"We all know what George W. Bush decided to do," says Naturalism.

Org, discussing
the subject of free will, using Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq as the
example.

"But if we could turn back the hands of time and give the President a second
chance, with everything exactly as before, might he chart a different course?
Could he choose otherwise?
"With the help of free will, surely he could.
"Or could he?
"With everything as before, including Bush, why would he?"
http://www.naturalism.org/Converse.pdf

Naturalism.Org does not believe in free will. It believes in science without the
interference of metaphysics. Metaphysics is not science. Naturalism.Org is
interested in science, but not about the conclusions of broader, more
comprehensive thinking that begins with science and ends with philosophy. Like the
science of physics, scientific naturalism has its own means of distancing itself
from metaphysical judgments.
On the subject of free will, it says: "...it's no surprise we defend this
conception against science, hoping to keep those nasty dogs of determinism at
bay." [emphasis added]

But it is not against science when we identify the unchangableness of a thing that
remains "as it was before." It is merely common sense to say that if "A is A", and
we go back in time to a place where "A remains A", it is "A".

If "A" is something that human will is capable of changing, it cannot itself

change when everything else remains as it was. In other words, for an example, if
someone swings a fist at you the first time and you duck because the act of
defensively raising your arm to deflect his swing in not in your arsenal of self-
defensive behaviors, what makes the author of the Bush scenario think that,
turning back the hands of time, when the identical situation occurred you would do
other than you did the first time?

In order to change your will and thus your behavior, at least one thing in the
scenario must change. To declare that "with the help of free will you surely could
change A into B or C or D" is to ignore the fact that omnipotence is not part of
man's description. You can't change that a man takes a swing at you; you can't
change that certain defensive moves are not part of your knowledge; you can't
change that the one thing you know how to do without thinking about it first is to
duck. If everything stays the same, everything stays the same including the
outcome.

It is morally objectionable to set up a premise that has no chance of ever

becoming reality, and changing "A into not-A" has no chance of ever becoming
reality.

The owner of Naturalism.Org, Tom Clark wrote this: "In a piece on recent murders
in Connecticut, [the author] defended the concept of evil as a matter of free
choice, nothing explicable by looking at genes or environment. Why do people do
horrible things? Not, he says, because they were shaped by nature and nurture,
although of course genes and environment have their effects, but simply because
they are evil.

"It's disturbing that [the author] supposes the appeal to innate evil reflects a
rational comprehension of behavior, since it's precisely the opposite: he's
insulating horrific acts from explanation, from understanding them in terms of
their causal antecedents." [emphasis added] http://www.naturalism.org/freewill.htm

First, the idea of innate evil is not the same as evil by free choice. Clark is
disingenuous by turning A into not-A, free choice into something innate. What is
innate is not by choice, free or otherwise. The author is not talking about innate
evil; he is talking about evil by choice--as he plainly states.

But to determine that evil, determined to be through free choice, is then the
result of causal antecedents makes evil neither innate nor of free choice: it
makes it deterministic.

"Again," Clark continues, bemoaning that someone has chosen to believe in free
will, "choice is king: it's held to be independent of how dysfunctional the
killers were, something that floats free of any explanation involving the factors
that shaped them. But of course we don't need to suppose killers are moral
levitators, as Daniel Dennett puts it, to hold them responsible, although we won’t
any longer think of them as self-created monsters."

But Clark himself forgets--in this argument--that choices are made in spite of
causal antecedents, which is the very crux of his own argument for scientific
naturalism. "People and their wills aren’t disempowered when we explain them in
terms of antecedent causes," he writes elsewhere on his site. "Just as my
antecedents, genetic and environmental, had the causal power to create me in all
my glory, I too have causal power to influence the world. So don’t forget about
me." [emphasis added]
If we are not to forget despite antecedent causes about the will of men, then I
can think of people such as murderers, terrorists, rapists, and child abductors as
nothing less than self-created monsters. You can say they chose to go on a
murderous spree; or you can say they did not choose to do something else. Being
beaten up by your father as a child; watching your mother get hit by a car; having
your face burned by battery acid; having no shoes because your family is too poor;
getting angry at the rain because it soaked your new clothes; or being hungry,
tired, cold, lonely, depressed, achy, or lovelorn, all of which are antecedent
causes, are not reasons to choose to do evil, nor to choose not to do what is
right and good. They are not reasons to choose not to do evil. The "factors" that
shape a persons's choices are moral whether or not biological, social, or
environmental influences are consuming one's cognitive powers.

"Mental defect" may often be a proper defense in a court of law; but improper
behavior based on faulty epistemology, or the metaphysically evil thoughts that
can sometimes follow improper epistemology, are not "mental defects." They are
defects in the process of thinking.

“The lack of free will," Clark quotes another story, "sometimes called
determinism, maintains that peoples' decisions are the result of an unbroken chain
of prior occurrences; each action is caused by the previous one; individuals don't
really have choices.” – news story from The Vancouver Province, 2/28/08.

"This conclusion, of course, is mistaken," he posits. "You can’t logically

attribute power to the world and not to the agent," which is what the previous
examples do: concede the causal efficacy of what created the person, "but deny
that the person plays a role in how things unfold in her immediate neighborhood,
and sometimes well beyond. Although we don’t have ultimate control over ourselves
– there’s no evidence," he says, "we are self-created in a way that can’t be
traced back to non-self factors – we have plenty of local, proximate control and
power: our actions, controlled by our wills, often have the intended effects. This
control and power doesn’t go away when we admit that the will itself has causal
antecedents, that it didn’t create itself." [emphasis added]
http://www.naturalism.org/demoralization.htm
That, Mr. Clark, is what free will consists of, and in the end holds people
repsonsible for "playing a role" in the choices they make, choices which are of
free choice and which then cannot be described as "innate." Innate would be mental
defect. Free choice resulting in wrongful acts, even accidental wrongful acts, are
the result of free choice, of a will that just didn't "create itself."

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of
the LLC and are:
© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®