Do you believe in free will?

[Flobee]

From my standpoint anyway, I explain it as this: I am a thinking creature. I have thoughts. I have power over myself and my thoughts, and therefore my actions and decisions; free will as you call it.

May I ask how you explain free will from a deist standpoint?

I would explain it similar to how you've explained. We are separate from our thoughts and do have power over them to be able to discern them and make decisions between them but in order for us to do that "we" or "I" would have to be distinct from my thoughts, outside of them so to speak, this is what I would describe as our soul. In naturalism however there really isn't an "I" or a "me" because we are nothing more then the chemicals of our bodies, we are only a brain. So we would think in terms of saying things like "hey use your brain," but that implies that we are distinct from our brain.
The argument essentially is that without the belief in a soul or immaterial reality we cannot explain free will as the posters above me have agreed on as well as the major atheists I have listed because we are nothing more then our matter or we are the matter and so "we" don't govern ourselves because there is no self, there is merely matter governed by predetermined physical laws.

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No naturalist ever said that these phenomenon weren't real.

To say that free will and consciousness are illusions seems to be saying that they are not real. To say that nothing is truly evil or that there is no absolute objective morality is to say that morality is not real. Those are all positions of major atheists.

So you have an argument for the existence of free will, or are you just going to keep committing the bare-assertion fallacy?

Yes we are created with a body and a soul, a self distinct from simply the matter of our bodies which makes us unique from plants or animals and gives us the ability to freely choose things apart from being governed totally by physical laws and allows us to know the moral law from our conscience. All these things seem to be basic realities experienced by all human beings at all times, every one knows they can choose, knows they are conscious, knows that there truly is right and wrong, these are properties of our soul.