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

[ShinyCrystals]

The beauty of hypothetical stipulations.  We find ourselves in some future situation where the issue has been demonstratively settled.  There is no free will.  The concern in the hypothetical being that this could amount to living a lie, or having lived a lie.  I think, at worst, we found out we were wrong about yet another thing.  The experience should be familiar to us by now.  

Might we then choose to live as though we had a free will knowing that we did not?  I brought up theological fatalism in this thread (or maybe another?) recently.  I think that what people do in response to finding out that they were not actually free to x as they thought they were is to accept some form of fatalism, if not outright absurdism.  We've vacillated over the entirety our our written history on this issue - there's no reason to think it began then, and that larger negotiation plays out in our own lives, intimately.  We seem to have an instinctive need to push and measure those boundaries.  To understand the world we live in.  To exert control, by whatever means.  

One of my favorite comments on the issue I picked up here, I modify it, though I can't recall who it was.  The notion that..at least in the sense of a classical free will or even a christian free will - we find ourselves living in a world where it was more salient to prevent us from freely willing to jump to the moon than to commit horrific acts.  We weren't satisfied with that state of affairs, though, so we created surveillance and support systems.  We built rockets to take us to the moon.  

So, no, I don't think it would mean that we lived a lie nor would I expect us to choose to live one.  We've been in that place before and we've been able to conceive of ourselves and our world without a free will and still function as a species, as a society.  Hell, as an organizing tool, fatalism is top notch.  We sneak it kisses everytime we think about our destiny.  Private destiny, national destiny.

Oh yeah...

What I was trying to say, was that many people in the world believe in free will, but with it most likely not existing, well, people think they have free will, but they do not, since it is said by neuroscience that it is the subconsciousness deterministically making the "decisions" we make rather than full conscious control. I was wondering how many people would feel if they realized (somehow) that free will did not really exist. That said, countries like the United States of America and their governments are based on free will, it seems, and lead people to believe it exists. I do not really think people would be happy with the government or whoever if they realized that free will is not really a thing that exists, not that it would be the end of the world, that is.

So yeah, as much as it would not really be living a lie as you said, that is what I was actually wondering.