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So @FCfromSSC, you've stated that you consider a lack of aliens, a lack of AGI, and a lack of Read/Write Consciousness upload ability to be proof that humans are divine and that God exists. If we find alien life, create AGI, and can scan a human brain and make a copy, would that be proof for you that God doesn't exist? Would any of those events change you mind?
Well, hopefully, if he's rational, Bayesian updating should occur.
One would hope.
It would be nice if it went the other way, and people noted that Determinism started by making strong predictions, and then retreated to weak predictions, and now has retreated to complete unfalsifiability.
Well, determinism's not incompatible with Christianity.
Yes it is. You can't have a model of the world in which people are automata and have no actual agency, and then apply a religion which says people will suffer eternal consequences due to their choices. In the determinism view, people don't have choices so you can't really hold them accountable.
I do think that people make meaningful choices. I don't think that conflicts with determinism being true.
Maybe I misunderstood what determinism is, but as I understand it the very premise is that we do not actually have the ability to make choices. That everything is a vastly complex clockwork mechanism, which is fully determined by the start conditions. If that is true, then Christianity would be morally abhorrent (cue Richard Dawkins saying "it already is"), because people would be held responsible for something which could not have happened and other way.
I'm sure there's equivocation on "choice" here—people who believe in libertarian free will usually have a theory of choice which I find bizarre and often incoherent. I'm not certain to what extent it's clockwork-like vs. is determined by continuous divine input, but I'll allow it for now. I don't think something clockwork-like, as you put it, is incompatible with choices. When you decide to do something, you think it through, and make decisions, with such factors influencing it as your own character and whatever circumstances are happening at the moment. You are clearly deliberating in such a way that your actions are a product of who you are, and it being deterministic doesn't change that—none of this requires things happening beyond ordinary causality. When someone is being judged, I don't think it's a problem that there's some sense in which it couldn't have happened in any other way—they still made wrong decisions and acted wickedly. Judgment was earned. Just because their decisions were part of a divine plan does not mean that they couldn't be evil in themselves. To quote Joseph, in Genesis 50:20, "As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today."
It seems like we're at an impasse, because to me freedom of choice is a hard requirement for moral culpability. This is a moral axiom as far as I'm concerned, so we probably simply have to agree to disagree.
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