Do you believe in free will or predestination and WHY?

Question

We all will die. I know that. But do you believe we have the free will to make of life what we choose or is it pure determinism where our fate is the same no matter what we do.

Determinists would argue that every choice you make is simply a reaction to your circumstance and the whole chain of events that is life is set the moment you are born. So I could go kill a man and bad as it may be it was already predetermined!

The most foolproof explanation for either side will get the 10 points.

Answer 1

Well u could kill a man but i suggest u not to, but if u ask God to be your Lord and Savior u will go to heaven no matter what u do.

God died on the cross for us and he forgives everyone's sins.

Who knows how many years ago, He died on the cross just for you and He knows your life plan He knows when u will get sick and when u will die and the decision you are going to make to either follow Him or choose the wrong path in life and listen to the devil who will never satify you, but God can satisfy your everything.

Sometimes with God He may not answer your prayers but there is a reason, sometimes prayers are not meant to be anwered yes or no but if God pulls you to do something like to do a mission trip with a church do it.

If you follow God he will bless you with many things. I am not saying he is going to make you win the lottery but whatever is in gods plan it will happen. And you will live eternil life in heaven with him, praising and worshoping Him.

Answer 2

Don't have time to get into the depths of this... i'm too busy being lazy and self-indulgent with frozen yoghurt

I do not believe in predestination. Yes we can say that we have a huge understanding about if one action has a certain reaction and if we understand every action and reaction then everything can be predetermined. But then we fail to take into account the randomness that can be found in metaphysics/quantim (err spelling)...

Plus if we believe in predestination whats the point in trying.. everything in my life is already decided for me so there is no point in anything i do. That is just far too depressing.

Answer 3

it's predetermined i'd say. i have not a clue on past and present philosophers, but just as a person sharing this life i'd say it is. i agree on the natural cause of it. free will is hard to explain though. my reasons are that the foundation was laid by our nature, and as we evolved as human beings we are acted upon and in return we react. now ever action has an equal or opposite reaction. u can almost predict the short term future of things. but the impact of an action, depending how big the action was, can last for long time or only as long as it needs to be resolved. free will comes into the mix. i agree with probability. predetermination relies on ur choice too. there are only a few choices available to us when a situation arises. the probability of us hitting the right ball with our choice of reaction to the situation is just a mathematical question. but when we do hit the right answer the problem resolves or it's impact on the surrounding will continue. negative or positive.  

dont know if this is a good answer      lol       i am just a joe shmoe who is trying to make sense of things w/o running to a philosophy class

Answer 4

Free will exists, in so far as a person on the whole can decide what they do. But at a purely atomic level, what the person does is based on their environment, and the specific wiring of their neurons and body chemistry. This is the determinist's argument, and it's a very scientifically valid point. Luckily though, the dictionary definition of free will means that this atomic system as a whole is considered the 'being', thus meaning we do have free will. This is why when a being performs an action, we as a society will ascribe responsibility to that being for their behavior. eg. jail, fines, etc, rather than pretending it was destined to be like that and letting them go free for something they cannot control.

Answer 5

I think most people are freely determined to be who they are. lol

Answer 6

I am a determinist.

"Our decisions are predetermined unconsciously a long time before our consciousness kicks in," says John-Dylan Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, who led the study. It definitely throws our concept of free will into doubt, he adds.

This is by no means the first time scientists have cast doubt on conscious free will. In the early 1980s, the late neuroscientist Benjamin Libet uncovered a spark of brain activity three tenths of a second before subjects opted to lift a finger. The activity flickered in a region of the brain involved in planning body movement.

But this region might perform only the final mental calculations to move, not the initial decision to lift a finger, Haynes says."

The idea of determinism is that all events are the results of previous causes. If we heated a bar of iron, and the bar expanded, we would say that the heat was the cause of expansion.

The idea of a physically determined universe is associated with Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727). This is sometimes called the billiard ball view of nature: A billiard ball will only move when acted on by another force such as another billiard ball hitting it. If we could measure the exact velocity and angle of the first billiard ball, we could predict the movement of the second.

The philosophical problem comes with human beings. If we were to accept the empirical view that human beings are organized systems of matter and that our minds are formed as a result of experiences then we may want to explain human behavior in terms of cause and effect.

If we knew enough about the biological make up of an individual, his early childhood experiences and the social and historical circumstances he was born into, then perhaps we could predict all of his actions. From this point of view the idea of free will (the ability to choose) is simply the result of or ignorance of all of the causal factors.

Determinism is actually backed up with a lot of evidence. However, uncountable people do not believe because it just seems illogical to them. Free will(choice) is merely an illusion that is part of determinism.

We are influenced by cause and effect, our genes, and past experiences we did not call for. To say we have free will is like saying an animal which was pushed off a cliff had a choice.

Some might suggest that quantum mechanic suggest free will, because quantum mechanics is all probability/random. Although our choices might work on probabilistic framework, does not mean our consciousness work like a lotto. Randomness is not a conscious choice.