The argument often goes - if we are all made up of atoms and if atoms behave deterministically, then according to greater universal precepts we too must be fully deterministic. Assuming that a God-created future is inevitable, the brain is unable to know what will happen unless God imparts into a human mind some prophetic information. Some say that the universe is either deterministic and undeterminable (practically, if not absolutely) or almost deterministic and undeterminable. Of course, due to our limited cognition, either of the above would in many cases be indistinguishable from the other due to our sparse sampling of nature.

 

When we look inside our brains, what we would expect to find are interconnected neurons, whose behaviour in turn is governed by their underlying molecular structure, which in turn is strictly governed by the laws quantum mechanics. If the laws of quantum mechanics ultimately determine how I deduce or apprehend the laws of quantum mechanics, then naturalism states that we are all, ultimately, automatons subservient to the laws of nature - laws over which we do not have much control. If we do not have much control over the laws that control us, then without God, we are not free beings at all. Yet a creation sustained by God includes the necessary order that make us more than automatons; the sovereignty is God’s not nature’s. This is the great paradox of free will, the more control God administers over nature, the freer we are. 

 

What we have done thus far in the series (among other things) is drawn an important and sometimes unanticipated distinction; there is a big difference between thinking you are free because that is what your experience of perception tells you, and actually being free. In whichever manner naturalist man is considered, he is connected to universal nature and submitted to the necessary and immutable laws that she imposes on all beings she contains, according to their peculiar essences or to the respective properties with which, without consulting them, she endows each particular species. For the naturalist, man’s life is a timeline upon the surface of the earth that nature commands him to make the most of, without his ever being able to swerve from it, even for an instant. He is born, even without his own consent; his organisation does in no way depend on himself. His ideas come to him involuntarily; his habits are in the power of those who cause him to contract them; he is unceasingly modified by causes, whether visible or concealed, over which he has no control, which necessarily regulate his mode of existence, and give the hue to his way of thinking.

 

I have said that paradoxically God’s omnipotence actually gives us more freedom than naturalism would permit, and here is what I mean. Under naturalistic conditions, human beings are entirely subservient to universal laws, the complexities and inevitabilities of which we cannot know beyond that of deductive and inductive reasoning. With naturalism, there is no such thing as free will - every apparent choice is false - you are inevitably going to do what you are going to do. If you are given a choice of A, B, C or D and you choose B, then A, C and D were never really choices in the first place. If the vast degrees of atomic activity have produced brains by natural processes and the functioning of the brain is entirely due to the laws of physics, the entire cognitive process, from receiving sensory signals, to realising that there are appearances of choice, and to the emotional accretions that lead to the decision-making processes, is all just nature playing out a realisation of the second law of thermodynamics.

 

The origin of the appearance of free will comes from our brains’ failure to predict the future. With regard to decision-making, our interaction with the world is like a chess program interacting with another chess program. Given the two programs, there will be an inevitable outcome, which is determined by the two different chess playing algorithms.  However, one program does not know what the other program is going to do, so it must make a decision based on what it knows, yet strictly speaking it is not really a free choice as the decision making process is hard-wired into it. Like the program, we do not know what the future will hold, despite its inevitability, and so from the perspective of the human mind, the universe provides perpetual novelty which gives us the illusion of choice.

 

The cosmos plays out its progression from present to future, yet, of course, because it is too complex for us to presently understand this does not mean it is not determined. Going back to the chess analogy, recently a computer program was made that could beat the world champion chess player in a game of chess. He could not predict its moves; he could not determine how the computer would play - but the computer’s play ‘was’ determined by its programming. Although we know complex systems such as the butterfly effect exhibit a high degree of sensitivity to initial conditions, the butterfly effect itself requires that the future is determined entirely upon future states otherwise it would be no effect at all. 

