Philosophy discussion

Yes, we all have free will. Is determinism responsibility?

One question that comes to mind is that if determinism is the actual condition of the human mind, how do you hold people responisible?

I read an argument several years ago to the effect that determinism is not incompatible with holding people to account, but I cannot remember the line of reasoning. Does anyone here know how that argument goes?

Compatible self determination says that when the individual is the cause of his free will his/her actions, he/she is said to act freely. There is passive determinism which is being able to do what one wants to do without external coersions or interference. and there is active we choose independent of cultural past conditions, we are self-aware and transcend and step outside of ourselves. Augustine, Spinoza and Hume are the proponents of the first(passive) and Aristotle is a proponent of the second(active)
Aristotle says to reflect on what we have become and decide whether we want to remain that way. This self-awareness allows us to be free to make new and creative decisions. There is also hard determinism (incompatible) determinism which is external forces environment other influences determine people to act the way they do, they are not responsible for their actions. But if people are not held responsible how can we be justified in holding people responsible, also hard determinism states that we are justified in holding people responsible only in order to influence future behavior. Does this make sense, Tyler?

If there were no free will, then tell me what you plan to do about it?

... hard determinism states that we are justified in holding people responsible only in order to influence future behavior. Does this make sense, Tyler?

That was the conclusion I had read, but what I don't remember is the exact line of reasoning behind it.

Robin, you are missing the point. If people's actions are simply the result of environmental conditions, then why ask what the justification is for holding them responsible. If you do hold them responsible, you do so because you are acting as the result of environmental conditions. What else could you do?

Tyler wrote: "The first thing to do is look at what's in front of our eyes. We see people acting freely all the time, "

Do we? Or do their acts appear to be free will because we don't understand the forces behind them.

When a leaf falls from a tree, most people don't attribute that to free will because they think they understand the natural forces which cause the leaf to drop at that particular moment in time. But to an infant who doesn't yet understand the principle of cause and effect as applied to a leaf, it may very well appear that the leaf is exercising free will.

Perhaps we think we have free will only because we don't yet understand the natural cause-and-effect forces which cause us to act as we do.

And we don't know what peoples' motives for their acting upon their free will. In their particular circumstance it might be they are conditioned to act a certain way, and know no other way of being.

Everyman, I don't think an infant has the thought process of thinking a falling leaf is acting upon free will. They may just be looking at a falling leaf. Everyone has free will, we don't live in a society yet where are thoughts are governed by just one person. Every day people are acting on free will. Some do good, and others do bad, by way that they decide how they are going to behave on any particular day, be it for their own risky behavior, like robbing a bank for instance, since they are out of work, or decide to be honest and upright and do the right thing whatever that means for the individual. There is free will working on both of these examples.

What is free will??

I am asking because I wouldn't know what that is or how it should function;
Should it be that my actions are somehow not a result of my genes in the environment which I inhabits, spiced with the statistical fluctuations caused by the rules of quantum mechanics and the like?

Look up free will on google, It depends, see if you can make sense of it.

Where does free will come from, if it exists? Why would humans be exempt from the constraints of science?

Our brains are subject to chemistry.

Hi Everyman --

Perhaps we think we have free will only because we don't yet understand the natural cause-and-effect forces which cause us to act as we do.

I think when a child sees a leaf falling from a tree she concludes that it's alive, and the same thing for building blocks falling over. She sees them acting, but I'm not sure if she imbues them with the idea of free will in the same way adults think of it. But I don't know; I could be mistaken.

I agree with a universe of cause-and-effect (for philosophical purposes, quantum mechanics doesn't factor in yet). So what has to be the case is that free will, if it exists, must be an effect with some natural cause.

Many people believe that if we live in a world of cause-and-effect, that world must be a deterministic one due to the necessary nature of causation. I question whether this has to be the case when abstract thinking has evolved to a certain point.

The problem is whether thought has to be determined in the same way physical existence is.

Isn't thought are ideas, and beliefs and physical is what we see outside of our inner thoughts. From just following the thread thoughts are inner, physical is causation.

