Free will, determinism, atheism, ...

I got this email from a friend one Sunday:
subj: "... ?"
body:
"thought: atheism and belief in free will are mutually exclusive.

discuss."

==

Then, during a conversation on AIM, the argument was made:

Friend: "so the argument goes like this:"

Me: "if there's no god to give us free will, then we're simply slaves to chance and/or the laws of physics, chemistry, etc...?"

Friend: "basically, yeah"

Me: "go ahead and say it however you were going to...
(don't let me stop you.. i'm curious)"

Friend: "okay
assumption 1: god=supernatural power of some kind, which is the only thing that can interfere with the laws of physics etc
anything
whatever
call it divine intervention"

Me: "k"

Friend: "assumption 2: without that intervention, we are slaves to our environment, which in turn was enslaved by ITS environment
example that one of my friends used:
"okay, so say I like Batman. how is that possibly fated?"
answer: you watched batman when you were little, or your parents made choices while raising you, or your environment tells you to like batman
or something
you can draw it all back
from the beginning of time, the movement of every single atom is predetermined
it's the answer to one big equation
and if we had a big enough computer we could solve it
the only way out of this is a higher power to interfere with that equation"

...

==
After reading up a bit on wikipedia's article on free will (which I highly recommend if you're interested in learning any more about any of the below) to fortify my personal perspective with some background knowledge and terminology, I wrote back the below email. Two days later, we were discussing almost the same stuff in my Philosophy of Religion class (by way of the topic "Omniscience"). I hope that gives a little sense of how well this class fits me, at least in some regards. Do let me know what your personal views on free will, determinism, etc and the connections to atheism, theism, etc are. Comments are fun for discussion, but go ahead and email to me if you want instead : )

1) yeah, i've thought that that is maybe true. (everything is determined by everything in the past/present combined with laws of nature/physics.)

2) but, there's a decent possibility that there is some uncertainty/unpredictability/... which would throw off the deterministic nature of a universe without a god. as you pointed out, this still leaves two options:
a. the quantum uncertainty/unpredictability is free will (or where free will comes into play)
b. one doesn't control this uncertainty in any way and it is not an expression of free will... in which case we still don't have free will, even if the universe isn't perfectly deterministic

and then:

3) what is free will? even if we don't know if we have it... or even if we don't have it, is there any point in approaching life from that perspective vs. thinking about oneself and one's actions in the context of free will?
okay... so i recommend reading (or at least skimming the parts you find more interesting) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will . the below are some things that i think are particularly relevant to where our discussion was going/my perspective. below these quotes i'll toss in my thoughts on which way i would lean. after glancing at the article hit me back with which perspective they outlined you most identify with (if any).

=====
one definition of free will (not from wiki):
"the partial freedom of the agent, in acts of conscious choice, from the determining compulsion of heredity, environment and circumstance."

a paragraph on compatibilism that seems to match what i think a bit, esp the sentence in stars:
"Compatibilists maintain that determinism is compatible with free will. A common strategy employed by "classical compatibilists", such as Thomas Hobbes, is to claim that a person acts freely only when the person willed the act and the person could have done otherwise, if the person had decided to. Hobbes sometimes attributes such compatibilist freedom to the person and not to some abstract notion of will, asserting, for example, that "no liberty can be inferred to the will, desire, or inclination, but the liberty of the man; which consisteth in this, that he finds no stop, in doing what he has the will, desire, or inclination to doe."[9] In articulating this crucial proviso, David Hume writes, "this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to every one who is not a prisoner and in chains".[10] To illustrate their position, compatibilists point to clear-cut cases of someone's free will being denied, through rape, murder, theft, or other forms of constraint. In these cases, free will is lacking not because the past is causally determining the future, but because the aggressor is overriding the victim's desires and preferences about his own actions. The aggressor is coercing the victim and, according to compatibilists, this is what overrides free will. Thus, they argue that **determinism does not matter; what matters is that individuals' choices are the results of their own desires and preferences, and are not overridden by some external (or internal) force.[9][10]*** To be a compatibilist, one need not endorse any particular conception of free will, but only deny that determinism is at odds with free will.[1]"

