Ah, I was under the impression that the uncertainty principle was established due to lack of explaination for the seemingly random movements, and not established due to the knowledge that nothing can possibly ever explain the movements.

Would you agree?

That doesn't seem to be a very accurate understanding of the Uncertainty Principle.

From here:

Free will might be more accurately phrased freedom to make decisions. That's not as catchy, though.

What you're talking about is a common theological subject, the "Problem of Evil." I believe it's pretty simple. God desired to expand the love that existed within the trinity - to have a family, if you will. Love needs to be reciprocal, and it can't be reciprocated if it isn't a choice. Therefore we had to be capable of choosing not to love God, therefore we had to be imperfect.

Some see this as cruel, permitting us to be capable of injustice. I see it as God giving me a legitimate chance to love him. A relatively short mortal life of discomforts is a small price in view of eternity.

How can u be an atheist?

Atheism is the belief that there is no God.

In order to know this for a fact you would have to know everything.

Every bit of knowledge in the universe.

No one can possibly learn, and retain all of this knowledge, no one ever has.

So i ask you again,     How can you be an atheist?

So by that argument, you must believe in all the Gods and myths ever thought of that you can't actually disprove...

And of course the famous china teapot orbiting the nearest star...

There are an infinite number of vaguely possible things that might exist, but we have no way of disproving, so this is a very stupid argument

Its simple, we don't know 100% that there is not something that we would see as a God, we just believe that it makes no sense to believe in something for which we see no evidence. The further away the idea is from things we can experience and observe and detect, like the Earth, horses, clouds, electricity, the emotions of love and happiness, etc, etc, the more unambiguous and strong evidence we would need.

It isn't about being able to 100% prove God doesn't exist, its about you being able to give us evidence that justifies even a few percent likelihood that he does...

UR DUM

My best argument against freewill is the same as my best argument against God.  I've never heard either defined coherently enough to attempt proof.  Therefore, the default position is non-existence.

'Good' and 'Evil' are not dependent on 'Free will' to be meaningful.

We only need to be able to recognise whether an action leads to great suffering or avoids it, or better, leads to entirely positive feelings such as happiness.

Reward and punishment, to encourage the good and discourage evil, also does not depend on whether 'free will' is a valid concept. In fact, 'deterministic' ideas explicitly do strongly justify the application of reward and punishment.

The concept of 'free will' only becomes even potentially relevant if we wish to apply blame, or consider motivations for actions.

Introducing the idea of a God just introduces total uncertainty into everything, since we have no way of actually knowing what the ultimate nature or motives of such a being would be, how it really 'wants' us to behave, or why. What purports to be the 'word of God' could well be a subtle exercise in confusing and misleading us for unfathomable motives. We would literally have no way to distinguish the intentions, altho the many contradictions, confusions, and general inconsistencies in the Bible do point toward a 'prankster' God, if anything, playing with us for its own mysterious purposes.

If a God is considered to define Good and Evil, in terms of obedience or not to his will, we effectively have 'Might makes Right', rather than anything truly resembling morality/ethics.

No, that's not a good argument at all.  You are completely free to choose to fly.  Whether or not you have the capability to translate your choice into action is another matter altogether.  Will is not about the ability to perform but, rather, about the ability to choose.

free will does not entitle humans to do whatever they want to.  free will gives us the choice to decide what we want to do, but only if other options are available.  those options cannot simply be "imagined" but they have to actually be possible.  we can't fly because of gravity and evolution, not because god had some glitches in the idea of free will

Ok, I will start this with the fact that I am somewhat ignorant of determinism in regards to how decisions are made etc. If I understand it correctly it functionally says that while I make decisions my schemas for doing so, my internal balancing scales, are already established due to previous actions and experiences, IE my decisions I make are based on what happened to me already/what I have already learned and experienced. While I agree with this concept, I don't fully see how it would negate free will.

This is such a bad argument, though. Concepts like consciousness and intelligence are similarly difficult to pin down and yet we accept that they describe something valid. I wouldn't attempt to claim that there is a best or even good argument against the existence of a god either, just a rational justification for not assuming ones existence. For this I apply Occam's razor. An omnipotent entity could do literally anything, including create a universe with no rational trace of its existence within it. Likewise an omnipotent being could easily be exempt from being consistent within this universe and it's consistency, or at least observed consistency within the universe which serves as the basis for logic. But the point is that all we ever observe in this universe is consistency.  From the position of recognizing ourselves as fallible it becomes prudent to rely on objective sources of information (preferably verifiable ones) to determine what is true.  This means going by what we observe and not assuming things we never observe.  Since we always observe the universe being consistent its reasonable to assume the universe is consistent so logic is justifiable.  Complexity is clearly apparent within the universe but there is no evidence that complexity requires intelligence (and every reasons to believe undirected processes are better able to generate complexity).  As a result there's no reason to assume that an intelligent entity is necessary to explain our observed universe.  There is likewise no direct line of evidence that such an entity exists, like him coming down here and hanging out with us on a regular basis and essentially making his existence known to us in an undeniable way Christians would claim he has done this I won't go into my objections to that here).  So lacking direct evidence that the existence of a God is an axiom, and lacking a justification why making the assumption that such an entity exists is necessary for purely explanatory purposes there's no reason to include the assumption in the axiomatic systm from which I derive my understanding of existence.

Free Will, however, as a concept doesn't fail this test.  It has value as an explanatory concept.  It is lacking in a well developed definition, this is true.  However what are the natural consequences of a universe in which all of our decisions are predetermined?  What does such an assumption offer us that is of any value?  To argue for strict determinism is to argue against accountability.  How can we actually be accountable for our choices if it isn't possible we could have chosen differently?  There is certainly a role that randomness plays in everything, and I would argue that this is especially true of consciousness.  It isn't even necessarily constrained to random firing of synapses.  There also seems to be (at least apparently from other posts I read as I was scanning this thread) confusion about certain other concepts.  For instance there was, especially in the beginning a lot of asserting that if free will is constrained it isn't free.  This was followed by the assumption that if free will is constrained and not free we should assume determinism.  This fails because it ignores the possibility of varying degrees of freedom.  We see this in die rolls.  The outcomes are random but very strictly constrained.  You will never roll a 7 on a 6 sided die, for instance.  So the objection that having free will doesn't mean we should be able to fly is perfectly reasonable.  We can easily be free to make decisions within the constraints of what is possible without having to reject free will and assume determinism.  We can't fly because it is not within the range of what is possible for us.  It's not an option.  We still have copious other options how do you prove that we aren't free to decide any one of them?  How do you prove that the decision we ultimately make was predetermined?

In short I reject the existence of a god because it is neither directly proven nor adds anything useful to my axiomatic system for understanding existence.  I have to reject the assumption that Free Will doesn't exist because it can neither be directly proven nor does it add anything useful to my axiomatic system for understanding existence.  Conversely there is the fact that the assumption that there is free will as it is intuitively understood (by m at least) does add useful explanatory tools to my understanding of the universe.  For instance I can use it to understand why people subject to similar circumstances as myself differ so dramatically in the decisions they make when presented with similar options to myself.  I can also use it to explain why people who receive a similar education to myself would have a different understanding about what was learned than myself.  Determinism, as an omnipotent entity, has the ability to concisely explain anything, of course.  "It's the way it is because it's pre-determined" (or it's the way it is because an all powerful entity made it that way!).  The explanation adds nothing useful, though, and it isn't falsifiable, so it faces the same shortcomings.

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 everyone here should read about quantum mechanical indeterminacy, heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the particle-in-a-box theory, and wave-particle duality. that should clear things up for whichever side you're on.