Freewill

Sometime early this year, I came to think about freewill of man. I probably should say that I hold to the Calvinistic view when it comes to the question of God's sovereign election and predestination. But that does not mean that I think we, humans do not have any "freewill". We still have an ability to make decisions in many areas of our lives. I cannot go much deeper since I am still undergoing a process of learning and un-learning in this subject, but as far as I know, Calvinistic view does not mean that humans have no freewill whatsoever.

So, after covering myself, let me get back to the subject of human freewill. I came to a conclusion that humans do have a "freewill" (the kind that is different to the ability to choose God and love Him), and that freewill we have only comes to us because we are spiritual beings. In other words, I concluded that our decisions and actions of freedom is a result of a spiritual act. I came to that conclusion because without spiritual element in the process, all things in the universe are deterministic. We are all physical beings and at the atomic level, everything has its mass and position with velocity/energy, so everything is and will behave in deterministic way. So for us to claim that we do have freedom, or freewill, we must be somehow above and beyond the physical limitation. Otherwise, we are just all bound by this deterministic law of the universe and whatever we do, it is in fact only a result of particles put in motion before we were even born.

Now, I learned later on that there's a such thing called chaos in our world. When we go to sub-atomic level, I learned that there are random activities going on and as far as we can tell, they are truly random, not just some phenomenon that is difficult-to-predict. This may pose a problem for my logic, since this indicates that not everything in the universe is deterministic. However, even so, this does not gift us with the freewill since it only says that things are not predictable, but we are still bound by the sub-atomic particles and their "random" activities.

So, I still hold to my view that human freewill can only be claimed and based upon another more profound truth, that humans are spiritual beings.

Now, I presented all these arguments without any reference to the Bible, and I am not going to give any here at the moment. Instead, I'll just show a secular and philosophical presentation on this very subject I found today.