Free Republic

If we have free will, so do subatomic particles, mathematicians claim to prove.“If the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will snap the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect—what is the source of the free will possessed by living things throughout the earth?”—Titus Lucretius Carus, Roman philosopher and poet, 99–55 BC. Human free will might seem like the squishiest of philosophical subjects, way beyond the realm of mathematical demonstration. But two highly regarded Princeton mathematicians, John Conway and Simon Kochen, claim to have proven that if humans have even the tiniest...

Coffee or tea with lunch? Which pants to wear to work? Which movie to watch? Your mind might be made up before you know it. Researchers have found patterns of brain activity that predict people's decisions up to 10 seconds before they're aware they've made a choice. In the 1980s, psychologist Benjamin Libet of the University of California, San Francisco, caught people's brains jumping the gun on consciousness. A few hundred milliseconds before a person thought he or she decided to press a button, brain areas related to movement were already active. The result was hard for some to stomach...

Barack Obama has a point. There are a group of people who are seeing it all slip away. They grab onto what they can hold and use these illusory points of reference as a substitute for genuine power and verifiable free will. They indulge in bong hits of false consciousness to the point where they genuinely believe that reality is the wasteland for individuals not up to the task of handling the narcotic of intellectual self-justification. Barack missed the metro train when he assigned these characteristics to small towns scattered throughout the American Hinterland of Central and Western Pennsylvania. America’s...

ELECTION "Election is God's eternal choice of PERSONS unto everlasting life -- NOT BECAUSE OF FORESEEN MERIT IN THEM, but of His mere mercy in Christ - in consequence of which choice they are called, justified, and glorified." How Important is the Doctrine of Election????? This Important IF IT WERE NOT FOR THE DOCTRINE OF ELECTION, NO ONE WOULD BE SAVED ! ! ! WHAT ELECTION IS NOT: * Not salvation, but unto salvation. 11 Thes. 2:13, 14; Eph. 1:4; Rom. 8:29, 30. * Not exclusive of means. II Thes. 2:14; Eph. 1:5, 13; II Tim. 2:10; I Pet. 1:2....

By Christopher CookLast night, my wife showed me an article about a young girl with an inoperable brain tumor, a little girl who has been given three months to live. The question in the air was why couldn't that Omaha mall murderer have gotten a brain tumor instead of this little girl? A couple of years back, a dear old friend (and former man of the cloth) and I had discussions along this general line. He introduced me to the concept of process theology, and we talked about the following question: How could an omni-benevolent God allow rocks to fall...

Why are you reading this? Yes, this particular sentence? There are billions of sentences out there just waiting to be read, in many different languages, but right now, you are reading this one. Why? Well, it could be that some reformed and crazed individual has put a gun to your head and told you that if you did not read this article he would shoot you. He would definitely be what I refer to as a "caged stage Calvinist," when after coming to understand the doctrines of grace, for a period of a couple of years or so, he needs...

Man has long asked how a loving God could allow evil to exist in the world.  It's an age-old philosophical question that can cause those who want faith to doubt and those who want to doubt to mock faith.  A Christian's answer to this question is "free will," a concept critics may regard as something reduced to a convenient cliché.  The truth is, though, that this is a most fascinating subject to inquisitive minds. The two qualities that make us like God are intellect and free will, despite the fact that the former can seem as lacking as the latter is...

"The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever..." - Deuteronomy 29:29 From the beginning of time, thinkers have puzzled over the paradox of fate vs. free will, or predestination vs. free choice. In theological terms, this leads to the struggle between Calvinism and Arminianism. As we explore this paradox, we find that examining the fruit of each position reveals that the River of Life seems to flow between these two extremes, and that once again, truth involves a careful balance. At the heart of the...

*Pastor Says New "Election Collections" Better Reflect Church Doctrine HARTFORD, CT – The moment of conviction came at what many would see as a rather inopportune time for Hartford Community Church Pastor Jeremy Galan. "We'd just taken one of our so-called 'free will offerings' after a singing group from Liberty University came to perform for us," Galan said. "We were counting up the money in the back to cut the group a check when I realized that what we were doing by calling this a 'free will offering' was unwittingly promoting the heretical doctrine of free will. It just goes...

I need to desrcibe succinctly several different philosopies of the nature of man. I will also need to support this with citations. I believe that man is inheirently selfish, prone to promote self above all else. His natural bent will be self gratification devolving into ever lower levels of depravity. Without the tempering influence of the Holy Spirit, or the presence of the conscience there is no hope that man will attempt to do good. The good that he does attempt without these influences or after 'quenching the spirit' or 'searing the conscience' all his efforts result from the basic...

