Being against a specific direction of radical change does not make you in favor of the status quo (especially when that change is largely just going faster further in the direction we've already been slowly drifting), and Hillary is not the only alternative vote to Trump.
Just want to say I really appreciate the civil tone of your replies and I'm sorry I started off my first post to you so harshly, it's been a tough couple weeks for me lately.
Only if by "such a thing" you mean incompatibilism, not just free will.
There are lots and lots of people who believe free will exists and can be (or even has to be) deterministic. They're called compatibilists and for centuries until very recently they were the dominant school of philosophy (and are still fighting a strong fight against a recent insurgence of incompatibilism).
Look up Harry Frankfurt and Susan Wolf for some notable contemporary examples.
It's a closely related phenomenon, but it's not self-awareness, it's self-control, which is the same thing as free will: you determine what you are going to do.
I was a major editor on the free will and determinism articles on Wikipedia a while back, and there was a problem editor who trashed a lot of those things and drove away a lot of other editors (including myself) and left things in a really craptastic state, so in this case I wouldn't rely too much on Wikipedia.
The SEP articles are good though, curated by professional academics.
Fatalism is the concept that a certain thing is absolutely inevitable one way or another; that no matter what anyone does, no matter what happens, this thing will end up happening anyway. It's actually rather counter to causal determinism, because it implies that changes in prior events can be no detriment to the inevitable, fated event; the effect happens independent of the causes, with or without them.
There are a wide variety of determinisms, most of which are about one class of phenomena (usually human thought or behavior) being determined exclusively (i.e. regardless of any other kinds of phenomena) by another class of phenomena (e.g. genetics, upbringing, etc). The three exceptions to that, that are almost equivalent as far as free will goes and are often used interchangeably in discussions regarding it are logical, nomological, and theological determinism. Logical determinism is just the position that there is some truth of the matter, already, about future events. That may or may not be because events naturally follow from other events in an orderly, law-like fashion; if that's the case, it's nomological determinism. If it's not the case, then something else besides natural laws, i.e. something supernatural, must have fixed the truths of those future events, which leaves you with theological determinism.
As an atheist, I generally disregard theological determinism, and am only concerned with nomological determinism which is thus equivalent with logical determinism. Even accepting the possibility of theism, I'd argue that theological determinism just pushes the question back further: does God's behavior, including the fixing of future events, proceed in an orderly, law-like fashion (in which case theological determinism is still just a subset of nomological determinism with a specific intermediary class of phenomena, acts of God), or not (in which case future events, fixed at the dawn of time though they may be, still proceed from the random whims of God, and so you've really still got indeterminism).
In all cases the combination of circumstances + wiring determines an outcome.
Yes, and there's a specific functional difference dependent on that wiring that imparts or inhibits the freedom of the will. You don't need to be able to choose how you're wired for you to be wired to be able to choose in the relevantly free manner, just like you don't need to be able to control how strong your muscles are in order for confines of spider-silk to be not binding on you; you just happen to be built in a way that something so little can't restrain your freedom of motion, but other organisms are not so lucky.
I guess I mistakenly implied that freedom is a boolean condition, but it's not; you can be more free, or less free, just like to one person, certain physical restraints may be no impediment to their physical freedom, while to others those may be absolutely binding.
it doesn't derive from sub-atomic indeterminacy but instead comes ultimately from a soul which science will almost certainly never be able to detect
If the functioning of that soul deterministic or not and does it matter and why or why not? You've just pushed the question back to the next turtle down.
That's like doing away with the concept of political liberty, or freedom in the sense of not being chained up in a box, because "meh it's all deterministic anyway". There is still an important psychological function that the term "free will" picks out that is a useful concept whether or not it's all deterministic anyway, just like those other kinds of freedom are important whether or not it's all deterministic. It's freedom from determinism that's the useless concept, and that just goes to show that that's not the proper referent of the term "free will".
