Did god give us free will?

What made them grow then? Deterministic factors obviously which is the same thing that makes any action you take occur. I'm not conflating the two. I'm arguing against the notion of free will and you simply don't understand what it truly means.

The issue is that you are being unnecessarily close minded to the idea of freedom and determinism coexisting in this world.

You’ve decided in your mind it has to be all one or the other. Either we all have godlike freedom to instantly actualize whatever we desire or there is zero freedom at all. No in between for you.

Why limit yourself to such an extreme position?

We're going in circles here brother. I granted the idea of limited will earlier in this thread, but doing so raises the question of why an omnibenevolent god would limit different peoples will in different ways. You've failed to explain that.

You don't. It's a self-contained question. If what your omnibenevolent god gave human beings is limited will, why choose to limit the will of some to only being able to starve to death for the entirety of their existence(yes that's correct, some people were born, did nothing but starve and then die) while instead limiting the will of you and I to sit here in our cozy homes arguing about pointless **** all day?

I couldn't care less whether you continue to engage or not. Use your limited will to go do something positive in the world maybe.

I’m a subjectivist. Meaning, ultimately, God is only good if we all agree that he is.

I promote the idea of a benevolent God as an ultimate truth because I see it as a subjective good.

I also promote the idea of a fallen God for the same reason (serves the subjective good).

I firmly believe that people who argue against God’s existence are obstructing humanity from the good.

Again, you beg the question when you say you could choose “one or the other for no reason at all”. You are assuming that you can actually do so when that is the very essence of the debate - can you actually choose to do something for no reason at all or are your decisions constrained by other outside forces that you are not consciously aware of?

Suppose determinism is true. Someone like, say Ted Bundy had no real choice but to do what he did. Bundy was executed for his actions. You are trying to say that he shouldn’t have been (and maybe you are even right). But the reality is that the actions of the police who investigated his crimes, the actions of the prosecutor who sought the death penalty, the jurors who returned the death sentence and the person who actually carried out the execution weee all equally constrained - those people could not have done otherwise. To say that we hold someone accountable for their actions inevitably requires actions on the part of other humans. These actions are no more free than the actions of the wrongdoer. The argument against determinism based on moral accountability is unconvincing as a result.

I certainly lean toward determinism, but I am certainly agnostic on the subject. I’m not sure that it ultimately makes any practical difference anyway. We perceive that we are free. Even if ultimate reality is otherwise, so what? We also perceive love, beauty, happiness, etc., but the ultimate reality is that these likely are just physical brain states. If my happiness is really just the result of release of certain chemicals in my brain and firing of certain neurons, am I any less happy? If my freedom is really just the confluence of outside factors of which I am unaware and unable to control, should that have any affect on how I proceed with my life? Indeed if that is really true, then, by definition, such knowledge CANNOT have any affect - my actions already are constrained.

Consciousness is partially volitional. We have will, not free will. Quantum realities seem to obliterate determinism. Some things are temporarily seemingly deterministic, some aren't.

This is not entirely true... while hopelessness is indicative of a lack of freewill, it is not the cause of it and the truth is FAR WORSE than most think.

your body knows it and your Brain knows it... but you dont know why.

The truth is, individuals no longer possess freewill when they are being told what to think, how to act and what values to have.

this isn't by accident... Social programming on a global scale is being done at an alarming rate thru various media sources and viewable programming.

Agentic AI is being used to mold and determine the future thru Human social PROGRAMMING... I am afraid the Globalist 1000 year reign is upon us as we're being lead into the future by the anti-christ.

that old chestnut.

Cool story bro. Never thought of that!

At one point in their life this is the default opinion of every stupid kid in college.

Moving the goal posts. It's MUCH MUCH harder for someone to prove determinism. Of course every decision I make has other influences around it but you're changing the meaning of "will" to suit your needs.

Of course I can’t prove determinism, but your mere assertions don’t prove free will either. If it were easy to prove either one, this would not be a 500 or so year old philosophical debate. But you aren’t debating; you’re just asserting without any real argument that you have free will. You assert without any evidence that when you make a particular arbitrary choice, there is no outside factor at play determining that choice. You assert this because you are unaware of any such factors. But that is the crux of the debate — are there outside factors that we are not consciously aware of that determine the choices we make that seem to us to be arbitrary and that we chalk up to free will? You are using the lack of awareness of such factors to assert that such factors do not exist, but that is no argument. It is merely assuming the answer.

Determinism means I can't prove to you free will doesn't exist . But if you actually had free will you should be able to prove free will to me. Just use your free will to come up with a convincing argument.

"Hell is empty and all the devils are here." -- Shakespeare

Proving determinism is easy, actually, you just have to prove cause and effect, which is how the universe operates anyway, what is hard is to show a single exemple of "self determined" or "freely willed" effect, that is, an effect that is not contingent to previous causes, but caused by an internal ghost called a soul or something

My experience of reality has been that it’s much more deceptive and can’t be taken at face value like you are wanting to do here.

Fellagaga’s idea of reality is that it’s the furniture.

Bolded is an epic logic fail, and it ain't even close.

An agent possessing free will is certainly not a sufficient condition for that person to have the ability to produce a convincing argument.

Human consciousness is partly volitional. We have will, not free will. Those are important facts.

I'm no physicist, but I've seen many physicists citing that quantum mechanics disproves determinism, including Faggin I'm reading now ("Irreducible").

I’m not sure I buy that one. Quantum mechanics proves that strict determinism is not actually true in the sense that every event has a cause and that everything about the universe is perfectly predictable if we have sufficient information about starting conditions. The classic example of this is radioactivity. In a sample of a radioactive material, atoms will decay, but there is no cause that can be given for why a particular atom decays at a particular time, and there is no way to predict whether a given atom will (or will not) decay in a particular time interval. Radioactive decay is perfectly non deterministic. Yet, on a macroscopic scale, it’s perfectly predictable. We can predict exactly how much of a macroscopic sample of a radioactive material will decay in a given time interval.

I suspect that human brain activity and decision making is something that is more macroscopic in nature. Even if the firing of a given neuron in a given time frame is completely random, the firing of large numbers of interconnected neurons is still something that might be very predictable and deterministic.

At the very most, QM provides a scientific case for the possibility of free will, a case that was lacking in pre-quantum science. IMO, that is far from proof of free will though. The universe on a macroscopic scale is still deterministic despite the underlying quantum randomness.

If the agent can't produce a convincing argument, then we have to ask what other things is the agent not able to do? Eventually we will whittle our way down to a list of maybe several dozen things the agent actually COULD do. If you want to call a few dozen options out of infinite possibilities "free will" and claim that it came from an infinitely powerful god, then I think you might be the one who has failed in logic.

Well, there a gazillion things (give or take) that an agent is unable to do. And there are some things that I can do that you can't do, and vice-versa.

The logic fail is claiming that an inability to produce an argument favoring free-will is somehow an argument against free will.

I haven't even offered an opinion one way or another on this topic.

Exactly. My argument is that we clearly don't have free will as bestowed upon us by a tri-omni god, who would theoretically be able to do any and everything, even simultaneously if he so chose. It's really more of an argument against god than it is against free will, hence the reason I posted it here and not in the philosophy forum.