Free Will is an interesting beast, and based on the half-dozen speakers in this thread, a fiery beast at that. I haven't done a lot of reading about this, but I have flip-flopped back and forth between believing in this concept to not being so sure. Given the latest scientific theories, I'm starting to wonder if Free Will is for real. I really need to think about this more.

Robin wrote: "Everyone has free will, we don't live in a society yet where are thoughts are governed by just one person. "

Ah, but isn't that just the question? Lack of free will doesn't mean that thoughts are governed by just one person. They could be governed by the laws of nature, of physics and chemistry, of the chemical, electrical, and physical interactions within the physical structures which we call our brains which follow immutable laws of nature over which we have absolute no voluntary control. After all, there are certain processes of our body which are not subject to our wills but just happen because nature makes them happen (has your will ever caused your blood to clot?); how do we know that there are any bodily process, and after all the movement of chemical and electrical signals in our brains are a bodily process, which are subject to what we call our wills?

You assert baldly that we have free will, but that's just the question. How do you KNOW that? What evidence do you have?

Robin wrote: "Isn't thought are ideas, and beliefs and physical is what we see outside of our inner thoughts. From just following the thread thoughts are inner, physical is causation."

But thoughts are all caused by physical actions. Every thought involves chemical and electrical interactions between physical structures in our brain tissue. There are no "inner thoughts," as far as I know, that are independent of the physical functioning of our brain cells, tissues, and other physical parts.

Are you contending that we are capable of having totally non-physical thoughts that do not take place in the physical parts of our brain, but take place on some non-physical plane? If so, how do you explain our brains being able to comprehend them? I'm not clear what it is that you're suggesting. Can you be clearer?

Lisa wrote: "Given the latest scientific theories, I'm starting to wonder if Free Will is for real. I really need to think about this more. "

You've got time. Humans have been asking this question at least since the advent of writing roughly 3,000 years ago, and probably long before that, though we had no record of it. Haven't resolved the question yet!

Everyman wrote: You assert baldly that we have free will, but that's just the question. How do you KNOW that? What evidence do you have?

Here's my evidence. I chose to write this reply. If I wanted to, I could just as easily have let it be.

On the other side is the idea that every physical action must have a cause. And how would you go about proving that? What experiment could possibly disprove it?

Thanks, Duffy, the thought behind free-will if I read correctly, is since everyone has intellect, that everyone is free to do what they want, within reason. I don't care for everyman's bullying tactics, was that supposed to get a rise out of me, my free will told me not to respond to you. How is that? Now for the opposing argument: cause and effect, that which we act on there will be consequencces be it morally or ethically wrong. Like jaywalking, I could choose to jaywalk if there is no police around and hope that I don't get a fine, or go to the stoplight, wait for the light and cross at the crosswalk. I have heard of people crossing at the crosswalk in the crosswalk who still get hit by cars. Cause and effect. Either way either outcome.

Duffy wrote: "Everyman wrote: You assert baldly that we have free will, but that's just the question. How do you KNOW that? What evidence do you have?

Here's my evidence. I chose to write this reply. If I wan..."

Ah. But DID you "choose" to write the reply? Or was it an inevitable result of the bombarding neurons and synapses in your brain reacting to my post which was an inevitable result of the bombarding neutrons and synapses in my brain responding to ...

All we know is that you DID write it. (At least for the sake of this discussion we know that, since we're discussing free will, not the question of existence.) What we DON'T know is whether it would have been possible for you NOT to write it. We'll never know that.

Patrice wrote: "Whether or not we have free will (and I do think we have it) we have to behave as though we do."

Oh, absolutely. Our whole society is based on that assumption.

Robin wrote: "I don't care for everyman's bullying tactics, was that supposed to get a rise out of me, my free will told me not to respond to you. "

I'm sorry you saw it as bullying. But I am interested not in what people assume, but in what they can demonstrate or prove by logical argument. And again you make the assumption that it was free will that prevented you from responding to me, and not some inevitable chain of electrical and chemical responses in your brain.

Maybe "I have free will because I assume I have it" is indeed the best we can do. But if so, let's be up front about that.