The following is a New York Times editorial that will never be written by the editors there: We here at The New York Times want to announce a new policy. This is that we will no longer criticize anyone, nor praise anyone. We will, in other words, hold no one responsible for his or her conduct. We institute this policy in light of the columns published recently in our pages arguing that human beings have no free will, that they cannot choose their own conduct. If this is so, as we believe it is-we haven't published anyone arguing the opposite...

At the Beginning of Time, God Created the Angels as Individual, Immortal Spirits with Intelligence and Free Will by Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J. Before we say anything else, I think we should ask ourselves: Why have twelve teleconferences on the angels and demons? This is no idle question because for many people angels and demons are figments of a pious or frightened imagination. In the Anglo-Saxon world, we are so preoccupied with the material world that surrounds us, that we have practically come to identify reality with matter. A standard dictionary definition tells the readers that “matter” is “to...

“Is it an illusion? That’s the question,” said Michael Silberstein, a science philosopher at Elizabethtown College in Maryland. Another question, he added, is whether talking about this in public will fan the culture wars. “If people freak at evolution, etc.,” he wrote in an e-mail message, “how much more will they freak if scientists and philosophers tell them they are nothing more than sophisticated meat machines, and is that conclusion now clearly warranted or is it premature?” Daniel C. Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts University who has written extensively about free will, said that “when we consider...

A seminary student tells this story about the first day of a class. The professor was the well known Reformed theologian and Presbyterian pastor R.C. Sproul. Sproul stormed into class on the first day, slammed his Bible on the desk and said, "You are all very very bad and God is very very mad!" I plan on telling that to my children before they go to sleep every night. There's a movement growing in young protestants in America over the past decade or so. It's called Calvinism and there are pastors around who would kill all the babies of this...

Adversus Haereses (Book IV, Chapter 37) Men are possessed of free will, and endowed with the faculty of making a choice. It is not true, therefore, that some are by nature good, and others bad. 1. This expression [of our Lord], "How often would I have gathered thy children together, and thou wouldest not," set forth the ancient law of human liberty, because God made man a free [agent] from the beginning, possessing his own power, even as he does his own soul, to obey the behests (ad utendum sententia) of God voluntarily, and not by compulsion of God. For...

"Where was God in those days?" asked Pope Benedict XVI as he stood in Auschwitz last week. "Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?" It is the inevitable question in Auschwitz, that vast factory of death where the Nazis tortured, starved, shot, and gassed to death as many as a million and a half innocent human beings, most of them Jews. "In a place like this, words fail," Benedict said. "In the end, there can be only a dread silence, a silence which itself is a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord,...

Many times googling I find the argument of determinism vs. freewill. It's all fixed or the future is totally unpredictable. I've come to an idea called determined freewill which states that there is a script for all and when the "play of history" has ended all will have followed this script exactly as it is written. Is this saying that everything is done is moral? No. It is saying that our freewill choices are predictable as well as directed by God. God prohibits, permits and causes what occurs from the beginning of time to the end of it. Jesus said...

If choosing the right outfit or whether to invest in stocks or bonds is difficult, it may not be just indecisiveness but how brain cells assign values to different items, scientists said on Sunday. Researchers at Harvard Medical School in Boston have identified neurons, or brain cells, that seem to play a role in how a person selects different items or goods. Scientists have known that cells in different parts of the brain react to attributes such as color, taste or quantity. Dr Camillo Padaoa-Schioppa and John Assad, an associate professor of neurobiology, found neurons involved in assigning values that...

Greetings. I think I have resolved the matter of fate and free will. Please criticize me. Thank you. FREEDOM IS NOT FREE The quandary posed by the perennial matter of fate v. free will is complicated, but I believe I have resolved it as much as such a thing can be resolved. First, free will in itself is a misnomer--I am not even sure what our will is expected to be free from. External influence? Internal influence? Even if we could live free from all influence whatsoever, which is impossible, we did not create ourselves in the beginning. You would...

III. THE FREE-WILL OF MAN This is my opinion concerning the free-will of man: In his primitive condition as he came out of the hands of his creator, man was endowed with such a portion of knowledge, holiness and power, as enabled him to understand, esteem, consider, will, and to perform the true good, according to the commandment delivered to him. Yet none of these acts could he do, except through the assistance of Divine Grace. But in his lapsed and sinful state, man is not capable, of and by himself, either to think, to will, or to do that...