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Did You Freely Choose to Believe in Free Will?

If so, do you have the freedom to change that belief?

Edward John
3 min readJul 28, 2022
Image by wayhomestudio on Freepik. Filtered using Canva.

I don’t believe we have free will.

We can often feel like we have free will, but this is a mistaken feeling. I’ve explained many times why. I’ve got a list with eight other articles relating to free will. One of the first pieces I published to Medium in July 2021 was a 9-minute read on the subject. So, I’m not going to go through it all again here.

Instead, I now want to ask you a very specific question:

If you believe in free will, did you FREELY choose that belief?

Why am I asking this?

Because often I get people responding saying they believe in free will. Then they go on to explain the reasons why they believe in free will.

But this creates a contradiction.

If you believe in free will because of XYZ reasons, those reasons are the cause of your belief. Thus, you didn’t freely choose your belief. If the factors that led to your belief had been different, you would likely have another belief.

But if you were to say that your belief was NOT due to any external factors, that either means one of two things is true:

  1. There is an internal reason, such as…

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Edward John
Edward John

Written by Edward John

Sometimes my inside is full of sunshine 🌞 edwardjohnwritesATgmailDOTcom

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