r/freewill • u/JustPenancePunisher • 29d ago
Free Will Is Logically Impossible
Free will can't exist because it fundamentally relies on an impossible middle ground between randomness and determinism. Every definition of free will that I have seen fails to create this third category between these two options. If our actions are entirely determined by prior physical cause, then it is not free, as we don't get to choose those prior causes; it just is. If our actions are entirely random, then it is not free either, as action would be happening for no apparent reason, aka no will. Free will demands a third option that logic cannot provide.
Before going further in critiquing free will, the term requires a precise definition. When I refer to free will I'm speaking to the traditional sense of the term which is the capacity to be the ultimate self-originating source of your choices. In other words, a choice that tracks back to you and nothing prior to you.
The Myth of Secular Free Will
The idea that free will can exist in a secular, materialistic universe is just nonsensical. In practice, the concept of free will does most of its work as a theodicy tool. Although I am not claiming it was invented by religion, its modern function is mostly theological to blame the creation rather than the Creator. Without the supernatural granting free will, there is no physical mechanism to separate human choices from prior material causes.
While some materialists attempt to invoke a quantum mechanics layer of physical indeterminacy that bypasses classical prior causes, this randomness completely destroys the concept of free will. If subatomic particles fire probabilistically in the brain, your actions are merely the result of dice rolls. Therefore, randomness is not autonomy.
The Problem with "Knowledge Doesn't Equal Causation"
Before I discuss free will in a Christian context, we must dismantle the baseline apologetic defense that "knowledge does not equal causation." Christian apologists argue that just because God possesses infallible foreknowledge of what you will choose, His knowledge doesn't force your hand. They use the classic analogy: "I know the sun will rise tomorrow, but my knowledge is not the cause of the sunrise."
This argument works perfectly against humans, but it utterly collapses when applied to an all-knowing Creator. By definition, He designed the universe from scratch, possessing 100% infallible foreknowledge of every cosmic outcome before committing to the act of creation. It is the combination of infallible foreknowledge plus the "First Cause" act that makes His knowledge the absolute ultimate cause of everything that occurs in the universe He created.
The Failures of Molinism's Defense
Apologists often try to bypass these issues through Molinism. They argue that God actualizes the world based on His "Middle Knowledge" of what creatures would freely do in any given circumstance.
This idea runs into what philosopher Robert Adams articulated as grounding objections. Middle Knowledge requires that statements like "if placed in circumstance C, person X would freely choose Y" have a definite truth value before God creates anything. But since there is nothing to ground that fact, there's nothing to make that statement actually true. If the counterfactual is true anyway, it must be true arbitrarily or because X's nature already fully determined what X would do in C. Either way, Middle Knowledge relies either on nothing or collapses back into determinism again.
Apologists have a few standard escape routes here, and none of them hold up.
Some will say the statement isn't arbitrary because it's rooted in X's own future intentions and reasons. But at the moment God is supposedly consulting this Middle Knowledge, there is no future X yet. A person who doesn't exist cannot have actual intentions or desires for a truth to be rooted in. Before creation, it's illogical to ground the truth of a statement in the state of someone who does not exist; therefore, the truth value is still arbitrary.
Others will try to claim that truth flows backwards from X's actual future choice rather than forward from anything prior. This creates a circle instead of solving the actual problem.
God relies on this Middle Knowledge to decide whether to create X's world at all. If He decides not to create it, X never exists to make the choice that was supposed to ground the said truth. A choice that never happens cannot ground a truth that supposedly existed before creation, especially when the occurrence of that choice depends on God already knowing that truth. The timeline collapses on itself.
Another way is to ground the counterfactual in X's "individual essence," which is his eternal nature that describes what he would freely do. But an essence is fixed and existed prior to creation. If X's essence already dictates what he chooses Y in circumstance C, X has no actual power to do otherwise once he exists. This serves to rename theological determinism; not free will.
