A small experiment
Before you read any further, try something.
Pick one of the two colours below. Don’t think too hard — just pick.
The core
A child dies in an accident. A neighbour says, “It was written.” A student fails an exam after months of study and hears, “Whatever was meant to happen, happened.” A government minister explains a preventable disaster by invoking the will of God. In each case, a philosophical position — one of the deepest and most consequential in human thought — is doing real work in real life, usually without anyone recognising it as philosophy. The question underneath all of these is the same: do human choices actually matter, or is everything that happens already decided?
This is the problem of free will. It is deceptively simple to state and extraordinarily difficult to resolve, because the stakes are total. If your choices are genuinely your own, then you are responsible for them — praise, blame, effort, and repentance all make sense. If they are not — if every decision you make was inevitable before you made it — then moral responsibility is a fiction, effort is a charade, and the entire vocabulary of praise and blame, reward and punishment, that every civilisation has built is a structure resting on nothing.
The sharpest version of the problem
Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher, put the determinist case with an image that is hard to forget. Imagine, he said, a stone thrown through the air. Now imagine the stone is conscious. It would feel the rush of wind, the trajectory of its flight, and it would believe — with complete sincerity — that it was flying of its own free will. It would be wrong. Its path was determined the moment it left the hand that threw it. Spinoza’s claim is that human beings are that stone. We feel free because we are conscious of our desires but unconscious of the causes that produce those desires.
The opposing view insists that this analogy fails precisely where it matters. A stone has no interiority, no deliberation, no capacity to weigh alternatives and choose between them. Human beings do. The feeling of freedom is not an illusion produced by ignorance — it is the direct experience of a real power. You are not a stone. You are an agent. The challenge for this view is explaining how genuine choice can exist in a natural world that otherwise operates through regular causal chains — how, exactly, an uncaused cause enters the picture.
What happens when God enters the question?
Within any theistic tradition, the problem deepens. If God knows the future exhaustively, then the future is already fixed in God’s knowledge, and your “choice” is something God has already seen. If God is omnipotent — if nothing happens except by God’s will — then your actions are, at bottom, God’s actions. And if God is just — if God punishes and rewards — then God must have created beings who can genuinely choose, or else the Day of Judgement is a trial in which the verdict was written before the defendant was born.
Omniscience, omnipotence, justice — you can hold any two comfortably. Holding all three while preserving human freedom is the problem that has preoccupied Muslim, Christian, and Jewish theologians for over a thousand years. The solutions they have proposed tell you more about a tradition’s deepest commitments than almost any other question you could ask.
Tap a line to see the tension
Any two sit together comfortably. Holding all three while preserving human freedom is the problem.
In the Islamic tradition
This question split the Muslim intellectual world almost from the beginning — and the side that won had consequences that are still unfolding in Pakistan today.
On one side stood the thinkers who insisted that divine justice requires human freedom. If God punishes you for an act, that act must have been genuinely yours. A God who creates your actions and then punishes you for them is not just — and since God must be just, your freedom must be real. This was the position of the Mu’tazilah, the great rationalist theological movement of early Islam, and it carried a real theological cost: it means that something happens in the universe that God did not directly cause. For the Mu’tazilah, this was a price worth paying. For their opponents, it was unthinkable — a limitation on God’s sovereignty that no theological argument could justify.
On the other side, the Ash’arites— who became the dominant theological school of Sunni Islam — insisted on absolute divine sovereignty. God creates every event, including every human act. But then how can human beings be held responsible? The Ash’arite answer was a doctrine called kasb (acquisition): God creates the act, but the human being “acquires” it. The act is attributed to the human for purposes of moral and legal responsibility, even though God is its real author.
Is this a genuine solution, or is it a label placed over a crack? The question has been asked for a thousand years and never satisfactorily answered. If God creates the act and you merely “acquire” it, what exactly are you contributing? If nothing, then “acquisition” is an empty word, and you are being held responsible for something you did not do. If something, then there is a genuine human power in play — and the Ash’arites are conceding the very point they set out to deny.
This was not an academic exercise. The theology that won — the one that insisted God is the sole real agent and human action is, at best, “acquired” — became the framework through which millions of Muslims, across centuries, understood their relationship to their own choices. The intellectual culture that formed around it did not encourage people to think of themselves as authors of their own lives. It encouraged them to think of themselves as recipients of a script already written.
Where do you stand?
Drag the marker to see which tradition aligns with your intuition.
God creates the act, but the human will that directs the act is genuine — a real, if derivative, power. This preserves divine sovereignty and human responsibility, though the metaphysics of how a derivative will can be truly free remains contested.
Why this matters
You can hear the residue of this theology in ordinary Pakistani life. The reflexive inshallahthat functions not as trust in God but as resignation to helplessness. The shrug after a preventable failure: “What can you do? It was taqdīr.” The parent who tells a child that results are in God’s hands — not as a supplement to effort, but as a replacement for it. This is not piety. It is the long cultural afterlife of a theology that denied human agency while claiming to preserve it, and it shapes everything from how people respond to natural disasters to whether they believe institutional reform is possible.
Iqbal saw this with total clarity, and it is the hinge on which his entire philosophical project turns. If human beings are not genuinely free — if khudiis an illusion, if the self is merely a passive surface on which divine or natural forces play out their predetermined course — then everything Iqbal calls for is meaningless. There is no point in demanding that a civilisation “think for itself” if thinking is not something selves genuinely do.
Iqbal’s answer is striking. Human freedom is not a concession God makes reluctantly, a small zone of autonomy carved out from divine sovereignty. It is the point. God creates selves that are genuinely capable of creative action — not puppets executing a pre-written script, but agents whose choices make a real difference to the course of events. A God powerful enough to create the universe is powerful enough to create beings whose freedom is genuine. A God who cannot create a genuinely free being is, paradoxically, a diminished God — omnipotent in name but incapable of the one act of creation that would give omnipotence its deepest meaning.
The recovery of genuine selfhood — what Tadreej exists to support — requires, among other things, a recovery of this conviction: that human action matters, that choices are real, and that the future is not written in advance but is being authored, moment by moment, by the creative activity of free beings under God. Not instead of God. Not in spite of God. Under God, in the sense of a trust granted and a responsibility accepted.
Connections
Related pages
Appears in
Lecture I (Sections 3–4, 6–8) · Lecture III (Sections 3–5, 9–12) · Lecture IV (throughout)
Further reading
- Al-Ghazali, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, Discussion 17
- Robert Kane, The Significance of Free Will (Oxford University Press)
- Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Lectures III–IV