Will that mean that the former alcoholic acquired free will?
Yes. That purely mechanical, neurological ability is what free will is. People with miswired brains lack it. If we could fix their brains, they would gain it.
This isn't a moral condemnation of people for failing to exercise "enough willpower", any more than it's a moral condemnation to say that someone locked in a cage lacks freedom of movement. Being mentally caged by the wiring of your brain makes your will unfree. Uncaging it would make it free. It's not determinism that's doing the relevant caging, it's the wiring of your brain. You don't need to be able to break the laws of causality to be free of will, you just need to be able to break your own bad habits. Some people can, and they are free willed. Others sometimes can't, and in that respect, they aren't.
Throwing time travel into this unnecessary complicates things. Think in terms of models and computation.
If determinism is true, then given a complete, perfect and accurate description of the universe at one time, and enough memory and time to compute upon it, you could model any future state of the universe from that. You would, of course, have to be outside of the universe you're computing about, or in other words, doing this on a simulated, model universe, but that model universe is deterministic if you can do that. If you can't, then it's not deterministic.
It being not deterministic doesn't magically make anything inside of it free of will though. If your model universe contains just a buzzing cloud of electrons, adding true randomness to the function by which their position evolves in the model doesn't make them "free willed". And no combination of randomization to the particles making up a model human makes that human free willed either. It's something else about the way that human's thoughts and behavior function that makes him free willed or not. And that something else doesn't need randomness in its constituent elements, and is at worse hindered by them; adding random noise to your decision-making process doesn't make you more free, if anything it makes you less.
There's room to debate exactly what that "something else" is that actually counts as free will or not, but indeterminism isn't it. If indeterminism is what makes human thought and behavior "free" then it makes electrons equally "free", and that shows that to be a useless sense of the word "free".
Okay, but your first sentence, "If hard determinism were true for all of the cosmos, then it is must be at least theoretically possible to infallibly predict a future state from a current state", is still strictly incorrect, even if your final conclusion comes around to the right general area. Hard determinism could be completely true, and yet the future still impossible in principle to predict perfectly.
Determinism doesn't make it not free will, just like indeterminism doesn't give an electron free will. It's a terrible (and terribly widespread) misconception to think that free will means anything to do with causal determinism rather than something to do with the kind of process that goes on in one's mind, which can be entirely deterministic (and must be at least adequately deterministic; pure random noise is not freedom).
I did not state the dichotomy and so I see why you think I was incorrect in my usage of the term. I am on a phone and was being brief. The way the problem is evil is typically presented is that because evil exists, God is either good and not all-powerful or that God is powerful and not good. These are the options I was rejecting. The option that God is good and all-powerful is opened when the premise is rejected.
Ok, point taken there.
If there is a reason that evil exists and we don't know for sure what it is, how can you say that the amount is so great the probability is low? How do you measure the amount of evil? I reject the claim that it creates a low probability of existence. What basis do you have?
Many truly terrible things happen in the world that would require a monumental excuse to forgive someone (i.e. consider them still reasonably good, much less all-good) for willingly allowing them to happen when they could easily stop them, as an all-knowing all-powerful God could. Just a priori that makes it unlikely that such a good excuse will be found, since it would need to be a truly exceptional one, and true exceptions are by definition rare. The fact that all the excuses thus far offered by Christian apologists fall so short of that mark makes it a posteriori even less likely that such a good excuse will be found; and thus, even less likely that there is an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God. (Maybe any two out of the three, but that's not enough to count as God).
As for utilitarianism and deontology, how is that objective? You just gave me two options. Do they both define morality exactly the same? Do they not both end up being consensus based? Would civilizations of the past and future all collectivity agree on the same standards? If not, how is that objective? Why would a utilitarian be right in telling a murderer or rapist he is evil? So what? It's an arbitrary decision on what makes something evil.
