The Argument from Free Will
1. Having free will means having the freedom to choose our actions, rather than their being determined by some prior cause.
2. If we don't have free will, then we are not agents, for then we are not really acting, but rather we're being acted upon. (That's why we don't punish people for involuntary actions—such as a teller who hands money to a bank robber at gunpoint, or a driver who injures a pedestrian after a defective tire blows out.)
3. To be a moral agent means to be held morally responsible for what one does.
4. If we can't be held morally responsible for anything we do then the very idea of morality is meaningless.
5. Morality is not meaningless.
6. We have free will (from 2- 5).
7. We, as moral agents, are not subject to the laws of nature, in particular, the neural events in a genetically and environmentally determined brain (from 1 and 6).
8. Only a being who is apart from the laws of nature and partakes of the moral sphere could explain our being moral agents (from 7).
9. Only God is a being who is apart from the laws of nature and partakes of the moral sphere.
10. Only God can explain our moral agency (from 8 & 9).
11. God exists.
FLAW 1: This argument, in order to lead to God, must ignore the paradoxical Fork of Free Will. Either my actions are predictable (from my genes, my upbringing, my brain state, my current situation, and so on), or they are not. If they are predictable, then there is no reason to deny that they are caused, and we would not have free will. So they must be unpredictable, in other words, random. But if our behavior is random, then in what sense can it be attributable to us at all? If it really is a random event when I give the infirm man my seat in the subway, then in what sense is it me to whom this good deed should be attributed? If the action isn't caused by my psychological states, which are themselves caused by other states, then in one way is it really my action? And what good would it do to insist on moral responsibility, if our choices are random, and cannot be predicted from prior events (such as growing up in a society that holds people responsible)? This leads us back to the conclusion that we, as moral agents must be parts of the natural world-- the very negation of 7.
FLAW 2: Premise 10 is an example of the Fallacy of Using One Mystery to Pseudo-Explain Another. It expresses, rather than dispels, the confusion we feel when faced with the Fork of Free Will. The paradox has not been clarified in the least by introducing God into the analysis.
Let's talk about boobs instead.
