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Exploring the concept of free will

The concept of free will is simply that.. a concept. If you believe in God, any God because they're all one, you realize the concept of free will goes against God's will, a divine plan as it were. Sure, you might have plans or ideas. Might even "exercise" your will from time to time.. but what about accidents? Floods, collisions, fires, earthquakes.. death? Do we have control of these things? I don't, and neither do you, but I'm not here to bash free will totally. I too am ignorant of where the dividing line of our will and divine will takes place. So lets explore it, shall we.

In Western philosophy there are four beliefs when it comes to free will: determinism, compatibilism, incompatibilism, and Libertarian incompatibilism. There are also several others, but these are the main thoughts. Determinism is roughly defined as the view that all current and future events are causally necessitated by past events combined with the laws of nature. Neither determinism nor its opposite, indeterminism, are positions in the debate about free will. Compatibilism is the view that the existence of a concept of free will and the assumption of determinism are compatible with each other.

This is opposed to incompatibilism, which is the view that there is no way to reconcile a belief in a deterministic universe with a belief in a concept of free will beyond that of a perceived existence. Basically it's like this.. In Determinism the problem of free will, in this context, is the problem of how our actions can be free if there is a being who has determined them for us ahead of time. With Libertarian incompatibilism there is the belief in a concept of free will that requires the individual to be able to take more than one possible course of action under a given set of circumstances.. so the results might not meet the means.

Some philosophers' beliefs on the subject can't even be catagorized due to depth, and with a subject such as this it's easy to get REALLY lost before you find what you might be looking for.. and this is just the surface. A lot of religious belief has it to where our will works with the divine will. Why not an old school though of Whatever Will Be, Will Be. Free will or not, most will never agree on one thing, and since we ALL know what we're talking about, no one's going to back down in a debate like this where actually BOTH sides are quite right, but like another wise one sang, "Nobody's right, if everybody's wrong."

Learn more about this author, Zachariah Langley.
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