The problem with your argument, Everyman, is that it applies just as easily to any type of causation, and it's just a form of general skepticism. All we can know is that X correlates with Y. We will never know if X caused Y. Thus, in your sense, just as we will never know whether I could have decided otherwise, we will also never know whether anything causes anything else. It could just be a happy co-incidence.

What I'm saying now is that the statement that everything has a physical cause is every bit as impossible to prove as the statement that nothing has a cause. And what this means, to me, is that somewhere the whole idea of cause (and of choice for that matter) has somehow slipped the rails.

Let me ask you this then. Suppose I ask you to choose heads or tails on a coin flip? Are you suggesting that you are not capable of doing so? I doubt it. If you insist that maybe you can not choose, then I think maybe you are using the word "choose" in a very odd way -- one that I don't quite understand.

Duffy wrote: "Let me ask you this then. Suppose I ask you to choose heads or tails on a coin flip? Are you suggesting that you are not capable of doing so?"

Not at all. But I AM suggesting that it may be that my choice of heads or tails was not one I made freely, but was a result of cause and effect working on the physical structures of my brain which caused the physical structures of my vocal cords (and related bodily structures) to say "heads" or "tails."

Do you think the coin makes a free choice whether to come down heads or tails? Or, once flipped, is it at the mercy of physical forces not under its control? I think most people, unless they were just committed to being obstreperous, would say it does not have free will, but is entirely subject to natural laws. My question is, why do we think we have free will ourselves when we agree that the coin doesn't.

Personally, I would love to believe in free will. I don't like the concept that everything I do is governed by natural forces beyond my control. But that implies, as you suggest, that the two core principles of physics, randomness and cause-and-effect, are both inadequate to explain how our physical brains operate, but that there is some other process which nature or God, depending on your view, has created which causes our brains to function neither under cause-and-effect or under randomness, but under some other force of operation of which we have no knowledge. To me, that contradicts Occam's Razor.

OK. lets just take the coin toss example. Coins are inanimate. They don't have any will at all, free or otherwise.

You say that how the coin will fall is simply governed by physical laws. But can you predict the outcome of a coin toss? Can anyone predict it? Even if the toss is purely governed by physical laws, the outcome of the toss is beyond the ability of anyone to predict. Thus, the talk about physical laws, at least when it comes to the prediction of a specific toss, is irrelevant.

How about when we talk about willful animals? Yes, they do have a will. You might want to speculate that all the outcomes are already set in stone. But it's pretty well provable that, even if that were true, we will never be able to know enough to establish the truth. So all you are talking about is extremely idle speculation.

I've mentioned this already here, I think on this thread. Suppose you are trying to predict where a pool ball will end up after a series of collisions. With a single collision, it's not that difficult. When there is a series of two collisions, you need to know the inputs with additional precision -- by a factor of about 10. By the time you get to 9 collisions, you need to take into account the gravity of the person using the cue to strike the ball (and anyone else nearby). By the time you get to 150 or 200 collisions (I forget the exact number), you would need to know the orientation of every electron in the universe. It's impossible for any computer to store that much information, because it would have to be bigger than the universe itself. Thus, we will never be able even to predict the outcome of a break on a pool table.

And you sit and wonder about the "possibility" that everything we do must be caused by some chain of physical events? It's a chimera. How much more complex is human action than the interaction of a few pool balls?

If what you are engaging in is science, I can't think of anything more silly. Give me the design of an experiment which could give data that would disprove your idea, and then I might listen to it as a scientific matter. Otherwise, you are just spinning your wheels.

Duffy wrote: "OK. lets just take the coin toss example. Coins are inanimate. They don't have any will at all, free or otherwise.

I will accept that as an assumption for the sake of the discussion, but we really don't know, do we? If we don't know exactly what free will is or even whether we have it or not, how can we know whether a coin has it or not? But I'll go with you for the discussion.

You say that how the coin will fall is simply governed by physical laws. But can you predict the outcome of a coin toss? Can anyone predict it? Even if the toss is purely governed by physical laws, the outcome of the toss is beyond the ability of anyone to predict. Thus, the talk about physical laws, at least when it comes to the prediction of a specific toss, is irrelevant.

