Do people really have free will

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Do people really have free will?

To begin, you will I'm sure agree, that we often feel as though we have free will, or freedom of choice. For example, it often seems to us that we could choose to go to the movies, or stay home, and that, whether we do the one rather than the other, the choice is entirely our own. This is what philosophers are getting at when they talk about 'free will': that feeling that you are in control of what you do.

The question you've been asked to address is whether people really have free will. This is essentially to ask whether our feeling of having free will is an illusion, or a reality. No one doubts that people often (but not always) feel free; the question is whether this feeling is more than just a feeling.

The best way of approaching your question is by considering reasons for thinking that we do not genuinely have free will. Philosophers have been troubled by several different arguments that seem to show that, appearances notwithstanding, we aren't actually free. The most famous of these is probably the argument from determinism.
Determinism refers to an understanding of the world based on science and physics in particular. It says that everything that happens in the universe depends on prior physical causes. For example, the motions of the planets depend on the laws of gravity, and the size and mass of each individual planet. When we know the mass of a planet, and the laws of gravity, we can calculate what it will do in the years to come; we can predict its future behaviour. So the motions of the planets seem to be determined by the physical laws of the universe.

With this understanding of determinism in mind, now consider the following argument:

(1) If determinism is true, then every human action is causally necessitated by events that occurred before the ...