My philosophy
(described from language)
This is a continuation of the description of my philosophy. Please read that first.
The chicken and the egg
Which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg? I've removed the most obvious blunder in this question by specifying the kind of egg, but ultimately, the question is still rather stupid.
This is an attempt to posit a larger question about the nature of causality, and how we can resolve seemingly infinite causal chains. But, it misses that point by focusing on something too mundane.
Although we did not observe it and do not have the direct material evidence, we can reason that at some point in the past, the following event occurred: An animal that was as chicken-like as it could be while not technically being a chicken laid an egg, and the egg contained the embryo of an animal that was as un-chicken-like as it could be while technically being a chicken. That is, at some point, a non-chicken laid an egg containing the embryo of a chicken. This event isn't actually of any interest outside of this particular question; I'm not describing speciation, as speciation happens at the level of a population, not an individual. This is just a mundane event that once occurred.
Is a chicken egg an egg laid by a chicken, or is a chicken egg an egg containing a chicken embryo? If the former, then the chicken came first. If the latter, the egg.
But here's the crux: We can choose either definition, and there is no insight to be gained by choosing whether a chicken egg is an egg laid by a chicken or an egg containing a chicken embryo. The underlying facts are all known, and as it turns out, once we remove a layer of arbitrary semantics, there's nothing interesting here.
I am not contending that all philosophical questions are so dull (and nor, of course, am I contending that all dull questions are philosophical!). Rather, I am simply contending that a seemingly intractable problem can be a problem in how we conceptualize the world, wrapped around something rather simple.
And now, I contend one thing further: A seemingly intractable problem can be a problem in how we conceptualize the world, wrapped around nothing at all.
Free will
Do we have free will?
You may not be surprised to learn that my answer is: That is not a meaningful question and thus does not have an answer.
As people attempt to grapple with this question, they often place free will in opposition to something else. For instance, it is sometimes posited as: Do we have free will, or are we deterministic? But, my answer to that question is: In what way is free will supposed to be contradictory to determinism?
Let's presume that I am nothing more than an assemblage of chemicals into an extremely complex and multifaceted electrochecmial reaction, and that my conscious mind is nothing more than an emergent property of that reaction. It should be easy to presume this since it's true. And further, let's presume that those processes are strictly deterministic. In the Universe I've just posited, do I have free will?
Let me address the arguments that I do not: In that Universe, yes, my decisions are determined by a set of laws, and yes, my decisions are inevitable given a set of preconditions. ... and? The argument that that's contrary to free will is... ? I may be a deterministic lump of chemicals, but that deterministic lump of chemicals is still me. The fact that my mind is described by this physical Universe doesn't make it not my mind, and doesn't detract from its independence of action.
As a brief aside, people often misconstrue determinism as predestination. This is not correct. The outcome is inevitable, but not predictable, because of the “pre-” in “predict”. To predict the behavior of a complex system, you must either approximate (and thus potentially be wrong) or take more time to simulate than the system would take to simply exhibit its behavior. That is, given perfect knowledge of my mind and environment at some moment (and assuming the Universe is determinsitic), you could predict my behavior, but to accurately predict, say, one hour would necessarily take more than an hour. That's not much of a prediction.
Following on, let's say the Universe is not deterministic. Our current understanding of quantum mechanics suggests that the outcome of a quantum system is truly random, and it's perfectly possible that the system that makes up my mind has quantum components. Does that somehow grant me free will in a way that determinism does not? Why would I be more happy to define myself as having free will if my behavior is random than if my behavior is deterministic?
It would seem that what people are really trying to get at is the idea of thought somehow transcending physics. That is, they want to ascribe the mind to a “soul”, and conceptually place that outside of any physical laws. So, does the “free” in “free will” mean “free of physicality”? Why is that a good definition? And, can we really be so uncurious as to claim that if there is such a thing as a soul, then it is simply outside of all scrutiny, exists in no definable context, and follows no rules, laws, or structure? Why is that a good definition either?
As we try to answer the question of whether we have free will, we must necessarily interrogate what it means to have free will, and at each turn, we find that any attempt to ascribe a meaning to the concept results in an unsatisfactory conclusion. Not unsatisfactory in the sense of being an answer we'd prefer not to be true, but unsatisfactory in the sense that we've turned this question on its head, and are merely choosing how to define free will, rather than determining whether we have it. There is no insight to be gained by deciding arbitrarily what “free will” means such that the answer is what you want it to be.
But, in this case, there was no underlying truth being hidden by a layer of semantics. When we strip away all the questions about what it means to have free will, what we find is nothing at all. “Free will” is an apparition of a concept, an idea that can survive no scrutiny.
The conclusion of this is not that we lack free will. I am not asserting that we don't have free will! Nor am I asserting that we have free will, and nor am I asserting that we don't know whether we have free will. There can be no truth value assigned to our having free will, because “free will” doesn't actually mean anything. We neither have nor lack it, just as we neither have nor lack twilbogulation, because “twilbogulation” has no meaning.
God
Is there a God?
Here is the fundamental problem: If there is a God, then God created “is”. Not the word, of course, but the concept of being. If God is subject to being—if God is—then whence call him God?
But of course, even in making that argument, I've fallen into the same trap: If there is a God, then God created “is”. And, of course created creation. By which I don't mean the Universe—though, of course, if there is a God, he created that too—I mean the actual concept of creating things.
Oh, and “if”. Again, not the word, but the concept. The basic idea that things can have causes. The basic tenets of logic. Of reason.
In order to answer the question of God, we must necessarily interrogate what it means for there to be or not to be a God, but any attempt at querying that is stymied by the fact that all of our faculties of reason are subject to the very laws that God must not be subject to. This is not a question we can answer, not because of any lack of evidence, and not because of the greatness of God, but because we're trying to create a concept to encapsulate the very idea of things being beyond conceptualization. Any foothold we find in our attempt to grapple with the concept of “God” is immediately rendered meaningless.
The more we carve out in our attempt to ascribe a meaning, the more futile it becomes to describe what remains. The reason for that is simple: There is nothing there. Any attempt to interrogate the concept of “God” reveals that no such concept exists.
Like free will, I am not claiming that there is no God. Neither am I claiming that there is a God, nor that the existence or nonexistence of God is unknowable. There is no truth value that can be assigned to the question of the existence of God. If the question “is there a God?” has an answer, then the being you're interrogating, by the very nature of being, is not God.
That is theological noncognitivism. The assertion that all arguments about the existence of God are quibbles over semantics wrapped around no concept at all. There is insight to be gained in interrogating why we are capable of building layers of thought and understanding over nothing, but the layers themselves are without meaning.