that if we get evidence or logical arguments that it is not free at all then these refutations do not matter and do not work. It is a way of making free will unchallengable. But it is cheating to make something definitely true and to refuse to find or admit there is any way to show it is not true. The arguments are not proofs of free will or indications of its presence for they are useless. The bias shows that there is a trick being played and that confidence in the argument for free will from experience is lacking.

Neitzsche insisted that free will is an error.  He asserted that it was inspired by the notion that it is choosing to do what you could have avoided doing that is the root of moral approval and disapproval and not forces inside our heads and outside of us that programme our “choice”. Notice that he is saying it is past forces that force us to act in some way in the present. Even if you think the choices were real and free, they are in the past.  They are the same as forces to us as forces now for we cannot change them.  We can be certain that experience tells us that!  Experience in fact refutes free will.  And if you see moral as being normal it follows that it does not matter how we behave ourselves but only that we do.

We are surer that we get illusions that we are that free will exists. Therefore free will could be an illusion.

Intention and free will are two separate things. Free will and intention are often confused. You do not need the power of intention to be free and you do not need to be free to intend anything. You can experience intending even when you are being programmed by drink or whatever.

Can intention matter, from a moral point of view, if we do not have free will?  No. It matters enough to us for our programming is to favour people who intend good.  That is all that matters.

If you have free will, you don't have free will to know you have free will.

Experience does nothing to justifying supposing we have free will.  It does even less to justify us supposing we have free will as in a faculty with which to choose or reject God.



SEARCH EXCATHOLIC.NET

No Copyright