There is a bit of science that I find truly astonishing...
It is one of the conclusions that comes from Einstein's theory of relativity. In his theory we do not have three dimensions that are then subservient to time, with relativity space and time are relative and determined by each other. This means your position in time is determined by where you are and what speed you are travelling at.
From this we get this famous idea that if you travel near the speed of light then you will age slower than those relative to you who are not. (remember when the lost fighter pilots return in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the guy says 'Einstein was right'?)
But this also has anothe bizarre ramification. There does not exist an event that is not in the past for some distant observer. For this to be the case it means that every event that has happened, is happening and will happen is written into the fabric of space/time. If the future is written then our paths are determined and we have no free will.
Now it could be that every act of free will creates a new universe of possibilities and there are actually an infinite amount of universes based upon every possible act of free will. But for this to be the case it would mean when we make a decision, at that moment in time, there was the possibility of making another decision. But I cannot see how if we roll the dice again under the exact same situation, that the same numbers won't keep coming up again and again. (As Einstein once famously said"God does not play dice with the universe.")
Of course, if you do have any arguments against relativity, please address all correspondence to A Einstein...
In 1983 the cognitive psychologist asked volunteers to press a button at the time of their choice, whilst at the same time remembering the position of the second hand on a clock. What this experiment showed was the voluteers pressed the button before they had the conscious desire to do so.
This experiment sggests that our decision making is not conscious, a decision starts way down in our sub-conscious beyond our rational decision making process.
Our decision making is dependent entirely on what has gone before. And these events are written into the space/time continuum of our universe.
The only conclusion is that there is no free will and we live in an entirely determined universe.
But even though these arguments seem valid and we actually operate as though the unverse is a determined place (eg. If I throw a ball I always expect it to drop down, not keep flying upwards) it is hard to stomach the fact that we don't have a free will.
As I'm writing this I am searching my mind about what to say and how to say it. Everytime I hit the delete buttton it is evidence of my free will. And yes, I decided to spell buttton with three 'ts' as evidence that I'm in charge, making decisions (any other typos are accidents of course)
And I have seen arguments for free will based upon quantum indeterminancy but I cannot see the correllation that the strange actions of sub atomic particles would have any influence on how we make decisions, or how knowing this fact somehow discounts all the stuff that I have already argued in this article.
This is troublesome stuff, especially to anyone who believes in an omnipotent God who has bestowed the (contradictory) super power of free will on humans so that they can choose to love him (very reminiscent of that scene in Spartacus when Crassus, who now owns Spartacus' wife and could possess her when ever he wanted, is still frustrated when she will not choose to want him, but such is the psychology of the bloodthirsty dictator)
So I tend to think that our feeling of free will would be better described as our on going agency. At every moment of our eternal now we are making decisions that were always written in to the fabric of space/time, ie. there is only ever one decision we are going to make, but that decision can only be made if we believe that there are a number of possible decisions that could be made at any given point in time.
In other words free will is a pragmatic illusion human beings require to operate, a construction of our consciousness, as real as the construction we make of the past and our imagined future.
