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In fact, without a soul, you cannot possibly have "free will".

I'll "prove" it. All of your actions are based on inputs and how those inputs are processed. Your brain is like a computer, albeit as you note a living organism. It stores previous information, and generates signals which cause reactions, including your thoughts.

Given a sufficiently advanced technology, I should be able to build a perfect replica of your brain, and i should be able to program it with precisely the current state of your brain. Maybe I'll clone you with an accelerant for growth, and then I'll dump your current synaptic pattern into your brain. (Think "6 days", with Arnold S.).

Now I can control precisely the input to your brain. If there is nothing controlling you outside of the things that make up your physical nature, when I provide identical inputs to you and your doppelganger, both of you will take the same action.

You could argue that both of you would choose the same way, that you both had free will. OK, now I put you in a sensory deprevation unit, and feed an input to your doppelganger. Then I bring you out and feed you the same input, and you do exactly what I already KNEW you would do.

You had no real free will, you simply did exactly what all of your prior history, along with your genetic makeup, led you to do.

Wait, though, these ARE biological organism, there is random variation.

Quite right. So in fact I can't be certain what you are going to do. But on the other hand, a random variation causing you to do something different isn't really "free will", because you can't control the random variation. If you CONTROLLED it, you and your doppelganger would control it in the same way.

But there is still some variation possible. Suppose you and your doppelganger decide to flip a coin to make a decision. You could get different results. But it still isn't free will, you both chose the same way based on your prior existance and input to allow a coin to control your destiny, and the coin was hardly "free will", unless you had a way to force it to land the way you wanted -- in which case your doppelganger would have done the same.

The only way in which there can be true "free will" is if there is a soul that exists outside the physical limitations of our body, and that soul has "god-like" properties which include the attribute of free will, by design.

I realise we can't create your doppelganger, but I merely argue that it is theoretically possible to do so, if not by our current technology.

BTW, even though I do believe in free will based on a soul, it isn't a completely free actor. We all have the ability at some level to accurately predict how other people will react to input. Some people are very good at it, and can uncannily "forsee" what others will do, especially people they know really well.

How often do married couples complete each others sentences correctly? Is this not anecdotal evidence that most of what seems to be "free choice" is in fact the foregone conclusion of our history and inputs?

My conclusion: Without God, there is no free will, only the illusion of it based on forced choices. With God, there is free will, but only so far as he has granted that attribute to us, subject to his control.

Realise that if you believe in a God that knows the future exactly, then you could have "free will" but not "free choice" since God's knowledge already sets the results in stone. And if you believe in a God that actually can control your life (even if it is only to the extent you submit to Him), that control must certainly include controlling those around you.

If you believe Jesus had to die on the cross for our sins, you must necessarily believe that God controlled the actual people around Jesus for his entire life to ensure nobody decided to kill him before the appointed time.

That's just the most obvious example of religious infringement on "free will". If God has appointed the hour of my death, I don't have the free will to choose to kill myself