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Imagine that tomorrow’s newspaper comes with a surprising headline: ‘Scientists Discover that Human Behavior is Entirely Determined.’ Reading through the article, you learn more about precisely what this determinism entails. It turns out that everything you do – every behavior, thought and decision – is completely caused by prior events, which are in turn caused by earlier events… and so forth, stretching back in a long chain all the way to the beginning of the universe.
via OUPblog » Blog Archive » Is free will required for moral accountability?.
Thought this might be interesting, giving recent discussions in the blogosphere.
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- The free will illusion illusion (psychologytoday.com)
- “Craig vs Harris” and related posts (metamagician3000.blogspot.com)
- Moral Responsibility vs. Moral Judgement (unfspb.wordpress.com)
- The Science of Morality (atheistethicist.blogspot.com)
- Deterministic Moral Responsibility? (war-on-error.xanga.com)
- The value of believing in free will (endhereditaryreligion.com)
- Lost in the Moral Landscape (seeingfaith.com)
Joel L. Watts holds a Masters of Arts from United Theological Seminary with a focus in literary and rhetorical criticism of the New Testament. His interests include exploring the role of mimesis in human civilization, specifically in the study of religion and media, as well as science fiction and the way in which it has allowed mythology to be explored in light of scientific discoveries of the past century. He is the author of Mimetic Criticism of the Gospel of Mark: Introduction and Commentary (Wipf and Stock, 2013) and a co-editor and contributor to From Fear to Faith: Stories of Hitting Spiritual Walls (Energion, 2013).
Website: → Unsettled Christianity
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Sounds like classic determinism. I kicked my daughter cuz an elephant stepped on a flower three thousand years ago. I think that knowledge (Rom 1) is a sufficient basis to establish responsibility.
Finally, we may have gotten away from the old religious excuse of, “the devil made me do it.” Thanks to science I will be able to give the new excuse of, “unknown previous events made me to it.”
If I saw that headline on tomorrow’s newspaper I would read the article with interest, chuckle, and then decide what to have for lunch.