Apologetics · Creation & Science — strict materialism cannot keep the one thing every courtroom, apology, and repentance requires
A man sits across from his grown son and says the hardest sentence of his life: “I knew better, and I chose wrong. Forgive me.”
Everything human in that moment — the guilt, the courage, the possibility of forgiveness — hangs on one small word: chose. And here is the claim of this post, stated up front: if strict naturalism is true, that sentence is false. Not overstated. Not melodramatic. False. Nobody chose anything, ever, and the apology is one arrangement of particles making noises at another.
Follow the Physics All the Way Down
Naturalism — the view that physical matter governed by physical law is all there is — has to say this, and its most consistent thinkers admit it. If your brain is only matter, then every brain state was produced by a prior brain state plus inputs, according to physics, all the way back to before you existed. The feeling of deliberating — of standing between two futures, weighing them, and settling on one — is, on this view, just what a particular cascade of neurons feels like from the inside. The cascade was never in doubt. You did not make the decision. The decision happened in you, the way weather happens in a valley.
Take that seriously and watch what disappears. Praise — for what? The hero’s neurons fired; so did the coward’s. Blame — of whom? The verdict “guilty” becomes a weather report. Promises, contracts, vows: sounds produced by prior causes, kept or broken by prior causes. Gratitude, resentment, reform, repentance — all of it presupposes that someone could have done otherwise, or at the very least that the doer was genuinely the author of the deed. Materialism has no author to offer. Only ink that moves.
And yet — notice this — nobody lives as if it were true. The same authors who write that free will is an illusion write op-eds urging readers to change their minds about criminal justice. They thank their editors. They resent their critics. They raise their children with “you know better.” The doctrine is announced in the seminar room and abandoned in the parking lot, because it is unlivable — and a worldview no one can live is telling you something about itself.
The Best Answer Naturalism Has
Fairness requires hearing the strongest reply, and naturalism has a serious one: compatibilism. On this account, defended by thoughtful philosophers, “free will” does not require escaping physics. You act freely when you act from your own desires, without a gun to your head. The bank robber is responsible because his action flowed from his wants; the man handing over money at gunpoint is not. Freedom, redefined as acting according to your own internal states, is compatible with those states being fully determined.
It is a clever repair, and it captures something real about coercion. But press on it. Where did “your own desires” come from? You did not choose them; they were installed — by genes, chemistry, and history, none of which you authored. A domino that falls in the direction it was leaning falls “from its own states,” but it is still a domino. Calling the fall free because the push came from inside the domino renames the problem without solving it. And moral obligation fares worse: “ought” implies “can.” Tell a man he ought to have done otherwise when the entire prior state of the universe guaranteed he would not, and the word ought has lost its meaning. Some naturalists, to their credit, bite down and say so — responsibility is a useful fiction, they conclude. But a justice system built knowingly on fiction is a stage play, and every victim who ever demanded that wrong be named as wrong deserves better than theater.
The Book That Takes Choice Seriously
Now open the Scriptures and feel the difference in the air. From its first pages, the Bible addresses man as a genuine agent — because of what he is:
“Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness…'”
Genesis 1:26, NASB1995
Man is not weather. He is an image-bearer of a God who wills, and so he genuinely wills. That is why the Bible can do what no consistent materialist document could: put a real decision in front of a real chooser and mean it.
“I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants.”
Deuteronomy 30:19, NASB1995
Joshua issues the same summons — “choose for yourselves today whom you will serve” (Joshua 24:15, NASB1995) — and Wisdom indicts those who “did not choose the fear of the LORD” (Proverbs 1:29, NASB1995). Judgment texts assume the same thing: “men loved the darkness rather than the Light” (John 3:19, NASB1995). Loved. A verdict on the heart’s real direction, not a description of helpless machinery.
And the inner courtroom that naturalism cannot build, Scripture explains: Gentiles who never saw Sinai “show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them” (Romans 2:14–15, NASB1995). Accusation and defense — the entire architecture of moral seriousness — is standard human equipment, because a moral Lawgiver installed it. Your conscience is not a glitch. It is a witness.
An Honest Note on the In-House Debate
Christians, it should be said plainly, have their own centuries-long discussion about the will — how divine sovereignty and human choosing fit together, how deeply sin has bound the will, what grace must do before a dead man can respond. Calvinists and Arminians read those texts with real differences, and both houses hold their positions with Scripture open. But do not let the family debate obscure the family agreement: every orthodox Christian position affirms that human beings are genuine moral agents, really responsible before God — creatures whose choices are meaningful precisely because a personal God stands behind the universe. The Christian argument is about how grace and freedom meet. The naturalist has nothing left to argue about: no agent, no ought, no answer.
Indeed, Scripture’s own diagnosis of the will is darker than naturalism’s and more hopeful at once: “everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin” (John 8:34, NASB1995). The will is real — and really enslaved, not to physics but to sin. Which is why the gospel is not advice to try harder. It is emancipation: “So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36, NASB1995).
The Choice That Waits
So the man apologizing to his son is not a domino making noise. He is an image-bearer doing one of the most God-reflecting things a creature can do: owning his agency, naming his wrong, asking for mercy. Naturalism must call that scene an illusion. The gospel calls it a Tuesday — because the God who commands choice also supplies the grace to make it, and He has kept the offer open to the last page of the Book:
“The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who hears say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who wishes take the water of life without cost.”
Revelation 22:17, NASB1995
The one who wishes. Your choices are not weather. They are the most consequential things about you — and one of them is still in front of you.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist