Pre-Alpha, The Existence of God, Episode III - Free Will and Rational Thought

The next thing I want to examine, and I think many atheists haven’t thought this completely through, is the whole area of free will and rational thought. In fact Richard Dawkins, the famous atheist who has, apparently, given this some thought (although I would argue, not enough) has said, “This is a question that I dread.” And here’s the problem – the atheist, or let’s say, the naturalist (a person who believes that everything must be within the realm of the purely natural, or physical) must believe that our minds, like everything else, are nothing but, as atheist Lawrence Krauss puts it, “particles in motion.” Krauss in fact gets the ramifications of his position. He says that we really don't have free will. I, of course, don’t pretend to know the entire workings of the human brain, but to put it very simply, all our thoughts are just the result of electrons travelling along certain pathways in our brains – everything is physical.  

So let me try something. Let me ask you to raise a hand – just one – it doesn’t matter which one, either your right or your left hand. Thank you. Now, to do that, each of you had to think about raising a hand, then think about which one you would raise, then make a decision, and raise the one upon which you decided. Some of you may have decided not to raise either, but the point is that you had a choice and you made a choice. How does the naturalist account for this? 

To look at another way, picture this: an infinitely large billiard table with an innumerable number of billiard balls on it. Imagine it being perfectly smooth with no friction, so that a ball started in motion would continue in a certain direction until it hit another ball. Then it and the ball it hit would move, or continue moving in a direction and at a speed determined completely by the original speed and direction of that first ball. Picture then, all these balls in motion, colliding with each other all around the table. Do these balls have any choice or control over themselves? Can they decide which direction they want to go? No. Then apply this picture to the entire universe. In the purely natural view, all these balls, or particles are completely at the mercy, so to speak, of what we will call antecedent events – each particle’s speed and direction is completely dependent upon the speed and direction of another particle with which it had previously collided. And we can carry that back all the way to the big bang. These atoms and molecules, electrons and protons, have no control over themselves. They themselves have no decision-making powers.  

So if that is all our brains are, how do we account for our ability to make decisions? To make conscious choices, we must be able to control along which paths these electrons in our brains travel. As John Lennox states it, "We have a mind that can move atoms." Where does that power come from? How are we able to do this? The most obvious explanation is that there exists something outside of the purely physical; some mechanism by which we can control the movement of particles in our brains. If everything is purely natural, we don’t, but surely, deep down, we must believe that we do have that power – to make decisions, to choose between one thing and another. 

The atheist, or pure naturalist, must logically believe that we don't. But that introduces another self-contradiction in their thinking. That is this; what is the point in any argument or debate. Each of our beliefs, according to their position, is immutable, every thought or opinion having been formed, not by conscious consideration, but by the purely mechanical movement of particles in our brains over which we have no control. Every thought we have was determined by the speed and direction of particles at the beginning of the universe.

Now, they might try to say that we somehow have some kind of power to make these particles behave in a certain way but that presents two problems. First, they are introducing some kind of intelligence (in this case our own) outside the purely physical, and if you’re an atheist I don’t think you want to go there – speaking of outside intelligence, that is. And second, if everything is purely natural, then we too are just particles and we come back to the original problem; how do we account for this ability to have free will and rational thought.

Now this may not be an argument or proof for the God of the Bible, but it is to argue for something outside the purely natural, and that may a beginning; a place to start.

Again, to quote our tag line from Alberta 2013, "Question Everything."

Blessings,
John