The idea that we have free will is an irrational idea
The notion that we have free will is, in essence, an idea that willful act can ultimately originate within us.
But that's not possible since we are not eternal beings, but beings who were created at certain point in time. So, nothing can ultimately originate within us.
More closely, every factor needed for us to make a decision is set in the past. Ultimately, all factors needed for any decision made by a human, at any point in time, are set before that human existed.
Now, for those who are atheists, this discussion is of no true importance. It's all from randomness anyway. And by the way, an atheist who thinks he/she has free will is double whammy, as both positions are irrational. Practically no reasonable discussion can be held with such person even if we wanted to.
For those who understand that God exists, but think they have free will, here is the consideration:
There are only two options that are, ultimately, source of decisions we execute.
It is either God's decision, or it is God-induced randomness.
But is God-induced randomness even possible? Can God make a mechanism that produces results which are random to Him, meaning unknown to Him, before they occur? I think that's not even possible, since that means that God has to consciously create a mechanism to produce something that He won't know what it will produce.
Even if that would be possible, though, it would mean that God, for the purposes of this creation, values randomness more than His (conscious) decisions, which seems odd. Like a gambler who rolls the dice for the thrill of it. Not to mention that such view would be opposite of God who revealed Himself through the Bible.
So, the conclusion is that even the act of making a cup of coffee, for example, is a direct decision from God for you to do at specific point in time.
But that's not possible since we are not eternal beings, but beings who were created at certain point in time. So, nothing can ultimately originate within us.
More closely, every factor needed for us to make a decision is set in the past. Ultimately, all factors needed for any decision made by a human, at any point in time, are set before that human existed.
Now, for those who are atheists, this discussion is of no true importance. It's all from randomness anyway. And by the way, an atheist who thinks he/she has free will is double whammy, as both positions are irrational. Practically no reasonable discussion can be held with such person even if we wanted to.
For those who understand that God exists, but think they have free will, here is the consideration:
There are only two options that are, ultimately, source of decisions we execute.
It is either God's decision, or it is God-induced randomness.
But is God-induced randomness even possible? Can God make a mechanism that produces results which are random to Him, meaning unknown to Him, before they occur? I think that's not even possible, since that means that God has to consciously create a mechanism to produce something that He won't know what it will produce.
Even if that would be possible, though, it would mean that God, for the purposes of this creation, values randomness more than His (conscious) decisions, which seems odd. Like a gambler who rolls the dice for the thrill of it. Not to mention that such view would be opposite of God who revealed Himself through the Bible.
So, the conclusion is that even the act of making a cup of coffee, for example, is a direct decision from God for you to do at specific point in time.
Comments (76)
If you say that someone's future decisions are predestined, and so the person doesn't have free will, how can you show this to be true.
If reality could be modelled on a computer, and you run the program, the computer has to model itself, which would lead to infinite reiteration, so that wouldn't be possible.
there is no way to stand outside of reality and check for determinism, by running any amount of powerful computer processes, as you would still have to model yourself and the computer.
I believe that willful acts can only originate within us, and that this is the case whether free will is possible or whether determinism is true.
Quoting Henri
When you combine vinegar and baking soda, one of the things you produce is sodium acetate (NaC2H3O2). The sodium acetate originates in the vinegar/baking soda combination. Neither vinegar nor baking soda are eternal. They were created at a certain point in time. Yet something originated within the combination of the two. The sodium acetate wasn't present prior to combining the baking soda and vinegar we combined.
You, unfortunately, given what you're asserting here, would have to claim that it's not possible for sodium acetate to originate in the vinegar/baking soda combo.
will is free in a way where we can perform any act but constrained by vessel where competition is conercerned. Sometimes freedom isn't good.
That's not the question here. Your decision doesn't have to be predestined in order for you to not have free will. God can make the decision for your decision as time progresses, for example.
