Freedom

This question is about free will: When I write this sentence I am not quite sure what I will think of to write next. Every word just seems to pop up into my head just a fraction of a second before I write it. It seems that I do not control what it is that I will write. It seems however that it is possible to not write something that pops into my head - but, then again, that counter-urge not to write a word also seems to just pop into my head. If performing any kind of action is like writing, can I be said to have a free will?

It sounds as though you take the model of a free and controlled action to be one over which you have deliberated like a judge at a tribunal. This is a bit surpising, because some have taken the sort of spontaneous, apparently unforseen actions you describe to be indeed more paradigmatically "free"--free from the allegedly constraining influence of prior reasons and thinking. Now, an incompatibilist thinks that any actions caused by past events cannot be free--not even the more spontaneous ones, for these are simply caused by something other than conscious deliberation. However, a compatibilist thinks that actions caused in the right way are free---that what it is for an action to be done freely, for you to be in control of it, is for it to be caused in a certain way by aspects of you (for instance, by your reasons, your thinking, and your deciding). So your question should really be directed to the compatibilist: a lot of actions seem quite unpremeditated, and to that extent do not...

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My question is about the relationship between God, determinism and ethics. In my opinion if there is no God, then it looks like people do not have any non-physical "soul". I think most people would agree with this, partly because people usually reject God in favour of a naturalistic worldview in which the soul similarly has no place. But if people do not have any "soul" then that must mean that that people do not have free will, because they are entirely physical. But if people do not have free will then I don't understand how any ethics could exist, because ethics surely requires that people can choose. So, if this is correct, then if you want to argue for some kind of ethics, then you have to accept the existence of God. But there is clearly an endless amount of Philosophers who don't believe in God and do argue for some kind of ethics, such as David Hume or Bertrand Russell. But how can they do this? What I think you will say is that maybe ethics can exist even without free will. But surely this...

Most of your question is an excellent formulation of a major philosophical issue: whether minds, if they are merely parts of the general causal order, can possibly have the sort of authorship of their actions that would be required to hold them responsible---how can right and wrong get a foothold if we're just machines? Some say there's no problem here; others are more concerned. Rather than attempt a paltry paragraph on current views about this, let me point you to Timothy O'Connor's article in the Stanford Encyclopedia. One thing I will say, though, is that it is not clear that the worry would be lessened if it turned out that our minds were immaterial "souls". Souls would have to work somehow or other---a full ("God's-eye") understanding of their workings would presumably involve an inventory of the various states, structures, and processes that souls host, together with the "supernatural laws" that describe how these change over time. These laws might be deterministic or indeterministic,...