Artful Dodger: "Does man have free will or do you believe it's an illusion."


Wow, I didn't realise how loaded that question could be until you framed it in that way.

I think there could be more than one answer, depending on how broadly you want to define what "free will" means.

Here's one way to look at it... If you wanted to divide the entire universe into only two parts, things that have free will and things that don't, I think an obvious division would be living things vs inanimate matter. Inanimate matter cannot make free will choices, it can only act on and react to its environment in accordance with the physical laws of nature. On the other hand living things can act in ways inanimate matter cannot. For example, a salmon can defy a law of nature when it swims upstream to spawn. No piece of inanimate matter which is able to be pushed by a stream (like a small piece of wood) will naturally move in the opposite direction the water is flowing. So, you COULD say that some internal purpose of the salmon is exercising free will by the act of opposing a natural flow of nature. By this (admittedly broad) definition you could say that all living things are able to exercise free will (to varying degrees) and inanimate matter is not. Men are living things, and so therefore men are able to exercise free will.

Then there's free will as pertaining to beliefs, such as what we choose to believe about the nature of reality, and how much of that is based on personal desire as opposed to natural evidence. Whether consciously or not I think we choose what that ratio will be... it's a free will choice whether we are aware of it or not.

Whenever people talk about free will, the idea of predestination usually shows up in contrast to it. I don't believe there is any real conflict between free will and predestination... predestination is pretty much a given when talking about inanimate matter, but not so obviously a given when talking about living things. But that's only because living things exponentially ramp up the complexity of physical objects... it's one thing to have a pile of tinker toys strewn about on the floor, but quite another to have them assembled into machines with co-dependant and interdependant functioning parts and that are able to achieve a self directed purpose.