Free will?
    Philosophy debates may different things, one being off the topic of free will: Do we have it? There are many different ways of taking the question and defining what free will is. Almost every historical philosopher had some response to this, ranging from 100% free will, everything is your choice, to nothing being chosen and all pre-determined. The best answer to this question depends entirely on how things are defined.
    Many religious organizations believed in the concept of fate, in which God has determined what everyone will do. For example, Gaarder says that: “St. Augustine’s point was that no man deserves God’s redemption… It is preordained. We are entirely at his will. (170)” The biggest distinction between fate and something similar, say, determinism, is that another, outside, omnipotent being choosing it to happen and in a sense give him free will to take ours away. And thus the biggest problem I have with it is the requirement of a higher power. In this world view what you do and where you go is already determined. So when free will is defined by something God or another power does not give you, you won’t have it. Side note on destiny: It is very similar to fate, however, the biggest distinction is that destiny only predicts larger events of the future, not how you get there.
    Interestingly enough, religions also may go the route of more total free will, where one’s actions will be judged. In this, God or whatever being grants free will to his subjects as part of the universe. In the third volume of Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers he wrote that: "the greatest good ... which can be done for a being, greater than anything else that one can do for it, is to be truly free." He said this because he thought it was the reason God would give true freedom over God. This is in very stark contrast of fate which even the same religion may practice. In the case of free will, it is defined here as simply something a higher power gave which means it requires a belief in said power, which I take issue with.
    Defining free will as something that means we can change at a moments notice, with no direct reasoning behind, you can get determinism: where everything is based on what came before, or as some may call it, cause and effect with a softer form of determinism. Peter van Inwagen, an incompatibilist (hard determinism where no free will can exist) states that:
    1. The moral judgment that you shouldn't have done X implies that you should have done something else instead
    2. That you should have done something else instead implies that there was something else for you to do
    3. That there was something else for you to do implies that you could have done something else
    4. That you could have done something else implies that you have free will
    5. If you don't have free will to have done other than X we cannot make the moral judgment that you shouldn't have done X (van Inwagen)
The problem with such a hard-line stance is that with the first point is that having a choice or not does not change what you did. This stance also has the flaw of it absolving morality from everything and everyone, as if we have no free will we cannot judge someone for doing something they always would have done.
    Similar to determinism is compatibilism, where determinism and free will can co-exist defining free will as something slightly more nebulous allowing for imaginary alternatives. In Arthur Schopenhauer’s “On the freedom of the will” he states that: "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills. (Schopenhauer)" This means that the base urge of man is not controllable, but how he translates that to action is, and thus we have free will. Again this goes against incompatibilism’s want for free will to be genuine with genuine alternatives and not just something that could have happened.
     All this is great, all have some good points. The closest one I subscribe to would be hard determinism. From a purely scientific point of view, if you knew everything about the entire universe, location of every fundamental particle, their speed, their everything, and you also had something capable of taking all that information and using the laws of this universe, you could predict everything. And in that sense, everything is predetermined. Except to have that is impossible, so we don’t know our future, or someone else knows ours, or anyone knows anyones. This lack of knowledge of the future gives us the illusion that we choose because I define free will as thinking you can do what you want to do in our physically restrained world. With that definition, we do have free will.
Jostein Gaarder. Sophie’s World. H. Aschehoug & Co. 1994
Kierkegaard, Søren. (1848) Journals and Papers, vol. III. Reprinted in Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1967–78.
Schopenhauer, Arthur (1945). "On the Freedom of the Will". The Philosophy of American History : The Historical Field Theory. Translated by Morris Zucker. p. 531.
van Inwagen, Peter (2009). The Powers of Rational Beings: Freedom of the Will. Oxford.