Hi everyone. I'm Vince Vitale, one of the hosts of Unbelievable.

Recently on the show you may have seen Ruth Jackson host a really good debate about

free will between Alex O'Connor and Alex Carter.

Alex O'Connor hosts the Within Reason podcast and the highly popular YouTube channel Cosmic Skeptic.

And Alex Carter is the Academic Director for Philosophy and Interdisciplinary studies at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education.

The debate was highly enjoyable and insightful.

Both Alexes are excellent thinkers, though as it turns out neither of them believe in

God. So we also wanted to offer some reflections on the topic of free will from someone who does believe in

God. That's me. These reflections will make sense. will But if you haven't seen it, I hope you'll go back to watch it and compare notes.

If something is random, then by definition you're not in control of it.

But if some event is not random, what that means is that something has determined it to be the case.

Something has made it so that this happened rather than that happened.

There is a semantic difference between being compelled to act and being freely acting.

You can look for scientific causes of my actions,

and that's absolutely fair enough.

But a scientific explanation of an event

is one type of explanation. So you can choose to do particular things, but when you choose to do something particular, it will be because you want to or because you're forced to.

If you're forced to, you're not a control. If you do it because you want to, then given that you can't control your wants, you're not in control of that either.

We have that established already.

That's kind of the starting point for where we begin.

The question then becomes where do we go wrong and I think with

philosophy where we go wrong is we try to define free will. We're anthropologists who

...