I can't, no. But a computer program programmed with all the inputs could. My inability to predict it is not a function of it's being unpredictable, but is simply a lack of complete enough information and a lack of information processing speed and ability. We can send a man to the moon and land him within a few feet of where we intend. If we put the resources of NASA to work on predicting the outcome of coin tosses, do you really think they couldn't do it?

How about when we talk about willful animals? Yes, they do have a will. You might want to speculate that all the outcomes are already set in stone. But it's pretty well provable that, even if that were true, we will never be able to know enough to establish the truth. So all you are talking about is extremely idle speculation.

How do you know that animals have wills?

Idle speculation? Perhaps. But most philosophy, on the level that it takes place here, is by that definition idle speculation. The question was asked at the top of the thread. That people are discussing it assumes that they believe that a) it is worth discussing and b) the answer isn't known with certainty. Otherwise it wouldn't be idle speculation but total stupidity even to post on the thread.

So far, I haven't yet seen anybody offer any evidence for the existence of free will other than the simple belief, clothed in various raiments but still coming right back to this, "because I think it exists." Maybe that answer satisfies you. it doesn't satisfy me, and I don't think it satisfies the concept of philosophy.

You glided over my discussion of billiard balls. With the coin toss, I was talking about a person tossing a coin. And no, no computer could ever predict how a coin is going to land when it is a person tossing it. The problem is just way too complicated, and the precision that you would need for measuring the inputs go beyond even our theoretical ability to measure it.

I have no idea what you mean when you say that we don't know whether a stone has free will. Again, I'm going to ask you this question: If you accept the possibility that a stone might have free will, what experiment are you going to use to try to disprove your theory? You insist on not addressing this question.

How do I know that an animal has free will? Yesterday, there were two tennis balls thrown at the park, very near my dog. She went to one, and sniffed it. Then she went to the other, and checked it out. She decided that she liked the first better, went back to it and picked it up. That's how I know. She made a choice, and she made it on her own. She does stuff like that all the time.

And once again, I will accept your skepticism about free will, if you will acknowledge that the same arguments apply with equal force to any cause at all. In your sense of the word "know", we don't know that any event is caused by any other. We simply know that there has been some correlation in the past. But no-one has ever given any evidence of a cause that amounts to anything more than "because I think it exists."

My position is that the problem is with your use of words like "choice" and "free will." I think there's a similar problem with your use of the word "know."

And since you keep saying that you don't see any evidence of free will I will ask these two questions once again. What, for you, would count as such evidence? And what evidence do you have that any event is caused by any other event?

Duffy wrote: "You glided over my discussion of billiard balls."

sorry. Reality is that if we had a strong enough computer and fine enough measurements about the resistance of the cushions at every point, the slight off roundness of the balls at all points, etc. -- that is, if we had perfect knowledge of every single aspect of the problem (including the air pressure the heating system might be exerting as the heat comes on), and we have instruments good enough to measure the exact force and angle of the initial stroke, we can indeed tell exactly where every ball will wind up. That we can't is simply a matter of inadequate information and inadequate computing power.

Philosophy and theoretical science say it can be done. Engineering says not yet, not at the present level of the state of our art.

I'll use other posts to respond to your other questions so as not to clutter the issue too much.

Duffy wrote: "Again, I'm going to ask you this question: If you accept the possibility that a stone might have free will, what experiment are you going to use to try to disprove your theory? You insist on not addressing this question.
"

Because I am a theoretical philosopher, not an experimental philosopher. What experiments did Socrates ever perform? None.* Was everything he said then totally useless? I don't think so.

*(You might argue that he performed an experiment with the slave boy in Meno. But that wasn't an experiment in the sense that you're using the term.)

Duffy wrote: "And once again, I will accept your skepticism about free will, if you will acknowledge that the same arguments apply with equal force to any cause at all."

Of course. But we can use reason to try to reduce our dependence on skepticism.

I have put forward the following argument, on very brief summary:

1. If we have free will, we assume for the sake of the discussion that it takes place in the brain. (If you disagree with this, where do you think it takes place?)

