I think the most convincing evidence of free will is the awful stuff that happens when people figure that, usually other people, don’t have the right to make up their own mind. What happens in real life is so much more impressive than the theories we come up with about it.

Sorry, I sang a tiger song in the Rosalyn zone, now I have babysitter privilege!

“But an infinite being who doesn’t actually do anything isn’t much of a deity, is it? It’s just the same as having no deity. Whether or not something pushed the Big Bang Button or not is irrelevant to everything in it. And to that deity, what is the purpose of creating the universe if not to do something with it? Since we’ve put this deity outside time and space, the deity already knows what the universe will do from its beginning to its end, so why bother making it at all?”

Well, no, it would be both outside and inside time and space – again, no limits except what that infinite being chooses to impose on itself.

As for whether it’s actually doing anything, well, my children are growing up and someday will move out and get on with their own lives. I love my kids and they’re a joy to watch and be around. But at some point I won’t be a necessary part of the lives – in the sense that they depend on me for food and shelter. And maybe we’re actually doing something for that infinite deity. Maybe it’s good for something that exists in the past, present and future to be able to focus on something that can only perceive the present. How comfortable are you with uncertainty?

But I absolutely agree, it’s just as valid to postulate no deity.

The one thing I do know is that science can help us discover real things about the natural world. Everything else has to agree with that.

“Free will, it would seem, is more of a quantum probability cloud. A living thing has an illusion of free choice, but really just has a large finite number of options to choose from.”

Sure, free will that’s within the bounds of what’s possible as a human being. I am free to choose among the things it’s possible for me to choose. What’s interesting is how we humans have expanded those choices – 200 years ago I couldn’t get in an airplane and fly around the world.

If anything, an infinite being who created a universe that needed direct guidance/constant correction or was bound by the constraints of time/no time would be less than infinite or all-powerful.
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But an infinite being who doesn’t actually do anything isn’t much of a deity, is it? It’s just the same as having no deity. Whether or not something pushed the Big Bang Button or not is irrelevant to everything in it. And to that deity, what is the purpose of creating the universe if not to do something with it? Since we’ve put this deity outside time and space, the deity already knows what the universe will do from its beginning to its end, so why bother making it at all?

Unless I’m understanding cosmology incorrectly, all objects in the universe are subject either to Newtonian law (planets, asteroids, stars, etc) or quantum mechanics (particles). After the first few milliseconds after the Big Bang, there was no more choice – energy coalesced into matter and from there was guided by natural laws of gravity and electromagnetism into the universe we observe today. The way matter clumped together made stars, and the way stars grouped together made galaxies, and the way they interacted and exploded and re-formed made other stars with more complex elements and planets and organic compounds, all based on the initial configuration of the Big Bang.

It’s only when life enters the picture that we have at least the illusion that a different law of motion can exist at the greater than subatomic level – free will. But free will is still limited. Living creatures can’t do anything – there are limits. Here’s an analogy:

If you toss a baseball out of a second-floor window, you can be reasonably certain that it’s going to hit the ground. If you can control for velocity and angle of release and spin and atmospheric conditions and ensure that a dog isn’t going to run up and catch it, you can predict exactly where that baseball will land.

You can’t quite do the same thing if you’re tossing a bird out of a second-floor window. It might fly up to the roof. It might fly into a nearby tree. It might land in your garden or poop on your car. It might land in a tree two miles away. There are many possibilities, but not an infinite number. It definitely won’t land on the Moon. It’s probably not going to fly to Beijing. It’s probably not going to land in Antarctica. It’s probably not going to hover in midair and start singing Beatles songs.

Free will, it would seem, is more of a quantum probability cloud. A living thing has an illusion of free choice, but really just has a large finite number of options to choose from.

Fun conversation, toasterhead! Kind of like the theological version of Calvinball.
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And you, sir, have just entered a Vortex Zone.

Now THAT’S Calvinball!

Is that really what the delayed choice experiment showed? I thought it just proved the idea that the act of observing a photon changes the nature of the photon. It’s not that the photon cares whether or not humans are observing it, it’s that the process of detection irrevocably alters the photon. It’s not like you can take a picture of a photon – pictures ARE photons.

This analogy may be completely bogus, but I liken it to watching a really really fast NASCAR race, one that’s moving so fast that the cars are just a blur. You can’t even take a photo of them – they’re moving too fast. The only way to determine who is winning is to drop a giant brick wall into the middle of the track and see which car slams into it first. While you will definitely see an example, the condition of both car and driver will be irrevocably altered by the detection process.

Again, that may be a completely bogus analogy. But it would certainly make NASCAR more fun to watch.

If you’re postulating an infinite being, then neither would be a problem since it would already know all possible outcomes. Or, another way of thinking is that there wouldn’t need to be infinite universes, just knowledge of all possible timelines for one universe. As the universe progresses, you still have a huge amount of possibilities for how all this plays out.

“And does this infinite being exist within time or outside time? Before the universe, there was no time, so if this being exists within time it would have to have come into existence after the universe was created, negating its role as creator. And if this being exists outside time, then how can it be said to have acted to create the universe – action requires time.”

Kind of the same answer as above. As it set the clock running, so to speak, it could experience time but also wouldn’t be bound by it.

“So you’re left with a non-creating, non-guiding, do-nothing God who is all-powerful and yet powerless. ”

No, you have an infinite being who has created an everything that has no need for tweaking (it’s a feature, not a bug ) and chooses to allow the universe/universes to proceed without direct interference as the “gift” of free will.

If anything, an infinite being who created a universe that needed direct guidance/constant correction or was bound by the constraints of time/no time would be less than infinite or all-powerful.

Fun conversation, toasterhead! Kind of like the theological version of Calvinball.

@44 Anthony. Interesting point.

I’d think that an infinite God could contain all of the parts of time but not only that, if there could be alternative time lines there could also be alternatives to time as well. What those would be, ?.

It’s like trying to conceive of what, if anything, a far larger number of dimensions would be like in terms of experience. We don’t seem to be equipped to do more than try to conceive the rudest sketches of some of those. Maybe a good way to think of it was the world before the atomic level of matter had been postulated. They were there, our physical reality depended on them but our ancestors didn’t perceive that reality because it was outside of their experience. It’s possible that other dimensions, times, etc. permeate our reality unnoticed by us. And there’s no reason to believe that it makes one bit of difference to the universe or to a possible God that we will never know about them. Maybe they’re not really any of our business.