The subject is: what is, ultimately, the source of your decisions? And it is impossible for it to be anything that's "within you", since you are created at a certain point in time. Meaning, you came into existence at certain point in time, as opposed to living from eternal past. Which results that you cannot have free will, and is the proof for it.
New mixture originates from the vinegar/soda mixture, on surface level, or on first level. Honey in my tea originates from a jar, but it doesn't mean that honey ultimately originates from a jar.
Reality has to have real quality of being able to produce what we see as something new, before the act of creation. If it didn't have that real quality, "new" thing would not be produced.
When man's sperm meets woman's egg, it can start a process that results in human being. But if sperm meets anything other than woman's egg, nothing will result from it. Why? Because reality is already set in a way to produce new thing in first case, and nothing in second.
So, mixture produces something new, on surface level, but ultimately, everything needed for this "new" thing to exist already has to be set before mixture is applied. Including that everything needed for vinegar and sodium to exist has to be set before they existed.
New mixture originates from vinegar and soda, but it doesn't ultimately originate from vinegar and soda.
Huh? That reads like gobbledygook to me.
Quoting Henri
Again, huh?
You'd have to explain all of this so it makes any sense. Let's start with this since it's already a lot of work you'd have to do.
You agree that sodium acetate is produced in the example above, right? Does that process originate sodium acetate? If not, what's the requirement for "origination" that's not being met?
how do you know if that is the start of a human or not....both sperm and egg will have originated at some point from the same source, way back on Earth when the first cells came into being.
How did those first single cells come into being?
I can't think they came into being other than some very complex cause that would be frowned upon by a lot of materialists.
If the cause was some kind of organise process...then how did that process start, and on and on..
I think it may be possible that all life has an eternal source...and we may or may not have much access to the memories there from, but maybe we do, and it is often expressed in art, and we are in touch with it when/if we have a deep feeling about something.
The situation is not so simple, as Terrapin explains. If you say that human beings were created at a certain point in time, and insist that the originating cause of our existence is not something "within" us, then to justify this you need to show that the originating cause of our existence is definitely something external to us, and not something which is within us.
Quoting Henri
This does not suffice, because it is what is within the sperm and the ovum which are responsible for the existence of the human being, and there is a continuity of DNA through the process. So you haven't shown an external cause of existence yet.
Originating cause of your existence is definitely something external to you. Do you disagree with that? Do you claim that originating cause of your existence is yourself? Then you are the one to prove such claim.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
How did first sperm and ovum come into existence? How does continuity of DNA exist? How does process that allows for DNA to exist exist?
You are mixing "originate" with "ultimately originate" in this discussion. "Ultimately originate" is the root cause.
Vinegar and soda are not the root cause of mixture they produce, because they are created entities themselves, which means that there was a root cause for their creation that existed before they were created.
You are also not seeing, maybe, that reality itself has to have a quality of being able to produce certain element when conditions are met. For example, how did laws of nature come into existence? Those are specific qualities of our reality, which can be measured and which are relatively constant. How did they come into existence and how did the quality of them being constant come into existence?
In order for your mixture to exist, it isn't only that vinegar and soda have to exist. Laws of nature which are specifically set to allow this mixture between vinegar and soda to produce something we label as new also have to exist. And those laws, as a quality of reality, existed before first mixture was produced. Even if those laws somehow changed at certain time, under what process did they change, and how did that process come into existence?
What are the definitions you're using of "originate," "ultimately originate," and "root cause"?
I am ok with what Google returns as first result for "root cause" - an initiating cause of either a condition or a causal chain that leads to an outcome or effect of interest.
That's what "ultimately originating" is also. "Originating" is any other cause within the chain.
Last domino fell because domino before it started to fall and pushed it. This second-to-last domino originated the fall of last domino. But it's not the root cause of last domino's fall. On closer inspection, I pushed the first domino to fall. Yet on even closer inspection, why did I arrange dominoes in a way that they will fall, one after another, when first one is pushed over? What is the truly root cause of last domino's fall?