mentions chaos and epistemic limits, which seem to be relevant:
"In Elbow Room, Dennett presents an argument for a compatibilist theory of free will, which he further elaborated in the book Freedom Evolves.[17] The basic reasoning is that, if one excludes God, an infinitely powerful demon, and other such possibilities, then because of chaos and epistemic limits on the precision of our knowledge of the current state of the world, the future is ill-defined for all finite beings. The only well-defined things are "expectations". The ability to do "otherwise" only makes sense when dealing with these expectations, and not with some unknown and unknowable future."

meh... that seems to be a bit strict... but then, i would say that:
"Most incompatibilists reject the idea that freedom of action consists simply in "voluntary" behavior. They insist, rather, that free will means that man must be the "ultimate" or "originating" cause of his actions. He must be a causa sui, in the traditional phrase."

any takers?:
"Accounts of libertarianism subdivide into supernatural theories and scientific or naturalistic theories. Supernatural theories hold that a non-physical mind or soul overrides physical causality, so that physical events in the brain that lead to the performance of actions do not have an entirely physical explanation. This approach is allied to mind-body dualism, and sometimes has a theological motivation."

some from the science section:
"Early scientific thought often portrayed the universe as deterministic,[51] and some thinkers claimed that the simple process of gathering sufficient information would allow them to predict future events with perfect accuracy. Modern science, on the other hand, is a mixture of deterministic and stochastic theories.[52] Quantum mechanics predicts events only in terms of probabilities, casting doubt on whether the universe is deterministic at all. The possibility that the universe at the macroscopic level may be governed by indeterministic laws, as it is generally accepted to be at the quantum level, has revived interest in free will among physicists.[53] However, there are a number of objections.

It is claimed by some that quantum indeterminism is confined to microscopic phenomena.[54] The claim that events at the atomic or particulate level are unknowable can be challenged experimentally and even technologically: for instance, some hardware random number generators work by amplifying quantum effects into practically usable signals. However, this only amounts to macroscopic indeterminism if it can be shown that microscopic events really are indeterministic.

This consideration leads to the criticism of indeterminism-based free will on the basis that quantum mechanics is not really random, but merely unpredictable. Some scientific determinists, following Albert Einstein, believe in so-called "hidden variable theories" according to which the unpredictability of quantum mechanics is due to ignorance of an additional set of physical variables not explicitly included in the standard theory (see the Bohm interpretation and the EPR paradox).[55]

There is also a further, more philosophical, objection. It has been argued that if an action is taken due to quantum randomness, this in itself means that free will is absent, since such action cannot be controllable by someone claiming to possess such free will.[56] If this argument is conjoined with incompatibilism, then it would follow that free will is impossible, since it would be incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism, and these are the only options. If it is conjoined with compatibilism, on the other hand, it would mean that free will is only possible in a deterministic universe."
=====

my leanings:
i'd go for a not too strict definition of free will which emphasizes that what one does is a result of their desires, preferences, thoughts, ... (i dance when i feel like dancing, i play robo when i want to play robo, ...). i'd also lean towards compatibilism: i don't think it really matters if everything is predetermined or not. what matters is that as far as we experience our consciousness, actions and the world, we have free will and can choose what to do or not to do. what is the alternative perspective? what can possibly be gained from viewing the world as if we all lack free will? in some senses when it comes to philosophy i think i'm a bit of a pragmatist. i don't know much about the exact philosophical definition of pragmatism but what i mean is that i tend to strongly consider the usefulness of various beliefs. i think it is useful to think about and approach the world in the context of free will (whether or not it exists) and not very useful to act as if we don't have free will. an argument of utility perhaps?