Charles Spurgeon Quotes

Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.

This means that to man God gave a degree of free will.

We have to believe in free will. We’ve got no choice.

Intellectually, I believe there's no free will.

The belief in free-will is not in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but fatal decrees.

Let that ethical philosophy therefore of free-will be far from a Christian mind.

My free will is a paradoxical partner of the power of intention.

The fact that God knows everything does not mean that He is directly causing everything. He respects our freedom at our level. He makes it possible for us to act freely. If He didn't, we wouldn't act at all - we wouldn't be at all.

Free will is a golden thread running through the frozen matrix of fixed events.

Human beings, in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free agents but are as causally bound as the stars in their motion.

If the effort also is predestined, it is not the less our effort, made of our free will.

There's too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.

The idea of determinism combined with complete human responsibility struck me as very hard to reconcile with an idea of justice, let alone mercy.

Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.

In the West, people don't have any real problems. It's all based on bad conscience, a very Christian notion. I don't have any bad conscience. If there's a God that created us, if I am bad, it's his fault.

Man is a responsible moral agent, though he is also divinely controlled; man is divinely controlled, though he is also a responsible moral agent.

I'm not sure I understand how responsibility for our choices makes sense if they are not determined.

Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.

If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.

He [God] made us free, and He respects that. It is two different spheres of causality. Interdependent, though. It is not two boxes looking at one another without any kind of direct connections. There are very direct connections. That's why the question of "how are we free if God is omnipotent?" is a real, constant question. Ultimately, God is all powerful, and yet we are free.

Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.

The question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds.

This is one of man's oldest riddles. How can the independence of human volition be harmonized with the fact that we are integral parts of a universe which is subject to the rigid order of nature's laws?

I have free will, but not of my own choice. I have never freely chosen to have free will. I have to have free will, whether I like it or not!

Free will is the sensation of making a choice. The sensation is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.