No Free Will According to Evolution
The rough summary of the atheistic evolutionary version of life, the universe and everything is: There was nothing. Then, this nothing exploded, which caused stars, planets, galaxies and stuff like that. Through time and chance, life happened ("spontaneous generation", an unscientific philosophy taught by Aristotle). With the help of mutations and natural selection, time and chance made life evolve, upward, more and more complex. You are the product of no purpose, the slave of chemical impulses in your brain. There is no God, no final judgment, no eternal reward or punishment. When you die, you're worm food. And they want to take away our beliefs for that worldview? Not hardly!
To be consistent with atheistic materialism, free will is impossible. We are reduced to chemistry and to environment, which in turn influences our chemistry. The one who claims that there is no God is responding to his chemistry. (For that matter, he has no right to complain about horrific murders, because it is simply one or more bits of rearranged pond scum eliminating other bits of rearranged pond scum.) So, it follows that he has no right to criticize those of us who do believe in God; if we praise God, show how science refutes evolution, affirm the truth of recent creation, ban obstreperous pinheads from our groups, well, it's not our fault because our chemistry makes it happen. The biblical worldview makes sense of the human condition and offers hope.
To be consistent with atheistic materialism, free will is impossible. We are reduced to chemistry and to environment, which in turn influences our chemistry. The one who claims that there is no God is responding to his chemistry. (For that matter, he has no right to complain about horrific murders, because it is simply one or more bits of rearranged pond scum eliminating other bits of rearranged pond scum.) So, it follows that he has no right to criticize those of us who do believe in God; if we praise God, show how science refutes evolution, affirm the truth of recent creation, ban obstreperous pinheads from our groups, well, it's not our fault because our chemistry makes it happen. The biblical worldview makes sense of the human condition and offers hope.
“Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly... [including the idea that] human free will is nonexistent... Free will is a disastrous and mean social myth.”—William Provine, Professor of History of Biology, Cornell University.
In The Descent of Man, Darwin explained human behavior largely as the function of pre-determined—and often anti-social—instincts. For all of Darwin’s praise of man’s sociability, he wrote that “it cannot be maintained that the social instincts are ordinarily stronger in man, or have become stronger through long-continued habit, than the instincts… of self-preservation, hunger, lust, vengeance, &c.” What did this mean in practice? “At the moment of action,” wrote Darwin, “man will no doubt be apt to follow the stronger impulse; and though this may occasionally prompt him to the noblest deeds, it will far more commonly lead him to gratify his own desires at the expense of other men.”
You can finish "Is Darwinian Evolution Compatible with Free Will and Personal Responsibility?", here, if you will.