Any atheists here who believe in free will?

I know we’ve had a bunch of free will posts on here, but I’m specifically interested in hearing from those who don’t invoke “and then a miracle happens” as part of the argument. I remember being appalled by Richard Dawkin’s comments in an interview wherein he said he believed in free will because “life would be intolerable otherwise” and that the notion of free will “is just an inconsistency we’d have to live with.” I was stunned how little he had thought about it, and how much his ideas about free will sounded like the religion he so loathed.

Let’s define free will as human action/feelings/thoughts being causally or absolutely determined as opposed to Daniel Dennet’s Compatibilism which essentially defines free will as an internal sense of choice.

So are there any atheist Dopers out there who believe in free will who have an argument any better than “because life would be intolerable otherwise?”

I’m an atheist and I believe “human action/feelings/thoughts are causally or absolutely determined”.

I’ve come across a decently large number of atheists who advocate free will.

The basic argument, as best as I can summarize it, is that there are holes in the chain of cause-and-effect that we see in our subjective experience and/or physics, and so those holes must get plugged arbitrarily moment by moment. There are constant new “first causes” seeping into reality all the time. These are uncaused by anything that came before, but nevertheless lead to effects that we see around us. These fountains of causation are everywhere, all the time.

mumblemumblemumble and our brain uses this process in some way, therefore free will.

I’ve seen people put quite a lot of thought into this. Not, like, high quality thought. A large quantity of thought, yes, but not care or consideration.

Atheist, here, and I don’t believe that humans have free will. What we do have, though, is a perfectly convincing *illusion *of free will- one so indistinguishable from *actual *free will as to be unfalsifiable.

The concept of free will makes no sense to me, so I guess I don’t believe in it. Your definition doesn’t seem like a definition of free will to me, though – of course human action is causally determined – what does that have to do with free will? I must be missing something.

I’m an atheist, and as far as “free will” goes, I think it is complicated. The reason I think so is…complicated and possibly out of my control.

I’m an atheist, and I believe in free will; but I don’t think I can provide a coherent explanation, at least right now, as to why.

Will have to think about this one.

I’m not an atheist but my theism is not located OUTSIDE of this discussion but squarely WITHIN it. (In other words no miracles and no references to God).

Causality is one way of looking at a sequence of events and explaining “why something occurred”.

Intentionality is a different way of looking at them, and produces a different explanation.

I find both useful, in different contexts. So far we’re not talking about absolute overarching truths here.

Arguments against free will assert the absolute overarching supremacy of determinism and causality. “You wrote this post * because* neurochemicals in your finger-muscles caused your fingers to strike the keyboard keys in this sequence”. “You wrote this post * because* you were socialized into a culture that inculcated into you certain beliefs about free will, and when stimulated with the question du jour, you spouted forth the set of beliefs with which you’d been programmed”. “You wrote this post because everything is a chain of cause-and-effect and prior events are the reason that any current event is taking place”. These are all causal, or deterministic arguments and there is no reference to intentionality, no assertion that they were written “of the poster’s own free will”.

Intentionality arguments assume an active consciousness made choices and the choices are why the action took place. “You wrote this post because you wanted to express your opinion on the topic of free will, and to contradict people who were being Wrong on the Internet”. “You wrote this post because you consider ‘free will’ arguments to be proxies for arguments about the soul or the appropriateness of holding people responsible for their actions, and this board is devoted to skepticism”.

Intentionality, or “free will”, arguments, rarely assert the absolute overarching supremacy of intentionality. That is, you don’t commonly encounter arguments to the effect that “The galaxies spin around their center of gravity and assume a spiral shape because they like to twirl” or “The rocky mountain chain thrust upwards because it feels glorious to rise into the sky”. So most of the action takes place around whether intentions, desires, etc, explain anything or can (and should) be discarded from our considerations as irrelevant and silly.

I don’t actually like the term “free will” (because it is too tied up in long-ago arguments that someone else made) but there is intentionality; it is true that things occur because some consciousness wanted them to, and untrue that everything is simply a chain of prior events causing current events in a perpetual cause-and-effect chain. The exact nature and location of that consciousness is not simple, but not because I’m about to wave a “God” clause at you, but rather because we individual human folks are not the separate individuals we (at least in our current culture) tend to think we are, which has ramifications for where the consciousness is actually located.

Debates about “determinism” vs. “free will” are characterized by sloppy definitions of both terms. When both terms are rigorously defined, it becomes apparent that there’s no conflict whatsoever between them.

If you’re talking about the compatibilist definition of free will, the OP specifically excludes it.

I’m an atheist who views the human brain as sufficiently complex and subject to so many random environmental inputs that trying to isolate a purely deterministic mechanism for how it functions may be practically impossible, hence we may as well operate under the working assumption that free will exists.