2. The brain is an organic structure/system which relies on chemistry, electricity, and perhaps other physical mechanisms.

3. Those chemical, electrical, and perhaps other physical mechanisms obey specific laws of nature which we are only beginning to understand but which our present understanding of organic chemistry and electricity say are totally deterministic. *

(* There is a branch of physics which contends that there are indeed some processes of nature which are random, but this is controversial and even if were true wouldn't help us, because I think we can both agree that purely random brain cell interactions wouldn't be a satisfactory explanation for free will, which we must assume has some level of intentionality.)

4. Therefore, in order for there to be such a thing as free will, we must assume that our brains are capable of behaving in ways which are neither deterministic nor random, but which intercept the normal deterministic (or random) processes of chemistry, electricity, or something else and substitute for them some behavior or force, call it the free will force. But this contradicts everything we believe we know about physics and biology. Nobody has ever observed, measured, or otherwise identified any such behaviors within any brain, nor identified any physical elements in the brain which as far as we can tell do not behave either deterministically or randomly.

Where, so far, do you contend that this argument is wrong?

On the billiard balls: the point is not that we have insufficient information; the point is rather that it has already been mathematically proven that we can never have enough information.

On theoretical vs. non-theoretical: your theory is that, as a matter of fact, there is no free will. If it's an empirical question, as you suggest, then you should be able to come up with an experiment that might falsify it. I didn't ask you to do the experiment, only to describe for me what the parameters would be. You keep saying that no-one has given you evidence of free will. So the question is: what, for you, could possibly count as evidence.

As for your argument: I reject most of the premises.

1) I think its a mistake to ask where free will resides. Again, this is a mistake about the logic of the language.

2) Your discussion of the brain may be accurate, but its irrelevant as far as I'm concerned.

3) I agree that science tries to explain how certain mechanisms behave. But that's as far as I'm willing to go. There may be a whole host of things that science cannot explain. Once again, I'm willing to be a skeptic about causality itself, so long as we are doing philosophy that way. So, as I said before, if there is no free will, then there are also no causes -- only correlations.

4) I agree that the form of the argument is probably valid. I am sympathetic to the complaint that this idea of free will contradicts deeply held beliefs about causality. So which are you going to give up? There's no better reason to believe in causality than there is to believe in free will. (And again, I think all of this is based on mistaken notions about how people behave, and how language works.)

And I can point to all sorts of behavior that happens with people that science has not been able to explain. You will insist: not yet. I say: probably not ever.

Everyman, You say you are a theoretical philosopher? At this point what you are saying is that everything is theoretical. Free will is and will be argued from now to the end of time. From what I have read, everyone has free will, an example, in simplest terms: Person A. hits Person B, person A did the hitting through his own volition, no one told him to do it. that is free will. If Person A was then told by Person C to hit Person B, he was coerced, he did not have free will. So this is evidence that I got from the Basics of Philosophy. We could go round and round with this.

The unusual thing about the Adam and Eve story is that it demonstrates both free will and determinism. In the first place, Eve's act was an act of free will. But even so, it was also predetermined to happen. God (who is omniscient) knew what Eve was destined to do, and she had no choice in the matter in that regard, yet He still held her responsible for it. It's interesting how theologians wrestle with this implication. Boethius did a pretty respectable job of it in The Consolation of Philosophy.

Perhaps God hoped she would eat the apple. God put man right next to where he had planted that tree. God told them what would happen to them if they ate of the tree (the negatives: Don't eat from that tree or you will surely die. But Adam and Eve had no real sense of what that meant). The snake told her what would happen if she ate of the tree (positives: you won't REALLY die---and maybe that's true in the sense that our spirits would live on after death---and if you eat, you'll know good from evil. But Eve didn't have any sense of good from evil so she didn't really understand what the snake was talking about and the words made it sound like a good thing.) So she took a bite. And then she knew. But there was no going back. But Adam and Eve would never have been able to grow if they had remained in the Garden ignorant of the difference between good and evil.

