That's a really good question. All beautiful things are in heaven. Does one consider sex a sin, or a thing of beauty? For two people who are in love and committed to each other, sex is a beautiful thing.

animals are those who just act upon what is in their DNA. Human beings have the intelligence, so we have free will.
If we would not have free will we would not be able to conciously evolve in different levels of knowledge.

Yes we have free will. We have the capacity to make judgments and decisions. Most people make bad decisions because they are selfish pure and simple. It is in our nature as humans to be selfish, but we have the capacity to chose to not act on that nature. That my friends is free will.

The animal does what it wants to do, the human does what it should do.

how u doing spider?

I'm doing good, how are you doing? You aren't on much, you must be busy with work.

actually i did not have internet for a couple of months, but thanks to the Lord I'm back

Well, welcome back man. Sorry to hear you didn't have internet, I know that can be tough.

u know it my friend.
I had a lot of time to think, read, and learn.

lol guys quit hijacking the thread.

I think we just proved that we have free will.

exactly I have the free will to say whatever i want.
sorry, it's just free will

I think we have free will within certain confines. We can’t choose to have talents that we don’t have. So our free will is definitely limited.

I also believe that our free will is limited by what we know. We simply can’t make choices if we aren’t even aware that there are available to make. When I look back over my life, especially my early life as a child, I can clearly see that it would have been drastically differnet had I been raised with different mentors and friends.

Someone might claim that we can choose our friends, but I’m not sure that’s so true. After all, our friends must also choose us back. Otherwise they would have no free will. There is some conflict in the mix when speaking about two beings who both have free will and are interacting with each other. This is very clear in the case of romantic love. While we may have the free will to choose who we love, we clearly do not have the free will to choose who will love us back.

This is the same think with education and careers. We don’t have the free will to choose any job we want because obtaining that job depends on the free will of the person who will make the final decision to fill it.

In this way there are many things that we do not have free will over. Our free will is definitely limited.

As far as having more free will than animals, I think that is only true in the sense that we are aware of more choices. Other than that, there is no difference between the free will of an animal and a person. We are just animals will more highly developed brains, and thus we have more intellectual ideas to choose from.

We clearly don’t have the free will to stop breathing, or eating, or doing anything that is required for our survival. At least not if we want to continue to survive. Clearly we do have the free will to end our life. That’s probably the only real thing that we genuinely have total control over. But even that can be taken away from us if we are placed in a situation where we can’t even end our own life.

Our free will genuinely does require a physical capability to execute it as well. For example, we don’t have the free will to fly without special equipment.

So there is no such thing as ‘absolute’ free will. It all must be taken within the context of what’s available to choose from. We only have the free will to choose from what is available within our means. I think we certainly do have that kind of free will. But animals have the same free will, they just lesser choices available to choose from.

regardless of what one believes, free-will is all relative? Do we have free-will in america or anywhere in the world, lets look at this question on a worldy level first? Do we ? Try walking around naked and talk about free will, lets see what they diagnose you with =), in all seriousness.

Now Spiritually, Do we? To some extent, just like in the real world but with consequences, with in a worldy envrionment provide order in our life, just like in religion provide us with a consequence for our actions.

I wanna see the atheists start talking about Free-will in this world and seriously think a about what type of chaotic envrionment we are talking about, so are standards in christiany really, that horrible. Ahh but again Atheists dont talk about "free-will" on the worldy level, just bashing somthing because they have hate built up inside, im not mad at you =)

not me, i have "Free Willy"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106965/trailers-screenplay-E15432-310

You are confusing free will with being all powerful. Free will has nothing to do with what we can do or even our situation. Its our ability to make a decision against our nature.

You gave an example that we can not control our breathing. Thats true that we will breathe unconsciously, but if you decide to you can hold your breath. It is the decision not the act that is free will.

Free will means that you can freely choose from any available options. Free will does not require a variety of choices.

I don't think I'm confusing it at all. I’m merely point out that free will is necessarily limited by the number of choices available. And this includes choices that may be possible, but we simply aren’t aware of. I’m simply saying that we can’t choose to do something if we are unaware that the choice exists. Even though that choice may ultimately be within our power, if we don’t know the choice is available we can’t choose it.

This is actually just an extension of the free will choice of animals to humans. The only reason that animals don’t have the same level of free will as humans is because they aren’t aware of what choices are available to them, or those choices simply don’t exist for them. This carries over to humans themselves. All humans do not have the same level of free will, and that is simply because some people have available to them (or are more aware of) a greater number choice than others, therefore they have a greater freedom of will than someone who is unaware or restricted in their choices.

Clearly if you were only aware of one possibly choice then you would have no free will to make any other choice because you simple wouldn’t even know they existed, or you wouldn’t have the power to choose them. If you don’t have the power to choose them then you don’t have the free will to choose them.

So yes, free will is definitely dependent on how ‘powerful’ you are, and what options are open to you. If you didn’t have the power or options to make a choice, then you’d have no free will in the first place.

The ability to make choices is directly dependent on the choices available to you and the knowledge that you can choose them. If they aren’t available to you, or you aren’t aware that you can choose them, then your free will is limited or even non-existent.

I don’t think there’s any confusion at all. Trying making a choice when you are in a situation where you have no choice and you’ll soon realize that, in that situation, your free will has been taken away from you.

You can’t claim to have free will if you don’t have the free will to make your own choice. You free is totally dependent on having choices to choose from. If the choices you have to choose from are restricted to only one choice then you don’t have much free will left do you? Therefore, the degree of your free is directly dependent on the amount of choices you have.

If you only have one choice before you, you don't have very much free will.