Is "free will" the big difference between humans and other animals?

Aren't there animals living wild and free today?? Aren't they making their choices freely?? Look closely. Don't animals just have fewer capabilities?? I know a man who had a squirrel problem. The squirrel kept getting in his attic. The man tried everything from traps, poison, even boarding up any place of entry. The squirrel kept getting in. The man came to a conclusion that the squirrel was smarter than him. It was a battle of free wills. The squirrel won. I say won but the man did win in the end. He outlived the squirrel. Thank God squirrels don't live as long as men.

...Hi Fulltank, I do think that we are classified as human animals, homosapiens, the highest class of animals. I remember having a question like this in school. My contention was then and is still that we do not have "free will". We tend to think that we have free will, but in fact, our every decision is based on a series of considerations that we take into account. So when we decide one thing or another is it really our free will or the emphasis we put on certain factors which steer us to our ultimate decision. When we buy a house, we look for the best part of town, we look for the best looking home that we can afford, why, because we want our home to be admired, we want to have the prestige of living in an affluent neighborhood, we want the neighbors to think we have enough money to live in such a house. So our decisions are molded by things which have nothing to do with our free will so to speak. Not altogether a concrete theory but one which I think is more predominate. The difference between humans and other animals is our ability to think and reason, other animals I think, react instinctively. Just a few thoughts. Sorry to be so long. Take care.

It can be. But now Human beings are also behaving like animals. They are even Worse than animals. Doing bomb blast here and there And destroying the man kind. I don't know what they get from doing so. Ya you are right "free will" To destory mankind and to destroy animals also.

If you had cats you'd know that a human's free will is not what sets us apart from other animals. Being created in the image of God is what sets us apart.

While some animals may be stronger or faster or may be able to do some other amazing things when animal intelligence is compared to a human we see a huge difference. On a scale of one to a million, animals are at one and humans a million, a big difference and even that is giving way too much credit to animals. Genesis 1:27 says that man was created in God's image. We posses qualities similar to God like justice which doesn't exist in the animal world. We can learn from the animals. From watching the birds we have designed better and better airplanes. Definitely a huge gulf between humans and animals Each was cretaed for a different purpose.

I believe that what makes humans different from other animals is our ability to think abstractly. Without the ability to think abstractly we would not be capable of language, artwork, religion, science... we probably couldn't function as a species without our ability to abstract, because all the nooks and crannies in our brains would be pretty useless without bodies that work to our own benefit in the wild.