And, more particularly, the concept of "sin" must necessarily disappear from religious discussion.....
Be that as it may, if we accept as axiomatic that there is no free will, it has an interesting corollary: when all is said and done, the universe must have a specified "direction." It seems that this leads to difficulties with some of the arguments regarding randomness vs. truth.
Indeed, dear r9etb. And what would that "direction" be?
I think (hope!) I'm following you here: If there is no free will in the universe, then everything that exists must be utterly determined. Which begs the question of who or what is doing the "determining," or as you say providing the "direction" of events, the sum total of which is the Universe at any "point" of its evolution.
Again that slippery word "random" rears its ugly head. How can a "random" process produce, not only the diversity that we see all around us, but also the unity and order of all things — which I think we also can see all around us, provided we have the eyes to "look" and see, and the minds to understand what we observe.
There are theological implications to the idea of a determined universe. A Calvinist is put into the position of having to blame God directly for all the suffering in the world — which is to conceive of God as a monster.... (At least I read this line of reasoning somewhere recently.)
Another famous determinist had a different problem. Sir Isaac Newton conceived of God as "the Lord of Life with His creatures," the cause that eternally determines everything that happens in the natural world, including the world of men. Newton's monotheist conception of divine action in the world is facilitated via the sensorium Deum, a sort of field-like interface between the divine and natural orders.
There is no evident support for the doctrine of free will in Newton's mechanistic, deterministic science, to put it mildly. What we have instead is a remarkably beautiful, intellectually satisfying formalism; i.e., something entirely abstracted away from the world of phenomena.
Case in point: the Newtonian "particle" is a perfect abstraction, a purely formal (mathematical) entity. Newton's theory doesn't regard whether the "particle" in question is a subatomic particle, an atom, a planet, a star, or a galaxy. All problems of scale are irrelevant to the operation of Newton's Laws. And evidently, these Laws are the expressions of divine will and thus cannot be evaded in Nature.
But then along came relativity and quantum theory. And the problem of "free will" became highly topical again, as summed up in "the observer problem" implicit in both the relativistic and quantum theories.
What Calvin and Newton agree about is that the universe is lawful. That is, whatever its fundamental nature, Nature is definitely not "random." Ontologically, it is persistently the way it is, and not some other way. Its order cannot be the "accident" of random causes on logical grounds.
On the other hand, neither is the Universe in any way "static." It is constantly involved in the flux of change which we denote by the term "evolution."
And this flux of change constantly introduces new elements into the world. Still, these "new elements" are subject to "direction." Or to put it another way, to universal "guides to the system" that did not arise from within the system.
Truth is built into the very foundation of the world. It utterly transcends the world — but at the same time it is immanent within it, lawfully "informing" (in multiple senses) its development.
At least, this is my belief FWIW.
Your last really set me off into "wool-gathering mode." :^) Thank you so very much for writing, dear r9etb! I hope my reply was in some way responsive to the issues you raised....