This is a good question, and it is easy to answer. "Coercion" here is something like arm-twisting. It is a use of force or the threat of force to cause someone to do something. It takes this kind of force to prevent freewill doing its stuff. Ordinary causation won't do it, according to compatibilism. If my mother tells me to eat my nice soup, and I do it because I am hungry, that is ordinary causation. If my mother tells me to eat my nice soup, because if I don't she will whack me round the ear with her wooden spoon if I don't, that is coercion. It involves force or the threat of force. In this second case, according to compatibilism, I do not eat my nice soup freely. Why? Because what I do is coerced. By the way, "compatibilism" isn't just "freedom from coercion". It is the broader claim that freewill and determination (determinism) are compatible, and there are other versions. In the version you have been thinking about, the compatibilism of freewill and determinism is achieved by making coercion rather than determination the opposite of freewill. But freewill could also be made the opposite of control, for example (someone else's, of course!) or of mechanism. And there are other options too.

If I really believed that you really believed that these are the only two alternatives, then I'd probably believe that you're stupid. But I don't believe any such thing. I'd be willing to bet a tidy sum that if someone else asked you the very same question, you wouldn't have any trouble pointing out a whole bunch of alternatives that they're overlooking.

Since I don't know anything about your circumstances, I wouldn't presume to guess which alternative best fits your circumstances. But I do think the idea that there's a "real place" for each of us is something to be suspicious of, and I'm also pretty skeptical that even self-aware people are always reliable about what they're capable of.

Of course, if you've already grasped the second horn of your dilemma (false dilemma though it is), my reaction won't count. In spite of this, I'd suggest that one kind of reaction it's often wise to ignore is the one that tries to shame you into not trying things. The approval of people who react like that isn't worth having anyway.

Hi,
I'm going to answer this question as a non-theologian, but I should note that there are many, many different theological approaches to the theory of prayer, and I'm sure some would disagree with, or offer a different answer than, mine. For the purposes of your question, it seems important to first point out that you are conceiving of prayer *merely* as an attempt to affect the course of events in one's (or another's) favor. So one prays for success at a soccer match, or that one's relative recovers from an illness, and so on. This first sort of prayer is what is commonly portrayed, I think, in movies, casual conversations (including jokes), and, I think, it is what most atheists/critics have in mind when discussing prayer. My first point is just that there are other purposes of prayer in many religious traditions; in most traditions, one regularly prays without having a specific request in mind ,in order to be intimate with the divine, our of love (or something like that). I think you have a Judaeo-Christian-Islamic religion in mind (sorry if my assumption is false), so I will also point out that, at least in the Hebrew bible, there are various examples of unanswered prayers of the kind you are imagining (anything from pleading for personal favor or help (Job) to prayers of an entire people for protection against an enemy (so many examples and lamentations here). So, there is plenty of reason to think that God, in the bible, often does not do what we ask him to do. Thus, if I understand your "why" in the question as a sort of accusatory objection to theism, one reply would be: it is not part of the religious doctrine under discussion that God does whatever we request, so the objection fails. If, instead, the "why" question you pose is the theological question, on what basis does God choose to help one player and not the other, I doubt there is anything definitive for us to go on in your story. I suppose one sort of theology would have it that God decided for Mr A because, ultimately or overall, Mr. A was more deserving, but there is so little in the Bible to suggest that things are so straightforward, with plenty of examples of the unworthy and wicked being successful, and vice versa, at a particular event. Again, Job is a good example, but there are plenty of other examples, including the story of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, in which the righteous are made to suffer/lose. A more promising answer, I think, is something like: in the grand scheme of the world, only part of which we see (I mean, we don't see everything in the world that is relevant, like how badly or for what reason, really, each player wants to win, and we also don't see the "scheme" or plan for the whole world, including the future and how it plays out given Mr. B's loss, etc), it is better for Mr B to have lost. Or, perhaps, less grandiosely, but just as plausible: the rules of the game were set, the players played, the best person at playing the game, or just the luckiest, won. We have so little to go on in your scenario, that I doubt there's anything much more to say that would enlighten us about God. I hope that helps! And I'm sorry if I've misunderstood the question.

There are several questions here, and we need to distinguish them.

1) Does belief require objects? Beliefs are "about" in a very broad sense, but I believe (as should you) that there is no ratio of two integers that equals 2 when squared. There is no object that answers to my belief, but it's clear that my belief is really a belief, indeed a true one, and in some sense is about something. In this case, we could perfectly sensibly say it's about numbers, though not about some specific number. This might sound superficially paradoxical, but the paradox persists only if we insist on treating the word "about" in a way that rides roughshod over how we actually use it.

2) Is it possible to have a belief about "nothing" or about a negative, as opposed to affirmative proposition? Two different issues here. I can believe that Barack Obama is not seven feet tall. That's a negative proposition, and I clearly can believe it; any analysis of belief that claims otherwise wold be silly. But it's not a belief about nothing; it's a belief about Barack Obama.

So what about beliefs about "nothing"? Depends on what you have in mind. The way to go about settling the matter is to offer some cases that look superficially like beliefs about nothing. Then examine them to see if they really are things someone could believe. Thoughtful common sense is the place to start here. If they are things someone could believe, try to decide in what sense, if any, they are beliefs about nothing. Ask yourself: what's the content of the belief? Whether or not a belief can be about "nothing," it's a mark of beliefs that they have content. Roughly: they can be true or false.

