Arguments Against Free Will
Every day in our lives and everything we do involves some degree of decision making or choice selection either mental or physical. We start making choices and decisions from the moment we wake up everyday to the second we sleep. Some decisions we make are blatantly obvious to ourselves because of our need to reflect on the choices before choosing. However, most decisions we make throughout the day are made without much thought. We are even, quite often, unaware that we are making decisions due to habituation and preference. Before going further, we must define the terms free will, determinism and fate or destiny. Free will is the ability to choose. Furthermore, it is the power of making free choices that are unconstrained by external circumstances
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The determinists and fatalists also have plausible arguments against free will. One argument against free will, although not deterministic or fatalistic, states that God contradicts free will of all living beings including itself. If God is omniscient, meaning it knows all, it should already know all of its future actions along with its "creation's". If God is all knowing, then it has no free will and neither do us. Excluding God and the metaphysical world, there are still many ways to disprove the idea of free will. "If we put a person back in time, and observe, they will make exactly the same choices, of course." This statement may be clever, but not very rational as time travel is impossible. It just seems to be an illusion of time travel habituated into us; where we think that if anything is changed when going back in time, it will affect the future. Causality seems to be the best way to refute free will. Causality is the way that all events are caused by previous events. In other words, all the choices we make were caused by other factors and not necessarily a decision of our own free will. As for the ice cream shop example earlier, a determinist might refute this by saying that Bob was simply not aware of the cause of his decision. It is undeniable that neurons firing chemicals and so forth could have deterministically resulted in his choice of vanilla. There are arguments which claim that free will is an illusion. It is an illusion that we accept because of our inability to observe all of the processes going on involved with making a choice. Basically, this point of view states that we are unaware and have a lack of understanding for numerous processes present within human
The determinists and fatalists also have plausible arguments against free will. One argument against free will, although not deterministic or fatalistic, states that God contradicts free will of all living beings including itself. If God is omniscient, meaning it knows all, it should already know all of its future actions along with its "creation's". If God is all knowing, then it has no free will and neither do us. Excluding God and the metaphysical world, there are still many ways to disprove the idea of free will. "If we put a person back in time, and observe, they will make exactly the same choices, of course." This statement may be clever, but not very rational as time travel is impossible. It just seems to be an illusion of time travel habituated into us; where we think that if anything is changed when going back in time, it will affect the future. Causality seems to be the best way to refute free will. Causality is the way that all events are caused by previous events. In other words, all the choices we make were caused by other factors and not necessarily a decision of our own free will. As for the ice cream shop example earlier, a determinist might refute this by saying that Bob was simply not aware of the cause of his decision. It is undeniable that neurons firing chemicals and so forth could have deterministically resulted in his choice of vanilla. There are arguments which claim that free will is an illusion. It is an illusion that we accept because of our inability to observe all of the processes going on involved with making a choice. Basically, this point of view states that we are unaware and have a lack of understanding for numerous processes present within human