Free will Argument against Divine Providence

[genkaus]

If it isn't my opinion, who's is it?

Yes, of course, it's my opinion, anyway, moving on.

It may have been your opinion, but you did not present it as such.

What kind of dualism? Physicalist? Non-physicalist?

Physicalist dualism? What's that? Emergentism?

If non-physicalist, I'm not interested, it can be rejected as nonsense.

That's interesting. Because your personal definition of free-will - the one requiring ultimate self-determination - can only make sense within the context of substance dualism.

If physicalist then it makes no difference anyway, it's still nonsense because it doesn't give you any more meaningful free will.

If it does... how?

Assuming that by physicalist dualism you are referring to emergentism, this is how:

According to emergentism, certain entities (or properties or aspects) can arise within the physical system that are not reducible to its parts. The whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. For example, while your brain is formed of neurons firing, the way it functions gives rise to the existence of "mind" or "self" which cannot be described or explained completely by the cellular neural events. Adding indeterminism to the mix, i.e. assuming that the individual states of the parts do not fully determine the whole - you have a bit of "elbow room" at the mental level within which the mind is allowed to determine itself to certain extent. This gap in determination is referred to as "free-will" which would be meaningful in the way you specified.

So their position is unsound.

Not unless you can prove indeterminism to be false.

I will answer questions only from now on, since that was a pointless statement you made because as I said, I changed the definition because I believed it to be an unsound one, so the validity/invalidity is irrelevant.

Except you didn't prove it as unsound, nor did you give any arguments to that effect, thus making your argument by redefinition - as indicated earlier - invalid.

No it can't because other forms of free will and responsibility are trivial truths.

No, they're not.

Ultimate self-determination is impossible since our will is ultimately either determined by unconsciousness and thereby not self-determined, or it isn't determined at all and therefore can't be self-determined at all since determination is a requisite for self-determination.

This is where substance dualism gives you a third option - your will is ultimately determined by your consciousness and is therefore ultimately self-determined.