Physics, Nature and the Will of God

Photo by Anni Roenkae from Pexels

In the study of our universe physicists have managed to construct models which describe the behavior of things from fundamental particles to galaxies. Of course, there are large and obvious missing parts; dark matter and energy or how quantum mechanics works with gravity. Yet still these theories are very successful and powerful. At first glance there doesn’t seem to be anything which indicates the existence of ‘Will’ let alone the Will of a creator. The non-existence of free Will was highlighted in a recent video by Sabine Hossenfelder, a physicist, popular author and blogger. Her argument boils down to the fact that everything which determines the actions you make are traceable to physical processes. Thus, there is really no free will as everything is determined by something else.

While this is true, I came away feeling that she was missing out on the whole concept of what is meant by the term free will and to be fair she does admit to the possibility of redefining this term. In a way it is as if I were to tell you that there is no such thing as a fluid since what we experience as a fluid really is due to many small particles interacting with each other. While this is true, as one increases the number of molecules under consideration their average behavior is modeled better and better as a fluid. At some point using a fluid model perfectly describes the physics at a given scale…