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Salam, Could someone please explain this video by the respected Sheikh? 1. If everything is based on cause and effect in this plane of existence, and is not a divine punishment what about the punishments of Firaun and people of Lot and the other prophets of God? 2. Does Allah (سُبْحَانَهُ وَ تَعَالَى) also have a role in this “infinite” chain of cause and effect? Is His (سُبْحَانَهُ وَ تَعَالَى) role to test us through these burdens? But then is He the cause of this chain of cause and effect? Or is it a mixture of free will and predestination? Barakallah Feek

Did the Mu'tazilah school of faith believe Allah knows everyone's future even though they have free will?

Salam walaikum I am confused regarding predestination and free will.These are some of the questions. (1)According to shia islam our actions are free and we can choose what to do or what not to do.But the question what arises here is that why accidents occurs?is it because of our free will or because god didn't guide me. (2)Why we observe prayers if everything happens because of our actions? (3)Will AllahÓÈÍÇäå æÊÚÇáì make the condition of a patient better by prayers if a person is hospitalized? (4)Like if someone is in trouble has it anything to do with what he has done in the past like wrong actions he commited in the past? (5)We read imam ali(as) was praying salah and at that moment ibn mulijim was planning for his murder.So my question here is that did AllahÓÈÍÇäå æÊÚÇáì not guide imam ali(as) over this situation ? (6)Do Allah totally leave his creature with free will and sometimes Allah indulge in some situation when AllahÓÈÍÇäå æÊÚÇáì wills? Guide me through solid reasoning and through quran and hadees.

Alsalamu Alaykum An important aspect of Islam is that every human being has the free will to choose between right and wrong. God, The Giver, has honored humanity with this great gift. Like everything else in this world, every act that we intent to do is a phenomenon and for it to actually take place, it is in need of a cause. Knowing that man is only one factor amongst many others, other factors can also affect his actions.[1] For example, for one to eat a piece of bread, not only does he need to will such a thing and carry it out with his hands and mouth, but a piece of bread must also exist and be available at the intended time and place. Without these conditions being met, eating the bread would not take place. Also if all the conditions are met and the complete cause exists, then the result will necessarily take place.[2] (The complete cause of something means the existence of all the necessary factors and causes of something taking place or coming into existence) Allah Almighty has decreed that man’s will have effect in this world. If an incident has five conditions that need to be met to take place, one of those is man willing it to happen. For example, to turn on a light, all the required systems must be in place, including the switch, wires, lamp, the connection between the wires, the source of electricity and the electrical flow itself. If all the other conditions are met we can be effective in turning the light on by turning the switch. In this example, let us say that turning the switch represents our free will and God has willed that as long as one hasn't turned the switch of something, for its light not to turn on (in voluntary actions). Also, just because the existence of something becomes necessary upon the existence of its complete cause, doesn't mean that the relation between it and part of its complete cause isn't contingency. It is true that in the previous example, if all the different factors existed, then the light would have to turn on, but is it necessary for the person to turn the switch on? Or is it simply possible? The answer is clear. It is simply possible for the person to turn the switch on and if all of the incomplete causes gather to form the complete cause, the light will necessarily turn on. This possibility between man’s will and turning the switch on does not contradict the necessity of the light turning on when the complete cause exists. Our simple understanding of this issue also proves this opinion, because we see that even an uneducated person considers things like eating, drinking, coming and going different than feeling well or sick and being tall or short. The first group are considered actions that man’s will plays a role in and therefore, people praise or blame individuals for carrying them out, while the second group are considered inevitable matters that man has no responsibility in regard to them. Therefore, environment, inherent qualities, parents, society, etc are as incomplete causes whereas Allah as the complete cause and the creator of them has given free will to human. For more info visit: http://www.islamquest.net/en/archive/question/fa287 ——————————————- [1] Either a cause necessitates the result by itself and does not need anything else to do so, or its existence is necessary for the result, but is not enough and also requires other causes to necessitate the result. In the first case, the cause is called illah tammah (complete cause), while in the second, the cause is referred to as illah naqisah (incomplete cause). [2] Tabatabai, Sayyid Muhammad Husayn, Shiah dar Eslam, p. 78.

Islam allow freedom of religion and Allah give humans freedom of choice and free will , so why are non believers can't go to heaven ? * someone asked me this question and I want your help to reply to them .. thanks in advance .

