Recently I had a lively discussion with a friend of mine on the subject of determinism, free will, and God, which rekindled my quest for the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Of all the questions that anyone or anything could conceivably ask, I cannot think of any which would outweigh the following, given the framework of our being: What is the purpose of existence? While I didn’t come up with the answer (and I don’t think it’s 42), I did at some point in our conversation remember a sudden moment of clarity I experienced when I was younger - when I first conceived of the notion that Free Will and an omnipotent God can’t co-exist.

The idea isn’t mine, per se. While I did come to the conclusion myself through my own logical reasoning, there are others who have espoused this idea in some form or another for years.  The idea is this: If the laws of nature are deterministic, then everything is, in theory, perfectly predictable - even the future. However, if the laws of nature are not deterministic; if an event could possibly occur such that the causes which led up to the event would have less than 100% bearing on the occurrence of said event, then it would be unpredictable, even by God. In the latter situation, this event would not be predictable because if the event were in some way predictable then logically it would have had to have had causes which were calculable, and thus it would be deterministic. In other words, if things occur without causes, then prediction can’t exist. Period. The only possible argument a believer in God could have against this argument (and a paper-thin one at that) is that there is a plane of existence beyond the scope of human comprehension of which God is so eminently aware that allows for the prediction of events in a way that transcends the deterministic nature of our universe (a fancy way of wording the argument of infinite regression to fit this discussion). While the existence of a reality beyond our own which defies all logic and understanding is theoretically possible (only to the extent that I could never disprove it), the argument itself is upheld by nothing more than mere wishful thinking (since obviously no one can possibly even being to prove that such a realm exists – after all, it “defies all logic and understanding”, duh). Similarly, no one can disprove me when I say that in the center of the Sun is an alien world filled with aliens who spy on humanity (and sometimes crash accidentally on Earth (see Roswell)). There is no way you could disprove me. Have you ever been to the center of the Sun? No. With all our modern equipment and understanding today is it even possible to get there? No. Is it possible we will ever figure out a way to get there some day in the distant future? Maybe. But as of now, both the Alternate Realm of Existence and Sun Alien Spies premises are speculation at best; fanciful musings about what could be, without any evidential support. On the other hand, massive worldly (and even otherworldly) evidence indicates that causality is the one true constant of our universe and it is unbreakable by anything we have ever been able to prove the existence of within the reasonable true-false framework we have been able to define in the realm of our awareness (I meticulously worded that sentence to ward off the inevitable existentialist counter-argument that “one can never prove that anything exists” - perhaps the least understood, most overused and improperly applied argument in all of philosophy).

So you’ve got to ask yourself: which is more important to you - belief in an omnipotent God, or belief in what is commonly agreed on by the vast majority of the scientific community as the most rational view of the natural universe (so far as our measly minds can comprehend it)? While the answer is strikingly obvious to me (belief in something we can never prove like Sun Aliens and alternate planes of existence, or belief in something with which we have massive real-world evidence for), it might shock many of my more liberal readers how many down-to-earth, intelligent religious moderates stand by their beliefs in long-winded discussions with me, either by blindly shrugging aside all reason and logic or, more reasonably, lessening God’s omnipotence ever-so-slightly by adding the stipulation that he has to obey some natural laws (perfect prediction requires perfect causality, law of contradiction, etc).

Hey, everyone’s got limits, right?  ;-)