You could say the same thing about the differing edicts of different religions. You're just making an argument for moral nihilism here, and not a very good one at that. The fact that there is disagreement over what the correct way to objectively pass moral judgement is, does not entail that there is no correct way, much less that some other equally-disagreed-upon option is the correct way. But all of these ethical systems agree that something is, on some basis or another, objectively right or wrong, so "God say so" isn't the only possible basis for saying something is objectively right or wrong (it's not even a very good one), and thus atheists aren't necessarily moral nihilists. They could be utilitarians, or deontologists. Sure, either of them could be wrong about what makes something good or bad, but so could the divine command theorist; but they all agree equally, theists and atheists, that something or another is objectively right or wrong.
I understand that it is an attack on the consistency of a Christians understanding of God. That is why I showed how that is not only false, but that an atheist must be inconsistent to even make the argument. An atheist who argues for morality is inconsistent.
Disregarding that last point refuted above, you seem to have misunderstood the main thrust of this point entirely. The Problem of Evil argument says "either God, if he exists at all, ignorant, impotent, or amoral if not outright evil, or else there is no such thing as evil in the world; because if there is evil in the world, an all-knowing, all-powerful, all good God would stop it." A moral nihilist would say "yeah, that's right; if there is any God, he's not all-good because there is no such thing as good, and in any case there's no evil in the world because there's no such thing as evil." So the Problem of Evil argument works on a moral nihilist by default: of course a moral nihilist agrees there's no omnibenevol
Obviously a joke, but yes free as in speech, at least approximately, inasmuch as it's "free as in unrestrained" rather than "free as in without cost", and both speech and will are free in (variations of) the former way.
Only if by "free will" you mean "non-determination", which you shouldn't.
If by "free will" you mean, as you should, a certain kind of functionality, an ability to cause your behavior to conform to the patterns you judge that it should conform to, then indeterminism is at most a hindrance and mostly completely inconsequential. Contrast, for example, to a struggling alcoholic who wants to drink, but doesn't want to want to drink and certainly doesn't want that want to drink to cause him to actually drink, but who nevertheless does drink, because their decisions about what they should want and how they should behave are not effective on their actual wants or behavior. That's what lacking free will is. Having free will is the opposite of that: the ability for your wants about [what to want and the efficacy of those wants on your behavior] to be effective. That doesn't require indeterminism, it just requires a decision-making mechanism built to function that way.
Yeah it's interesting and all and it's a valid theorem, in that its conclusion follows from its premises, but it starts from a faulty premise, namely that (as that wiki article phrases it), free will is "in the sense that our choices are not a function of the past". Sure, if we have that kind of "free will", then so do electrons and whatnot, but that just shows that that's not a sense that captures what we really mean by "free will".
Indeterminism is neither sufficient nor necessary for free will, but it (indeterminism) applies to electrons just as much as to people, sure, no duh.
You code the agent to be able to make normative evaluation about the behaviors of other agents; to form opinions about what agents should do.
You code the agent to respond to at least some kinds of input from other agents by changing its own behavior patterns; to be conditionable, at the very least (or at best) by rational argument.
You code the agent to be able to consider itself "in the third person", without bias, the way it would consider another agent; and to be able to act upon itself in the way it would act upon another agents, too.
Voila, the agent makes normative evaluations about its own behavior, acts upon itself in ways to cause it to change its behavior, and its behavior actually changes to conform to its normative evaluations of what it should be.
Free will is just what happens when social animals start parenting/governing/conditioning themselves individually, reflexively, rather than merely imposing their judgement upon others free from conditioning themselves, or accepting the conditioning of others without making any judgements themselves. It is being neither unruled nor other-ruled, but self-ruled.
It's just a kind of reflexive functionality, nothing magical about it.
Wow, you started off with a good point (there are compatibilist Christians, and compatibilist moral responsibility) but then got more and more wrong the longer you went on from the end of the first paragraph down.
