What Does it Mean to be Human? Part 3--Free Will
Imago Dei, meaning of life, What am I?, What is human? //

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga defines an agent who has free will as one who is free to perform a morally right action and free to refrain; “no causal laws and antecedent conditions determine either that he will perform the action, or that he will not”.(1) In the literature, it is generally defined as follows,

Free will:

The ability to make a decision that satisfies two criteria:

a. the decision was not determined by any antecedent conditions and,

b. the person could have decided otherwise,

where ‘determined’ means it was caused to happen such that no other result was possible. The conditions leading up to the outcome were such that the result was “carved in stone”. This is in stark contrast to bringing some influence to bear on a decision or putting pressure on a person to make a particular decision. Influence is compatible with free will; it can be considered and overridden by the person making the free decision. So even if we have a proclivity, propensity, or an almost overwhelming desire to say “yes” to something that we know is not good for us, we can override those powerful influences and say “no”.