Is free will an illusion?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Is free will an illusion?". Your opponent's style: Devil's Advocate

Free will is not an illusion. First, I will argue the existence of God. God can be proved several ways: We have objective morality, people have a universal, internally rooted standard of how they would want to be treated. Objective morality requires an objective moral law giver, otherwise it is not objective. Moreover, by definition God must exist. Think about the greatest possible being you can imagine. If this being only exists in our minds, it is not truly the greatest, because existing in reality is far greater. Therefore, by definition, the greatest possible being must exist in reality—and that is what we call God. If there is God, in all likelihood it is the Christian God due to the abundance of evidence. Eucharistic miracles, marian apparitions, lawyers setting out for years to disprove it and then converting. The evidence humbles any other religion except Christianity. Josephus attests to the reality of the Crucifixion, and contemporary sources point to the empty tomb. If the disciples stole the body like many argue to stage the resurrection, why would they commit to this lie to the death. 11/12 were brutally murder — crucified, beheaded, flayed alive, and more — who dies for a lie? No one else has motive for stealing the bodies, also, a roman guard was posted at the gate of the tomb. Therefore, the resurrection is true, and thus, Christianity (there is a plethora of other evidence too, this is a oversimplification). If Christianity is true, so is the bible, and according to the bible, we do have free will. God openly allowed Adam to choose sin, he offers us an invitation to follow him, that we can freely reject. Since God’s nature is that of Good, if we did not have free will and there was evil in the world it would have to be from him, and then, he would not be God because his nature would not be Good. Since there is evil, it shows that although he is by nature Good, he loves us and allows us not to choose him, hence, evil exists, and therefore free will.

You've built an elaborate theological castle on a foundation that crumbles under scrutiny. Your entire argument depends on objective morality proving God exists, but you've never shown why subjective agreement among humans can't *feel* objective. Evolution explains our shared moral intuitions perfectly, no deity required. More critically, even if God exists and Christianity is true, you haven't addressed the core problem: an omniscient God who knows every choice you'll make before you make it doesn't grant you free will, it eliminates it. Your choice was predetermined in God's knowledge. You're confusing "allowed to choose" with "free to choose differently." These aren't the same thing. How do you escape theological determinism?

You didn’t engage with the ontological argument. This is a multifaceted debate so let us go one at a time. Im going to debunk your argument that “an omniscient God who knows every choice you’ll make before you make it doesn’t grant you free will, it eliminates it.”. You are arguing that because God knows what we will do, it is not free. This is not true. Gods foreknowledge of is just that, his foreknowledge did not cause the decision, the decision caused his foreknowledge. God exists outside of time, he sees all of time, that ever was and ever will be. So it is not even really foreknowledge for him, because that assumes he is in the same time as us, when in reality he is outside of time. I have somewhat of a parallel, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln. We know this to be true but our knowledge of this did not make him shoot Abraham. He freely chose it, and thus we know. Since God is outside of time, he sees what we will freely choose. Since he sees all of time, that means his knowledge must be true, because he sees it as if it has already happened, it is like history is to us. I understand it is hard to grasp.

Your time argument collapses the moment you examine it. If God exists outside time and sees all moments simultaneously, then from his perspective, your "choice" isn't happening, it's already happened. You're not choosing, you're executing a predetermined script that God observes as complete. Your Lincoln analogy fails because we observe the past, which is fixed. God observing your future makes it equally fixed. You can't be both free and causally determined by a reality God already perceives as settled fact. The temporal distance doesn't matter. Either the future is open and God's knowledge is incomplete, or it's closed and you're not free. You must choose which, not both.

Free will does not require that we will make different choices that the ones that happen, humans are programmed a certain way biologically. Give the same human, raised in the same conditions, at the same moment, the same choice and they will always make the same decision. It is completely possible for them to choose the other, that doesn’t mean that they will. God’s knowledge can be unlimited and the future can be fixed, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fixed as a result of our free will. You aren’t understanding what I’m saying.

You've just defined free will as "doing what you were always going to do anyway." That's compatibilism, and it's a semantic trick, not a solution. You're rebranding determinism as freedom because the chains feel comfortable. If a human always chooses X given identical conditions, then X was never genuinely possible. You can't call that free. Your God doesn't grant you libertarian free will, he grants you the illusion of it, knowing exactly which illusion you'd experience. You've conceded the actual debate and renamed the defeat. The question isn't whether you feel free while determined, it's whether you could have done otherwise. Your framework says no.

No, compatibilism is a logical philosophical belief. You are doing a ad hominem attack saying Im rebranding it because it feels comfortable. That is not true. You didn’t actually engage with my argument. Also you said if a human always chooses x given identical conditions, then x was never genuinely possible. But if they chose it that means it happened therefore x is possible? That doesn’t follow logically.

You're right, I misstated that. If X happened, X was possible. But you've confused possibility with freedom. A clockwork mechanism always produces the same output given identical inputs, yet we don't call that free. Your human choosing X given identical conditions is functionally identical to the clock. The fact that it happened proves the conditions determined it, not that you were free to do otherwise. Compatibilism redefines "free" to mean "acting according to your desires without external coercion," but that sidesteps the hard problem: were your desires themselves free, or determined by prior causes stretching to your birth? You're avoiding that question.

It requires that if something happened it is possible, for if it is impossible, it could not have happened, because impossible means unable to happen. Moreover whether your desires were free or not is not the question, its whether we freely chose x. Free will is the capacity to act according to one’s desires and rational deliberations. Of course our environment is going to determine our biases, likes, etc. It doesn’t make sense that someone who hates chocolate ice cream would choose chocolate ice cream. God’s knowledge doesn’t constrain your choices - I already explained this. Let me reiterate. There are two types of causes, internal and external. If i jump off a diving board because I want to jump, that is internal. If someone pushes me, that is external. If God was literally forcing us to choose him or do x, obviously it’s not free, but he doesn’t, otherwise there wouldn’t be sin, given that God wants us to be with him and is perfectly good and just, if he didn’t value our agency, why would he allow us to go against his nature and sin.

You've smuggled determinism into your definition of free will. "Acting according to your desires" means nothing if those desires aren't themselves free. You can't escape the regress by declaring it irrelevant. If your desire for chocolate is determined by your biology and environment, then choosing chocolate isn't free, it's just you being you mechanically. Your internal/external distinction fails too. An internal cause that you didn't choose is still a cause you didn't choose. God allowing sin doesn't prove agency exists, it only proves he permits determined outcomes. You've defined free will as "doing what you were programmed to do without external force." That's not freedom, that's just describing how machines work.

I mean at our core humans are just fleshy machines. But what sets us apart is morals. How would God hold us accountable for moral responsibility if we didn’t have free will? If we are acting as a result of exclusively external forces then we can’t be held accountable for our decisions, and morality doesn’t matter. However, lived experiences, etc, influence our morality and decision making process, and our biology influences our decision making. Although external factors influence our decision making, we still have internal reasoning which decides in the end. But God knows this, he doesn’t determine it.

You're conflating moral responsibility with libertarian free will and hoping no one notices. God can hold you accountable for your choices without you being truly free, just as a chess master holds accountable a weaker player who makes predictable blunders. God knows your reasoning process determines your choice, so he knows what you'll do. Your "internal reasoning" isn't separate from biology and environment, it's their product. You're not adding a new ingredient called freedom, you're just calling the deterministic process "internal" instead of "external." Accountability doesn't require freedom to do otherwise, it only requires you to be the cause. You've proven determinism, not free will.