Valuable information which deserves a clearer infographic!

Thanks for sharing.

I don’t think the excerpt you provided addresses the points I was making. What do we mean by free will? Presumably it’s the idea that a person is able to make their own choices, and they’re not being controlled by some external force.

On the one hand, yes, I can imagine a conscious being without free will - imagine a scientist could disconnect the nerves that control your body and replace them with a remote control, but the nerves which provide sensation stay - someone else is driving the car, but you still see and hear what’s going on.

But that’s not what I mean when I say free will is absurd. I mean the idea that we could act without reference to our past experiences, conversations, physical circumstance, DNA, isn’t plausible. Yes, I like to eat fruit loops for breakfast! They taste good and I enjoy the sensation. I have “free will” to eat gravel instead, but I don’t.

In the normal mundane world that’s fine - we can say we have free will. In the case where we argue that an all knowing and all powerful God exists that’s an issue. Because God knows every possible force and prior circumstance that will act on us, and he put those forces into motion. So such a God would have decided for us what will happen.

Got to be honest, I started reading that, saw how long it was and stopped. Would you want to share the gist?

To nibble further at the arguments for God: free will is absurd.

If god is all knowing and all powerful, then when he created the universe, he would know exactly what happened from the first moment until the last. Like setting up an extremely complex arrangement of dominoes.

So how could he give people free will? Maybe he created some kind of special domino that sometimes falls leftward and sometimes falls rightward, so now it has “free will”. Ok, but isn’t that just randomness? God’s great innovation is just chance?

No, one might argue, free will isn’t chance, it’s more complex than that, a person makes decisions based on their moral principles, their life experience, etc. Well where did they get their principles? What circumstances created their life experience? Conditions don’t appear out of nowhere. We get our DNA from somewhere. Either God controls the starting conditions and knows where they lead, or he covered his eyes and threw some dice. In either case we can say “yes, I have free will” in the sense that we do what we want, but the origins of our decisions are either predetermined or subject to chaos/chance.

I worked with a guy who told me when he was on DMT he talked to little green aliens

I don’t think that’s healthy for the tree

That’s supposed to say “cave” right? Not cove? (Which I always took to be a sort of micro bay)