First, that's not what a false dichotomy is. A false dichotomy is claiming that there are only two possible options where there are actually more than those two (and so falsely imply anyone rejecting one of them must be supporting the other). It's a kind of fallacious argument. It doesn't mean "a problem that isn't really a problem".
Then, "any possible reason" doesn't eliminate the problem. I assume you're harkening to people like Plantinga who say that that God is still logically compatible with the observed existence of evil because he might have had some good reason that justifies it, but for one, that depends on there actually being some possible good-enough reason (glorification certainly isn't one; and back on topic, his free will theodicy, a kind of attempted "greater good", doesn't give a good reason because that's not even what free will is); and secondly, that still leaves open the evidential problem of evil. Yeah, sure, maybe there might conceivably be some good reason to allow some evil, but is it likely that there's good enough reason to allow this much evil? Not really. So at best this reduces Problem of Evil arguments from proving there definitely is no God to merely proving that there's really, really probably not one.
Then, your whole thing about the Problem of Evil being a problem for atheism hinges on atheists being moral relativists or nihilists (but I repeat myself). Divine Command Theory is not the only conception of objective morality, and most ethical systems employed by most philosophers, such as deontology and utilitarianism, are both non-theistic and objective.
Lastly, even for a morally nihilistic atheist, the Problem of Evil is an attack on the consistency of Christians' own conception of God as being an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good being, showing that to be incompatible with the existence of evil in the world, and requiring for consistency that we deny either: that there is an all-knowing God; that there is an all-powerful God; that there is an all-good God; or that there is evil in the world. Adopting moral nihilism denies both of the last two (there's no evil in the world because there's no such thing as evil, and there's no all-good God because there's no such thing as good), and so concedes to the argument, leaving one merely holding that there is an omniscient omnipotent amoral being in an amoral universe, which is no longer a Christian viewpoint, QED.
Even if the universe were deterministic, it still wouldn't be possible in practice to completely computer a future state, because of mathematical chaos and limits on the theoretical speed of computation: by the time you finished computing, that future will have already passed, so the best you can do to "predict" the future is wait to see what happens.
That's only an incompatibilist conception of free will, which is completely trivial. If you'd say an electron "has free will" because it's position and momentum are not causally determined, then something is defective with your conception of free will. That's like saying an electron "is conscious" because it it able to "observe" things in the quantum mechanical sense that means nothing more than "interact with".
That is only the incompatibilist conception of free will you're talking about, which has been an enormous philosophical waste of time. An electron doesn't magically have free will about its location just because its exact position isn't causally determined.
There are many other different conceptions of what free will is, and pretty much all of the others don't give a flying fuck whether or not God or Nature has predetermined all events.
Look up people like Harry Frankfurt or Susan Wolf for much better ideas about what free will means. Here's a hint: free will is the difference between someone who (whether determined or not) wants to drink, thinks they shouldn't, tries not to, and so doesn't; and someone who (whether determined or not) wants to drink, thinks they shouldn't, tries not to, and does anyway. Both of them deliberated on their actions, both were equally determined (or not), both came to the same decision on what to do, but only in one of them was that decision effective on their behavior, and that person had free will while the other didn't, because that's what free will is.
This isn't studying free will per se, this is just studying the neurology of will simpliciter; of decision-making in general. From the summary at least, this doesn't at all address the question of whether the decision the person made was the decision that the person wanted to make, or just the one that they happened to feel like making with no further deliberation or possibly even contrary to their wishes.
You'd need to study something like a recovering alcoholic deciding not to drink, even though he wants to drink, because he doesn't want to want to drink, and compare it with a struggling alcoholic deciding to drink because he wants to even though he doesn't want to want to, to see where that kind of free will neurology is happening.
Slashdot Mirror
Being against a specific direction of radical change does not make you in favor of the status quo (especially when that change is largely just going faster further in the direction we've already been slowly drifting), and Hillary is not the only alternative vote to Trump.
