Last year I took a group of high school students to UC Berkeley to interact with skeptics. After spending an evening with S.A.N.E (Students for a Non-religious Ethos), I found myself in a conversation with an undergraduate student about the existence of free will. She told me that she recently embraced determinism and rejected free will.

 

In response to my query about why she changed her mind, she appealed to genetics, background forces, and environmental factors. In other words, she believed there is no free will because external forces determine beliefs. What she didn’t realize was that the justification she offered for her belief in determinism undermined her deterministic beliefs. She believed that she had evaluated the evidence and embraced the position—determinism—that is most logical. And yet if determinism were true she would have been incapable of evaluating evidence and freely following the logic because all her choices were already set. Logically speaking, her position was self-refuting. In other words, she sawed off the branch she was sitting on.

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The following Associate Press article appeared in my hometown newspaper, The Staten Island Advance, on Sunday, May 24, 2009. I thought it was great and expressed my impressions every time I hear folks like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, et al interviewed or read from their respective books.

For the record, I don't believe in atheists. I don't believe they actually exist. To be so angry at something requires that one believes it exists. Atheists are too angry at God to actually believe He doesn't exist. 

I think that makes me an Aatheist. 

- Christy 

Atheists: No God, no reason, just whining

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