"We have said that the grand premise of religion is that man is able to surpass himself. Such ability is the essence of freedom. According to Hegel, the history of the world is nothing more than the progress of the consciousness of freedom. Now, what gives us the assurance that freedom is not a specious concept? By the term freedom we mean the will’s independence of antecedent conditions, psychological and physiological. Yet is the will ever independent of the character of the person or the circumstances of the environment? Is not every action the result of an antecedent factor? Is not the present moment in which a decision is made loaded with the pressure of the past? The ability of the mind to compare the reasons for and against a certain action and to prefer one against the other does not extend beyond the scope of those reasons which are conscious and apparent. Yet these reasons are derived from other reasons which in turn have an infinite genealogy. Whatever the genesis of the original reasons may have been, facing the descendants is not an act of unbiased, undetermined thinking. Can we really claim to possess the power over the determinations of our own will? Who is to be regarded as free?
Free is not always he whose actions are dominated by his own will, since the will is not an ultimate and isolated entity but rather determined in its motivations by forces which are beyond its control. Nor is he free who is what he wants to be, since what a person wants to be is obviously determined by factors outside him. Is he who does good for its own sake to be considered free? But how is it possible to do good for its own sake? How then is personal freedom possible? Its nature is a mystery, and yet, without such a belief there is no meaning left to the moral life. Without taking freedom seriously, it is impossible to take humanity seriously.
From the viewpoint of naturalism, human freedom is an illusion. If all facts in the physical universe and hence also in human history are absolutely dependent upon and conditioned by causes, then man is a prisoner of circumstances. There can be no free, creative moments in his life, since they would presuppose a vacuum in time or a break in the series of cause and effect. Man lives in bondage to his natural environment, to society, and to his own “character”; he is enslaved to needs, interests, and selfish desires. Yet to be free means to transcend nature, society, “character,” needs, interests, desires. How then is freedom conceivable?"