Just want to say I really appreciate the civil tone of your replies and I'm sorry I started off my first post to you so harshly, it's been a tough couple weeks for me lately.
Only if by "such a thing" you mean incompatibilism, not just free will.
There are lots and lots of people who believe free will exists and can be (or even has to be) deterministic. They're called compatibilists and for centuries until very recently they were the dominant school of philosophy (and are still fighting a strong fight against a recent insurgence of incompatibilism).
Look up Harry Frankfurt and Susan Wolf for some notable contemporary examples.
It's a closely related phenomenon, but it's not self-awareness, it's self-control, which is the same thing as free will: you determine what you are going to do.
I was a major editor on the free will and determinism articles on Wikipedia a while back, and there was a problem editor who trashed a lot of those things and drove away a lot of other editors (including myself) and left things in a really craptastic state, so in this case I wouldn't rely too much on Wikipedia.
The SEP articles are good though, curated by professional academics.
Fatalism is the concept that a certain thing is absolutely inevitable one way or another; that no matter what anyone does, no matter what happens, this thing will end up happening anyway. It's actually rather counter to causal determinism, because it implies that changes in prior events can be no detriment to the inevitable, fated event; the effect happens independent of the causes, with or without them.
There are a wide variety of determinisms, most of which are about one class of phenomena (usually human thought or behavior) being determined exclusively (i.e. regardless of any other kinds of phenomena) by another class of phenomena (e.g. genetics, upbringing, etc). The three exceptions to that, that are almost equivalent as far as free will goes and are often used interchangeably in discussions regarding it are logical, nomological, and theological determinism. Logical determinism is just the position that there is some truth of the matter, already, about future events. That may or may not be because events naturally follow from other events in an orderly, law-like fashion; if that's the case, it's nomological determinism. If it's not the case, then something else besides natural laws, i.e. something supernatural, must have fixed the truths of those future events, which leaves you with theological determinism.
As an atheist, I generally disregard theological determinism, and am only concerned with nomological determinism which is thus equivalent with logical determinism. Even accepting the possibility of theism, I'd argue that theological determinism just pushes the question back further: does God's behavior, including the fixing of future events, proceed in an orderly, law-like fashion (in which case theological determinism is still just a subset of nomological determinism with a specific intermediary class of phenomena, acts of God), or not (in which case future events, fixed at the dawn of time though they may be, still proceed from the random whims of God, and so you've really still got indeterminism).
In all cases the combination of circumstances + wiring determines an outcome.
Yes, and there's a specific functional difference dependent on that wiring that imparts or inhibits the freedom of the will. You don't need to be able to choose how you're wired for you to be wired to be able to choose in the relevantly free manner, just like you don't need to be able to control how strong your muscles are in order for confines of spider-silk to be not binding on you; you just happen to be built in a way that something so little can't restrain your freedom of motion, but other organisms are not so lucky.
I guess I mistakenly implied that freedom is a boolean condition, but it's not; you can be more free, or less free, just like to one person, certain physical restraints may be no impediment to their physical freedom, while to others those may be absolutely binding.
it doesn't derive from sub-atomic indeterminacy but instead comes ultimately from a soul which science will almost certainly never be able to detect
If the functioning of that soul deterministic or not and does it matter and why or why not? You've just pushed the question back to the next turtle down.
That's like doing away with the concept of political liberty, or freedom in the sense of not being chained up in a box, because "meh it's all deterministic anyway". There is still an important psychological function that the term "free will" picks out that is a useful concept whether or not it's all deterministic anyway, just like those other kinds of freedom are important whether or not it's all deterministic. It's freedom from determinism that's the useless concept, and that just goes to show that that's not the proper referent of the term "free will".
Do math problems sound nefarious to you too?
You are confusing fatalism with determinism.
Will that mean that the former alcoholic acquired free will?
Yes. That purely mechanical, neurological ability is what free will is. People with miswired brains lack it. If we could fix their brains, they would gain it.
