No morphological differences between living and non-living systems are yet known

What "evidence" is this? Are you referring to the radioactive dating data that must first assume that radioactive decomposition happens at a fixed rate across all time (unverified and unverifiable), and that we even know what the "original" isotope breakdowns of various elements were (unknown and unknowable)? Or is there some geological evidence I am not aware of that does not require first assuming the desired conclusion.

> Science doesn't say it did. Science said it could.

Ok fine, with what evidence does science support the claim that things could go from not existing to existing with no outside intervention?

> it is the most "likely" answer

Only if you explicitly exclude the idea that a higher intelligence created the universe with life more or less as we know it (explaining the great holes in your "fossil records"/etc.). If you refrain from artificially excluding that explanation, you will see that no answer is any more likely than precisely it.

A naïve person would then argue that hydrogen must have been created by their God, that the existence of the universe must be the doing of their God and that proves that their God must exist. A scientist would interject, as that's a whole load of assumptions which are untestable and the simpler theory, that the universe just exists as an assumption in itself, is a much better one. A less religious person, however, would argue that God is that abstract fact of pre-existence, a pre-existence that all the scientific investigation in the world could never get rid of.

All philosophy of science starts with the set of assumptions known as materialism: the world exists objectively, and its phenomena can be measured and explained. We can't possibly ever escape the assumption that the world exists with any scientific theory and therefore must accept some kind of pre-existence.

The argument does not actually support the existence of a conscious, material God any more than just saying that you believe in him. It simply argues that science can never explain the existence of the universe, just its development. Intelligent design is pretty much excluded.

We are a collection of germs and molecules. We share a lot of commonalities with the units we are composed of. That doesn't make us "no different" than them, when taken as a whole. It certainly doesn't have to make us or the world uninteresting.

It's only naive, over-confident people jumping into conversations they don't understand who define it as something else.

We can also talk about cognitive abilities, sentience, etc., but these are distinct concepts from consciousness and it's extremely valuable to maintain that distinction if you want to have productive discussions.

It can also be a self-reinforcing behavior, as giving credit can also in turn benefit you later.

Again, just because everything is predetermined doesn't mean there aren't complex dynamics in motion, ones which greatly influence behavior and the chances of making a decision. Understanding these dynamics can also influence how you behave in the future.

Edit:

It seems that I am saying "if you kick a raccoon, it will run away". And you are saying "whether I kick the raccoon or not has already been determined".

In this case, my analysis is helpful/useful while yours isn't. My analysis can influence your future behavior (e.g. if you run into a menacing raccoon in the future, it will increase the chances that you will be able to defend yourself properly), especially if you didn't know this before, while your analysis probably doesn't affect behavior (except to promote apathy perhaps, which is likely even detrimental).

[ Disclaimer: I know nothing about raccoons, it was just an example ]

It doesn't mean you are wrong, it's just that saying "everything is predetermined" is not a useful way of looking at the world. It's like saying "white paint is white", which is not very surprising.

Strictly speaking, it's not even quite correct: quantum mechanics tells us that, even though the universe has (deterministic) physical laws, it also behaves randomly at a fundamental level. However, that does not change the fact that we don't have free will (since we have zero control over the randomness).

But it's conceivable that some of our decisions might be affected by quantum randomness (this is even obvious in some contrived, but realistic Schrödinger's-cat-like scenarios).

Scientific predestination? /j

What makes you think we don’t?

Whether or not you have free will, punching someone in the face is likely to have consequences. That is your reason to consider whether or not to do it.

If we assume you have free will, it provides you with the opportunity to actively make the choice that will get you the best outcome.

If we assume you do not, then that won't alter the outcomes, nor the reasons to prefer one choice over the other, the only thing that has changed is whether or not the choice you made was a genuine choice or would always play out the same way if we somehow was able to rewind time.

That the outcome would be the same given the same input and same state of your mind does not mean there was no reasons not to act a given way, only that you had no agency in which outcome you actually end up with. But the state of your mind would be a factor in that, and a belief that your decisions has no effect on your future outcomes so it doesn't matter what you choose to do certainly would make you less likely to end up with good ones. Whether or not "rewinding time" would let you make different "choices" does not alter that.

I think they are conflating free will with freedom and capability and it sounds a bit off the rails.

