Quantum mechanics strongly suggests indeterminism (events not fully fixed by prior states). We register that as randomness, but can we, mathematically or in principle, distinguish mere noise from something grander and unknowable, like free will? My stance, akin to Gödel’s lesson that formal systems outstrip their own rules, is that reality contains an irreducible indeterminate component. What instruments score as chance is not brute randomness but the interface where Free Will, ultimately the Free Will of God, acts as needed. The “random” we measure is the measurable surface of purposeful selection.

Science succeeds by reduction, explaining effects by their constituents (molecules, cells, fields). That method is superb for emergence from below, but it is not tuned to detect holism from above, where outcomes are selected in light of wider ends. My stance is that wavefunction collapse is such a holistic selection: the hunt for a deeper sub-mechanism simply ends there. If God decides local collapses for global reasons, detection would not come by finer parts but by discerning purpose-shaped patterns in the whole, by understanding the larger aim to which the local outcomes are fitted.

A merely epiphenomenal consciousness, spectator to fixed neural outputs, would be pointless theatre, or else a sign we inhabit a staged experience (which itself points beyond us). I hold that we do have free will, and that it is holistic in kind, akin, by analogy, to God’s: a reason-responsive capacity to select among genuine alternatives. Determinist readings (e.g., Sapolsky) find no bottom-up “free-will particle,” but that is the wrong place to look; agency is not a neural residue but a top-down power of the conscious agent to act for reasons.

We all wrestle with the old donkey (C. S. Lewis), yet our deeds disclose our creed. James asks whether faith without works can save; our ledger of time and money answers daily. To purchase a house without vocation—no call, no mission, no charge from God—is not neutral: it is a massive act of self-investment. It ties up capital for private comfort and status, locks future income into self-maintenance, and binds attention to my walls, my equity, my horizon. If Christ has bought our freedom, stewardship means directing our time and money to His ends, not our comfort; otherwise our calendars and accounts become a liturgy of self.