Okay, so you're just talking about whether x is part of a long causal chain or not.
What would that have to do with being an "eterenal being"?
Say that some phenomena can happen acasually. You'd say that it can only happen acausally via an "eternal being" I suppose. Why would you say that?
No I don't agree with that.
Quoting Henri
No, I wouldn't say that the originating cause of my existence is myself, that would be nonsense. However, it looks far more likely that the originating cause of my existence is something internal to me, rather than something external to me. There is no reason to conclude that if I am not the cause of my own existence, then the cause of my existence must be something external to me, because something internal to me is another possibility. And, the evidence points to the internal.
Quoting Henri
Need I point out, that these processes are internal processes, not external processes?
“But that's not possible since we are not eternal beings, but beings who were created at certain point in time. So, nothing can ultimately originate within us.”
Why not? Surely God didn’t put magic on Van Gogh that he painted all those paintings? It came from him, would you agree with that? Human beings aren’t anything if they’re not creative and imaginative.
Now, whether that comes from free will, is another question. It probably doesn’t most of the time.
I have a little test that irrefutably shows that we do have a free will whose only limits are physics and nature. We cannot choose to fly but can chose anything within our natural limitations.
If anyone really believes they have no free will to choose between alternatives, my test will show you that you do. It is quick and simple.
Come one come all.
Regards
DL
but if say you have a choice between 10 options but you use a random number generator to make the decision, then a series of decisions can look like you have free will, but it was all determined by some computer program that produces pseudo random numbers.
I do believe in freewill though...
but a counter argument to my argument could be that the person always had a choice whether to use the pseudo-random number generator or not.
Theoretically, randomness produces acasual act. Although, reality has to already have a quality which allows randomness to occur. Even randomness is limited by laws of nature/reality above it, which allow it to happen or not, at certain rate. Maybe, theoretically, that kind of quality of reality can itself come into existence acasually, randomly. But that doesn't solve the problem. There is no uber law of nature that says: In any given possible reality, randomness must occur.
Anyway, that's sidetracking from the subject. The subject is human being, who is not the first mover in a reality, who is not the first cause in a reality, but is created somewhere on a timescale. As such, we cannot have free will, although we do have a will.
Even if some of decisions you execute could come acasually, which I don't believe is true, just because decision is helped by randomness doesn't make it "free will". Quite the opposite.
What would you say is required other than (a) will, and (b) a lack of determinism in conjunction with will?
Isn't "will" simply the term for "I'm choosing a number," "I'm intending to do x," etc.? And if that phenomena, when it occurs, isn't of you, what is it of?
Aside from contradiction in the two statements, as I see it, what is "something internal to you" that is originating cause, the root cause, of your existence? DNA? Your DNA didn't exist until it was set by a process external to you. Just because your DNA is very similar to the DNA of your parents, you are not your parents and there was no you until you were conceived by them, which is a process external from you, since you didn't even exist at the initiation of conception. Or is it something else?
Can you rephrase the question a bit? What is required for what?
What is required for free will.
If free will is a willful act of a conscious being which ultimately originates within that being, then a being has to be eternal, without being created at certain point in time, in order to have free will. Maybe to add, if that's not a given, that such being must not be subjected to randomness.
On the other hand, if a being is created, either by another being as a root cause, God, or through random act, such being doesn't have free will.
It's of God. Or, theoretically, it's from randomness, which makes the subject inconsequential. You can label randomness produced through your mind as "yours" or not, but it doesn't matter, as I see it. This discussion matters in relation to God. Otherwise, it's a time waste.
A problem with this answer is that earlier, when I wrote this:
Quoting Terrapin Station
You didn't do the "Why would you say that" part. I tried just ignoring that you bypassed it, but since you're bringing it up again, we need to figure out why this would be the case.
So it's God's thought, not your own?
It is not God's thought. It is God's command for what your thought as certain point in time is to be.
The phenomenon in question is the thought, "I intend to do x" for example. So that's your thought?
