In a book he published earlier this year, Sam Harris, a neuroscientist who has made his name in recent years for his outspoken (and extensively published) atheism, argues that we human beings have no free will.  Free will is an illusion, Dr. Harris says; that is, when we really consider why we do what we do, we must admit that we really have no idea why we do it.  Moreover, he proffers, recent research indicates that our brains know what we are going to say or do a split second before we actually say or do it.  In short, we cannot possibly conclude that we control how and why we make our decisions.  Our thoughts and actions are no more than seemingly random fluctations of brain waves and neurons.  The mystery is gone.
     Well, if we really have control over what we say and do, we may as well abandon all pretense of defining culpability and responsibility in any area of life.  We will never be able to definitively demonstrate that we, that is, our thinking and reasoning selves, did it.
     Yet consider the writings of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.  Towards the beginning of his massive magnum opus, A Critique of Pure Reason, Kant suggests that human beings are born with the capacity to think and reason in terms of cause and effect.  We are designed, he says, to consider and explain action and reaction, and act and consequence when we make decisions.  We live in a universe where individual thought and reason leads to decisions with effect.  To put this into contemporary terms, if we did not have the ability to understand why we come to decisions, humanity as we know it would be no more.  People have an inherent capacity to come to understand why they are doing what they are doing--and that they are doing it.
     (Brief caveat:  of course, this conclusions adnits that due to various chemical imbalnces, illness, drug use, particularly adverse environmental circumstances, people may, on occasion, really not know why they do what they do.  Nonetheless, they still possess the capacity to think about and do it.)
     Let's enlarge the picture a bit.  We are creatures who think in terms of cause and effect because we live in a universe grounded in cause and effect.  And we live in a universe that is grounded in cause and effect because we live in a universe that has been created by a  God who himself is a God of cause and effect.  If he were not, he wouldn't be much of a god!  Who wants a God who cannot cause things to happen?
     Granted, if one believes that because God created the universe, he exercises absolute control over it and its creatures, one might conclude that we human beings really have no say in how and why we say and do what we do.  We are no more than pawns of the creator, captive to his sovereign purposes.  To an extent, this is true:  we live in a world we did not make, a world that we will never fully control.
     On the other hand, and this is a big "on the other hand," we still possess the capacity to consider and render decisions.  And unless we fall into one of the categories of unfortunate situations I cited above, we, we ourselves, know that we are doing it.  We cannot be otherwise.  If we are sentient and reasoning beings created in the image of a cause and effect God, then we will be creatures of cause and effect.  We will be able to consider the effects of our decisions, and we will be able to reason ourselves to the point where we make those decisions.
     God is sovereign, yes, but we are as well, though in another way.  We are sovereign creatures of cause and effect.  In ourselves and by ourselves we can make choices and in ourselves and by ourselves we can understand, to a point (we will always be a mystery even to ourselves!), how and why we make them.  There is more to us--much more--than chemical and neuronal exchange.
     We cannot have it both ways.  Either we are reasoning creatures endowed with conscious choice making capacities, or we are robots, victims of ourselves and our neurons, incapable of logical or credible function.
     And I cannot think of anyone who, in her right and ordered mind would like to imagine herself this way.