Epigraph

The Crashing Blow! What is the Crashing Blow? What will explain to you what the Crashing Blow is? On a Day when people will be like scattered moths and the mountains like tufts of wool, the one whose good deeds are heavy on the scales will have a pleasant life, but the one whose good deeds are light will have the Bottomless Pit for his home –– what will explain to you what that is? –– a blazing fire. (Al Quran 101:1-11)

Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD, Chief Editor of the Muslim Times

Majority of both the Muslim and the Christian theologians commit a very common fallacy in our new age of information. This is a new fallacy that did not exist before, let us call it fallacy from self indulgence. Despite the democratization of knowledge in this day, thanks to internet, social media, YouTube and more, they continue to bank on their own personal scholarship or only of their tribe to make a case for the God of Abrahamic faiths, namely Judaism, Christianity or Islam.

I will be the last person to commit this fallacy. I think, I can make a good case against atheism by not only just focusing on my reading, my religion or my scholarship, but by deploying every successful Western philosopher, scientist and even theologian in service of God of Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Moses, David, Solomon, John the Baptist, Jesus and lastly Muhammad, may peace be on all of them.

Freewill is a very important phenomenon, because without it we have no accountability in our world and we will have no accountability in Afterlife and Judaism, Christianity and Islam will all be wrong.

A very large majority of the Western philosophers deny freewill and actually the terminology or nomenclature used in the literature is intended to achieve that very purpose. So rather than obfuscating the subject, let me divide the philosophers into three groups that helps the believers’ understanding of freewill.

I will present short videos based on these three categories and this will be followed with an epilogue:

Unapologetically Believing in Freewill

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Apologetically Believing in Freewill

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Denying Freewill

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Epilogue

In the nineteenth century, based on the success of Newtonian physics and military victory of Europe over the rest of the world, the West had developed a paradigm of determinism that given enough progress in science and technology, they can determine everything and scientists like Pierre-Simon Laplace claimed that they have no need left for the God hypothesis. Legend has it that he announced this atheistic verdict to Napoléon Bonaparte, as the latter was discussing Laplace’s book with him.

Even though the early scientists like Newton studied nature to glorify God, since Laplace more and more of them are denying the God hypothesis and today, majority of the top scientists, mathematicians and the Western philosophers are atheists. They are on a long trajectory to continue to declare that they have no need for God hypothesis.

The discovery of Quantum physics in early part of last century shook this triumphalism of being able to predict and know everything, to some degree by introducing indeterminism, but self indulgence created by four to five centuries of scientific success has been difficult to resist and majority of the philosophers now take determinism as a given.

According to Encyclopedia Britannica as it describes determinism:

Determinism, in philosophy and science, the thesis that all events in the universe, including human decisions and actions, are causally inevitable. Determinism entails that, in a situation in which a person makes a certain decision or performs a certain action, it is impossible that he or she could have made any other decision or performed any other action. In other words, it is never true that people could have decided or acted otherwise than they actually did.

Determinism in this sense is usually understood to be incompatible with free will, or the supposed power or capacity of humans to make decisions or perform actions independently of any prior event or state of the universe. Philosophers and scientists who deny the existence of free will on this basis are known as “hard” determinists.

I believe that by denying freewill and insisting on hard determinism the Western philosophy has now set itself on a suicidal course. After all if there is no freewill, what is their philosophy and discussion about other than issuing statements that were determined at the time of the big bang? The more they deny freewill the more they will travel into a dreamworld of Alice in the wonderland.

With these provisions, the theologians like me are likely to have an easy victory by simply pitching the believing philosophers against the atheist ones and the neuro-scientists who study the benefits of meditation or any cognitive behavior therapy against rest of them.

An additional area here is examining the related question, whether AI can have consciousness: Can AI be Conscious: A Billion Dollar Question?

Another fertile area related to this debate is: If Mind and Meditation Can Heal Body, Does it Prove Free Will.

The holy Quran had predicted more than 14 centuries ago that humans are given rather little knowledge about human consciousness, soul or freewill:

And they ask you concerning the soul. Say, ‘The soul is by the command of my Lord; and of the knowledge thereof you have been given but a little.’ (Al Quran 17:85)

The irony is that the Western civilization in their arrogance has changed their ignorance into tall claims that freewill does not exist!