They had to take the consequences of their actions...but I wouldn't say that they were responsible for the choice...because they had no understanding of what the choice entailed.

I probably shouldn't be here at all jumping into your conversation...but I saw Patrice's post and I just HAD (lol) to post.

To be upfront, I come down perilously close to determinism.

Since Patrice used a biblical allegory (which I liked), another biblical allegory occurred to me.

When Cain slew Able, and God asked, "Where is Able?" (rhetorically, of course, because God knew and was giving Cain an opportunity to do the right thing and be honest) and Cain said , "Am I my brother's keeper?" ... I think that line symbolically represents all of us: We say, "Am I responsible for what happened to him? No, he made his own choices and I want no responsibilty for him."

Free choice vs. determinism. I liked the leaf story. I usually think along the lines, What if a young girl repeatedly sees her mother beaten by her father? That influences how she sees men for the rest of her life. That influences how she interacts with them for the rest of her life. Let's say the father, too, makes off with the family's savings. The woman grows up wary of men handling the finances. Say in her marriage her husband stops by the bank, withdraws some money for an emergency, she over-reacts, he's offended, "You don't trust me. We don't have a marriage. I want a divorce." (mmm, he has issues from childhood, too.) How much "free choice" did she have in being suspicious and reacting --- WHAT a great word: "reacting the " ???

I believe very much of our lives is "reacting" determined by-and-large by what has happened to us in the past ... and although I think there is a germ of "free will" and don't think there's much and I think it takes tremendous effort to access it.

Mmm. Back to the apple in the Garden. Allegorically. We don't understand/realize that we can access free will/the apple unless and until someone points it out to us and helps us learn to use it.

OK, Patrice, thanks for letting me bend your ear. I really did like your apple allegory. Ta.

"When Cain slew Able, and God asked, "Where is Able?" (rhetorically, of course, because God knew and was giving Cain an opportunity to do the right thing and be honest)"

Assume God already knew. Then he also already knew that Cain was going to evade the question. So what was the point of the question? The way I read it, either he asked the question as a kind of "perjury trap", or God doesn't have free will either. He knew what Cain was going to answer, which means he already knew what he was going to ask, so he couldn't ask anything other than what he did.

Duffy wrote: "
1) I think its a mistake to ask where free will resides. Again, this is a mistake about the logic of the language. "

You wrote My position is that the problem is with your use of words like "choice" and "free will." I think there's a similar problem with your use of the word "know."

Well, actually "free will" was Tyler's choice as the topic of this thread. If you think I can't even use the term, it's pretty meaningless for me to discuss it with you.

Seems to me that your basic argument is, I don't know what it is, I don't know where it is, but I believe in it.

No, no. God would have known that Cain had slain Able because that had already happened. But it doesn't necessarily follow that God knew how Cain would answer. This is a point at which, perhaps, Cain could have answered differently than he did.

Patrice wrote: "I thought it was a rhetorical question. God is the father who knows what his naughty child has done. But rather than attack he asks him to own up and take responsibility for his action."

If there is any case to be made (biblically) for free will, it's here. God knowing what has already happened. (Cain killed Able.) But God NOT knowing how Cain will answer the question.

but if God is omniprescent, and he made everyone wouldn't he know what Abel would have said, since he knows what the outcome is. And keeper is sarcasm, Patrice. I thought in Abel saying this he is saying he isn't responsible for Cain.

But IS God omniprescent, past/future/present?

Don't know.

I would suppose from a biblical point of view this is a very large "if"

God being all knowing regarding what has actually already occurred. I would venture "yes" here.

God "perhaps" knowing everything that's going to happen. But how boring would that be. Knowing that Satin will rebel. Knowing what everyone is going to do. Humans being little automatons. Too terrible to contemplate. And I go back to God created us in his image. Not phyiscal, I think, but spiritual. We have the ability to "grow" as people, and we can only grow if we can make actual choices. So that's why I think God would have wanted Eve to eat that apple.

Or God "seeing" points in the future --- and here I'm at perhaps --- perhaps from where God is situated all time lines/possibly alternative actions cross. Perhaps God has designed the system so that people actually can make choices... And he designed it so that he doesn't see every step and detail along the way...perhaps so that his knowledge doesn't make "possible" actions into "certain/pre-destined" actions...perhaps to keep the human panorama interesting.

