Reason and free will are not great bedfellows
Free will is the power to be the creator of your own action. Many think it does not exist for you are in fact programmed. Logic is the power to avoid contradictions so that you can see what is true and real and guard against some lies. Logic is correct thinking.
Believers say that free will and belief in logic go together. They presume
you need free will before you can reason and trust what you think. But free will
is full of mystery and contradictions and nobody is able to explain how it
works. Nobody is able to prove it actually exists. Feeling free does not mean
you really are free. One function of free will is to enable you to use your
reason and logic. To many, the problem of knowing if free will is really logical
or makes sense hinders your use of free will. They suppose that if you have free
will then it is limited by default. In fact the news is worse than that. Rather
than limiting free will, it debunks it.
If we have free will and free will does not make any sense to us and seems to be
full of contradictions and paradoxes then what? People believe that reason is
only of any value if you believe in free will because you need free will to
exercise it. In other words, what you think is doubtful if you are programmed.
This overlooks the fact that a computer can replicate reason because we program
it. And it could be that reality programs us. Programming by definition has to
at least try to conform to reality. If it gets it wrong it is wrong but is still
an attempt to fit reality. So you can believe in reason and think free will is
nonsense. So you don't need to believe in free will to believe in reason or vice
versa. If our being programmed means our reason and logic is untrustworthy, the
reason is that nobody rational programmed us. That is to say that a rational
being with free will has to program us. If that view is correct, we still cannot
show how free will is logical or have any reason to imagine that it is. So there
is no way to be sure free will really supports reason at all. If free will is
nonsense and we believe in it and claim that our reason is based on it then our
reason looks like reason and acts like reason but is not reason. We are putting
reason in an irrational framework. When you do that there is no reason left for
there is no self-consistency. And you are left with nothing to say when somebody
says a dog created the universe.
You might think that when God gave us free will he limited our logic and
therefore our free will. No - he made it impossible, that is what he did! It
makes better sense to hold that free will is nonsense and an attack on reason.
Clearly if there is a God he has no right to let us create so much suffering. He
cannot use respect for our free choice as an excuse.
We conclude that belief in free will does more than call reason into question
but is the enemy of reason.