Even organisms that clearly lack free will (like bacteria) will respond to stimulus.

This presumes a very specific sets of views on morality. One might argue that it makes whatever reaction you feel like justified, because it was not a choice. Certainly if we can't punish you for hitting someone, we can't punish the person you hit if they hit back.

Others would argue that while it would remove the moral justification for retribution, free will or not does not need to affect the moral argument for punishment as a means to reduce the chance of reoffending or even general effects on the rest of the population.

Free will only affects whether or not you had any immediate control over what you did, not on the effects it had on society, nor to what extent you pose a future risk or whether failure to punish you affects the future risks to society from others, all of which are factors in peoples views on the extent to which punishment is moral.

My metric is machines that punch me in the face are bad, and I put myself in charge of deciding it. If enough people agree with me, we can make rules and hire cops to stop the machines behavior we don't like.

>I mean, you don't see people putting defective water heaters in prison, right? Why not? Because they have no free will, and are thus deemed incapable of committing crimes..

I'm not proposing putting it in jail, just repair or replacement. On the other hand, people don't ignore their water heater starting fires because "it was designed that way" or "it is a product of its environment and mistreatment".

I saying it is irrelevant if the water heater has choice or not. It is simply a problem that needs to be delt with either way. Blame isnt mutually exclusive. The water heater could have a defective design, poor maintenance, and as a result be defective itself.

I don't have to believe it has choice or there is a tiny man inside it to go about fixing it and stopping it from burning down my house

You seem to assume that a lot of judgements we make of actions require that the actions have been made "freely". But we judge things that we all agree does not have free will behind them all the time. E.g. we judge the weather.

> Nonsensicality, criminality, judgment, quality, all go out the window if we are all just puppets on strings.

None of them go out the window. The morality of how we approach some of them are affected. E.g. I do strongly believe that any judgement of peoples actions morally should account for their lack of ability to act otherwise, and that this e.g. makes punishments or reactions based out of a desire for vengeance entirely immoral, and that punishment in general should be based on an assessment of how to minimise the harm to society as a whole - and that includes taking into account harm to the person you're punishing, but that does not remove the need for judging criminals because criminals still affect society irrespective of how they make their decisions.

It does mean that from my point of view a punishment is only justified if you can show that the harm from imprisoning someone sufficiently mitigates risks of harms to society that sufficiently outweigh the harm we do to the person we imprison, and that would certainly affect how you deal with those you imprison, and when you use prison sentences, but it would not end imprisonment.

And we are just puppets on a string. I feel comfortable making that statement firmly, because nobody has ever even come up with as much of a definition of "free will" that isn't compatibilist (that is, an illusion over predetermination, though many compatibilists would get irate at me describing it as an illusion) or otherwise does not in any meaningful way make actions "free", much less posited any remotely testable hypothesis for what such "free" decisions even would be that would let our minds influence them without any cause and affect that isn't some mix of deterministic and randomness that we have no meaningful influence over. The burden is on those who believe in free will to, for starters, define it in a logically coherent way other than just arguing in the negative by insisting we're somehow different from all other matter and energy we've observed.

There are many sculpture-like artifacts from prehistoric sites. In most cases, we have no proof that they are sculptures, just strong evidence, and there's a long tail of increasingly vaguely sculpture-like forms where no strong conclusions should be drawn.

The existence of this tail does not invalidate the strong conclusions about the clearly artificial sculptures, and the analogous conclusion follows for RagnarD's main point about the fossil record.

I guess one of the rules of life will be "It's not an object, it's a system"

Not directly, but without them chemical reactions would not be possible. "The molecular vibrations", Brownian movement, or, more formally, temperature determines how fast the reactions could occur. It's a physical equivalent of a clock signal in a computer.

Without temperature (t=0), "molecular vibrations" do not occur, so all chemical reactions stop, making active computations based on those reactions impossible. This is a physical equivalent of a halt state in a digital computer.

> What's more, that rock might itself be a processing element of a larger computer and its own processing elements might themselves be computers, so in fact life exists fractally at all levels of magnification

This is logically wrong. Water is a chemical substance. It makes life possible, but it's not alive by itself because it does not meet the formal criteria. Just like a single transistor is not a CPU.