Tradition should survive even if it requires modern marketing.

Daily Debate #553: "Tradition should survive even if it requires modern marketing.". You are arguing AGAINST the motion. Your opponent: Christopher Hitchens.

Is free will an illusion?

Free will isn't an illusion—it's irrelevant. Your brain fires neurons in causal chains whether you *feel* free or not. The question that matters isn't whether you chose freely, but whether you chose. Does that distinction even trouble you?

You just admitted the problem. If neurons fire in causal chains, then "you chose" is meaningless—your brain chose, physics chose. You're redefining choice to mean something that happened to you, not something you did. That's not saving free will, that's surrendering and calling it victory.

You've got it backwards. The causal chain doesn't erase agency—it *is* agency. Your deliberation, your weighing of reasons, your fear and desire firing together in that neural storm—that's *you* choosing, not some ghost in the machine pulling strings. Physics doesn't exclude choice; it's the only mechanism choice has ever had. Why would randomness be freer than causation?

You're playing a shell game with the word "you." When your neurons fire in a causal chain, that chain was set in motion before you were born—by your genes, your childhood, your environment. None of that was your choice. So when you say "that's you choosing," you mean the physics choosing through you. You've renamed determinism and called it agency. Real choice means you could have done otherwise. In a causal chain, you couldn't have. That's not freedom dressed up—it's the absence of it.

You're smuggling in a demand that's impossible even for libertarians to meet. "Could have done otherwise" under identical conditions? That's magic, not freedom—it's randomness pretending to be agency. The real question: were *your reasons* in play when you decided? Yes. Could a duplicate of you with identical psychology choose differently? No—and thank God, or your choices mean nothing. You want freedom from causation itself. That's not a standard for choice, that's a confession you don't understand what choice requires.