In this month's meeting of the atheist group I attend, we discussed free will.  Some, citing recent research that seems to indicate that we are merely "victims" of our chemical selves, unable to independently make decisions, argued that we do not have free will.  Others, while not rejecting the research, contended that even if we are chemical and neuronal constructs, we nonetheless possess choice making capacities and that we do in fact make independent decisions.  As one said, "Even if I do not have free will, it feels good to think that I do."
     And so it does.  We like thinking that we control ourselves and our choices.  We like thinking that we determine our destiny.  Yet whether we believe that our choices are neurologically determined, overseen by the sovereignty of God, or something else altogether, choice remains, it seems, a mystery.  We know that we are deciding, and we know that we are choosing.  We know (at least we think we do!) that it is us who is making a choice.  Whether this choice is the result of our chemical make up, God's preternatural choosing, or our inner sovereignty is not nearly as important as realizing that, big picture, we are here and, as the existentialists never tire of saying, must make choices.  We cannot escape the fact of our will.
     And we cannot the escape the fact of us living and having a will in a world without one.  We spend our lives in a tension, a tension that fuses the fact of chemical determinism and the presence of divine superintendency with the ineluctableness of our human freedom to will.  It is a tension with which we will always wrestle, a tension that circumscribes our finite existence.  We do not always like living with it, yet we will never be able to live without it.
     In the end, as Jewish theologian Martin Buber observed, it is either us and and us only, or us and God both.  A will in a vacuum is no will at all.