Posted by:
amos2
(
)
Date: March 13, 2012 05:07PM
(By Sam Harris)
I've been reading excerpts, and it got me thinking...
(Sam Harris is one of the "Four Horsemen" of Secular Humanism, along with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and the recently late Christopher Hitchens. I also honorarily include the late Carl Sagan as the fifth because his last book "Demon Haunted World" was along the same lines. Harris is a neurophysiologist).
The book is arguing that we do not actually have free will in the popular sense, but that we are, inevitably, products of the minute state of the universe at the moment.
He states the obvious that all agree on, that as soon as the present slips into the past, it is unchangeable. We are then left with a necessarily unchangeable present, and the only thing we can anticipate, obviously, is the future.
But no two people's past, present, and future are alike...at all. There's no way to say that one person's choice is not what another person would have done if everything was identical...EVERYTHING.
This suggests an interesting hypothetical scenario...a situation in which people are in the exact same state as each other, down to the the last particle in the universe, and are left with NO difference whatsoever...except what they're about to do next...
...Will it be different?
I think Harris argues that it cannot be different. As long as they are all exactly the same they will proceed the same. There is no rationale to expect a difference, no "free will" independent of the minute state of the universe.
But Mormonism says otherwise...
The BoM talks about, in relation to who acquires the high priesthood in this life, that in some beginning state they were all equal. They differentiated themselves by their choices from there.
But wait. How could they have started out the same but ended up different if they all had the exact same input? Or, what prompted to first one to make a bad choice unlike the others? Where did this evil come from? If it originated within the wrongdoer, they all had it or none of them had it. If it originated from elsewhere, it must have influenced all of them the same...so we are left with an unanswered question...What made the difference?
If it was random, that's not fair.
If it was "take a guess", that's not fair.
I used to treasure a belief in the preexistence, but from racism to who "finds" the gospel in this life, who has addictions, who has talents, whatever, it is a loophole for all kinds of excuses, prejudice, and self-importance, flattery, and a cop-out for a bunch of things...same as the afterlife is.