Free Will

Yes, I do believe we have free will. I will use your own scenario and say for arguments sake that God does exist and knows everything. That is just it he knows EVERYTHING. Every single, possible outcome of every decision we will ever face.

There are 2 doors (Door A and Door B). God knows what will happen if we choose to walk through Door A, he also knows what will happen if we choose to walk through Door B. What he does not know until it happens is which door we will choose and why. It is the why behind the choices we make that are the reason we are here. These are the things we learn. This is the 'great experiment' of life.

Yes you could say that God already knew which door we were going to choose because he could see the out come of that choice. Well yeah he saw the outcome of all the possible choices we could have made, but only we can actually make the choice, hence using our free will.

See these aliens could see all of time and knew everything that was going to happen. To them there was no free will.

Time is not linear, or at least the future is not. What is done is done, our history is set firmly in it's place as a nice straight line (unless you want to argue time travel, except even then it is set, but I digress...). The future fans out in infinite directions.

Every decision in your life has multiple directions it could take you, for example:
Your alarm clock goes off in the morning. Do you hop up or hit snooze?

Which ever one you pick will open new threads of possibilities and close ones that can no longer be taken. Now try to imagine this happening with any decision your faced with no matter how big or small. All decisions will have at least two possibilities, most will have several (hundreds and thousands) start trying to add them all up and it very quickly becomes mind boggling.

God knows all of those 'mind boggling' possibilities, he just does not know and cannot choose which ones we will take.

Ahhh...free will.

Well good, someone responded. Now to the argument.

I said God knew everything, and that means EVERYTHING. Which means he knows, like you said, all of the possible choices, but he knows what choices we WILL make. If he knows what choices are made, do we really have a choice in making them? It seems kind of like God's existence takes away free will.

you said:

Every decision in your life has multiple directions it could take you, for example:
Your alarm clock goes off in the morning. Do you hop up or hit snooze?

But when I wake up and push that snooze button, I took the course of action to push that snooze button and there is no way of knowing if I would have jumped out of bed. There is no what if. It was what I did and It was what I was going to do regardless of the choices possible.

If I were to watch a video tape of you walking through a door, but could do nothing to affect what you did, I know that you are going to walk through that door, and you have no choice as to not walking through that door or blowing the door up. I know you will walk through that door like God knows what you will do; He knows EVERYTHING.

You also said time was linear but that was irrelevant to what I was saying. We see in a three dimensional world: length, width, and depth. The aliens could see in 4 dimensions, the 4th being time. They could see, like God, everything that would happen. That is why they found it so bizarre that humans believed they had a choices. They knew what choices were going to be made.

Free will: will or action unguided by thought.

Free thought: mental activity unguided by will.

These two are in oposition, and only in the balance can harmony be found.

Also, this seemingly twisted use of the terms is the only one I truly understand, because talking about free will without determining what it is free from is like talking about light without a source. I don't believe in it.

Without getting into the argument about God, I think we should first analyze definitions. What do you mean by free will?

If free will simply means the ability to choose, then yes there is such a thing as free will.

If free will means a choice outside of the realm of cause and effect, then perhaps there isn't.



Even if there is a God who knows the choices that we will make, we do choose nonetheless. In that sense, our choices are free. It is us who chooses and noone else. I think to go deeper we have to look at what is meant by "we."

ZXwarriorX wrote:


That's because you misunderstand the term god. God does know everything, but the particular knowledge of my choises resides in the part of god that I've come to know as "my mind".

It's the same with everything. God's knowledge of the stars resides in the stars themselves, not in some unverified entity left over from religious lore. There is no such entity, or if there is, it is the concept of all of existence as one.

Feewill is an illusion caused by our perception of the forward moving sequential nature of observed events. When things are examined in retrospect it can be observed that there is an action behind every reaction, and that every reaction becomes an action that is further reacted to. This is the nature of cause and effect.
Freewill? Free of cause and effect? the very idea seems ludicrous and unprecedented.

An illusion of freewill? Yes, until such a point as we can deconstruct the 'stuff' of time.

Yeah, that's if you define free will as such, and that is how it is defined in formal philosophy. I have a suspicion that the general public defines "free will" in a different manner though.

Anyways, I want to add that an event/action is not solely dependent on a cause, for it is also dependant on the properties of the things interacting.

Free Will
I think that you (and of course I) have free will in the same sense that a hungry animal that espies some food has a choice between eating and not eating the food.

At most, you merely have the freedom to be yourself, and as you have little control over the external factors that define you, you have not as much free will as you might imagine.

Shoot!
Sorry, just repeated Doktor S!

But you do have the power to change "yourself" (if by it you mean personality and behaviours).

I think the stoics said it best when they said that your desires, habits, and actions are within your control.

Really?
I'm not so sure.
If this were true everyone would be in good shape, happy, and successful. (assuming the desire for these things) Most people that desire these things do not have them.
Just an example.

It depends on the person. The first step is always to understand that you can change yourself. Knowledge is power. The more knowledge you have on what needs to be done, the better off you are. Yes, it does depend to a certain amount on circumstance, but we are a part of that circumstance.