A thing about religious (and other) people and the illusion of free will

[Istvan]

What I find interesting about that...is that free will wasn't even a thing until abrahamism was a state religion. We were fated. Our fates are the thing (or one of the things) that god(s) knew. Theological determinism. The nuts only got in an uproar about determinism when we figured out that their god wasn't The Determinator.

But we didn't get rid of that idea, we just dressed up the gods in sci-fi costumes. All the talk of causal chains and determinism sounds like secular theology to me. Another poster here says if we just get a computer big enough and feed it enough information, we could know everything about the past and predict the future with 100% accuracy. Each to his own magical thinking, I guess.

I have no problem with the paradox of assuming I'm making free-enough choices while acknowledging the deterministic nature of physical reality, any more than I have a problem with the paradox of seeing the Sun move through the sky while I understand that the rotation of the Earth causes that phenomenon. And we at least acknowledge a certain amount of personal input in people's decision making: if we made plans to meet somewhere and I blew you off, you probably wouldn't accept my excuse that I wasn't free to do otherwise.