 

Even with something like chaos theory one can visit a website that will draw a complex fractal pattern based on the initial values inputted. If one puts in slightly different values then naturally there will be a drastically different result, but if one puts in identical values he will get identical results. What we are really doing here is demarcating a distinction between what we can presently understand and predict and that which we cannot. Obviously as the cosmos plays out its succession there will be much we cannot predict, but this does not, of course, proscribe our predictive abilities regarding things we understand more. In a game of chess (something we can easily understand) it is often noted by capable players that a checkmate is inevitable several moves before it comes. This is essentially a prophecy - it is not a guess or a wager on what will come, nor does our limited knowledge of future cosmic states prohibit it - it is absolute certainty that if the game continues, the named player will win. As we saw in part one of this series, predictions of the future based on present facts are not often called prophecy - they are usually an application of logic and consideration of all the possible alternatives. The word prophecy is, as we Christians know, often used in Biblical contexts, and clearly involves Divine impartations, but as we have already seen, this is, of course, very different from predicting the future by having sufficient data from which such predictions can be made.

 

As we have also seen, quantum mechanics has a random element to it, yet we can still understand enough about probabilities to make some sense of quantum activity; for example, with radioactive isotopes, we do not (possibly cannot) know when a radioisotope will decay, but we can know for sure the probability of it decaying in a certain time frame.  Hence, given a large number of atoms, we know the proportion which will decay after a certain amount of time. 

 

One of the possible implications of quantum theory is that, at least at the quantum scale, true randomness does actually exist and that this makes for an indeterminate future even at the macro scale. But we are perceiving this timeline with finite minds, and virtually all perceptions made from human minds about future states are made inductively from within human mindsets, therefore we should not confuse our mental states with those of the Divine. In summary, we can perceive our own free will in the sense of making choices - but it is an illusion as the choices at their deepest level are the results of processes at the cellular, molecular, and to some degree even quantum level. Our ability to predict the future is mostly commensurate with our information regarding the present state – the more we know about something the greater our chance of predicting future states (assuming prediction is possible).

 

The apparent randomness of quantum phenomena is just an illusion resulting from our inability to see the underlying cause, the speculated non-deterministic implications of quantum theory would, if they are as they seem, negate the concept of causality. The world on a bigger scale than the quantum scale gives appearance that all interpretations of the random factors are washed out before they affect anything on the non-quantum scale (as our solar system demonstrates).  To put it another way, if we have a metal sheet with two slits; a photon can go through both slits, an electron can go through both slits, but I can only go through one door at a time. Schrödinger’s cat is not both alive and dead, it is one or the other, we just can't know which.

 

It is true, in a classic sense, that there is no such thing as a random number, but this isn't to say the there is any reason to a priori exclude the existence of a truly random event. In quantum mechanics, the consensus is that there is true randomness, and that random effects can have impact on the macroscopic world; that is, Schrödinger’s cat may not be simultaneously dead, alive, not dead and not alive - logic may well be spared, but that isn't to say that the random effect of quantum mechanics hasn't decided whether the cat is dead or alive. Similarly, another random quantum mechanics event is the emission of photons, such as ultraviolet emissions from the sun, which is responsible for genetic mutations, which in principle and in practice shapes the course of biological evolution. There are formulations of quantum theory in which there is hidden determinism, and in God we have a fundamental reason to believe that there is determinism at the heart of it. God’s purpose, even in the created order, is something too great and complex for human minds, but in perceiving the world around us we do at least sparsely sample the realities of the laws and facts that make up the created order. 

Having admitted a certain degree of predictability in the universe, particularly in the relationship between God and man, we do not have to admit to an all-consuming predictability in future events. The laws that are governed by God still allow for non-determinism in areas where non-determinism is necessary, but that does not say anything about deterministic laws, because these events are category distinctions within the interlocking system (as with miracles), or they are part of the laws within the laws to which we have no access. If we rely on strict determinism we are saying that the movement of every particle at a sub-atomic level and every nuclear mechanism is entirely predictable (if we could get a purchase on it), thus making every future event an already established entity. Of course there is no measuring apparatus for such knowledge (even if it were ever possible), but even if there were, we are still relying on presently unknowable things such as God’s method of sustaining His creation.