Neuroscience and Free Will Are Rethinking Their Divorce By Christian Jarrett Back in the 1980s, the American scientist Benjamin Libet made a surprising discovery that appeared to rock the foundations of what it means to be human. He recorded people’s brain waves as they made spontaneous finger movements while looking at a clock, with the participants telling researchers the time at which they decided to waggle their fingers. Libet’s revolutionary finding was that the timing of these conscious decisions was consistently preceded by several hundred milliseconds of background preparatory brain activity (known technically as “the readiness potential”). The implication was that the decision to move was made nonconsciously, and that the subjective feeling of having made this decision is tagged on afterward. In other words, the results implied that free will as we know it is an illusion — after all, how can our conscious decisions be truly free if they come after the brain has already started preparing for them? For years, various research teams have tried to pick holes in Libet’s original research. It’s been pointed out, for example, that it’s pretty tricky for people to accurately report the time that they made their conscious decision. But, until recently, the broad implications of the finding have weathered these criticisms, at least in the eyes of many hard-nosed neuroscientists, and over the last decade or so his basic result has been replicated and built upon with ever more advanced methods such as fMRIand the direct recording of neuronal activity using implanted electrodes. These studies all point in the same, troubling direction: We don’t really have free will. In fact, until recently, many neuroscientists would have said any decision you made was not truly free but actually determined by neural processes outside of your conscious control. Luckily, for those who find this state of affairs philosophically (or existentially) perplexing, things are starting to look up. Thanks to some new breakthrough studies, including one published last month inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by researchers in Germany, there’s now some evidence pointing in the other direction: The neuroscientists are backtracking on past bold claims and painting a rather more appealing account of human autonomy. We may have more control over certain processes than those initial experiments indicated. The German neuroscientists took a different approach from past work, using a form of brain-computer integration to see whether participants could cancel a movement after the onset of the nonconscious preparatory brain activity identified by Libet. If they could, it would be a sign that humans can consciously intervene and “veto” processes that neuroscience has previously considered automatic and beyond willful control. The participants’ task started off simply enough: They had to press a foot pedal as quickly as possible whenever they saw a green light and cancel this movement whenever they saw a red light. Things got trickier when the researchers put the red light under the control of a computer that was monitoring the participants’ own brain waves. Whenever the computer detected signs of nonconscious preparatory brain activity, it switched on the red light. If this preparatory activity is truly a signal of actions that are beyond conscious control, the participants should have been incapable of responding to these sudden red lights. In fact, in many cases the participants were able to cancel the nonconscious preparatory brain activity and stop their foot movement before it even began. Now, there was a point of no return — red lights that appeared too close (less than about one-quarter of a second) to the beginning of a foot movement could not be completely inhibited — there simply wasn’t time for the new cancellation signal to overtake the earlier command to move. But still, the principle stands — these results suggest at least some of the activity identified by Libet can, in fact, be vetoed by conscious will. “A person's decisions are not at the mercy of unconscious and early brain waves,” the lead researcher, Dr. John-Dylan Haynes of Charité - Universitätsmedizin in Berlin, said in the study’s press release. “They are able to actively intervene in the decision-making process and interrupt a movement. Previously people have used the preparatory brain signals to argue against free will. Our study now shows that the freedom is much less limited than previously thought.” This new finding comes on the back of research by French neuroscientistspublished in 2012 in PNAS that also challenged the way Libet’s seminal work is usually interpreted. These researchers believe that the supposedly nonconscious preparatory brain activity identified by Libet is really just part of a fairly random ebb and flow of background neural activity, and that movements occur when this activity crosses a certain threshold. By this account, people’s willful movements should be quicker when they’re made at a time that just happens to coincide with when the background ebb and flow of activity is on a high point. And that’s exactly what the French team found. They recorded participants’ brain waves as they repeatedly pressed a button with their finger, sometimes spontaneously at times of their own choosing, and other times in response to a randomly occurring click sound. The researchers found that their participants were much quicker to respond to the click sounds when the sounds happened to occur just as this random background brain activity was reaching a peak. Based on this result from 2012 and a similar finding in a study with rats published in 2014, the lead researcher of the 2012 study, Aaron Schurger at INSERM in Paris, and two colleagues have written in their field’s prestige journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences that it’s time for a new perspective on Libet’s results — they say that their results call “for a reevaluation and reinterpretation of a large body of work” and that for 50 years their field may have been “measuring, mapping and analyzing what may turn out to be a reliable accident: the cortical readiness potential.” And like their counterparts in Germany, these neuroscientists say the new picture is much more in keeping with our intuitive sense of our free will. When we form a vague intention to move, they explain, this mind-set feeds into the background ebb and flow of neural activity, but the specific decision to act only occurs when the neural activity passes a key threshold — and our all-important subjective feeling of deciding happens at this point or a brief instant afterward. “All this leaves our common sense picture largely intact,” they write. I’ll leave you to decide whether to believe them or not. http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/02/a-neuroscience-finding-on-free-will.html Some previous problems discussed here:

Video: http://www.philostv.com/al-mele-and-eddy-nahmias/ Alfred Mele's new book : http://www.amazon.co.uk/Free-Science-Hasnt-Disproved-Will/dp/0199371628/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408554383&sr=1-1 Apart from what's said about substance dualism, the video makes good points

what do you think about this issue? i have heard a saying that "even a leaf of a tree doesnot move without the will of Allah swt" how much is that true? i vote for free will i think so because on the judgement day nobody can question Allah swt that why he is going to hell when everything he had done was already written by Allah swt and Allah's will we know that Allah swt is just so doesnt it contradict predestination (Allah decided who will commit sins and later he is punishing them - something illogical isnt it?) [for ex - yazid] and my understanding of islam so far (as i am a convert) is that life is a test Allah is the judge prophets saww are teachers we are students life is test who ever passes it go to heaven who ever fails goes to hell so what do you guys think free will or predestination and also about hidayat now when Allah swt didnot give hidayat to abu jahl for example and also Allah swt had destined and written that abu jahl is going to die as a disbeliever so on the day of judgement wont he and others of such kind, question Allah swt that why are they being punished for it is Allah swt who had predestined and not given hidayat??? also how yazid is lanatullah when karbala was predestined?????? thats why i strongly believe FREE WILL so please share your views and also any authentic hadiths and verses of holy quran sharif salaams