This isn't a moral condemnation of people for failing to exercise "enough willpower", any more than it's a moral condemnation to say that someone locked in a cage lacks freedom of movement. Being mentally caged by the wiring of your brain makes your will unfree. Uncaging it would make it free. It's not determinism that's doing the relevant caging, it's the wiring of your brain. You don't need to be able to break the laws of causality to be free of will, you just need to be able to break your own bad habits. Some people can, and they are free willed. Others sometimes can't, and in that respect, they aren't.
Throwing time travel into this unnecessary complicates things. Think in terms of models and computation.
If determinism is true, then given a complete, perfect and accurate description of the universe at one time, and enough memory and time to compute upon it, you could model any future state of the universe from that. You would, of course, have to be outside of the universe you're computing about, or in other words, doing this on a simulated, model universe, but that model universe is deterministic if you can do that. If you can't, then it's not deterministic.
It being not deterministic doesn't magically make anything inside of it free of will though. If your model universe contains just a buzzing cloud of electrons, adding true randomness to the function by which their position evolves in the model doesn't make them "free willed". And no combination of randomization to the particles making up a model human makes that human free willed either. It's something else about the way that human's thoughts and behavior function that makes him free willed or not. And that something else doesn't need randomness in its constituent elements, and is at worse hindered by them; adding random noise to your decision-making process doesn't make you more free, if anything it makes you less.
There's room to debate exactly what that "something else" is that actually counts as free will or not, but indeterminism isn't it. If indeterminism is what makes human thought and behavior "free" then it makes electrons equally "free", and that shows that to be a useless sense of the word "free".
Okay, but your first sentence, "If hard determinism were true for all of the cosmos, then it is must be at least theoretically possible to infallibly predict a future state from a current state", is still strictly incorrect, even if your final conclusion comes around to the right general area. Hard determinism could be completely true, and yet the future still impossible in principle to predict perfectly.
Determinism doesn't make it not free will, just like indeterminism doesn't give an electron free will. It's a terrible (and terribly widespread) misconception to think that free will means anything to do with causal determinism rather than something to do with the kind of process that goes on in one's mind, which can be entirely deterministic (and must be at least adequately deterministic; pure random noise is not freedom).
I did not state the dichotomy and so I see why you think I was incorrect in my usage of the term. I am on a phone and was being brief. The way the problem is evil is typically presented is that because evil exists, God is either good and not all-powerful or that God is powerful and not good. These are the options I was rejecting. The option that God is good and all-powerful is opened when the premise is rejected.
Ok, point taken there.
If there is a reason that evil exists and we don't know for sure what it is, how can you say that the amount is so great the probability is low? How do you measure the amount of evil? I reject the claim that it creates a low probability of existence. What basis do you have?
Many truly terrible things happen in the world that would require a monumental excuse to forgive someone (i.e. consider them still reasonably good, much less all-good) for willingly allowing them to happen when they could easily stop them, as an all-knowing all-powerful God could. Just a priori that makes it unlikely that such a good excuse will be found, since it would need to be a truly exceptional one, and true exceptions are by definition rare. The fact that all the excuses thus far offered by Christian apologists fall so short of that mark makes it a posteriori even less likely that such a good excuse will be found; and thus, even less likely that there is an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God. (Maybe any two out of the three, but that's not enough to count as God).
As for utilitarianism and deontology, how is that objective? You just gave me two options. Do they both define morality exactly the same? Do they not both end up being consensus based? Would civilizations of the past and future all collectivity agree on the same standards? If not, how is that objective? Why would a utilitarian be right in telling a murderer or rapist he is evil? So what? It's an arbitrary decision on what makes something evil.
