Reply To: Good News: And No Religion, Too

“Alex says this is an illusion (because everything that happens anywhere in the universe at one moment is determined by everything that happened before right back to the Big Bang). Maybe it is in that unhelpful sense (unhelpful because it doesn’t explain anything). Or maybe “free will” is the (unhelpful) name given to that illusion?”

I didn’t watch the video, but the arguments seem like the common ones. I think the mistake being made here is one of confusing different levels of explanation. The assumption is that every explanation has to be reducible to physics, and since ‘free will’ can’t be seen in the world of physics (in the interactions of atoms, particles etc) then it doesn’t exist. But the kind of social explanations we are looking for take place at the level of intentional agents (eg in a social world made up of agents that act according to intentions – not in the world of atoms and particles), there is no need to reduce the explanation to physics.

This podcast explains it better (you can skip to 13 minutes if you are already familiar with the arguments): https://philosophybites.com/2020/02/christian-list-on-free-will.html