Free will and humans

[Kiekeben]

It depends on what you mean by free will. We have desires and we are able to act on them. If that's all you mean, then of course we have free will. However, the majority of people mean something more by free will - especially in a religious context.

The usual understanding of it - and I say this based on asking people questions that make them explain further what they mean, as well as on what many religious (and even nonreligious) people say in general - is that free will involves the ability to choose from among more than one possible way of acting. So for instance, at the moment you decided to write your post, if there is such a thing as free will, then - everything else being equal - you could have decided not to write it. This is what is called "libertarian free will," by the way.

IMO, there is no such thing as libertarian free will, for a very simple reason: the very concept of it is incoherent.

Beautiful.
I had that same thought,now I know it's called libertarian free will but I don't understand why you think it's false. 

Jörmungandr has already explained - very nicely, I might add - a big part of the problem here. Let me add a bit more:

In a nutshell, the problem with the libertarian conception of FW is that it requires our decisions to be neither determined nor ultimately random. If your decision to write the post was determined - so that, given the totality of the situation at the time, it had to happen - then obviously you don't have LFW. (In case it's not immediately obvious why, recall that LFW means that there is more than one possibility available to you; determinism, however, means that there is only one possible outcome.) If, OTOH, your action was ultimately random - a matter of chance - then that too is incompatible with LFW, because then it wouldn't really be something that you were in charge of; instead, it would be something that just happened. 

LFW, then, requires that there be a third alternative, something in between the determined and the random. But the problem is that logically, there can be no third alternative. If an event can either happen or fail to happen in the same exact situation, then there cannot be anything in that situation that explains why it happened or failed to happen. And that is what it means for the event to be random.

BTW, in ch. 7 of my book THE TRUTH ABOUT GOD, I explain this further and then use it as part of an argument for atheism.