Not sure if Ive understood repy 64 correctly, but I was talking about the concept of a random soul that Allah has no control over.
It makes independent decisions based upon whether it was concerned with itself, or concerned towards others (including Allah). And this is how you would ultimately be judged.
You are still thinking on too large a scale. Think of the smallest, most fundamental, events/interactions (or experiences as some people would say). Each entity cannot make independent decision
S, because a truly independent decision has to be random. Randomness has to be completely free of influence (though I wouldn't say unconstrained). Rolling a dice isn't random. Hence any random enitity makes one choice, any choice further along the particular group of events cannot be influenced by the first random entity. You could, I suppose, argue that our souls are the first random entity in our existence, but then they cannot be responsible for any (true) choices made later in our lives. If there are no more choices to be made in our lives, and everything we do is a result of that first event, in effect they are doomed by a single,uncontrollable (though again, I wouldn't say unconfined), random decision made at their birth. Rendering the idea of our souls exercising free will during our lives nonsensical.
When looked at this way it becomes apparent that all (caused) events have a will. A ball being dropped has a will to reach to the ground. Will cannot be acted against, it is just causality. For a being to have free will (or more accurately, imo, to be
free of will), it has to be uncaused, uninfluenced, random - and it must only be a single event/interaction/experience. We are, very clearly, a
collection of such interactions.
The problem, as ever, seems to be conciousness. A sense of self, that encompasses more than one event. I'd love to know how it arised, how our brains managed to build a me/not-me boundary, or an object/not-object view. (I think now, more than ever, I can relate to the idea that everything is concious, and our sense of self is just an illusion. Though I'm not yet convinced.)
Our brains naturally attempt to assign agency to events (I think it's obvious how that evolved, no?). And when it became more prudent to assume an intelligent agent, our god-inventing abilities began to take shape. Natural selection would surely have favoured organisms that assumed the rustling in the trees was a predator, or a competitor, rather than, say, wind. (Somewhere down the line, when it became natural to assume a particularly complex event was due to another human, we began to invent man-gods to explain natural phenomena.) I think this is, in part, responsible for why religionists assign responsibilty (ultimate responsibility - that is, free [of] will responsibility) to people for their actions/will. When they are actually a collection of caused events/beings with a will(s).
Topic: Discussion on freewill with friends.