• also see: Calvinism

• Yaaron Reuven's Shiur: https://youtu.be/ZGTEsNWc9uo

The rest of this page explains what's spoken of in this video; essentially that once again the atheist is placing limitations on God's ability, knowledge and understanding.

The problem goes something like this.

• a) We appear to have free will.
• b) The universe appears to be predetermined.
• c) Therefore there is no free will.

Anyone can see that a and b are not going to meet in the middle; c is determined because, if the universe can be predetermined in any way, even if it is possible but not plausable, then there cannot be free will. This is the complete knowledge argument, which then Atheists apply to a belief in God.

The atheist argues, the bible (and God) is wrong – we do not have Free will, because such a thing is impossible – and therefore there is no God, and belief in religion and morality is stupid.

If a being existed which had complete omniscience, there cannot be free will.

• a) if there is a time T1, T2, T3 which represents before, during and after making a choice,
• b) if any being is aware of T3 before T1 or T2, then T2 becomes a necessary action (because he is aware of it).

I.E. if someone is aware that something is going to happen, it therefore must happen.

If there is a room – say, called the “Chinese Room” – where by any slip of paper passed under the door is, within a reasonable timeframe (say 10 to 30 seconds) translated perfectly to or from Chinese and English, one might assume there is an intelligent Chinese person on the other side of the door typing out answers. Taking it even further, you can ask questions about facts from history, basic science, and so forth – and they will be answered.

The idea is a sort of Turing Machine – what is really going on is that a series of computers are simply looking up responses in a database of answers created over perhaps thousands of years – every conceivable question, every conceivable statement, everything ever put into print, and perhaps the digitized transcripts of conversations from a digital era.

In this case it can be proposed, that there is no consciousness within the machine despite the machine itself being able to act as if it possessed a consciousness – or, a free will.

First it must be stated that this argument assumes the premise that the universe is predetermined, when this is not an established fact. This is because a and b in the first argument are in fact exclusionary and there is no other reason to presuppose that one or the other is correct. Therefore the superlogical case (see quantum logic)) must assume that 'since it is self-evident we have free will,' therefore we have free will. This then becomes the default position because we do not actually have any evidence that the universe is predetermined – this is an assumption based on current knowledge, which is technically impossible to prove (all we have proven is that one layer of reality, such as chemical interactions, is wholly simulated by the next level down, such as atomic physics, ad nauseum, and we do not know what lies at the bottom. In fact, quantum weirdness would insinuate that in fact even using just pure scientific knowledge, that the universe is not in fact predetermined).

(This may lead back to the religious argument that since God “knows what will happen” this is an assumption of predeterminisim. This is in fact a false assumption, usually based on some false understanding of God, such as that he is limited by time:

¹⁾ Merely because God is aware of T3 before T1 does not mean T2 has to become a guaranteed action – The idea that God becomes aware of T3 only after T2, but then this knowledge back-propagates to T1 seems to confirm the original argument, but it does not – since in such a case free will is still present, but God would have the choice whether or not to change whatever variables he would need to change if indeed he wanted something different to happen.

Finally, we revisit “The problem is choice.” –Neo, “The Matrix”. The Chinese room example, and in fact the omniscience example, assumes that one can know the mind of God – i.e. the mind of the outside observer who assumes omniscience. In fact, we do not know this but exist from the other side – the side of subjective consciousness. We intuitively know that free will exists, we simply are unaware of the mechanism by which it operates. We know it exists because we are conscious and can think through an action before we take it, thus being able to make a choice – not a blind or “forced” choice, such as the path of a ball in a pachinko machine – but informed choices based on reason and experience.

So what the atheist has really done is presuppose the universe is predetermined and therefore thrown out his own subjective personal experience as worthless. This is in fact a mistake. What the believer does is to recognize that he does in fact have free will from his own standpoint – and then when faced with the fact that he does not know how this mechanism operates he assumes it is part of the nature of the universe.

In fact, our own personal subjective observations, experiences and reasoning constitute the enabling factor of modern science, and indeed all knowledge. Is there a free will? Yes, of course there is, and what remains is to understand how it works, or why it is indeed there.

There is one more issue to discuss on the nature of the mechanism of free will, that is randomness. There are two kinds of randomness; the first kind is where the choices themselves are informed by some sort of randomness directly, such that the outside observer cannot predict the outcome. In any case this presupposes the outside observer cannot predict the outcome (and therefore free will exists), but this is really the Atheist revealing his plan ahead of time, we will get to that.