God gives command that at certain point in time, in certain situation, you have a thought "I intend to do x." And then you do have such thought. In a way, you are executing God's command.
Right, so it's your thought.
Who owns the code in a piece of software? Software or programmer?
"Your thought" is simply another way of saying "it occurs of (or we could say 'in') you."
Whether anyone is making a choice is irrelevant to what I was responding to as well as my response.
That's fine. A thought given to you without an option to deny it, but which you can then call yours, doesn't make you have free will.
Re the post in question, it was asking, and I was answering, whether there even is such a thing as will and whether it's our will. That bit wasn't about the issue of whether it's free.
I don't understand why you would call this process "external from you". Weren't you internal to your mother, in her womb? That was you in there, in that act of conception, and all those processes going on, which you say, "set' your DNA, were internal to you. When these processes are internal like that, it doesn't make sense to refer to them as "external from you".
Why do you think that it's more rational to think of the cause of your existence as something external to you, than to think of it as something internal to you? Consider that the self, the "being", is a very specific spatial-temporal perspective, and internal/external are spatial terms. It does not make sense to restrict "cause" to necessarily external, when causes could equally be internal. And, if you can separate an external cause, as distinct from the thing caused, why not also separate the internal cause as distinct from the thing caused?
Quoting Henri
This is a mistaken premise because it assume that a "cause" must be external to a being. That it is mistaken is evident from Newton's first law, inertia. Newton takes inertia for granted, as if there is no cause of it. However, once you accept the reality that mass is the cause of inertia, then mass is an internal cause, the cause of a body's inertia. And if you accept the reality of an internal cause, then the premise stated here is false.
There you go buddy. I add a bit more logic and reason to my test but it is as KIS as yours.
Regards
DL
Choose is the operative word. The future can see what you chose. It cannot see why you decided to chose, unless it can follow your reasoning right to birth.
Regards
DL
Your thinking is sound, but better to ask our friend who used numbers for his test, and let him answer for it.
My test does not have numbers and it has the subject actually give up his free will to do my bidding.
His test, to me, has one stage while mine has two and that makes a difference.
Regards
DL
You know how babies are made. There is a specific action man does to a woman, before sperm even comes into contact with the egg. That action is part of the process of making you, and you are at that time non-existent.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It doesn't assume, generally, that cause must be external. If a being is eternal, cause is internal, within that being. If you are created in time, then the cause is always external, even if the cause is, theoretically, randomness. Clearer way to look at it is not as external but as prior in time. External here means an element of reality which existed prior to creation of x, including (theoretical) quality within reality to produce randomness.
Yes, now what is the proper "cause" of existence of that baby? Is it the internal activity which happens within the sperm and the egg, or is it the external activity which happens between the man and the woman. Notice that the activity between the man and the woman doesn't necessarily produce a baby.
Quoting Henri
This is incorrect. If a being is eternal, then it does not have a cause. So it is contradictory to say that an eternal being has an internal cause.
Neither does activity between the sperm and the egg. Everything what man does and what sperm "does" and what woman does and what egg "does" is part of causal chain. And not one of those is the root cause, which is prior to man, and woman, and sperm, and egg.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I was talking about an action of eternal being, not the cause of eternal being. So we can say, in keeping the theme of root cause, that the root cause of an action of eternal being is eternal being, and not something prior to eternal being. If one wants to say that there is actually no root cause, or no cause, of an action of eternal being, that's ok too. Eternal being is different category of being than us, so some translation of terms is necessary one way or the other.
Perhaps the best way of thinking about free will is to put it on a spectrum, in survival terms. Let's use the Rule of Three.
Without air you can survive for 3 minutes.
Without shelter (hot or cold weather) you can survive for 3 hours.
Without water you can survive for 3 days.
Without food you can survive for 3 weeks.
In practical terms you can do whatever you want within those time frames at the end it does not matter whether god or chaos or both or neither are true... You die.