 

Having said what I just did, there is also enough wriggle room to allow for the cosmic story to be ‘open’, despite God’s sustenance. The leap from chemistry to biology entails something in addition to chance and law, because of the primarily informational character of life. Law produces elemental patterning; disorder produces unspecified sequences that cannot be compressed further and thus show no consistent patterns. Richard Dawkins frequently makes the mistake of suggesting that conventional physics and chemistry can explain the meaning of life, but this is to be guilty of confusing the channel with the underpinning primacy. Moreover, even the chemical basis is insufficient to explain what life really is, we must delve into the logical and informational rules that chemistry utilises if we are to understand life.

 

Random mutations along with natural selection is what generates biological information, comprising a short random genome into a long random genome.  Chance in the pretext of mutations and law in the pretext of selection form just the right combination of randomness and order needed to create organisms, and the necessary information comes from the environment. But laws and chance are not enough to create the thing that makes life what it is, which is the software bearing the information. It was Steven Hawking who contended that a unified physical theory would enable us to "know the mind of God" – a postulation that I think is profoundly untrue, at best only partially correct, but it does go to show that there is acknowledgement from the top physicists that ‘mind’ seems implicit in the background of reality. Of course Steven Hawking, when referring to the mind of God, was really talking about the laws themselves, not a personal God; but I suspect that even the ultimate laws themselves will be forever beyond the tractability of man.

 

I have already said that events may appear to us to be random but also that a perception could be attributed to human ignorance about the details of the processes concerned. A good example is Brownian motion, where a tiny particle suspended in a fluid can be observed to carry out an indiscriminate zigzag movement as a result of the slightly uneven bashing it suffers at the hands of the fluid molecules that assail it. Brownian motion is the archetypical random, unpredictable process, and this is compounded by the fact that the smaller the particles the more extensive the motion - and with increased activity from initial disequilibrated states particles can pursue a system of direction which, with more knowledge, could be apprehended. In other words, if we could apprehend the detailed activities of all the individual molecules involved, Brownian motion would be entirely predictable and, to us, deterministic. Knowledge of the myriads of participating variables in any random or disordered event would of course be fully known by the mind of our God, but in many cases in human thinking our senses are too unrefined to permit detailed observation at the deeper dimensional level. 

 

The same is almost certainly true with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle; it is only our lack of knowledge of the myriads of participating particle variables which elicits in us the perception that they are truly random fluctuations. Quantum fluctuations are inherent in the workings of an ordered natured on an atomic scale, yet within their intrinsic nature an element of genuine unpredictability is instilled into nature – an unpredictability that we may never fathom.  One primary example of unpredictability is that the exact moment of decay of a particular radioactive nucleus is intrinsically uncertain. But as cognitive beings, it doesn’t mean that we have all-out ignorance on these matters. Although the outcome of a particular quantum process might be unpredictable, the relative probabilities of different outcomes evolve in a deterministic manner. 

 

As I said in part one of this series, although the pitch of the quantum dice might be unpredictable, it remains true that because quantum mechanics remains deterministic one can know with a degree of certainty how the betting odds vary from moment to moment. Quantum mechanics builds chance into the very fabric of existence; yet despite the more contemporary theoretical precipitations of Einstein, Schrödinger and Heisenberg, a vestige of Newtonian mechanics still remains.

 

Reality gives the appearance that God’s created universe is endowed with the ability to fine-tune itself – it may even be true that its laws are fundamentally simple enough to generate further laws as the cosmic state changes. This has a profound bearing on the way we interpret God’s creation; for even a strictly deterministic nature entails a reality in which various future states are in one sense open-ended. Of course this should not really change what we have established in this series regarding human free will, rather it imputes a kind of open-ended creativity – possibilities that are, of course, already known by God (and have been preordained) but remain part of the eagerly anticipated future for us. To put it another way, God has already written every page of the cosmic book (as the Bible clearly shows) but He has allowed us to peek at many of the forthcoming pages. 

