Part 11

Recitation of the Holy Scripture.

And if your Lord had willed, all those who are on the earth all of them would have believed. Then, will you compel mankind until they become believers? 

And it is not for a soul to believe except by permission of God, and He will place the wrath upon those who will not use reason.

Say, “Observe what is in the heavens and the earth.”But will not avail the Signs and the warners to those who do not believe. 

So do they wait except like the days of those who passed away before them? Say, “Then wait, indeed, I am with you among those who wait.” 

Then We will save our messengers and those who have believed. Thus, it is an obligation upon Us that We save the believers

Say, “O people, if you are in doubt as to my religion  then I do not worship those which you worship besides God; but I worship God, who causes your death. And I have been commanded to be of the believers

And [commanded], ‘Direct your face toward the religion, inclining to truth, and never be of those who associate others with God;

And do not invoke besides God that which neither benefits you nor harms you, for if you do so, then indeed you would be of the wrongdoers.'”

No disaster strikes on the earth or within yourselves, but is in a Register before We bring it into existence. Indeed, that is easy for God.

And if God afflicts you with adversity, then none can remove it except Him, and if He intends for you any good, then none can repel His Bounty. He causes it to reach whom He wills of His slaves. And He is the Oft Forgiving, the Most Merciful. 

End of Recitation of the Holy Scripture.

People ask is there a freewill for us or everything is already determined. This is an old debate in science and philosophy. Philosophers extend this issue up till God that God cannot have free will. A benevolent god always chooses the path that causes most good so therefore has no real choice. Also because an all knowing God instantly knows all of its future actions and its knowledge cannot be wrong, it therefore has no free will to choose otherwise. However a god with no free will cannot be a moral being; it must be morally neutral. Also, if an all powerful and all knowing God exists then this by a long chain of cause and effect denies any free will of any living being. Our feelings derive from our personality and character, and our choices are influenced by the things we have learned in life: God has the power to change any of the circumstances that form our personality and character, and the things we learn in life are purely down to the providence of God, or, to a long chain of cause and effect which did begin with God and no other. They further say that the free will of god is important for resolving the problem of evil. If God has free will, but never chooses evil, then it could have created life in the same way: With free will, but also never choosing evil. If God has no free will but is still good then there was no point creating evil to grant humans free will as it is possible to be good with no free will. If God, angels and other beings in heaven have free will where there is no evil or suffering, then it cannot be true that god lets evil exist because it is a required side effect of free will.”

After modern discoveries in physics and biochemistry they say that free will is an illusion. Our amazingly, wonderfully complex brains are comprised of various cognitive systems cycling amongst themselves and generating our thoughts, consciousness, choices and behavior. These systems and their effects all result from the mechanical, inorganic laws of physics, over which we have no control. Consciousness is presented to us as a result of our neurons, our brains, our senses. When we lose these, we lose consciousness. These systems are governed and controlled by neuro chemicals, hormones, ionization, impulses: in short, by biochemistry. Biochemistry is in turn merely a type of chemistry, and when we look at the molecules and atoms that make up our chemistry, they obey the laws of physics. 

When the advocate of freewill say that our ‘minds’ are separate to our bodies because of this, our minds are therefore free from cause and effect. They reply that there are conceptual problems with this idea. Most thought must follow cause and effect in order to be coherent. Thinking randomly is no more free will than having your thoughts controlled by neurons. So, our minds must still run along lines of logical cause and effect, or, in other words, in a cycle of thought and after thought. To break this chain of causality is to break the very flow of consciousness. If thoughts are not random, there must be factors which influence what thoughts are thought, and what choices are made. We know that most of those factors are purely physical  sex drives, hunger, hormone driven emotions and the like. They make little sense without a physical foundation. Is there really any room for a nonphysical mind?

One philosopher explains all this in another way by taking into account time travel and creating a paradox that If when traveling back in time we changed the facts of history  however minor  then in the future when we go back, we will not be able to make those changes because they will not have occurred. As we can’t make those changes, it means they will always occur as they did originally. He imagined as follows:

“Disappointed in love, I wish myself dead. More than that, I wish that I had never lived. Given that I have a time machine, I am in a position to bring this about. So I travel back to some suitably distant moment before my conception, find a relevant relative e.g my grandparent and strike them dead. I thus bring it about that I was never conceived. If my action is successful, who is it who prevents my conception? It cannot be me, for it is now apparently true that I was never conceived, and so never grew up to step into a time machine to prevent my conception. I cannot, then, prevent my conception. This itself may seem to have further worrying implications. For if I cannot prevent my own conception, despite being present at the right time. Does this not suggest that I am not, as a traveller into the past, a free agent? If this is an implication, then it extends to our ordinary, non time traveling situation. For I am not free to change the future, either.”

So you can see that throughout history there are long debates on determinism and freewill. Some follow one school of thought others follow the second one. Now the answer is that reality is in between. That means man has a free will in the matter of his actions. Although his free will is by divine decree. Because God is the ultimate and independent cause of all causes it is correct to relate all that exists to God. Similarly, because God has granted man free will in his actions, it is also correct to relate the actions of man to his own choice. 

When a chosen slave of God was asked this question by a man” What is Fate ?”he said,” Lift your one foot in the