Thus free will exists within certain boundaries. It can wax and wane but ultimately all possibilities come to an end at the moment of death.
Well that's not the case, a lot of things are unrelated and some are incidental. We are looking for a causal chain for the existence of the baby, examining to determine whether it is internal or external. We follow the sperm and the egg, and see where they come from. Exactly what the man and woman are doing, is incidental, so long as the egg and sperm are brought together and supported under the right conditions. I agree that external factors play an important role as causal factors, what we are arguing though is your denial of internal causes.
Quoting Henri
I don't follow you. Before you seemed to be talking about a cause of eternal being, which I explained is contradictory. Now you are talking about "an action of eternal being". But it's not clear to me what you mean by this. First, this requires the assumption of "eternal being". I believe that "eternal being" refers to something which never ever changes in time. If it changed, it would become other than what it was, and therefore be a different being. So it's arguably the case that eternal being cannot change and therefore it is also contradictory to talk about an action of eternal being. So I am really not following what you mean by "an action of eternal being".
The person who came to be your grandfather might have eaten some bad shrimp and fell out of mood for lovemaking that day. As a result, it happened a couple days after, and because of that, it was not your father who was conceived but a baby girl. And you never existed.
If God doesn't make your life and actions, then your life is made and acted, ultimately, by randomness. Isn't that something to be sceptical about?
The main claim of the OP is that human cannot have free will, even without considering existence of God. So, main claim doesn't require your belief. You didn't answer the question, though.
What if these two objects are considered as constituting a single object? Doesn't the relation of determination disappear?
Suppose that a process we have no understanding of, i.e. an oracle, produced a sequence of a hundred numbers that we do not recognise as following a mathematical law. In which case we might identify the sequence with the oracle's actions. For to say "the oracle determined the sequence" wouldn't say anything over and above the fact that it outputted the sequence. We could have equally said that the oracle performed a miracle. In other words, it would make no sense to say at this point in time that the sequence of numbers that the oracle produced was either random or non-random.
Suppose that we later recognised the sequence as being the Fibonacci sequence. Then the sentence "The Oracle determined the first 100 numbers " has a sense it previously did not have. For in this case we are indicating that we are interpreting the oracle's outputs using at least one additional external process, such as a calculator, that is independent of the oracle's actions and that we might externally appeal to if predicting the oracle's future actions. In which case we might then say that our calculator determines the oracle's actions, or equivalently, that the numbers the oracle produced are non-random.
But what if we considered the calculator and oracle as constituting a single object? Does it now make sense to say that the joint outputs of the calculator and oracle is either random or non-random? The answer is yes, assuming we live in a culture of mathematics that interprets this joint system using external criteria for 'checking' the answer.
But what if we considered all of that together with the oracle? Now the answer is no. For the concepts of determination and randomness are purely representational concepts that are relational and have no universal applicability.
Not so,@Henri. All though I don't completely agree with 'Christian' views, I have extensively studied their religion, and have come to this conclusion concerning it. Their God already knows what choice they are going to make, but the choice is theirs's to make. Let's say you ask me if I prefer yellow over orange, but you already know which one I'm going to pick. I consider the colors and say orange, and you already knew I was going to say that. That doesn't mean you chose for me, but you already knew.
If you don't understand I can explain this further.
Obviously there isn't "free-will", any more than a Roomba has free-will. What you choose is determined by your (hereditary or acquired) preferences, and your surroundings. "Your choices" are thereby made for you, and your role is merely to make a good guess about which option best accords with those preferences and circumstances.
Not all Theists believe that God created this physical universe. For example, since medieval times or before, the Gnostics haven't believed that.
And the notion of creation is anthropmorphic.
Michael Ossipoff
13 W
1859 UTC
Are they? Are you telling me that if I am standing next to a tree, that tree choses what I do? Or possibly what I think? Does a rock have the brain capacity to influence me as well?
