- Atheism rejects the concept of free will
- Biblical view of free will
- Genesis 2:15-173 Why did God place the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden?
- Exodus 7:1-44 What can we learn from God hardening Pharaoh’s heart?
- Exodus 32:15 What is Israel’s response to the almighty display of God’s power?
- What does the story of Jonah tell us of free will and sovereignty?
- Determinism
- causal determinism – every effect has a physical cause. Human decisions are part of a chain of natural laws.
- theological determinism – God has foreordained everything, including all human actions
- “I have a materialist view of the world. I think that things are determined in a rational way by antecedent events and that commits me to the view that when I think I have free will, when I think I am exercising free choice I am deluding myself.” ShirleyFilms. (2012, February 13). FREE WILL – Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anBxaOcZnGk ↩︎
- “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.” Crick, F. (1994). The astonishing hypothesis: The scientific search for the soul. New York: Scribner’s. p3. ↩︎
- 15The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. 16And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (ESV) ↩︎
- 1And the Lord said to Moses, “See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron shall be your prophet. 2You shall speak all that I command you, and your brother Aaron shall tell Pharaoh to let the people of Israel go out of his land. 3But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and though I multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, 4Pharaoh will not listen to you. Then I will lay my hand on Egypt and bring my hosts, my people the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great acts of judgment (ESV). ↩︎
- 1When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, “Up, make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” (ESV) ↩︎