Have you ever done a single calculation in any of your posts here?
We are. He doesn’t understand biology. But you only do hearsay, right? While demanding much, much more of those with whom you disagree?
Isn’t that blatant hypocrisy?
Indeed. I see zero sincerity.
Your fear of evidence comes to mind. Got any?
That’s clearly what you’re implying by the hearsay you’re quoting.
Why do you completely disregard the diplomas (and more importantly, the expertise) of everyone with whom you disagree? Isn’t that just reiterating the same hypocrisy?
Consider that even the act of posting here is caused in part by other posts and their contents. The chain of causation can literally be seen in real time. The contents of the post you are replying to is what is causing both your act to reply, and the subject matter of your posts. Had the post you are replying to not been written, you would not have posted in return, much less written the specific contents it contains.
When was the last time you came to a forum discussing things like theology, philosophy, and science, read a post, and then decided to launch into something completely irrelevant? Like typing long and fictional soccer anectotes, or your experiences with different exotic burger brands?
If you think about it you can probably also remember why you came back to this forum after some hiatus and started replying to posts in this thread too. As in, there was an external cause of that behavior too. Once again, that cause made you post here in the manner you did. It didn’t make you go and play soccer, or eat a burger instead.
And before I wrote this post, the idea of doing something unrelated and disconnected from the topic as a response to a post you read here had not even occurred to you. I have now directly caused a thought to appear in your head. You didn’t choose to think this thought. It simply occurred to you as you read this post. The cause came from the outside and created the thought in your mind.
As you read these words, thoughts of how to reply will occur to you too. Not by choice, they will arise spontaneously in your consciousness through a process over which you have no actual control. At best me writing this post can be interpreted by you as a type of challenge, and you can react by abstaining from reply. But would you have done so had I not replied in this manner? You would not.
Indeed, all of this. All I’ll add is that, if freedom of the will is to mean anything worth having, it has to be a freedom to react to things, a freedom to pick a path in response to all past and present stimuli, external and internal.
This idea that “true free will” is the sort of thing that is wholly causally severed from all preceding events and influences defines freedom into something only an unthinking and unfeeling process can have, and one dominated by randomness at that. Naive libertarian free will, far from being either truly free or truly a will, is a freedom from will. It boggles the mind why those who insist that this is the most intuitive understanding of free will should find it also the most meaningful sort, or otherwise desirable.