Communist

Do you think knowledge, reasoning, experience, and risks do not play any role in our decisions?

Sure, it is inevitable that we will make the decision we make, but it’s not that the marble will fall down every time that makes our choices significant, it’s the fact that we don’t arbitrarily make decisions.

If, because you know about determinism, you stop bothering to learn about the world, there will be a different outcome, even if that was inevitable, that’s how you influence the world. Free will doesn’t mean anything and isn’t important.

Even if there was free will, those things would be vastly more important than it. Free will is totally unimportant.

what is the difference in the case of the agent vs. the marble?

The agent made its decision based on knowledge, reasoning, experience, the risks, the morals. A marble doesn’t have knowledge, humans do, even if we’re deterministic, we can make decisions, it’s just that the decision will be made no matter what. That doesn’t free us from the responsibility of our decisions.

Just because the agent would’ve never made a different choice, doesn’t mean these things don’t matter anymore, it’s wholly irrelevant to whether or not we should punish them.

in your view, what is the difference between having a forced decision and not having a choice? and why exactly would this forced choice be punishable in the same way a free one would be?

In determinism, you still have free choices, it’s just you would’ve made that choice if time was reversed and played again, nothing changed so why would the result be different? You compared all the options, and decided to make that choice, and if we reversed time, and played it back, you’d still make that decision… but it’s not like the universe compelled you to make that decision, nobody FORCED you to make that choice, you still made a decision all on your own, even if we reversed time and you would’ve made the same one, that changes precisely nothing of importance.

in brief, god makes decisions about who is saved and who isn’t not based on conditions they follow in their life, but based on his own purposes and goals.

then he’s just a dickbag putting us all in a world to suffer for fun, when he could just make us all in heaven.

again, a calvinist would probably say that he created evil people for his glory and grace. notably, jesus dying on the cross for humanity’s sins as a display of god’s grace does not make sense without the existence of evil.

yeah it doesn’t make any sense. that doesn’t actually make it make sense, that’s just a vague set of words. So god is a dickbag that needs worship why? Quite frankly like, any decent human being is better than this god, he’s just evil.

traditionally, determinism is not compatible with moral responsibility since all actions are predetermined and it is not obvious that one can be held morally responsible for them.

this is nonsense. You’re still making choices, just because you would’ve made those choices no matter what doesn’t mean your choices aren’t punishable or your fault. It’s not that you didn’t have a choice, it’s that you would’ve made that decision no matter what based on the laws of physics. These are not incompatible ideas, and I don’t get why people struggle with this. It’s very straightforward.

to the problem of the theist test, standard christian doctrine is that your fate in heaven is predetermined and individuals have been pre-chosen by god (theological term is ‘the elect’). in that sense, your worldly life is not a ‘test’, but the idea is that the holy spirit reveals god to those who have been selected.

this is also nonsense, the point was that it was a test, god should already know who’s going to be selected, if there’s no free will, this is still all pointless. Why does god need the holy spirit to do all that nonsense if it isn’t a test? If it’s predetermined, why did god make all these evil people that were just going to be miserable in hell anyway?

This isn’t a problem for athiests, I am a determinist athiest, we have no free will and the idea is silly in a place governed by physical laws. It honestly doesn’t matter at all to me and I don’t see any reason to care.

it’s a problem for theists because this is supposed to be a big test, god is checking if we belong in heaven. If we have no free will the test makes no sense at all.