A relaxing and informal subject, no? This sort of area is one of those that is usually thought of as quite deep, but like a few others, is actually quite foundational to everything else we might believe. So; I present to you one of my foundations.
I believe that we have free will. However, from reasoning I have come to the belief that free will cannot exist as a physical or mental attribute, only as a spiritual one. This is because we understand that our physical world is built on physics, and causality, and also that our mental worlds are built on the foundations of the physical world (e.g. nature and nurture).
The reason for my belief that free will is a spiritual element of ourselves goes like this...
Imagine we have a slanted table and a ball. If we know everything about each of them- the weight, the angles, and the forces of gravity and friction that affect both, then we know exactly where the ball will roll to and where it will stop when we place it on the table.
We can decide where the ball will land by placing it deliberately on a spot that will cause it to roll there. In fact, even if we did not want it to land in a particular place, but we were supernaturally quick thinkers, we would not be able to help but know where the ball will land when we put it on any part of the table surface.
Now transfer the above image to God creating the universe, including us. As he places each molecule where it belongs, his vast, outside-of-time-and-space knowledge cannot help but know what that molecule will do, and also, how it will interact with every other molecule in the universe throughout its existence.
If the universe is only a physical thing, it is merely clockwork on a big scale.
If you believe that there is no God, and no spiritual realm, this will still be the case. The only difference is that there is nothing that planned, or knows, how the clockwork started, or how it will end.
So I believe that we have a spiritual free will, and that this is the only sense in which we could truly have one at all.
This also begins to show to what extent free will is and is not understandable. Our understanding of the spiritual world will never become very developed whilst our vision is clouded by these strange physical things called time and matter. Or at least, not as developed as our understanding of this time and matter stuff. Does it seem strange that the material world we can currently control and understand will soon be taken away from us, like toys being taken from a child so that it can start a formal education?
I believe that we have been given free will because God is described in the Bible as, among other things, a judge. The ultimate judge, in fact, who will decide our fate after we have finished this first part of our lives. God is also described as fair (and that's putting it mildly!) It seems fairly obvious that there must something in each of us that can be judged, and it must be fair for God to judge by it.
I think that the 'something' is the choice which every person makes- probably not consciously in many cases- and our free will has been given to us so that we can make that choice.
I think, in fact, that this choice is the meaning of this lifetime. As far as our eternal lives are concerned, which includes the lifetime spent on this earth, I think the meaning is something else. But I think that in this life, the most important thing we can do is make the choice- God or No.
On a near instinctual level, I believe our souls either run towards or away from our creator, a being greater than ourselves. That is the choice, beyond all nature and nurture, that God will finally judge. All of our deeds are only symptoms that hint at which decision we have made, so God will only need to look at the source. It is only on such a deep level that any judgement could be said to be fair.
See another post about Choice...
Image source: http://www.lifeinthefastlane.ca/the-domino-effect-christmas-must-have/uncategorized
