Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD

Denial of God and Afterlife go hand in hand according to the Islamic theology. Denial of free will is a refusal of accountability and possibly a pawn of modern atheism.

Less than 14% of the contemporary philosophers believe in the full concept of free will that every human being lives with on a daily basis.

Majority of the top scientists and 85% of top mathematicians today are atheists.

If we take free will as a given in our theology, metaphysics, philosophy and science, perhaps atheism can be pushed in a corner.

Looking at the above video from this perspective, I wonder, if Daniel Dennett is merely obfuscating in the above video, starting around minute 11. To understand the modern scientific or philosophical denial of free will, one has to understand two terms, physicalism and determinism.

In philosophy, physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that “everything is physical“, that there is “nothing over and above” the physical,^[1] or that everything supervenes on the physical.^[2] Physicalism is a form of ontological monism—a “one substance” view of the nature of reality as opposed to a “two-substance” (mind–body dualism) or “many-substance” (pluralism) view. Both the definition of “physical” and the meaning of physicalism have been debated.

Physicalism is closely related to materialism, and has evolved from materialism with advancements in the physical sciences in explaining observed phenomena. The terms “physicalism” and “materialism” are often used interchangeably, but can be distinguished based on their philosophical implications. Physicalism encompasses matter, but also energy, physical laws, space, time, structure, physical processes, information, state, and forces, among other things, as described by physics and other sciences, as part of the physical in a monistic sense. From a physicalist perspective, even abstract concepts such as mathematics, morality, consciousness, intentionality, and meaning are considered physical entities, although they may consist of a large ontological object and a causally complex structure.^[3]

According to a 2009 survey, physicalism is the majority view among philosophers,^[4] but there remains significant opposition to physicalism. The philosophical zombie argument^[6] is another attempt to challenge physicalism.

In a recent survey of 1900 academic philosophers, 30 philosophical questions, including one about zombies. The results showed: zombies conceivable but not metaphysically possible 35.6%; metaphysically possible 23.3%; inconceivable 16.0%; other 25.1%.

Zombie are imaginary, robot like, undead creature frequently featured in works of horror fiction and film. While its roots may possibly be traced back to the zombi of the Haitian Vodou religion, the modern fictional zombie was largely developed by the works of American filmmaker George A. Romero. Although the word zombie has been applied to different types of creatures, they generally share a few defining characteristics, perhaps most importantly a lack of free will. Zombies are usually wholly subordinate, either to an outside force, such as a sorcerer. Imagining zombies gives philosophers a tool to discuss human consciousness and free will as separate from the physical self of human beings.

The zombie belief has its roots in traditions brought to Haiti by enslaved Africans and their subsequent experiences in the New World. It was thought that the voodoo deity Baron Samedi would gather them from their grave to bring them to a heavenly afterlife in Africa (“Guinea“), unless they had offended him in some way, in which case they would be forever a slave after death, as a zombie. A zombie could also be saved by feeding them salt. English professor Amy Wilentz has written that the modern concept of Zombies was strongly influenced by Haitian slavery. Slave drivers on the plantations, who were usually slaves themselves and sometimes voodoo priests, used the fear of zombification to discourage slaves from committing suicide.^[22][23]

Imagining zombies makes free will all the more real and in line with my intent and purpose for this article.

As regards determinism, in Encyclopedia Britannica we read:

Determinism is the view that, given the state of the universe (the complete physical properties of all its parts) at a certain time and the laws of nature operative in the universe at that time, the state of the universe at any subsequent time is completely determined. No subsequent state of the universe can be other than what it is. Since human actions, at an appropriate level of description, are part of the universe, it follows that humans cannot act otherwise than they do; free will is impossible. (It is important to distinguish determinism from mere causation. Determinism is not the thesis that every event has a cause, since causes do not always necessitate their effects. It is, rather, the thesis that every event is causally inevitable. If an event has occurred, then it is impossible that it could not have occurred, given the previous state of the universe and the laws of nature.)

If we accept free will based on our intuition then it is logical to conclude that physicalism and determinism are false. The discussion in contemporary philosophical literature raises a lot of other possibilities, but, I want to keep the discussion simply at accepting free will completely based on human daily experience.

In other words I am suggesting libertarianism and accepting free will.

Libertarianism is one of the main philosophical positions related to the problems of free will and determinism which are part of the larger domain of metaphysics.^[1] In particular, libertarianism is an incompatibilist position^[2][3] which argues that free will is logically incompatible with a deterministic universe. Libertarianism states that since agents have free will, determinism must be false and vice versa.^[4]

Most contemporary philosophers (59%) are compatibilists according to a recent survey and only 14% are libertarians. In this study 72% of the responding philosophers were atheists. So, when three fourths are atheists, less than 14% of the philosophers believe in the full concept of free will that every human being lives with on a daily basis:

With a posteriori complete acceptance of free will, all of Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s videos on consciousness and free will become a very dramatic collection for the believers. Even though, he himself is an agnostic, by, seeing all the positive facts he has collected on these subjects, his other videos begin to have a strong emergent properties for God of Abrahamic faiths.

With acceptance of free will and each human as a free agent it is simple to conceptualize God as a transcendent free agent acting at the same quantum level as free will.

Now, I present a few articles to further clarify some of the above details:

Quantum physics may imply the existence of free will

Tim Andersen, Ph.D.

For The Infinite Universe

Free will is one of those things where people tend to be very attached to its being true or false and yet most people implicitly treat it as true. Consider that we hold people accountable for their actions as if they decided to carry out those actions of their own free will. We reward people for their successes and discoveries likewise. If Albert Einstein didn’t really make his discoveries but it was, instead, inevitable that his brain would do so, does he really deserve his Nobel Prize?

Some argue that we should accept that free will is a myth and change our society accordingly.

Our justice system (especially in the United States) is heavily invested in the free will hypothesis. We punish people for crimes. We do no treat them like broken machines that need to be fixed. Other nations like Norway, however, take exactly this approach.

Many physicists believe that free will in incompatible with modern physics.

The argument goes like this:

(1) Classical (non-quantum) mechanics is deterministic. Given any initial conditions to a classical system, and the entire future and past state of the system can be determined. There is no free will in determinism.

(2) Quantum mechanics allows for randomness in the outcomes of experiments, but we have no control over those outcomes. There is no free will in randomness.

(3) Human will is a product of the brain which is a physical object. All physical objects are subject to physics and the sum total of physics is contained in classical and quantum mechanics (technically, classical is an approximation of quantum).

Ergo, humans have no free will. Our brains are simply carrying out a program that, while appearing to be making free choices, is in fact just a very complex algorithm.

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