Or do you mean beliefs about nothingness? Depending on how that's understood, there might well be such beliefs, even if nothingness isn't an object or thing. I'm not willing simply to assume that Sartre's Being and Nothingness didn't express beliefs about nothingness, though there's a perfectly good question about what that amounts to. Making progress here would call for figuring out what Sartre meant by "nothingness" (or "le néant") though that's not germane to our topic. In any case, the idea that a belief must always be about some object—some thing—is a rookie mistake. It doesn't begin to do justice to how we actually use the word "belief."

3) Finally, atheism. An atheist, as most philosophers use the word, is someone who believes that there is no God. If someone claims that they don't understand this, I'd be suspicious. They may have gotten themselves in the grip of a bad idea, but believing that there are no pink elephants, or no even primes larger than 2 or no gods are perfectly familiar cases of belief that any account of belief has to make room for. And these beliefs are only puzzling if you squint the wrong way. In ordinary contexts, we understand claims like this without any difficulty.

A lack of belief in the existence of a God is not automatically atheism. An atheist lacks a belief that there is a God, but so does an agnostic; an agnostic neither believes nor disbelieves. Again, this is no puzzle, I neither believe nor disbelieve that the President of the USA in 2030 will be a Democrat. I don't have a belief about it.

A more general comment: there's lots of worthwhile philosophy to be done in analyzing the logic of belief and trying to sort out just what distinguishes beliefs from other mental states. And since beliefs are in some sense "about" or, to use the $64 word, are intentional states, there's interesting and worthwhile work to be done sorting all of that out. But even if our account of these things ends up going beyond what we'd normally be inclined to say, what we'd normally say is the place to start and the place to keep returning to.

Why assume that Mr A's prayer's were answered? Is the idea of the example that Chelsea won because Mr.A prated for it to happen and God acted accordingly? Suppose I ray for a natural disaster and one happens. Would we assume that this was God answering my prayers? Surely not on any conception of God that's worth taking seriously.

That Mr A prayed for what happened doesn't mean it happened because Mr A prayed for it, and in this case, that seems to be the response the believer should make. There's no reason even for a believer to think that Chelsea's victory was a matter of God favoring Mr A over Mr B.

Of course, non-believers have an even simpler reply. But I'm treating your question hypothetically.

No.

There is a set of even numbers. There is also a set of numbers that are even or prime. (Note, by the way: something can be even and prime: the number 2.) The number 8 is in the first set because it's even. It's also in the second set because it's even, hence even or prime.

Not all good paintings are beautiful, but for present purposes, we can still assume that all beautiful paintings are good paintings. A beautiful painting clearly fits the membership condition for the set of beautiful paintings. But it also fits the membership condition for being in the set of paintings that are beautiful or good and it fits it by virtue of being beautiful.

There's nothing peculiar here at all. If X and Y are both sets, their union is also a set. That's elementary set theory, and it's so whether or not X and Y are mutually exclusive.

Some theologians and philosophers would say that religious devotion to anything less than a perfect being amounts to idolatry, and a less-than-omniscient or less than omnibenevolent or less-than-omnipotent being would be less than a perfect being.

My own view is that this is a view that only someone in the grip of a theory could love. I rather doubt that most believers give much thought at all to the difference between omni-God, as it's sometimes put, and a being so far beyond us that, perfect or not, deserves their profoundest devotion. (Whether there actually is such a being is a separate matter, and not the subject of these comments.)

Perhaps there's one exception. Perhaps a being that was less than morally perfect couldn't be the object of a non-idolatrous religious devotion. That's a subject for an interesting conversation, but I'm not convinced that even this is right. So I think your question is a good one, and I"m inclined to think you're right.

One of the philosophical roots for identifying divine attributes is the idea that God (if there is a God) is maximally excellent or (in language going back to St. Anselm) God is a being greater than which cannot be conceived. Advocates of this way of thinking are sometimes described as advancing perfect being theology. They ask: what would be more excellent a being that knows a great deal or an omniscient being? a being that is very powerful or one that is omnipotent? It is through this line of reasoning, that it is held that God (if God exists) exists necessarily (rather than contingently), God is maximally good (rather than sort of good) or worthy of worship (rather than worthy of admiration). Interesting disputes arise over different attributes. For example, some philosophers think that a maximally excellent being would be eternal in the sense of not being temporal (on this view, temporality may be a creation of God) versus everlasting (God is in time, but without a temporal beginning or end).

A technical term that these philosophers use about God is that God has the greatest or maximal com-possible set of attributes. "Com-possible" means that the attributes can be had (or be exemplified) of the same being at the same time. Philosophers in the perfect being tradition include Jews, Christians, and Muslims (and some theistic Hindus). If interested, the work of T.V. Morris is quite accessible.

Perhaps you are very gifted and your mother was humorously commending humility. Maybe you won an award and she did not want you to think you were the best and could therefore retire. In any case, on the matter at hand: if your mother told every (to use your example) artist that there was always somebody better than that artist, then there would indeed have to be infinitely many artists --just as there cannot be a greatest possible number, there could not be a greatest possible artist. Going further, if we have reason to believe there are finitely many artists (which we do), it would be hard to argue that there must be a single best artist. There might be many equally talented artists. Also "if person A was the best person at art in the world" there might be many artists who can POSSIBLY be better at art than them, but they never try to be.

PS: I suggest that you may be good at something and nobody could be better: being you.