Don't know.

But if one is going to put God into one's conception of Life, and if one wants to entertain the possibility that humans have free will, then one might want to consider that God knows the large structures, the scaffolding, but has left the detail work for humans to work out on their own.


But who knows God? If one concedes God, then one almost has to concede that we have absolutely no understanding of what rules he lives by. We only know what rules he gave us to live by.

Anyway, you've got an interesting thread going here.

Adelle wrote: "If there is any case to be made (Biblically) for free will, it's here. God knowing what has already happened. (Cain killed Able.) But God NOT knowing how Cain will answer the question."
With due respect, I think the case ought to be stated somewhat differently, although this appears to be an equally strong argument for free will (given the circumstances.) It is not necessary (and indeed implausible for omniscience) that God does not know what answer Cain will give. To paraphrase what Maritain once suggested, there is no new thing for God.
While God knows what happened to Able, he gives Cain the free will to answer as he may. Insofar as this may be correct, I suggest that Jonathan Edwards in his excellent book of 1754, Freedom of the Will, suggests that one's will is in fact free only when he or she wills contrary to one's natural inclinations and in accordance with what God wants us to do. Clearly at various times the two (natural inclination and God's will) are not required to be mutually exclusive for the argument to be true. This of course leads to further discussion on other issues, but it certainly removes it from the limited realm of materialism in biology and chemistry, et al.

In the philosophy book that I just read it stated from some of the phlosopher that disproved free will that God is all knowing maybe it was Aquinas, that he knows what the past, future is. Who was there when the Bible was written and are they still here, No.

Everyman wrote: "Duffy wrote: "
1) I think its a mistake to ask where free will resides. Again, this is a mistake about the logic of the language. "

You wrote My position is that the problem is with your use of wo..."

There are two quite different activities in which people engage. At the risk of oversimplificaton, I will say that one is Science and the other is Morality.

When we do Morality, we operate on the idea that people make choices and that, under some circumstances, we both can and should hold them accountable for those choices. I know people who claim not to believe this, but in every instance, that claim strikes me as empty, because almost everyone acts as though they believed it. The people who behave otherwise are sociopaths, not theoretical philosophers.

When we do Science, we operate on the idea that there is an observable cause for every observable event. The idea that all events have some cause is one of the founding principles of science.

There's no way to prove either of these ideas. It's perfectly possible that there are no causes. It's also perfectly possible that there's no such thing as a choice. And the two ideas we operate under contradict each other. But so what? We still do Morality, and we still do Science. Why is that so bothersome?

Let's keep in mind that there may be a third option between determinism and free will. I say may. But some scientists are now contending that at the subatomic level, particles move with true randomness. That is, they do not obey the laws of cause and effect. So their actions are not deterministic, since no level of knowledge and skill could predict where they are going next. But do they have free will? If not, there is then a third option.

Duffy wrote: "There are two quite different activities in which people engage. At the risk of oversimplificaton, I will say that one is Science and the other is Morality.
"

You are mixing up subject with process. Yes, there is both science and morality. But, both are the result of human thought. It's the thought process which we need to examine to see whether we believe that that process can produce free will or not. Doesn't matter whether we're doing morality or science or just deciding which ke to push next on our computer.

Duffy wrote: "When we do Morality, we operate on the idea that people make choices and that, under some circumstances, we both can and should hold them accountable for those choices. "

Yes and no. We don't hold children accountable for their actions. We find people not guilty by reason of insanity. And at times we find them not responsible for their actions because the cause and effect is so great that morality becomes irrelevant.

I guess I'm more cautious than you are about some things. I'm perfectly happy to say that science and morality are both human activities. But I'm not so sure that I would make the leap from there to say that they are both the result of human thought.

As for your second post, not that I said "under some circumstances". You have correctly pointed out a few of the exceptions. Keep in mind, when applying the exceptions, people are still in some sense "doing morality."

What an excellent discussion -- great reading.