“I am the first and I am the last; besides me there
is no God.” (Isaiah 44:6b)
1.
Personal Free-Will (in the Ontological
Sense).[1] One tenet of philosophical materialism (the
view that neither God, nor souls, but
only physical matter exists) is that our perceptions of making choices
are illusory for the reasons that, as solely physical entities, they are merely
the result of electrochemical firings of the interactions between the synapses
in our neural system. Yet such a view both
utterly defies reality and leads to logical incoherence. After all, since this view, if actually true,
applies not only to the professors who teach these notions, but to students who
are expected to understand them.
Astrophysicist John Polkinghorne has stated about the materialistic view
that, “Thought is replaced by electrochemical neural events [which are]
neither right nor wrong. The world of
rational discourse dissolves into the absurd chatter of firing synapses. Quite frankly that cannot be right and none
of us believes it to be so.”[2] Consequently, the notion of free-will is a
brute reality that must be accounted for.
The Christian finds a sufficient cause for such free-will in the God of
the Bible who freely knows and acts according to His own purposes. The non-theist, by contrast, is a hostage to
the logical ramification that free-agent personality cannot arise from
“law-abiding” mindless physical entities and events.
Through the
prophet Isaiah, the Lord God said, “‘To whom then will you compare me…’
says the Holy One. “Life up your
eyes and see: who created these?” (Isaiah 40:25-26a). In public debates I have, for example, raised
the question to my opponents as to how they account for the beginning of the
cosmos out of nothing at the Big Bang.
The replied either that a scientific answer would be sure to come in the
future, or simply, that any notion of a “god-answer” would be a
“non-starter.” Yet neither offered a
view that accounted for the brute scientific facts at all.
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