Epigraph:

Allah burdens not any soul beyond its capacity. It shall have the reward it earns, and it shall get the punishment it incurs. Our Lord, do not punish us, if we forget or fall into error; and our Lord, lay not on us a responsibility as You did lay upon those before us. Our Lord, burden us not with what we have not the strength to bear; and efface our sins, and grant us forgiveness and have mercy on us; You are our Master; so help us against the disbelieving people. (Al Quran 2:286)

Presented and collected by Zia H Shah MD

Before you watch the 13 minute above video, please consider reading the paragraphs till the PDF file below.

The Western philosophers have debated free will for two centuries. If free will does not exist then all religions are wrong as no one has a responsibility and as such is not accountable. In Islam after Monotheism the second most important belief is about Afterlife. So, as a Muslim theologian, it is very much my responsibility to examine and defend free will. In other words discussions about free will are at the very core of defense for theism against the current academic culture of atheism in the modern Western universities.

Before, one can fully understand the above 13 minute video, one has to understand three terms:

1. Determinism
2. Compatibilism
3. Libertarianism
4. Indeterminism

Determinism, in philosophy and science, the thesis that all events in the universe, including human decisions and actions, are causally inevitable. Determinism entails that, in a situation in which a person makes a certain decision or performs a certain action, it is impossible that he or she could have made any other decision or performed any other action. In other words, it is never true that people could have decided or acted otherwise than they actually did. This is called hard determinism. Determinism in this sense is usually understood to be incompatible with free will, or the supposed power or capacity of humans to make decisions or perform actions independently of any prior event or state of the universe. Philosophers and scientists who deny the existence of free will on this basis are known as “hard” determinists.

In contrast, the so-called “soft” determinists, also called compatibilists, believe that determinism and free will are compatible after all. In most cases, soft determinists attempt to achieve this reconciliation by subtly revising or weakening the commonsense notion of free will. Contemporary soft determinists have included the English philosopher G.E. Moore (1873–1958), who held that acting freely means only that one would have acted otherwise had one decided to do so (even if, in fact, one could not have decided to do so), and the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt, who argued that acting freely amounts to identifying with or approving of one’s own desires (even if those desires are such that one cannot help but act on them).

In the following survey, in the PDF file below, a large majority of the philosophers are compatibilist (59.1%) or believe in soft determinism and in so doing weaken the notion of free will or complete responsibility, a subtle denial of accountability and Afterlife.

Libertarianism is a position defending and leaning towards freewill for theological or philosophical reasons. So, I am a libertarian and so is Peter Van Inwagen in the above video, even though for different reasons. The first recorded use of the term libertarianism was in 1789 by William Belsham in a discussion of free will and in opposition to necessitarian or determinist views.^[7][8] Metaphysical libertarianism is one philosophical viewpoint under that of incompatibilism. Libertarianism holds onto a concept of free will that requires the agent to be able to take more than one possible course of action under a given set of circumstances.

Accounts of libertarianism subdivide into non-physical theories and physical or naturalistic theories. Non-physical theories hold that the events in the brain that lead to the performance of actions do not have an entirely physical explanation, and consequently the world is not closed under physics. Such interactionist dualists believe that some non-physical mind, will, or soul overrides physical causality.

Explanations of libertarianism that do not involve dispensing with physicalism require physical indeterminism, such as probabilistic subatomic particle behavior—a theory unknown to many of the early writers on free will. Physical determinism, under the assumption of physicalism, implies there is only one possible future and is therefore not compatible with libertarian free will. Some libertarian explanations involve invoking panpsychism, the theory that a quality of mind is associated with all particles, and pervades the entire universe, in both animate and inanimate entities. Other approaches do not require free will to be a fundamental constituent of the universe; ordinary randomness is appealed to as supplying the “elbow room” believed to be necessary by libertarians.

The extreme alternative to determinism is indeterminism, the view that at least some events have no deterministic cause but occur randomly, or by chance. Indeterminism is supported to some extent by research in quantum mechanics, which suggests that some events at the quantum level are in principle unpredictable (and therefore random). The indeterminists may or may not be libertarian.

Now, a few words about Peter Van Inwagen.

Peter van Inwagen (/væn ɪnˈwɑːɡən/; born September 21, 1942) is an American analytic philosopher and the John Cardinal O’Hara Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is also a research professor of philosophy at Duke University each spring.^[2] He previously taught at Syracuse University, earning his PhD from the University of Rochester in 1969^[3] under the direction of Richard Taylor.^[4] Van Inwagen is one of the leading figures in contemporary metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of action. He was the president of the Society of Christian Philosophers from 2010 to 2013.^[5]

Peter Van Inwagen presents three premises, in his above 13 minute video, in his main argument that free will is in fact incompatible with determinism, that moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism, and that (since we have moral responsibility) determinism is false. Hence, he concludes, we have free will, and he is a libertarian and among a minority of 13.7% in the survey below:

Having understood the current debates about free will, one is now ready to launch a deeper study of theology and philosophy and better tackle the atheistic tendencies of the modern academic philosophers. In the above poll only 15% of academic philosophers are theists.

…

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