Free Will

Today I overheard our resident atheistic philosophy instructor discussing with a student in the hallway the topic of Free Will. I very nearly laughed out loud to hear him stating that, in his view, we do have Free Will, limited, of course, by such things as our cultural milieu.

The reason I found this to be so funny is that it seems to me that there can be no Free Will outside of God's Existence. While I recognize that there are some difficulties with reconciling God's Will with Free Will, nonetheless, it is clear to me that God's Existence is a prerequisite to Free Will. And here is why.

If we posit an existence based on random chance and not some grand design, there is no ultimate plan against which our choices make any difference. There's no particular reason to believe that anything we choose to do, whether driven by pure choice or by biological determinism will take us to any particular point. In the first place, then, we have no point of reference against which to measure our beginning, middle, or end points. Ultimately we will be wherever we end up being, with no one end point being better than any other end point. Second, without a point of reference above our human one, if we are mere animals among other animals, in what sense can our choices be meaningful? How is our choice to feed the hungry any different than, say, a dog's choice to feed its young? It's immaterial--irrelevant. Whether we choose because we "thought about it and made a conscious decision" or moved in that direction by virtue of some biological imperative means absolutely nothing, and there is no frame of reference from which to make any judgement about the action. How could we possibly ever have a clear enough vision to be able to see above the circumstances in which our decisions are formed to understand our motivations. No, only an omniscient God could determine the influence of our circumstances on our decision making.

In my humble opinion, when a secular humanist rejects God, he or she must henceforth reject Free Will. And yet, is it not clear to us as humans that there is Free Will? And if we sense that Free Will exists, is it not as compared with some grand design, some master plan? As difficult as it may be to understand the paradox of Divine and Free Will co-existing, is it not very natural for us to understand it? We see it in politics all the time at election time, when voting for one's preferred candidate will only serve to take a vote away from the most plausible candidate closest to the voter's own political views. We see it when a parent takes a child for a walk, only to lose the child in traffic when the child pulls out of the parent's grip.

We know that we have Free Will, but we also know there are serious limitations to that Free Will, not only culturally and socially, but also as an individual's free Will must conflict with the Free Will of others; in addition, it can only be free to the degree to which we understand the ramifications of the choice. Thus, the apparent conflict between Divine Will and Free Will only describes what our human nature sees occurring every day.