You could say the same thing about the differing edicts of different religions. You're just making an argument for moral nihilism here, and not a very good one at that. The fact that there is disagreement over what the correct way to objectively pass moral judgement is, does not entail that there is no correct way, much less that some other equally-disagreed-upon option is the correct way. But all of these ethical systems agree that something is, on some basis or another, objectively right or wrong, so "God say so" isn't the only possible basis for saying something is objectively right or wrong (it's not even a very good one), and thus atheists aren't necessarily moral nihilists. They could be utilitarians, or deontologists. Sure, either of them could be wrong about what makes something good or bad, but so could the divine command theorist; but they all agree equally, theists and atheists, that something or another is objectively right or wrong.
I understand that it is an attack on the consistency of a Christians understanding of God. That is why I showed how that is not only false, but that an atheist must be inconsistent to even make the argument. An atheist who argues for morality is inconsistent.
Disregarding that last point refuted above, you seem to have misunderstood the main thrust of this point entirely. The Problem of Evil argument says "either God, if he exists at all, ignorant, impotent, or amoral if not outright evil, or else there is no such thing as evil in the world; because if there is evil in the world, an all-knowing, all-powerful, all good God would stop it." A moral nihilist would say "yeah, that's right; if there is any God, he's not all-good because there is no such thing as good, and in any case there's no evil in the world because there's no such thing as evil." So the Problem of Evil argument works on a moral nihilist by default: of course a moral nihilist agrees there's no omnibenevol
Obviously a joke, but yes free as in speech, at least approximately, inasmuch as it's "free as in unrestrained" rather than "free as in without cost", and both speech and will are free in (variations of) the former way.
Only if by "free will" you mean "non-determination", which you shouldn't.
If by "free will" you mean, as you should, a certain kind of functionality, an ability to cause your behavior to conform to the patterns you judge that it should conform to, then indeterminism is at most a hindrance and mostly completely inconsequential. Contrast, for example, to a struggling alcoholic who wants to drink, but doesn't want to want to drink and certainly doesn't want that want to drink to cause him to actually drink, but who nevertheless does drink, because their decisions about what they should want and how they should behave are not effective on their actual wants or behavior. That's what lacking free will is. Having free will is the opposite of that: the ability for your wants about [what to want and the efficacy of those wants on your behavior] to be effective. That doesn't require indeterminism, it just requires a decision-making mechanism built to function that way.
Yeah it's interesting and all and it's a valid theorem, in that its conclusion follows from its premises, but it starts from a faulty premise, namely that (as that wiki article phrases it), free will is "in the sense that our choices are not a function of the past". Sure, if we have that kind of "free will", then so do electrons and whatnot, but that just shows that that's not a sense that captures what we really mean by "free will".
Indeterminism is neither sufficient nor necessary for free will, but it (indeterminism) applies to electrons just as much as to people, sure, no duh.
You code the agent to be able to make normative evaluation about the behaviors of other agents; to form opinions about what agents should do.
You code the agent to respond to at least some kinds of input from other agents by changing its own behavior patterns; to be conditionable, at the very least (or at best) by rational argument.
You code the agent to be able to consider itself "in the third person", without bias, the way it would consider another agent; and to be able to act upon itself in the way it would act upon another agents, too.
Voila, the agent makes normative evaluations about its own behavior, acts upon itself in ways to cause it to change its behavior, and its behavior actually changes to conform to its normative evaluations of what it should be.
Free will is just what happens when social animals start parenting/governing/conditioning themselves individually, reflexively, rather than merely imposing their judgement upon others free from conditioning themselves, or accepting the conditioning of others without making any judgements themselves. It is being neither unruled nor other-ruled, but self-ruled.
It's just a kind of reflexive functionality, nothing magical about it.
Wow, you started off with a good point (there are compatibilist Christians, and compatibilist moral responsibility) but then got more and more wrong the longer you went on from the end of the first paragraph down.
First, that's not what a false dichotomy is. A false dichotomy is claiming that there are only two possible options where there are actually more than those two (and so falsely imply anyone rejecting one of them must be supporting the other). It's a kind of fallacious argument. It doesn't mean "a problem that isn't really a problem".