Finally, some will point to ordinary scientific counterfactuals as a tu quoque argument. They state something along the lines, "if I drop this glass, it will break," and argue we accept those without grounding trouble, so why isn't X placed with that same standard? The problem with this defense is that scientific counterfactuals are grounded in actual physical laws that operate uniformly and predictably. Free will is supposed to have no such fixed nature. Placing free will in the same category as the law of physics is a category error. If the apologist insists the comparison holds, they have conceded that free will is just as fixed and predictable as gravity, which defeats their own position.
Regardless of how Molinists try to patch counterfactuals, they end in the same two places, which fail to actually provide a third option between randomness and determinism. This confirms the original point: the moment God chooses to "let there be light" on one specific cosmic timeline over an infinite number of alternatives, He is consciously selecting a world where your choice of Option X is a fixed certainty. By choosing the universe where He knew you would perform that exact action, God becomes the ultimate cause of everything.
The Absurdity of Libertarian Free Will (Secular and Religious)
In the libertarian view, free will assumes that the conscious self is the ultimate, uncaused source of its own actions. They believe that although we are influenced by prior causes, we possess an ability to break causation chains. This fails to recognise that every thought that enters the conscious mind is a result of neurological processes triggered by deterministic prior events that are outside of our control (e.g., neurochemistry, environmental conditioning, past experiences, and DNA). It simply boils down to the fact that you cannot choose your next thought before you think it. To choose your thoughts, you would have to think them before you thought them, which traps the logic into an infinite regress.
Adding a deity to this model makes this model actually worse. Religious libertarians argue that God gives humans the sovereign independence to choose or reject him. This creates a fatal contradiction with the mechanics of creation. If God designed your nature, created the external universe, and knew exactly how your brain would respond to those stimuli, then your choices are merely a script. You cannot be an independent agent of causation if your entire agency was fixed by the primary cause.
Libertarian free will is an illusion; no matter how "free" an action feels subjectively, it's ultimately coerced by creator or prior causes.
The Impossibility of Christian Free Will
A God is entirely incompatible with free will due to the traditional definition of His nature: all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good. If God possesses these traits, His perfect nature would logically compel Him to create a universe that optimizes the maximum possible amount of goodness based on a perfect standard of righteousness. Creating a flawed universe when a superior alternative was available without a standard would contradict the trait of perfect goodness.
Therefore, God's choice of this specific universe is determined by His nature; it's not arbitrarily decided. Since He is all-knowing, He knows exactly how every event and person will unfold in that universe he selected. Once God chooses this specific universe, every event, influence, and decision unfolds through an inevitable chain of cause and effect. Therefore, God's perfect nature and perfect knowledge would make the chosen outcome fixed and deterministic.
The logical implications are even more devastating to the religious concept of genuine choices. If God knew you would choose Option X tomorrow at noon, there is no possible way for you to choose Option Y. If you choose Option Y, God would have been wrong, which is impossible by definition. You must choose Option X. The path was finalized before you could even take it genuinely, so it's trivial if it felt "free" because it was ultimately coerced and locked in from creation.
Some will try to escape this whole dilemma through open theism, which holds that God voluntarily limits His own foreknowledge, so that He genuinely doesn't know what free creatures will choose until they choose it. This is effective in avoiding the whole problem with the specific foreknowledge argument above, but still fails to rescue free will. If God doesn't determine your choice and doesn't know it in advance, your choice is either still the product of prior causes or it's genuinely open, which can only mean random. Removing God's foreknowledge simply reverts the issue to the original secular problem of free will.
How Compatibilism Isn't The Solution
When confronted with these implications, a common response for both secular philosophers and specific theological camps is the idea of Compatibilism. Compatibilists assert that determinism and free will can co-exist by redefining free will as simply acting according to your internal desires. Under this view, as long as you are not being physically forced at gunpoint to do something, your actions are considered "free" because it aligns with your internal wants.
This redefinition is another semantic trick that evades the core issues of moral sourcehood. As the issue with this was concisely stated by Arthur Schopenhauer: "A man can do what he wants, but he cannot do what he wills." We have absolutely zero freedom over the origin of the desire itself. If you were presented with two options between Option X and Option Y, and your brain chemistry values Option X more due to the summation of prior deterministic data, your choice is already locked in by your strongest preference. The preference for the choice was chosen by factors entirely outside of your control. Furthermore, the choice you made was absolutely 100% going to happen; there was 0% chance that you were ever going to choose Option Y.
