We are free to choose regarding things over which we have control.  Therefore, we are able to think independently and to perform some acts absent the control of universal forces.

If humans are predetermined to act as a result of a cause, this cause lifts and erases all sense of responsibility, morality, and ethics.  Blaming our actions on a previous cause can be used as an excuse for inappropriate behavior, laziness, crime, or countless other forms of anti-social actions.  In the words of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “if the complete concept of any being is known and was chosen for existence, then is such a being free in any sense?  If not, then what nonsense is made of the idea of morality or of sin?”

Leibniz defines freedom as something that is not predictable in the same way as, for example, the combination of numbers is predictable.  There is no universal-physical truth governing human action:  “The will has the power to suspend its action with respect to the physical sequence of efficient causes -- but also even with respect to what would otherwise be seen as a decisive final cause.”  Therefore, if by individual free choice we mean individual action that cannot be known in advance by even an infinitely subtle application of the laws of physics, chemistry or biology, then we have free choice in that sense as well.

The materialist Thomas Hobbes objects, however, contending that everything is simply a complicated assortment of moving physical atoms.  He believes the universe is so structured that everything that happens is the result of some prior cause:  in this sense we are not free.  Hobbes also argues that all things, including thought, arise out of the motion of atoms which obey the universal law of physics.  He therefore denies the existence of choice, freedom, or free will.  For Hobbes, free will is only an illusion brought on by processes such as reasoning and deliberating.  Because we are aware of our deliberations, he contends, we merely believe we are making choices that are not the result of any kind of cause.

But consider Immanuel Kant’s view that reality is divisible into two separate spheres – a sphere of appearance which contains all that can be known or experienced, and a sphere of independent reality about which we do not and cannot have knowledge.  Kant allows, therefore, for the possibility of freedom outside the world of experience and scientific causality within this sphere of independent reality.  We can still maintain that minds are the source of action, not anyone or anything else.