Does God give us any choice in salvation?

 I was talking with a man who believed in God, and thought that we have no choice about whether or not we're going to heaven or hell. "God chooses His elect and there's nothing you can do," he said. "To believe anything else makes God no longer sovereign and not all powerful!"

Look what God lamented in Luke 13: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, just as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not have it!" (v43)

It is God's sovereign decision to let us make our own choices, whether to be with Him eternally or to be forever separated. Saying that He does not have the power to let us make our own choices is to contradict what He says.

Why did God create atheists?

Take a look at this picture. It's been said that Christians doing good only do it because it's an order from a superior, whereas atheists do it simply because they love and choose to be moral, using free will. Sounds nice, huh?

But stop for a second. What is free will? We know that all actions are responses to a stimuli. We know that we are vastly complex biologic machines. You see an orange. Light has reflected off of it and hit your eye. Nervous impulses travel along your neural pathways and interact with cells in the brain. Chemicals fire and change in response to this stimulus. You eat the orange.

Your mind is a vast array of cells and chemicals, all responding to physical forces. But what is free will? Willpower supposes that some disembodied "force" can change the chemical reactions going on inside our bodies. Instead of eating the orange, you can "choose" not to. But free "will" is the equivalent of the spirit—a nonsensical illusion to any true atheist. Can you prove that you could have done anything different? No. Can you pinpoint this "force" that lets you "choose" to behave this way or that? No. Can "you" somehow "force" the chemical reactions happening in response to stimulus to react differently? To have one chemical outcome instead of another? No.

Does an atheist, then, really "choose" to be good or bad, in a universe where we are simple science? No. There is no good. There is no evil. There are the illusions of them—intangible thoughts; nothing real. To believe that one has some "will" outside and superior to biophysical mechanics is truly superstitious—and yet inevitable and pointless. The logical conclusion for the atheist is that everything is casually determined. Two famous atheists really summed it up, saying,

"“You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” —Francis Crick

“Given the state of the universe at one time, a complete set of laws fully determines both the future and the past. That would exclude the possibility of miracles or an active role for God....It is hard to see how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.” —Stephen Hawking

Do we have free will?

Have you ever thought about the implications that atheism would have on free will? Many prominent atheists have. Consider the logical conclusions of a world without God.

Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, concluded, “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
 

Stephen Hawking likewise said,  “Given the state of the universe at one time, a complete set of laws fully determines both the future and the past. That would exclude the possibility of miracles or an active role for God....It is hard to see how free will can operate if our behaviour is determined by physical law, so it seems we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.”
 

Isn't it so much nicer that God created a world where we have free will! "And if it seems evil to you to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve." (Josh 24:15) It is a privilege to serve such a Creator!

Murders on college campuses.

Why would someone murder college kids? Isn't that pointless? Why would someone propose marriage? Richard Dawkins’ assessment of human worth may be depressing, but why on atheism is he wrong when he says, “There is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference...We are machines for propagating DNA...It is every living object’s sole reason for being?” 

In a world where there is no objective good or evil, emotions in the moment ultimately rule supreme: there is nothing beyond them, and so marriage is no better or worse than how it makes someone feel, which puts it at the level of a mass shooting. There could not even be such a thing as free will, because human "will" is an intangible concept that supersedes the level of chemical reactions in the brain. Saying that someone can "choose" to do something else in the moment is nonsense—they are a mere physical machine, using chemicals instead of cogs, but cogs turn with pointless indifference. 

Such confusion and such pointless indifference. There is no hope, only a desire for pleasure until death. 1 Cor 2:14 sums it up well, saying, "But the natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness to him, and he is not able to understand them, because spiritually they are discerned."