No. But your preferences, and your circumstances in the context of your preferences, determine your choices.
Your circumstances don't have or need brain-capacity, to determine "your choices" for you.
Like all animals, you're a biologically-originated purposefully-responsive device. ...a purposefully-responsive device like a Roomba, a refrigerator lightswitch, a thermostat, or a mousetrap. You don't have any more free-will than they do.
Your job is guessing what courses of action best accord with your preferences and circumstances. ...circumstances, and hereditary built in or acquired preferences, that determine your choices for you.
Michael Ossipoff
13 W
1950 UTC
You are wrong. I can prove it in this single comment. I have many, solid preferences, yes. But I am also very spontaneous. One day, even though no one in my family likes shrimp, and neither do I, I bought a kebab at the market. Now, beside this vendor was a shop that had my favourite snack, and for an amazing price. Yet I chose the shrimp, because I could. Explain this to me. Or not, because you might be so struck be the thought of "OMG I'm Wrong!" that you can't answer.
Easy. You are a person who for whatever reason, is convinced that free will exists. Therefor, just like most of us, you bend the evidence to fit your perspective. Since you are so convinced of "free will" you will occasionally make an abnormal decision just to prove to yourself that you have free will. With enough information, everything would be predictable (I am not sure I am entirely convinced of this, but enough so, for me to doubt free will).
That being said, I also disagree with much of the OP.
This does and doesn't make sense. Sure, you can predict with enough information, just as a God would know what I'm about to choose because he would know me well enough. But just because you can predict, doesn't mean I didn't choose.
It just means that you were a malfunctioning purposefully-responsive device.
For some reason known only to you, the desire (purpose) to say that you have free-will was more important, predominated over, your preference for your favorite snack. So you bought shrimp in order to prove that you have free-will.
Governed by your philosophical goal/purpose, in preference to your favorite snack, you followed your stronger purpose/preference, by buying something that you like less. Malfunction.
Of course nutritional variety is desirable, and we surely have an instinct for nutritional variety that can be subconscious "I feel like ______ today.", or "I think I'll get ________ today".
But, in your case, you bought the shrimp because of a philosophical goal that was more important--the goal of proving (or so you believed) that you have free-will, by buying something that you like less.
Michael Ossipoff
Material causality tells us that objects and forces have inherent, stable and thus calculable attributes. This allows for a procedure of prediction if we know initial conditions of environment and the design of the purposive device. Nothing new is supposedly being created when we predict the future history of the device, just a schematic algorithm being run through its paces. This is the way we have learned to think about human beings as material entities. We have Galileo and Descartes to thank for our basic notion of objective causation.
This kind of causation doesnt really begin to be challenged till Hegel's dialectic, wherein attributes of objects no longer are assumed to be ascertainable outside of their relation not only to other objects in a space, but in relation to a total dialectical history.
And if people disagree whatever you wrote after this is probably quite redundant. The question is can you see another possible perspective or use of the term “free will” that is reasonable to use yet in opposition to your own? If not look harder.
Things interact, and have properties related to those interactions. That doesn't sound like something new. Density and albedo are determined by interactions, for example.
What I said about us as purposefully-respsonsive devices is nothing new either. It's what was correctly taught to us in pre-secondary school (In the U.S., pre-secondary school was previously called "junior-high school", and now "middle-school").
Some things (like that) that they taught us then were right.
Some things (like Materialism) that they taught us were unsupported and not well-defined. ...but nonetheless remarkably tightly held-onto by Western philosophers.
Michael Ossipoff
It doesn't sound like something new if you are understanding it via an old metaphysics. In order to understand which metaphysics is informing your view of something like a purposefully-responsive device we would need to ask what a 'thing' is.
"What I said about us as purposefully-respsonsive devices is nothing new either."
I'm assuming not. It probably dates aback aboot 200 years to at least Kant.
Lets say instead of thing as physical object we are talking about thing as memory. Some still believe that memory is organized as a stored trailing spectrum of pasts, which we are able to search through. What we retrieve as a particular memory can then be compared with a present meaning.
