The first thought I had when I wanted to write this first line was, "As a Calvinist, I do not believe in free will." But that statement is not entirely accurate. I started questioning free will before I became convinced of Calvinism, and I didn't give up on free will until some time after I became a Calvinist. Before I go through with this post, I want to clarify a couple of things. First, I am not too serious about free will. I am not especially interested in trying to convince people I'm right if they are not willing, and I do not rank it as an important issue at all. My goal is not to divide, but provide insight for those who would find it compelling. Now, I would also like to explain what I do not believe. I do not believe that people are robots incapable of making choices. We know by the Bible and everyday intuitive experience that we make choices, and no one, Calvinist or Arminian, denies this. When we do something, we do it because we have in our hearts and minds determined it to be worth doing, whether we are right or wrong. My denial of free will states not that man is a robot, but that man is a complex spiritual being, but still holds to basic cause-and-effect without a mysterious intervention known as "free will." When we make a choice, we choose to do whatever seems most appealing to us out of our options, based on the weighing of the choices in our own personal hearts and minds, for which we are responsible. Now, God has the ability to design us and our circumstances so that our emotions, desires, intellect, and other immaterial aspects of the self will lead us to make specific choices throughout the entire course of our lives, and this is the only Biblical, as far as I can tell, explanation of the human will. God does not program our actions, but creates our hearts and minds, which in turn bring about choices in our wills according to God's sovereign wisdom in designing us. Note that this does not make God the author of sin. God creates men who will sin, but he does not create their sins in and of themselves.
Anyway, enough of my position. Now I will give a brief refutation of free will. It begins with a hypothetical situation in a free will understanding. A person exists who hears the Gospel and rejects it. Now, God, being omnipotent and sovereign, should have been able to put this person in a set of circumstances in which he would not reject it of his own free will, but accept it of his own free will, right? There are two possible answers to this question. The first is "no," saying that the person would have rejected the Gospel in any circumstances. But this is inconsistent with free will. If it is inevitable that a person will make a certain choice no matter what happens, then his will must not be free, for there are no other possible choices he could have made. Therefore, the only other possible answer is "yes," saying that God could have placed the person in a different set of circumstances in which he would have accepted the Gospel. But this destroys conditional election. If God did not choose to place the person in the positive circumstances, and thus bring them to faith, then, as our free will friends like to say about salvation, "To choose not to choose is to choose." Therefore God choose not to put this person in saving circumstances. Since their action was dependent on His sovereign planning, His plan must have been unconditional since there was no set future action which this person would choose. So then the person is not ultimately the decider of his own salvation, and does not really have free will. Thus, either way this circumstance is examined, free will destroys itself. The only way out is to claim that God does not know all the future because it does not exist and thus could not have predicted the circumstances under which the person would accept or reject Christ. However, this view, called "open theism," is a terrible distortion of everything Scripture teaches and is, in my humble opinion, the closest one can get to damnable heresy without actually crossing that line. Of course, even if open theism was the case, a problem could still arise. God, being omnipotent, should be able to alter the past, and therefore should be able to change someone's past circumstances to bring them to faith. And don't even try to tell me that the past no longer exists for God to alter. God is the ultimate Creator, and special/general relativity exists that all of time exists together. Then we end up in the same predicament in which we began. Therefore, having exhausted all possible options for free will, we must accept that free will is logically inconsistent and cannot exist. And before you dismiss my conclusion based on my limited credentials, just bear in mind that I have John Piper, John Macarthur, Charles Spurgeon, Charles Whitley, Jonathan Edwards, John Calvin, Martin Luther, St. Augustine, and a host of other renowned Christian thinkers (not to mention many of the confessions and creeds of the Protestant Reformation) on my side.