Atheists: do you believe in free will?

Atheists: do you believe in free will?

--- No. In fact, if we had free will, we wouldn't be morally responsible for our actions....so it's a good thing we don't have free will.

UPDATE: Here is what I mean ---

If free will exists, then the choices we make are not determined by any factors that came before them. Our thoughts, our beliefs, our circumstances, our past experiences. None of that would impact our choices IF we have free will.

So, if I believed murder was absolutely wrong, if I had free will, that belief would not prevent me from killing.....If there's free will, then it's really nothing but a lucky accident that I don't kill people, because these choices would be 100% random. Every time I saw someone it would just be a "roll of the dice" whether I was kind, neutral, or cruel to them.

And if the things I do (or don't do) are 100% random accidents, then I cannot reasonably be held responsible for them.

Sort of.

It seems to me that certain things are written out in a future that we could not fathom to find. Through every choice a person makes a new dimension is made, every action creates another universe. So, it's not so much free will as it is the decision on which path to take, which dimension to continue your current consciousness in. In seeing only one universe at a time, we carry the illusion of free will while in actuality we do not chose one thing or another, we chose them all in parallel.

So what I see is that our free will is not the freedom to do what we want, but the freedom to direct our consciousness toward whichever existence we see fitting. If you've ever experienced deja'vu you could think of that as a glimpse into another set of choices you or another has made that ended up with similar results to the life you're currently aware of.

It is an interesting question. I very much feel as though I have free will, but intellectually, I suspect we do not. I do not see that there is any way that one could test for free will, so we may never get an answer. I have seen some research that suggests that decisions can be detected by brain scans before we are aware of making them, which suggests free will does not exist.

Complete free will does not exist. In life you may be presented with possible choices, but you still have to choose one that is presented. If you define free will as the ability to act how you want and make those choices then yes, we have it whether a god exists or not. I would actually say the concept of free will is less apparent in christianity (or religion in general), because 1) if God knows all your choices ahead of time and chose to create you knowing you would make those choices, then did you really even make those choices? Because you didn't have a choice in your circumstances or even being created in the first place. 2) If hell exists, then your choices dwindle down considerably and you are left making decisions out of fear. I don't consider a choice made in fear as a choice made with freedom.

No...

“Free Will is not.

I do NOT have the Free Will to be thirty once again or even six foot two and 180 pounds.

I do NOT have the Free Will to have been born as the Sun King in 1638 or to have invented the telephone or to have had Natalie Wood even just once.

Free Will is a furphy dreamed up by godsters who lacked the intellect to discern the fact that there are very few things in life that we can actually choose.

We can't choose our parents, intellectual quotient, status in society, our teachers.

Most of the things we 'can' choose are little more refined than Pavlov's dogs’ responses to his bells.

AND I'll bet the starving-dying little kid in Mogadishu KNOWS Free Will is a crock.”

You were programmed the way you were and so was I... and SO is the suicide bomber... with promises of virgins.

Horrific circumstances not of our choosing also determine our actions... do you think 6,000,000 Jews CHOSE to be slaughtered? and if the Treaty of Versailles wasn't as harsh do you think Germans would have gone along with Hitler? Think Critically... please.

~

Depends what you mean by free will, I believe I can choose one thing or another. Some people choose to do 'inhuman' things, but at the end of the day, we can't choose to be perfect we can only be human.

The only way primitive religion exists today is through the child abuse of forcing it into very, very young children but thanks to better education and growing intellects so many teens are able to discover the truth, throw off the indoctrination and step into the real world!

So atheism is not a conscious decision or a belief but a realisation!

Only those that have escaped even know what free will is! Those who cannot escape remain prisoners of their conditioning!

Here is an analogy you might find illuminating.

Does a single cell have freewill? Clearly it is a complete slave first to its biology and second to its environment.

You may argue that a cell does not possess consciousness or self awareness and therefore the concept of freewill can not be applied. However, according to our present understanding "consciousness" is merely an "emergent property of a sufficiently complex brain" which of course is composed of "single cells."

In short, freewill is just another human contrivance, an illusion created to rationalize a particular philosophical or religious stance.

"Free will" is a quite vague phrase. Most of what we do is dictated by our biology and culture.

Biology forces us to eat, drink, sleep, reproduce, eliminate body waste, protect our territory, obtain shelter, train our children, investigate, protect our loved ones and property etc.

Our culture "directs" how we do most of those things. We can follow our desires in some few ways, but not many.

No, cognitive neuroscience has conclusively demonstrated that free will is an illusion. The sense of choice is generated in the prefrontal cortex AFTER the brain has already begun taking action.