Shallow Draughts: Faith in the Absence of Free Will

By Steve Mendelsohn

Faith is the psychological process by which our brains generate our beliefs. That psychological process - Automatic Involuntary Subjective Evidence Weighing or AISEW, for short - is the same process that generates all of our beliefs whether they are "religious" beliefs like "God exists" or "God does not exist" or "secular" beliefs like "E=mc 2" or "Shakespeare wrote Hamlet." The inputs (i.e., the evidence) may be different and the outputs (i.e., the beliefs) may be different, but the AISEW process is the same. Since the AISEW process is automatic and involuntary, our brains automatically and involuntarily generate all of our beliefs. In other words, we don't exercise conscious control over our beliefs.Moreover, the AISEW process performed by our brains produces not just our beliefs, but all of our thoughts, including our desires. Since the AISEW process is automatic and involuntary, and since we always act in accordance with our desires, our actions are also automatic and involuntary. In other words, we don't have free will.Shallow Draughts was written for the author's fellow atheists who have yet to give up the ghost of free will. It's easy for a theist to explain the existence of free will. "It's just another one of God's many miracles." It's impossible for an atheist to do so.But Shallow Draughts was also written for those atheists and theists alike who believe that the psychological process by which religious beliefs are generated is different from the psychological process by which secular beliefs are generated. In fact, they are all (automatically and involuntarily) generated by the same AISEW process, which is just another name for faith.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1981823689
• ISBN13: 9781981823680
• Release Date: December 2017
• Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 238 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"