Gay Marriage, Forced on Everyone???

Like Apostle, you put your body on the line for the cause of gay hate.

Yyyyeah. He's gonna buy-a-dozen-donuts teh lez-beans. Brutally. He'll buy-a-dozen-donuts them into bloody pulps.

Interesting technique, coming at me sideways. "Well, you never said it, but other people did, so I'm asking you."

Others have answered this far more thoroughly than I could, so I'll just ask you to consider whether this man's establishment is a bakery or a church.

No one's denying him the practice of his religion in his church, in his home, or in his heart. The law is simply telling him what he can or cannot do in his retail establishment.

I'm sure he'd give you a free donut hole.

And I'd ask you to consider whether the bakery is his or the government's.

I'll also observe that if he's refusing service on religious grounds, whether the government's interference in this case wouldn't constitute an infringement on his First Amendment freedom of religious expression.

Could I, for example, take a Halal establishment to court because their refusal to serve ham sandwiches is "discriminatory"?

I think you are missing something. Infallibility doesn't come into this argument at any point. The meaning of 'knowledge' suffices. The challenge to freedom discussed in this passage is this: "Your choices can't be free if they're predetermined, and they have to be predetermined if they can be known before you make your choice." The carrier of that knowledge by no means needs to be infallible; he only needs to know this one thing. If he does, see above. If he doesn't -- as might well be, if he isn't infallible -- the challenge to freedom is void anyway.

Here's how this applies to the general issue of determinism and freedom. Assume I have a very close friend or loved one. That person knows me outstandingly well; better perhaps than I know myself. That person might be able to predict my choices in any given situation. (In reality, the best we'll get is an 'almost', on which see above.) But that means that knowing me and the situation, i.e. all the elements going into a choice, allows that person to predict the outcome: the very definition of determinism. In a strictly incompatibilist worldview, this means that my choices aren't free: They are wholly determined by a set of preconditions. But in my own compatibilist worldview, my choices are no less free; they are just free choices that have been precisely predicted. Free choices are not free because they are not determined, but because they are immediately determined by their immediate agent.

There are already limits on religious expression.
The Mormons don't get to be (openly) racist anymore, and a Satanist can't commit human sacrifice.

I'm pretty sure polygamy was the Mormons' hobby, and to my knowledge Satanists never did actually engage in human sacrifices. Neither of which is in the same ballpark as refusing to create a cake for lesbians, as much as the lesbians might insist it is.

Hey, I should hire you to write religious tracts, and then report you to the cops for discrimination when you refuse to do it. See, 'cause if the lesbians get their way, that means I can use the courts to make you write religious tracts.

Where is his bakery located again? Oh, right. In a state with anti-discrimination laws.

Does the signage indicate that it's a Halal establishment? Then it's exempt from the law.

Does his bakery have signage indicating "My religion does not allow me to serve teh gheys"? No? Gee, I wonder why. Could it be because that's a violation of the law of the state he lives in?

Tell you what: Read the specific law in question and see what it says.

In the meantime, your poor persecuted widdle bakery owner could always move his business to some theocracy that shares his views, though I doubt his bahklava would pass muster in Iran.

This is the heart of the fallacy in your reasoning. If you don't believe in a God who can know the future, or if you don't believe that "before" has any meaning to God (who can easily be conceived of as being outside of time), the statement becomes meaningless.

IOW, the argument has some validity only to a very small segment of the range of philosophical possibilities. For it to actually be a valid argument, you would have to demonstrate that that range is the only valid one.

A blatant epistemological error: the outcome is predicted with a great degree of accuracy, but not the absolute 100% certainty that would be required for the argument to be valid.

^Yep, and he's gone beyond the bounds of his example, which predicates the fact that God knows what our choices will be because he made us. Its explicitly stated.

If you want to take a broader approach and say that there is no predestination if people simply can predict your actions, I'd tend to agree, because I can't see any chance of that being being 100% accurate, as Async neatly demonstrates.

