The riddle of free will has hauntedtheologians, philosophers, and psychologists for at least 2200years, yes, even the biologist E.O. Wilson, who recently presentedus with an explanation of everything, in the spirit of the Frenchencyclopedists of the 18th century.
In the second century BCE, Alexanderof Aphrodisias wrote On Fate, in which he defended theconcept of free will against the Stoic doctrine of the predeterminationof human action.
Lest you think that the issue was settledfor the theologians 1580 years ago, here's the thunder of theRev. Harold Taylor, pastor of Allegheny Baptist Church here inBlacksburg:
"Depraved, controlled by a fallennature, having no spark of divinity, no burning coal of goodnessto fan into flame, man is under the rule of the evil and leftto be his own authority in all things. Every man practices whatis right in his own eyes and he is the sole determinate of whatis right."This was the tragedy of Pelagiusand Arminius. In exalting man they jettisoned God and his Sovereigncontrol over the whole of His creation. They, in cowardly fashion,without respect for truth, except as they perceived it, promoteda heresy which leaves man hopeless and helplessly doomed. Thesemen and their offspring are today confined to a worldly orderdevoid of any heavenly wisdom with their satanic lies."
But wait. There are the "Free WillBaptists," whose belief system includes the generous admissionthat "a saved individual may, in freedom of will, cease totrust in Christ for salvation and once again be lost. This theyhold in distinction from those who teach that a believer, oncehaving accepted Christ, may not again be lost."
For Pelagius and all who have upheldthe concept of free will, the issue is moral responsibility. Ifwe cannot choose freely between right and wrong, between goodand evil, then we have no responsibility. This is the defensefrom insanity in Anglo-American jurisprudence.
Why are we so concerned about"free will?"
The fundamentalists reject it, denouncingPelagius and Arminius. The humanists cling to it. What is thisall about?
We easily see why the fundamentalistsfeel the way they do. For Augustine and Taylor, and all like them,the issue is one of God's omnipotence. By asserting free will,they claim, we are denying the absolute sovereignty of God. Hereis the Rev. Taylor again.
No mere man has ever possessed absolutesovereignty over anyone or any thing. Such is reserved for Godalone. He alone has authority over body and soul. This is deniedby those mentioned earlier [Pelagius and Arminius] and in ourpresent day as well.They insist that man has sovereignty,ultimate power to break the dominion of Satan or sin (if indeedthey acknowledge either as declared in the Word of God) which,in Adam, was mankind's own choosing.
Does this mean that poor Adam, beforehe knew right from wrong, did have free will? Incidentally, ifwe don't have free will, how can we "choose" Christ?Indeed, the fundamentalists denounce the humanists and free willbecause, if we have free will, they say, "anything is permitted.There is no morality."
On the contrary, we say, only if weknow right from wrong, only if we have eaten of the fruit of thetree of knowledge of good and evil, only if we can choose betweengood and evil, only if we "break the dominion of Satan andsin" of our own free will can we be morally accountable.
But are we right? Can we be morallyaccountable and not have free will? We want to avoid the trapof determinism; if causality prevails, where then is free will?So we (i.e., our philosophers invent "agent causation,"a sort of ghost in the machine, all the while denying that theyare dualists.
The philosophers have tried to savetheir day by postulating a hierarchy of "causes," or"agents," and on the top a second level agent that isnot subject to causality, and that is where the free will ultimatelyresides. One of them wrote: "A free act is one where theagent could have done otherwise if she had chosen otherwise,and in such acts the agent is morally responsible, even if determined."(Well and good, but she didn't choose otherwise!)
Another has suggested that if determinismwere known to be true, no one could ever rationally deliberateabout any type of action.
Deliberation, it is said, makes senseonly if genuine alternatives are available to us. If I deliberateabout whether or not to raise my arm, my deliberation is rationalonly if I am able to either raise it or not to raise it. If determinismis true, only one course is genuinely open to me. So, it is alleged,my deliberation is irrational."
These philosophers are really dense.Suppose that I am terribly angry with somebody, and that at theend of my raised arm will be a clenched, menacing fist. The deliberationis part of the causal process, that may eventually cause me notto raise my arm (fist). On the other hand, my anger may be suchthat I can't "deliberate," I act on (the causal) angryimpulse. It seems to me that the philosophers' causality is simplistic.They neglect the psychological causality; they identify eventsin the mind with this mysterious second level "agent."By relegating psychological events to the realm of the uncaused,in order to preserve free will, they are committing the "sin"of dualism.
Or they invoke quantum mechanics andHeisenberg, to introduce unpredictability from which they "derive"free will. I believe that the fundamental motivation for tryingto save free will is just this issue of predictability. Like themechanists of the 17th through early 20thcenturies, they believe that if we know the present state of everyparticle, we could predict the entire future of the universe.In the present discourse, it would mean that if we knew all thesensations and thoughts of a person at this moment, we could predictwhat they would do next. And that is unacceptable. The thoughtthat we are predictable is abhorrent. And there would be no moraljudgement, no accountability.