The second kind of randomness is a randomness or obscurity of process such that we ourselves cannot predict the outcome and that therefore our free-will seems to be truly free since we ourselves cannot predict what someone else will do. The atheist will balk at this because a) his premise is really that there is no God – and premise two is that everything can be predetermined out of a sort of physical determinism. So you could not make the argument for example, that “the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts”, because there is no God/Spiritual space for it to operate in, and is completely contained within the physical world.

“What about something like Go,” where there are not enough particles in the physical universe to record the number of possible game positions? The idea that you cannot build a computer which is able to predict the future out of physical determinism because, there are not enough particles in the universe to record the position and momentum of all the particles in the universe? Again, this is really just the premise that there is no God – for any outside observer could use the universe itself as it's own simulation – i.e. maybe there is in fact such a computer, in a universe far greater than our own, and that in fact every particle and it's momentum is recorded and simulated on such a computer? Thus the randomness argument reveals the Atheist's real premise, which is that there is no God. The idea of physical determinism, a premise in and of itself, rests on that notion.

What about people who cannot control their desires? Well, many people can control their desires. If a person cannot control their desires and then acts in a criminal way, they must be removed from society, say, put in jail. We note that some forms of punishment work better than others at 'teaching' people how to control their desires, or allowing them to reflect and come to their own conclusions.

Thus we see that even if there was no free will, in the extreme sense that someone may be unable to control his desires, we still must act as if we have free will or society would collapse. This is not a choice we are unable to make; for example the CHAZ in 2020 and other such concepts such as disbanding or defunding police operations in various areas – these are choices people do in fact make.

So whether or not free will exists we must act as if it does.

May the Atheist switch horses in midstream? “Thank you for so eloquently proving my point,” the Atheist will then say – there cannot be a God because free will exists(!!) After all, if you really did have free will then God could not be omnipotent, because he cannot alter your free will.

The atheist's premise is then there is no god – and there is no conclusion. It works like this:

• a) There is no free will, therefore there is no God.
• b) There is free will, therefore there is no God.
• c) Therefore there is no God.

When in reality it is really this:

• a) There is no God.
• b) Therefore determinism must be entirely physical
• c) Therefore there is no free will.

In this, the Atheist has decided to ignore his own subjective experience. I have frequently heard Atheists say that even if God came down and moved the stars for them in the greatest miracle ever given, it would still not prove to them that they could trust such a God, or that such a God would be true, good, or worthy of worship. Such unbelief is in fact foolishness. There is a difference between being a skeptic and a denier. A skeptic asks for some sort of proof – a denier denies such proof.

However this is based again on a false understanding of God; God can in fact alter someone's free will, if he so chooses – for example during the time in which God interfered with Pharao's free will in order to allow him the power to deny God's power and not release the Israelites from Egypt. Also merely talking to someone can be considered altering their free-will; such as when God issues a command, thus altering the will of people who follow that command against their natures; or when advising Cain; even though in all such cases God acts so as to increase one's choices and not limit them, it is still an alteration of one's decision-making ability. So in short this argument is a dead-end for the atheist, any way you slice it the fact that we do or do not have free will does not mean there is or is not a God.

I once asked an atheist, if we could travel through time to see into the future, if this meant free will existed or not (assuming that we knew what was going to happen). Phrased like this, he immediately added the precondition that if we merely observed the past it would not change the present, and if we did not take action in the present it would not change our observations of the future.

This struck me as the idea that God exists outside of time and space. So then, it's easy to come up with the notion that there is a being who is omniscient, only that he does not in general “touch” his creation. An omnipotent being might not need to. This is the idea that God exists outside the physical universe. So a physical proof is never going to be found, as our scientific instruments cannot look outside of the physical universe, cannot look beyond the physical laws and 'stuff' of this universe.

A conclusion if I may. The only possible proof there is for God would take the form of an emotional argument, an appeal to our own self-consciousness and our own subjectively observed free-will. The plain interpretation of this is that we are self-conscious and have free will as we assume a God also would. Thus the belief in God becomes a choice. The question I am left with is what can validly inform this choice? The answer can only be our own observations, experiences, and reasoning about the world. The atheist looks at the universe and sees physical determinism without a first cause, the believer looks at the same universe and sees a creator who designed it.