Quote Originally Posted by sport_122
We will have to disagree on the faith issue then. But i can't see it in another way. Faith itself is not always a religious faith. It can just simply be believing. Even you have demonstrated that you have faith (which I think proves the existence of God as well, but that is another conversation)

So, the way I look at it is that when talking about free will you have to look at the entire scope of choice, ordination, and rationale. The decision to go out and shoot someone would not be based on YOU choosing to do so without being grounded in everything about you. What you know, how you were raised, what you have been taught. It would be a decision based off of all of your emotions and all the things that are inside you that say "I AM going to shoot someone".

If your choices are limited to what you have experienced this disproves the concept of free will simply because there are limitations which remove the ability of freedom. If your will can be tamed by something then it was never free to begin with. I am defining free will as the ability to make choices apart from what has been revealed to you. So if you can only make choices based off of what you know, or experience, then you are limited in the choices that you can make and your will cannot be free. If our wills were free I wouldn't own a car because I would fly, but I am limited to the choices I can make because of what has been presented to me as our reality. This why I believe logic, rationale, and revelation are eternal and (I believe) from God.

So in closing, I guess I think that everything you do is subject to what has been revealed to you and what has been revealed to you is a cornucopia of history, personality, experience, and knowledge of the ages. That knowledge has its origins somewhere and echos through time to dictate what you can do. I also think that as soon as law (I can only speak of an eternal universal law) enters the picture the idea of freedom goes away because your parameters are now controlled as that law will echo into what becomes your experience.
yes faith isn't limited to religious faith, and I do have faith, in humans, to continue to grow, mature, and advance mentally, physically, spiritually, and technologically.

I do not feel that the choices one can make are limited to ones experience/upbringing, etc....of course the way a person was raised and his experience has a great deal with what kind of person he'll be, how he'll act, and the choices he'll make, all of us human have it in us to do things, unexpected, to go off on a tangent, and to make unusual choices. And nothing completely governs why we do the things we do, human are extremely illogical beings and we like to think the opposite.

Saying that "If our wills were free I wouldn't own a car because I would fly, but I am limited to the choices I can make because of what has been presented to me as our reality." is not true. Our wills are argueably free, but just because you don't want to own a car doesn't mean you should be able to fly, or ignore the laws of physics....No matter what our universe has rules, rules to which everything follows, and certain rules can be bent, but humans can't fly, atleast not yet....Our wills are free but this being the case doesn't mean we can do the impossible. Logic and rationale are relative. It all depends on who the person/thing is....and I don't understand what you mean by them being eternal?

The actions we perform are based on our experiences, culture, how we were raised, history, and etc....but we still have the choice to do whatever we want, but can obviously only do what the world and the laws of the universe let us do. There are such things as gravity, which you could say is a universal law/constant, and this is something that cannot be ignored simply because we want to. But if I want to go shoot someone, I can, or atleast try....