From the time of Newton to the firstdecades of the 20th century, the universe seemed totallydeterministic. It consisted of little hard objects, called atoms,that bounced off of each other like billiard balls. Once giventhe initial push by the "prime mover," nothing couldhappen by chance. Determinism in human affairs was the philosophicalcorollary of Newton's physics. And it strangely echoed Calvinist(and Augustinian) predestination.
Only by invoking some remnant of thenotion of soul could free will be saved, only by a dualistic mind-bodyphilosophy could something be found that could intervene in humanbehavior.
In a recent interview of E.O. Wilson,the biologist, the magazine The Skeptic touched on hisview of the problem.
Skeptic:How about free will?Wilson [modestly]:I spelled out how the free will issue can be handled in ChapterSix of Consilience: "The Mind." To very brieflysummarize, free will exists insofar as the ambit of ordinary humanthought reaches. Perhaps a super-computer simulating the actionof virtually every molecular system within every neuron of a person'sbrain might be able to predict in advance how that person is goingto act. But that is a theoretical construct so far beyond whatis practical, that effective human action cannot be determined.
One hundred and eight years ago, thegreat American psychologist Will James wrote: "the most thatany argument can do for determinism is to make it a clear andseductive conception, which a man is foolish not to espouse…thatprediction of all things without exception must be ideally, evenif not actually, possible." Wilson is not very original.
But then James, 110 years ago, goesfar beyond today's Wilson:
When scientific and moral postulateswar thus with each other and objective proof is not to be had,the only course is voluntary choice, for scepticism itself, ifsystematic, is also voluntary choice. If, meanwhile, the willbe undetermined, it would seem only fitting that the beliefin its indetermination should be voluntarily chosen from amongother possible beliefs. Freedom's first deed should be to affirmitself….The utmost that a believer in free-will can everdo will be to show that the deterministic arguments are not coercive.
Wilson's statement is a copout! He statesthat while the future is unknowable in practice, it is predetermined.On the eve of the overthrow of Newton's billiard-ball universeby quantum mechanics, James, while thinking that the future maybe deterministic, in which case it would be unknowable in practice,accepts that this might not be the case after all!
I believe that the problem is not, asWilson says, in the computational impossibility of prediction.It is in the physical impossibility in principle of prediction.We cannot even predict which radioactive nucleus in a very smallcollection of atoms will fission next, nor when. The physicaldimensions of neural synapses are such that they are subject toquantum uncertainty.
But even more. The brain is not a closedsystem. Not only are there macroscopic events impinging on itconstantly through the sensory systems, both internal-the endocrinehormones-and external, but microscopic, in the form of energyfields and even particles, such as from cosmic rays. Rare thoughthey be, neutrino interactions may intervene in triggering a synapticevent a split millisecond sooner-or later-than it might have triggeredwithout that, or even not at all. A neutrino emitted by a starin a galaxy 10 billion light years away could play the role inthis scenario of the Brazilian butterfly flapping its wings inthe chaos theory of meteorology.
Do quantum uncertainty or the effectsof other random events imply free will? A British Marxist philosopherat a lecture in London around 1936 had this to say.
You believe that the uncertainty inknowing both the momentum and position of an electron is at thefoundation of your free will. OK. Suppose that tomorrow morninghalf of you will be in Calcutta and half of you in Rio de Janeiro.Suppose further that at this moment none of you knows where you'llbe tomorrow morning. Tell me that you have free will.
So much for finding free will at thelevel of quantum events.
Sigmund Freud and Will James, each inhis own way told us about the enormous work going on in the unconscious,the subconscious mind, the vast expanses of the brain to whichwe have only fragmentary contact. In that region, subject to unfathomeddeterministic and yes, random events, we can never knowwhat causes us to choose what we choose, in principle.
Knowledge is stored in the brain andinfluences our actions. Our entire experience from birth, includingexplicit and implicit moral training has its effect on our unconsciousmemory. This is Freud's super-ego. Genesis 3 has it right. Wehave eaten of the fruit of the "Tree of the Knowledge ofGood and Evil."
Psychological, or mental, events areno less real and causal in our actions as the unconscious actioncaused by the tickling of a fly on our forehead, leading to areflex head shake or hand gesture to chase the offending critteraway. For me, "mind" is something the brain does. Andthe neurophysiologists, in particular, armed with recent brainimaging technology, are learning more and more how the mind worksin the brain.
A remarkable series of experiments,reported recently in the journal Science, has actually demonstratedthe neural substrate of consciousness-where in the brain we areconscious of certain stimuli, and where in the brain similar stimuli,presented at the same time, may be processed without our beingaware of them. If we believe that mind is simply something thebrain does, we are on the threshold of knowing what is consciousnessand what is the unconscious mind.
In short, it is not predictability ofan event that would deprive us of free will. It is not the computationalimpossibility of prediction that allows us free will. But in thefinal analysis, Wilson gets it right when he says: "At thecommon sense level of an individual being able to follow a widerange of intentions, free will certainly exists." We feelthat we have free will. That's "as good as it gets."But that's good enough. OK?
Copyright 1998, Morton Nadler; Commercial Duplication Prohibited
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