5 Replies to “Psychology 3306 – More intro and some history”

  1. I was just listening to this podcast and incidentally the Bible doesn’t say that we have free will. To the annoyance of a lot of people it actually tends to say that we don’t have free will, the whole idea of “predestination” which Paul (the apostle Paul that is, I don’t think he had a last name… ) writes about. A lot of people figure that predestination is about God deciding in advance who goes to heaven and who gets roasted, but I always figured that a God would know all about the environment and genes and the interactions between them and so would be able to predict what would people would do based on that. Anyway just thought I’d clear that up; although a lot of Christians do think we have free will, it isn’t strictly Biblical.

  2. Thanks!

    I always figured that eve and the forbidden fruit and all of that sort of implied it. Then again, I am hardly a biblical scholar…!

  3. Jewish commentary does clearly state that people have free will, or if you prefer moral choice, as the “plain meaning” of the text. Also that G-d knows before the circumstances arise what choices will be made, which would seem contradictory. However, that is only a contradiction if one posits a G-d who creates space-time and is also bound by the time He/She/It created, which seems to me a very limited, small concept of a Creator. A G-d sitting outside time would naturally know what will happen no matter how many variables are involved, because it’s all “already” happened, so to speak (confound it, I need a time-independant tense here!); using this post-Einsteinian outlook also makes any religious upset over evolution irrelevant.

    Not to mention the sheer irrelevance of the two spheres (science and religion) to each other, as you so correctly pointed out.

  4. Sort of like Galactica, ‘All of this has happened before, all of this will happen again’

  5. Maybe even more like string theory (all possibilities exist, each in it’s own universe on it’s own brane)? … I don’t really understand string theory, so maybe not. (How is it a scientific theory if it can’t be tested?)

    (And how come every time I see “Battlestar Galactica” I read “Encyclopedia Galactica”?)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.