Question: Atoms and particles behave in probabalistic ways, and our brains are made of atoms and particles. so how can free will exist?

Sam Geen answered on 21 Jun 2013:

Free will is a religious idea, and is designed to explain why people do bad things even though God created the universe – the idea is that people are told what is right and wrong, but can still do bad things if they choose to. However, free will isn’t a scientific idea.

Often, people do things before they consciously realise and then justify them later. Reflexes are a good example of this – if you touch something hot, you pull your hand away before you consciously realise what happened to stop your hand being burnt. But even complicated decisions, like whether to buy a chocolate bar or not can be made subconsciously.

But still, we can make conscious decisions. We’re still not sure what consciousness is. One possibility is that it’s the brain’s way to learn from new sense data – we see things in the world around us, and try to make sense of all the information. In philosophy, there are two main approaches to consciousness – one says that consciousness is separate from the brain, and one says that it comes from the complexity in the brain. Science is trying to find out whether consciousness can be explained by looking at the brain, but we’re still a long way from understanding it.