If you can picture for a second a game of cricket taking place in a park. One man bowls and another man hits the ball some distance high in the air. One could say that the flight of the cricket ball is following the laws of nature. If the ball was struck at a different angle or at a different strength it would take a different path of movement. But there are several things in this picture that are not ‘laws’ at all. All of the men’s thoughts about the game itself are not ‘laws’. Let me give you preceding picture. Twenty four hours before the game is due to start, a man, we shall call him A, is unsure whether he wants to play or not. He either chooses to play (which he later did) or he chooses to do something else. Now the laws of nature do not work in this way - I do not mean at a quantum mechanical level where ‘mystery’ seems to be the watchword - I mean the laws that govern the whole of nature. There is no existent multitude of combinations that could arise in the same way that multitudes of combinations that are solely dependent on people’s choices can arise. So we have facts and we have laws. Not everything can come under the subheading ‘laws of nature’. The laws of nature tell us how far a cricket ball will travel if it is hit by a certain object at a certain speed. But the law won’t set the cricket ball in motion. Only the fact of man’s thinking and, then, action can do that.

 

What I am trying to do here is impute some important properties to choice itself outside of universal laws; that is, I am attempting to show that at a psychological level choice is a given if we are to do any sense-making. Of course, one could object on grounds that the universe is wholly deterministic and every single event that has ever happened is a subset fact in a set of inevitable universal activity. But then so is that thought itself, and we might as well say that that is the end of our conceptions of choice - the second law of thermodynamics means there is no free will at all, we are all part of a inevitable drama over which we have no control - Doris Day was right ‘whatever will be will be’. But we can do better than that. Having seen that if we can bring choice into the equation and not settle for a ‘whatever will be will be’ concession, then returning to the cricket analogy, we have also seen that laws won’t set the cricket ball in motion. As I said, only the fact of man’s thinking and, then, action can do that. Man’s free will has caused the event to happen. 

 

We might get a better idea about how choice fits in to the equation if we take man out of the equation for a second. Let us imagine a leaf blowing across the park. In this case it was the wind that set the leaf in motion and that wind was caused by other winds, and even further back, gravitational forces and other sub-atomic activity. But however far we traced it back we would not find the laws of nature causing anything. The laws of nature have never in the strictest sense caused anything to happen, they simply follow a pattern of conformity – they conform to God’s will. Even our Lord was able to rebuke the wind.

 

Similarly, the laws of arithmetic have never caused you to go into a shop and buy a 40 pence chocolate bar with a £10 note. The action of the shop assistant should produce £9.60 change in your pocket, but it is people’s freedom working within the laws of arithmetic that has caused this event. And I think we can say the same about the laws of nature. We cannot say, as far as I can see, that human free will is part of the laws of nature, and yet, there is a but...

 

As I said a moment ago, some people would disagree with me and say that the laws of nature do include ‘everything’ including human thought and human free will, and in the sense that God created a cosmic blueprint that contained all of His plans for nature, the laws of nature do include everything contained within nature. But that isn’t wholly satisfactory, for the laws of nature still omit one vital thing - nature itself. How the universe came about cannot be explained by the laws of nature. Some scientists postulate a contention that there are things outside of nature that might, naturalistically, explain things inside nature. But I think that still leaves unexplained the creation of those other laws and so on and so on. However far back you go, you still need an initial explanation of causation – no sensible thinker can be satisfied with an infinite regress.

 

If we keep going back further we eventually reach a point where we have to admit that existence cannot contain its own explanation - there must be something that is self-evident, and such a Being would be infinitely complex. And with this conclusion, I firmly believe that the source of all human activity, that is, the power behind human decision making, is from a Being that exists outside of nature itself. I cannot reconcile the whole complex nexus of choice, free will, moral conscience, and emotions with an impersonal and uncaring nature - there seems to me an incongruity that can only be explained by the will of God - that creation would give all the appearance of being one of possibility - a simulacrum of better and more transcendent things to come.

 

We have, I think covered all the aspects of free will and God’s creation, but it is worth recapping on one or two of the things we have established in the previous articles, particularly given that the issue of whether we have free will or not is a rather involved business and largely depends on how we are assessing it. 

 

We have seen that God has to allow things to happen that He does not wish to happen or does not enjoy seeing happen, and that we can never demonstrate free will as anything other than a performance in front of a very complex behind the scenes background. Moreover we have seen that no human being can have absolute freedom, of course, for each and every one of us is bound by certain factors of living, linked to the need to survive, and our capacity to choose and to impact upon the world is dependent upon a degree of uniformity in the first place;

 

I also said that the actions of a man are never really free; they are always the necessary consequence of his temperament; of the received ideas; of the notions of happiness, either true of false, which he has formed himself; and of his opinions, strengthened by example, by education, and by daily experience. The conclusion we went on to reach after a bit more analysis is that we do not live in a world that is wholly deterministic or wholly non-deterministic, nor a world with wholly chance factors, nor wholly random either. So we are left with a mix of all four – a world perceived by humans as laws and facts, with the whole mix of determinism and non-determinism and chance and randomness overseen by our Creator God. God loaded the quantum dice to have a random yet uniform world as well as creating human minds that can affect things in the cosmos with God kindled free will - He set up creation - generating a system in which determinism, randomness, chance and free will are compatible, and as we have seen, this makes for an exciting reality to contemplate, as well as a fairly clear concept of free will. 

 

Furthermore, God determines certain uniform facts about creation and what other options are available in any given system, but a variety of subsystems in which randomness plays a part too in choosing among several alternatives. We have freedom within a set of ordinances that are statistically part of a uniform plan - an end result that has already been predetermined by God outside of creation. Also, God gave us freedom to make choices (both good and bad) because He did not yet wish for us to be in the Heavenly realm until we had learned how to receive the grace that will bring us there. He has given us the gift of independent living, not in a state of complete separation, but in a state where we can experience the joy of knowing Him more and more each day by assenting to His will. 

 

He created the laws which He could sustain (a bit like designing the cosmic blueprint for a grand novel and turning its pages), and He has a plan for us as Christ already loved each and every one of us even before we were born. The reality of existence is that often things are random and unpredictable to us but not to God. We live in a world where unpredictability plays an important role in our own analysis of things but where God’s will surpasses our understanding of things. God loves us enough to give us freedom, and by forgoing some of the things that our free will enables us to do, we are assenting to God’s will and living a life that will give us blessedness and wisdom. Finally, we are to the greatest degree free to live as we please (human imposed limitations excepted), but pleasure - true pleasure - comes from knowing our God who created us and gave us such freedom. 

 

Here we come to the biggest realisation – all this is much easier to explain and justify if we acknowledge our Creator God, but those who resist find themselves in a knotty situation. Do you remember when we said in part one that all science works on the principles of laws and facts – in descriptive terms, a chain of ontological truths? If in our institutions for discovery we fail to admit to a Creator, we are forced to admit that our investigations only have the potential to understand as far back as the first link on the chain - one cannot simply say that the chain has always existed. The mystery lies outside science, indeed, outside reasoning itself. In other words, the upshot is that all our descriptions through the scientific method will furnish us with, at most, the explanations within the contingency lines of the laws of nature – the explanations regarding why anything in nature exists at all will only be found outside of nature – in the realm of the Divine. 

 

There must be something rather than nothing to bootstrap existence - a fact of some kind that is self-evident. And seeing as though science is more about systems, patterns, description and algorithmics, and it explains nothing at all in absolute terms, existence only makes sense if we admit that it is bootstrapped by a self-affirming and self-referencing nature of underwritten logical necessity. And if this self-evident ‘fact’ was systematically elemental, I see no reason why it should exist let alone be self-evident, for the truth of the matter is, a self-evident, self-sustaining fact would logically suggest a power and complexity that contains within it the explanation for existence itself. Once we drop mere possibility down to its secondary level we are left with the primary irreducible truth, and the primary irreducible truth seems to demand a consciousness to think it - a ‘mind’ that can only ascribed to God.   And as I explain in my Theory of Everything, I think that self-affirming logical necessity is the God we find in Jesus Christ. 

 

That being the case, anyone that wants to know if God really exists will have to take the route that presumes He has an interest in His creation. In my experience, an experience that is attested to by millions of other Christians, Divine grace supersedes all forms of ambivalence, all forms of doubt, and all forms of procrastination - He is ready and willing to reveal Himself to any who wish to know Him.