I’m an atheist - I reject the notion that some supernatural being has predetermined my choices and eventual outcomes -I have free will to do as I choose - that being said the process that I use to make my choices is not one that I fully understand - some choices seem to not be much of a choice at all - other ones moreso.

Given that definition of free will I would say free will does exist. But only because it doesn’t seem like physics is deterministic. Now to be transparent I’m not expert on the subject but it’s my understanding that at a quantum mechanical scale this become probabilistic. So even with perfect information the laws of physics cannot tell exactly what happens next.

But that’s not really what I think of free will being. I think of it being more as ‘is your life on rails’. IE If some super-super-computer knew everything about the universe(I don’t know what this would really mean) could it predict every decision you’d make? But this kind of gets to the core of how I really feel about free will. I think the concept of free will is ill formed and is meaningless. If something can predict what I would do based on all the information about me does that really mean I didn’t have a choice? Or that the other thing understands me so well it can know how I would respond. If my decision making process is consistent, then if you know enough about me you would know how I would respond.

I have a little difficulty expressing the way I see it so maybe an example is easier. Imagine we believe in free will. If have a universe with a person in it who makes a series of decisions in their life. Then I duplicate that universe exactly. Would that person make the same decisions as the first one? Does that mean that the first one had free will but the second didn’t? What if they were happening simultaneously? Who has the free will?

I don’t know. It seems sort of meaningless to me unless free will gets much more strictly defined.

To answer the question more directly. I believe with sufficient knowledge and computational power you could predict with very high certainty the rest of my life and every decision I’d make.

The free will/determined arguments I read here all stumble when they approach any semblance of a true scientific proof. They fail to define the terms and the consequences of the differences adequately. They fail to demonstrate experiments that would distinguish between the two. They do, unfortunately, start at the end with their conclusion and work backward to create an explanation.

We don’t even have an understanding of quantum mechanics and how the collapse of the wave function happens. If such a matter of pure mathematics that controls the way the universe works can’t yet be addressed then any argument that depends on outside cause and effect has a massive hole at its core.

In the same way, Libet’s experiments that have brain activity starting before a “conscious” movement is also flawed, because we do not yet have an understanding of what consciousness is.

This is not a problem for atheists more than for those, I presume majority of, non-fundamentalist believers who don’t merely wave away any rational thought with “goddidit.” There is no way to act as if there is not free will. No one can make any action, including a lack of action, without willing it to be so. The clockwork universe was disproved a century ago; why it has been resurrected for this special case is a mystery to me.

I am not saying that “free will,” whatever that is, must exist. I’m contending that the arguments are so flawed that they are currently meaningless. That the OP had to specifically exclude compatabilism is proof. The answers to many “either/or” questions turn out to be “both.” We don’t know if it is. All we can say for sure is that the argument was poisoned at the beginning.

That’s probably a better description of how I feel than kayaker’s well phrased “it is complicated!” :smiley:

I actually had a discussion about this recently w/ 3 other atheists. 2 of us were lawyers, so decent with words and argument. The other 2 were microbiologists, 1 of whom specialized in electrical and chemical transmissions within and among brain cells. His opinion was that as much as we know about what goes on in the brain, we don’t know enough about every synaptic firing and every protein coding to support pure determinism. And there is enough “noise” or randomness in the process to limit predictability.

So yeah, “insert miracle here.” As Lightnin’ said, how do we distinguish between the illusion of free will and free will? And our observable universe might all be a dream, or a mote in the fingernail of some giant…

The thing about determinism is that it’s like Schrödinger’s Cat: after any decision is made, it’s easy to look back and argue that it was pre-determined. But before the decision is made? Not so much.

Can someone explain what determinism has to do with free will? If quantum mechanics is rolling dice in my brain, what does that have to do with whether I (whatever that means) is controlling it? Free will, if I understand it at all, is that sentient beings have some ability to make choices that are separate from their underlying physics and chemistry. Just because it’s impossible to predict what a being will do next doesn’t mean that being has free will.

As usual, I like Bryan Ekers approach. But that doesn’t mean that there’s “free will”.

I always thought atheists believed in free will. I thought it was a given. It’s those religious types that didn’t. Huh, learn something new every day.

Yeah, I don’t think you can prove either free will or determinism. Not scientifically; and philosophically, you can only establish one or the other by starting from premises that are equally unprovable.

Where I think the OP is coming from is that, for many atheists, the premises they start from are those that lead to determinism. He’s looking for people whose belief in free will is not compatible with determinism but is compatible with atheism.

Yeah, I think you have that exactly backwards. Atheist: “Why does God permit evil or allow humans to do evil?” Apologist: “Because God allows humans to have free will so that they can make their own choices about salvation” or something like that.