But let's take it even a step farther - let's say an exponentially growing AI is devoted to studying you and only you, and it can determine your actions within for all practical purposes 100% success rates.

Does that in any way mean that your actions aren't your own?

I'd say that Packard's point holds up there. Its an external force, and it in no way makes your choices for you. Knowledge isn't what precludes free will.

Its creation that precludes it. If you are created in a method that your actions are foreknown, then its pretty hard to argue any choice you make are your own.

For example, I created the AI that studied Async and knows everything he knows and can predict everything he does. I'm not smart enough to do that myself, but I am smart enough to make a machine that does that by making it far better at this task than I am.

Async still has free will. But if I program the machine in that way, it doesn't, because it has to do what I created it to do.

Anyway, my 2 cents on the subject. Ultimately all moral authority belongs to God if he knows everything we will do before we do it - and all moral responsibility as well.

That's the part the Church doesn't like.

Not the question. Does the business belong to him, or does it belong to the government?

So if he puts up a sign indicating it's a Christian bakery, he's off the hook? Why is a Muslim establishment off the hook but not a Christian one?[/quote]

He should claim to be an illegal alien. That'd get him off the hook, too.

But you love Iran!

www.oregon.gov

The whole state of Oregon is this one law?

Did you mean "Is the law applicable in the entire state?" or did you mean "I know the law can be found on the site you linked to, but I'm too lazy/stupid to look for it"?

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I meant, "I asked you for a link to the law, not a link to the State of Oregon."

Nothing in the argument depends on the person being called God. I believe that humans can know the future. For instance, tomorrow will be Saturday.

So that would be Option #2, then.

On a side note, have you been invited to Volpone's wedding?

Quantum mechanics disallows strict determinism in any event.

The point of comparison is that in a deterministic universe, you can always point to a set of exterior and prior conditions that made you what you are, in every aspect of your being.

But see, if the AI can predict my actions, that means my actions are predictable. Determinism implies such predictability; if you know everything about the prior state and everything about the laws of nature, you can predict the posterior state. So not only does the AI know what I'm going to do (and this doesn't make my choices any less than free), but in demonstrating that knowledge, it also proves that all my choices are wholly formed by prior factors (and I argue that this still doesn't make my choices any less than free).

That, again, is valid only if the term "before" applies to God. I am not at all convinced that it does. A demonstration of that point would have to be made (i.e., show that God is necessarily bound by time, moving through it inexorably, as we are) before the argument could be convincing.

Believe it all you want. That doesn't make it true.

There is an extremely high probability of that. But it is not certainty, and thus is not "knowledge" in an epistemological sense. For example, the whole continuum in which you think you exist might be an illusion; you might be the classical "brain in a box". Or there might not be a tomorrow; the entire space-time continuum might not extend any farther than today. You are using inductive logic ("Saturday has always followed Friday, so we validly infer that it will continue to do so in the future"), and it has long been established that induction merely establishes high probabilities. It does not establish certainty, and without certainty, there is no true "knowledge". Without knowledge, your whole argument falls apart.

I am no expert in quantum theory, but a friend of mine who is told me that this is pure nonsense. He wasn't able to show me the demonstration, because it is far beyond my level of expertise, but he said that the idea that strict cause and effect do not hold beyond the quantum level is the fallacy of those who do not understand quantum physics.

I admit I just have to take his word for it, but since that seems to be conformed to what is observable in the physical world, I have no particular reason to doubt him, either.

I knew you were gonna say that.

First I've heard. I know you don't have it, but I'd be interested in some explanation of how that's consistent with the uncertainty principle.

Jesus Christ, what a fucking drama queen.

You don't hang around here much (though not too much is still too much). You probably don't get the reference. However, I'd suggest a drama queen is somebody who thinks another person's marriage impacts his own life in any meaningful way.

So you're planning to make this thread about you now?

He tried to explain it to me, but I was in WAY over my head. And in any case, we didn't have much time.

In any case, he was pretty clear that deterministic cause and effect are absolutely clear beyond the quantum level and that quantum theory has nothing to say to the contrary.