When we then say that the present is determined by our past, we mean that the past as encoded on memory sits there, acting as a constraint on the present.
A recent, alternative view of memory is that it doesn't sit there as a stored meaning, but only exists as a reinterpretation of the past when it functions as a constraint upon our present. In other words, our remembvered past is changed by our present and there is no veridical memory of the past to locate.
What does this account mean for the functioning of cognition as a purposefully driven device?
It changes the meaning of determinism as regards the effect of our remembered past on our present functioning. If our past only exists as already changed by our present, then it is no longer a constraint in the way the first account understands it to be. The cognitive device is at every moment redefining the meaning of its past such that its purpose is also at every moment subtly being transformed
.
Thus, in this model, the past is being determined by the future as much as the future is determined by the past
It happens that I have a little test that show irrefutably that we do have a free will.
If you or Henri would like to take it, I am here for you.
Regards
DL
That being said assuming my christian values are true i do believe God could forget the cosmic chess game that is reality (in terms of game piece combinations and game rules and tactics) and purposely allow him the possibility to lose some cosmic chess matches. I would hope he wouldn't lose any cosmic chess matches that would cause someone to go to hell.
Your thinking is right but so shallow that you do not see your errors in thinking.
You did not take my little irrefutable test that would prove you wrong.
Care to?
Regards
DL
Thats what i said, right wrong or indifferent i associate predestination with a lack of free will and i thought i would be understood.
Who is the ghost in the machine?
Regards
DL
1. If free will exists, there is willful act that can ultimately originate within us.
2. If we are not eternal beings, there is nothing can ultimately originate within us.
3. Determinism is true.
4. The idea that we have free will is an irrational idea.
For 2, it equals if there is something that can ultimately originate within us, we are eternal beings. And what you want to argue is that:
1. If there is something that can ultimately originate within us, we are eternal beings.
2. We are not eternal beings.
3. There is nothing that can ultimately originate with us.
If what you are saying is that free will entails eternality, it seems that you presuppose determinism when you think this way since you are assigning an outcome as the property that we can’t have to rule out the existence of free will. For 3, it’s not necessarily true since free will can be compatible with determinism. An easy way to question determinism is that when someone punches your face, you should not blame him because he is not the ultimate source of his actions or he does not have the ability to do otherwise. Free will, the ability to do otherwise, is necessary for moral responsibility.
Quoting Henri
Follow your line of determinism, the ultimate source is God. God determines all we did, do, and will do or God allow randomness of human actions. Given the first, one can say the world with free will agent is better than a world with all human machines controlled by God. If God only creates the world in line of determinism, one can create a world better than God by allowing free will. Therefore, in other for God to be omnipotent, he should have created a world with free will agent.
In conclusion, determinism is not necessarily true when there is alternative like compatibilism which allows free will and hence moral responsibility. If determinism is true, one can create a better world with creatures who can act with free will. Hence, the idea that we have free will is not that irrational as you think it is.
I'm not quite sure how sound this argument is so please let me know if it needs work, but I believe randomness is unpredictability but that doesn't mean that I don't know what the outcome is. If I put two numbers (1 and 2) into a random number generator that will randomly spit out the numbers that got put into it, isn't it safe to say that I know im either going to get 1 or 2? I think that even though this is random and i don't know which number ill get its safe to say that i know its either going to be one or the other.
Another way to look at it; could it be possible that we have options and free will to choose between any number of choices and god still is aware of what the outcome is? If I present a child with a banana split hot fudge sundae covered in sprinkles and also present to them a bowl of steamed radishes and mushrooms i think it's fair to say that i know which bowl the child is going to choose even though the child has the free will and choice to choose either. Couldn't the God and human relationship work in this same way? We are presented with any number of options and even though we have the freewill to choose any, God can know which one we choose just like how we know which bowl the child is going to choose.