Artful Dodger: I'm reading The Case For A Creator by Lee Strobel. It's one of the best sources I've seen for a scientific, philosophical and mathematical approach to questions I personally find interesting. I don't think it gets into free will, but I haven't gotten to the part about consciousness yet... I just looked, it's the second to the last chapter.

The book is not about theism. Theism isn't automatically rejected or ruled out, but I doubt there is anything in there about free will. It's technical enough to be interesting but not so technical to be mind numbingly boring or hard to understand. Anyway, reading this book has me all primed and ready to think about questions like free will... how's that for a happy coincidence?

You're right, the question of free will is probably taken more seriously by thiests than by atheists. A purely materalistic approach to the mind is that it is nothing more than an advanced thinking machine, and so the concept of a "mind" would be an illusion. And if the conscious mind is only an illusion, then any thoughts about free will would also necessarily be an illusion. However, the people who say this are the same people who think you can get something from nothing, or that time is only an illusion. I read an article in Scientific American a few years ago that said time was an illusion. I have no idea what that meant, and after reading it I still didn't know what it meant. Just because time is an abstract (is not a physical thing) it doesn't mean that time does not exist... I'm not even sure if that was supposed to be the point of the article.


I'm trying to quit smoking, so if I seem unusually gabby that's why... and sitting here typing away makes me want to have a cigarette. I type because I want to smoke, and I want to smoke because I type...
AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH crap, I'll roll one anyway, just in case I can't hold out... any... longer...