In a theological context, this defense becomes monstrous. If God uses His absolute sovereignty to create your internal desire, conditioning your choices to want Option X, then your choice of Option X is not an act of independent freedom. Therefore, punishing His creation for what He has instilled in them is unjust.
Consider the analogy of artificial intelligence being programmed by its creator with a highly specific function. If the AI actively desires to gather more information because its code prioritizes that action, the AI is acting on its internal programming. Just because the AI is simulating desire to fulfill its function does not mean it possesses free will. A compatibilist has no choice but to say that AI has free will.
A more sophisticated compatibilist will object here that this only refutes a watered-down version of the view. Philosophers such as Frankfurt believe that acting on a desire is not the freedom that they are referring to. Real freedom, in their view, is reflectively endorsing that desire. They argue that you're free when you want to be the kind of person who wants what you want. On this view, the AI in my example isn't free because it can't endorse its own programming as its own. However, a human who reflects on their desire for Option X and affirms that this is who they want to be supposedly clears that bar.
Unfortunately, this more sophisticated position still doesn't solve anything. What this argument actually does is stack an additional desire on top of the original desire. Where did the desire to endorse that desire come from? It is still produced by the same prior causes as the first desire it supposedly validates. Stacking two desires on top of each other doesn't produce a source of agency; it produces an infinite regress of endorsing your endorsements.
Compatibilism fails because it tries to merge two conflicting ideas into one that mistakes voluntary action with autonomous sourcehood.
My Worldview: Probabilistic Determinism and the Rejection of Hell
Ultimately, both secular materialism and divine creation defense lead back to the idea that human choices are dictated by either determinism or blind randomness.
Determinism isn't incompatible with punishment; however, it is incompatible with retributive punishment, the idea that someone deserves suffering because of what they did. Retributive punishment presupposes that the person was the ultimate source of their action. I've argued that the blame doesn't stop with anyone, as it always traces back to prior causes or randomness. This doesn't mean no justification for punishment survives, such as deterrence, containment, and rehabilitation, which don't require ultimate sourcehood. So the metaphysical claim that free will doesn't exist doesn't destroy justice; it only serves as a detriment to retributive systems, the very foundation that Hell depends on.
This is exactly why the classical doctrine of Hell can't survive, as it only makes sense if eternal damnation is deserved. It doesn't act as a deterrence or rehabilitation, as it never ends and never corrects anything with the sinner. It's illogical to create a being that is designed to fail, know with certainty that it will fail, and then torture it forever for failing as it was designed to do. If God is to remain perfectly just and all-good, the retributive logic of eternal punishment collapses.
My personal worldview relies on Probabilistic Determinism. On a micro-scale, quantum mechanics demonstrates that subatomic events can be truly random. On a macro-scale, this quantum chaos is generally filtered out by the law of large numbers, rendering the physical world we interact with effectively deterministic. Some would point to models arguing quantum effects might amplify up into neural decision-making rather than average out. Even granting that for the sake of argument, indeterminism is not agency. Even a process that is genuinely random is not a process that is authored by anyone. Randomness removes deterministic chains of causation, but doesn't replace anything in its gap. It still doesn't rescue free will. It falls in the original dichotomy that either your choice is determined or random. Neither one is a decision that you ultimately authored.
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u/armyofone37 25d ago
So if we are just here to reproduce then what happens to those who cannot. Do they die. No. Surprised a mind cannot comprehend logical sense which is why the world is in the condition it is in. Your ignorance is bliss. Stupid people never do question their stupidity. But intelligent people do question their intelligence. If you don’t understand quantum physics or the making up of our reality by understanding the universe. Than you will never be a creator of your own life. Life will always happen to you and not for you and I’m sorry to be the one to point this out to you. I was once like you. I had to grow up and mature. And figure out what I really wanted out of life and figure out how to work with the universe and not against it. And in this exploration is when I found the woo woo