Then, "any possible reason" doesn't eliminate the problem. I assume you're harkening to people like Plantinga who say that that God is still logically compatible with the observed existence of evil because he might have had some good reason that justifies it, but for one, that depends on there actually being some possible good-enough reason (glorification certainly isn't one; and back on topic, his free will theodicy, a kind of attempted "greater good", doesn't give a good reason because that's not even what free will is); and secondly, that still leaves open the evidential problem of evil. Yeah, sure, maybe there might conceivably be some good reason to allow some evil, but is it likely that there's good enough reason to allow this much evil? Not really. So at best this reduces Problem of Evil arguments from proving there definitely is no God to merely proving that there's really, really probably not one.
Then, your whole thing about the Problem of Evil being a problem for atheism hinges on atheists being moral relativists or nihilists (but I repeat myself). Divine Command Theory is not the only conception of objective morality, and most ethical systems employed by most philosophers, such as deontology and utilitarianism, are both non-theistic and objective.
Lastly, even for a morally nihilistic atheist, the Problem of Evil is an attack on the consistency of Christians' own conception of God as being an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good being, showing that to be incompatible with the existence of evil in the world, and requiring for consistency that we deny either: that there is an all-knowing God; that there is an all-powerful God; that there is an all-good God; or that there is evil in the world. Adopting moral nihilism denies both of the last two (there's no evil in the world because there's no such thing as evil, and there's no all-good God because there's no such thing as good), and so concedes to the argument, leaving one merely holding that there is an omniscient omnipotent amoral being in an amoral universe, which is no longer a Christian viewpoint, QED.
Even if the universe were deterministic, it still wouldn't be possible in practice to completely computer a future state, because of mathematical chaos and limits on the theoretical speed of computation: by the time you finished computing, that future will have already passed, so the best you can do to "predict" the future is wait to see what happens.
That's only an incompatibilist conception of free will, which is completely trivial. If you'd say an electron "has free will" because it's position and momentum are not causally determined, then something is defective with your conception of free will. That's like saying an electron "is conscious" because it it able to "observe" things in the quantum mechanical sense that means nothing more than "interact with".
That is only the incompatibilist conception of free will you're talking about, which has been an enormous philosophical waste of time. An electron doesn't magically have free will about its location just because its exact position isn't causally determined.
There are many other different conceptions of what free will is, and pretty much all of the others don't give a flying fuck whether or not God or Nature has predetermined all events.
Look up people like Harry Frankfurt or Susan Wolf for much better ideas about what free will means. Here's a hint: free will is the difference between someone who (whether determined or not) wants to drink, thinks they shouldn't, tries not to, and so doesn't; and someone who (whether determined or not) wants to drink, thinks they shouldn't, tries not to, and does anyway. Both of them deliberated on their actions, both were equally determined (or not), both came to the same decision on what to do, but only in one of them was that decision effective on their behavior, and that person had free will while the other didn't, because that's what free will is.
This isn't studying free will per se, this is just studying the neurology of will simpliciter; of decision-making in general. From the summary at least, this doesn't at all address the question of whether the decision the person made was the decision that the person wanted to make, or just the one that they happened to feel like making with no further deliberation or possibly even contrary to their wishes.
You'd need to study something like a recovering alcoholic deciding not to drink, even though he wants to drink, because he doesn't want to want to drink, and compare it with a struggling alcoholic deciding to drink because he wants to even though he doesn't want to want to, to see where that kind of free will neurology is happening.
In China, what do fears-that-Pokemon-Go-may-aid-in-locating-military-bases do?
Alternatively, in China, who fears that Pokemon Go may aid in locating military bases?
The headline lacks either a verb (if the fears are the subject) or a subject (if fearing is the verb).
You are aware that, for example, the letter A, is a highly derived and abstracted version of a picture of an ox's head?
Text characters and pictures are not that far apart, and in East Asian languages (where emoji originate) even less so.