FREE WILL AND GOD

I am going to begin this particular essay by making this statement: if you DO NOT believe in God (or some kind of external, "spiritual" force), then you logically CAN NOT believe in Free Will. If you are a naturalist, and you believe only in "rationality", you cannot believe in Free Will. To restate it a third way, only the intervention of some kind of external, spiritual force can give humanity Free Will.

Based on the laws of cause and effect, Free Will cannot exist because, on a very simple level, our brains are merely processing machines (for anyone who reads Scott Adams, he calls us "moist robots", an apt term for this exercise) without anything to make them otherwise. Everything that is occurring next is merely the next logical result of everything that has happened previously. Up to that moment, your brain is merely reacting to its conditioning, its experience, and its current chemistry. You are not making a choice; you merely appear to be making a choice. In each moment, the decisions you think you are making are guided merely by the resultant effect of everything that has happened up to that moment. The appearance of making choices is far from real, just as the appearance of any trick-of-the-eye is far from being real as well.

Free Will can only exist if there is some kind of intermediating force, operating outside of the confines of reductionist science, giving us the ability to operate ourselves out of the confines of our own reductionist worldview. Either that, or we have to entirely reformulate the model which our scientific worldview is based upon where everything is not simply cause and effect, in order to bring Free Will into it. However, as it currently stands, without God, there is no Free Will.