Okay Yuyutsu, I appreciate your efforts to try and make your position coherent but I don't think you succeed. In the end I think you just continually contradict yourself.

Presumably you will think that I have arrived at this conclusion because that is just what God causes me to think. If that should be correct, that God is causing me to think as I do, then there is nothing I can do about it! But again, I don't think that is correct.

Thanks again for the discussion, but I am going to leave it there.

Dear JP,

May God bless you, and keep safe.

We are driven by an elaborate set of instincts.
These make up the basic person.
We can add to these with learned behaviour.
We also have the ability to reason.
So we can control, to a useful extent, all of the above.
This ability to control is the free will of which we speak?
As long as we can reason, we have this 'free will'.
Whether we use it or not is another matter.
Some cannot.
Such as serial killers etc.
Their instinctive behaviour overrides all other considerations.

Are there boundaries on how we apply that great attribute of reason?
And hence our free will?
Yes there are.
We all realise that there is 'safety in numbers'.
So we willingly belong to a group.
In any group there will be a great diversity of attitudes and opinions.
So compromise will be needed to reach a set of common goals and behaviours.
These are largely outlined by our system of laws.
There are also other 'standards' to which we adhere.
These are usually of a relatively personal nature.
Together, they all contribute to the 'culture' which exists in our society.

I generally support Sam Harris but maybe that's the way he justifies his gayness to himself. I enjoyed the Sam Harris / Jordan Peterson's God debates. Physicist Roger Penrose wrote the Emperor's New Mind and refers to quantum consciousness. Determinism looks different from the point of view of quantum mechanics. The 'deterministic free will' view seem to be variations on the "End of History" "and why are we here" themes which have been done to death. Sam Harris is generally very thoughtful and so his arguments are bound to be interesting.

The comment that implies that the Dog/ Human cultural relationship is encoded genetically is interesting- and contradicts Marxist understanding of culture as being a purely nurture based phenomena.