But how did the knife and fork get to be in front of you?

Who put them there?

Who told you which table to sit at etc. ?

All scientific theory suggests that at the macro level, that all events are caused by the laws of science interacting with the pre-existing states of the universe.

Which would allow no role for free will.

At the micro level though, some events do appear to be random, but they don’t seem to involve free will either.

God also determined that man would have free-will, the ability and responsibility to choose to obey Him.

(cf. Gen. 3:1-6; Josh. 24:15; Matt.11:28).

If we do have free-will, then it’s very limited indeed.

For example.

You get a call from your office and they tell you that you have to go to New York tomorrow morning.

You can of course say that you don’t want to go, but are you prepared to lose your job by insisting that you won’t go?

You insist and get fired. Was it your will that you got fired?

You agree to go to New York even though you don’t want to go. No free will involved there.

When you arrive you check into your hotel that the company booked for you. No free will involved here.

In the evening the hotel restaurant is either open or closed so whether you can eat there or not does not depend on you.

You go out to look for a restaurant but are limited by not knowing the area or by funds, or whatever, and wherever you decide to eat will be limited by the fact that you’re in NY and didn’t want to go there anyway.

You enter a restaurant and choose what you prefer from the menu, but what you really want to eat doesn’t appear on the menu so you’re unable to eat what you’d really like to eat.

Back at the hotel you go to bed in one that was selected for you, and you sleep between sheets that were bought by one person and put on the bed by a different person, neither of whom you know.

So where was your free will in all this?

In the 1970s, Benjamin Libet, who was a physiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, wired up the brains of volunteers to an electroencephalogram and instructed the volunteers to make random motions, like pressing a button or flicking a finger, and he noted the exact times on a clock.

Dr. Libet found that brain signals associated with these actions occurred half a second before the subject was conscious of deciding to make them.

The order of brain activities seemed to be perception of motion, and then decision, instead of the other way around.

So the conscious brain was only playing catch-up to what the unconscious brain was already doing meaning that the decision to act was an illusion.

Dr. Libet’s results have been reproduced a great many times over the years, along with other experiments that suggest that people can be easily fooled when it comes to assuming ownership of their actions.

Does God know everything before it happens?

If “yes”, then that would mean that in advance he knows what we will do.

If He knew yesterday what I will do today, then am I free to NOT to not take those actions?

There is a conflict between our assumption that we have free will, and God’s all knowing nature, as is recognized by all creationist religions.

Philosophers who distinguish freedom of action and freedom of will do so because our success in carrying out our ends depends in part on factors wholly beyond our control.

Furthermore, there are always external constraints on the range of options we can meaningfully try to undertake.

As the presence or absence of these conditions and constraints are not usually our responsibility, it is plausible that the central loci of our responsibility are our choices, or willings.

* central loci = The set of all points whose location is determined by stated conditions.

Randomness is nothing more than lack of information. What event appears to be random to one person might not be random at all to another because they simply have differing amounts of crucial information about the event in question. So the argument that free will exists because randomness exists holds no weight whatsoever. Randomness is not absolute. It depends on how much information you have. To see this, imagine I tossed a coin with a programmed mechanical arm and the result is “heads” (say). Now, if I toss the coin again with EXACTLY the same conditions (i.e. same starting position, with the same force, same environmental conditions etc..), we know the result will be the same. For someone who only just walked into the room, the second toss would appear random. The fact that it is impractical to set up this thought experiment with perfect accuracy is irrelevant – it just shows that randomness in the truest sense of the word (how most people understand it) does not exist. In order to address the question of whether we have free will or not, we need to imagine a situation where we feel like we are in full control of our actions e.g. deciding whether to have a cup of tea or coffee at a particular time (assuming that both are equally preferable). People who advocate ‘free will’ might say that the choice is made without conscious thought i.e. spuriously or dare I say it, randomly! To me, the fact that we are unaware of our thought process on this occasion serves to delude us that we are in control of our actions. The fact that we choose tea (say) has to have a reason behind it, however tiny the preference is. It might be that we (subconsciously) feel that we drank too much coffee for one day or we saw a TV programme on bad coffee habits 3 weeks ago etc.., even though that information doesn’t come to the conscious mind at decision time. The sub-conscious mind is a remarkable machine at weighing up options at speed, most of which are hidden from the conscious mind. ‘Free will’ people usually say at this point “Yes, but aren’t we free to make a conscious choice?”. It appears free, but when you look at it closely, again there’s a reason behind it. The sub-conscious has made the decision. The ‘consciousness’ or awareness comes AFTER the decision has been made by the sub-conscious mind. This has been well documented scientifically using fMRI imaging of the brain. It is ‘reason’ itself that locks us in to doing whatever it is we are programmed to do by the sub-conscious. People generally are reticent to accept this idea (similar to the dispelling of the geocentric universe). When presented with information that threatens people’s importance, people will go to extraordinary lengths to show how autonomous they are – all of it delusional in my view. We are nothing more than the product of our genes and our environment, neither of which we have control over. If you “choose” a different environment, the reason behind it is just a more complicated version of the tea/coffee example – the same principle applies (just more factors to weigh up). There is a reason for everything

Thank you very much for your well thought out response.

I shall reread it a couple more times, but the thought that I took away after a first reading was, “It is ‘reason’ itself that locks us in to doing whatever it is we are programmed to do by the sub-conscious”.

i thought we were talking about having free will as a gift from G-d. not at all the same topic now.

Talkbacks tend to shift and drift but….

Some of the best known Christians in history have taught there is no free will, including St. Augustine , Martin Luther, and John Calvin.

The Christian Bible states in many places that God creates our future and decides our fates.

It constantly denies that we have free will.

If God knows exactly what will happen, (Being omnipotent and omniscient of course) the status of choices as free, is questionable.

We have free will. Those aspects of life may lead our sub conscious to influence or dictate our choice in a situation are a sum unique to that individual. In such as every person has different experiences. The sub conscious is not calibrated and identical in every person. To compare a human life to a calibrated robot is a bit simplistic aswell. While I can avidly agree that the sum total of our sub and conscious states influence our choices they are still ours to own. While God may know all that is laid out before us we do not. So the illusion of free will is in fact free will for the human life.