Everything has a cause.
 
Our actions and thoughts have a cause. They are either caused by brain matter and the laws governing it (materialistic determinism), or by something extraneous to matter.

Matter is comprised of atoms such as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, etc., and their slight variations called isotopes. Each kind of atom is the same, be it in the human body or elsewhere.

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​Materialists believe that these building blocks of matter, the smaller quanta of which they are composed, the electrochemical energy they produce, and the natural laws governing them define our reality.
 
This seems reasonable since physicists, chemists, engineers, and computer designers use atoms, the matter they form, and natural laws to make the wonderful modern tools and conveniences we all enjoy.
 
That has led to the conclusion that the only difference between you and your car, computer, tree in your yard, and me would be quantities, ratios, and placement of all the different kinds of atoms.
 
This materialistic thinking that since everything is made of atoms everything is essentially the same has even spilled into our social and political world. It's now politically correct to think that sexes, age, races, cultures, religions, intellect, physical attributes, etc. are all equal and therefore deserve the same outcome in life.
 
But we are clearly different from one another in multiple ways.
 
Something other than atoms must account for why we have hundreds of thousands of thoughts and actions moment by moment during the course of a day. And none of these thoughts and actions are the same for any two people anywhere at any time.
 
We are not robots doing what a program in a computer demands or slaves to random electrochemical transmissions bound by inflexible natural laws in the brain.
 
The thoughts we have and choices and actions we make float free of being controlled by matter. It's called free will.
 
In denial of free will, materialists contend that our entire being could be duplicated if all of our physical details were known. That's the dream of strong artificial intelligence (AI).
 
Materialists contend that you could be exactly duplicated if the correct percentages of your various atoms were known and downloaded into a computer. Algorithmic software, a vat of atoms, and a wet biochemical printer could birth an exact duplicate of you. Each of you would think and act exactly the same. That would mean you would even occupy the same space--an impossibility.
 
In the future strong artificial intelligence land of Oz, you could be scanned, a duplicate file of you e-mailed to a vacation destination, downloaded on their computer, and then reassembled into a copy of you with that wet biochemical printer machine.

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​That's the materialistic dream. It's absent any reality other than a belief.
 
Materialists choose to hold this belief using free will. But use of free will voids the deterministic materialism they try to prove.
 
Not one experiment has ever been done demonstrating that atoms mixing on their own, or assembled in the laboratory, can create free will and the qualities characteristic of life.

Brain molecules obey chemistry, they don't have free will.

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​Atomic agglomerations and ratios don't create self-identity, personality, conscience, consciousness, empathy, appreciation for beauty, poetry, music, unique skills, love, hate, hope, ethics, despair, compassion, creativity, curiosity, and most importantly, free will.

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At death, creatures have all their atomic physical components. Yet they no longer have the qualitative attributes nor the free will they had while living.
 
Moreover, identical twins and cloned animals made of identical nucleic acids, don't think, move, behave exactly alike, or occupy the same space. They are individually unique due to the nonmaterial other that has free will and drives the unique qualities of the living.
 
Logical syllogism
 
1. Atoms do not have free will.
 
2. Living creatures have free will.
 
3. Therefore, living creatures are more than atoms.
 
The extracorporeal non-material conscious I, our essence that exerts free will, cannot be reduced to matter.
 
That means we are not only other than matter, we are immortal and timeless. (See my previous Quora posts proving our immortality--not to be confused with man-made religions.)