“You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice/ If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice/ … I will choose a path that’s clear — I will choose free will.”
— from the song “Free Will” by Rush
These lyrics are an almost-criminally-small sample of a wonderful song about free will in regard to God. Does the force or being that over half the world calls “God” preordain, control, know, sanction, and correctly predict every single thing that happens to us? That is a question of free will. It’s about whether we have agency — liberty, if you will — to act according to our own will, preferences, choices, values, and whims. Either we are free to do this or that, or we are merely acting out something that God knew ahead of time was certain to occur. This is a very big deal, to decide how we feel about what Joseph Conrad described as “The implacable destiny of which we are the victims — and the tools.”
The remarkable theologian Martin Luther King, Jr. says this on the topic: “We are responsible human beings, not blind automatons; persons, not puppets. But endowing us with freedom, God relinquished a measure of his own sovereignty and imposed certain limitations upon himself.” Twentieth century Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset agrees: “We are not launched into existence like a shot from a gun, with its trajectory absolutely predetermined.”
“Are we free? Most of us, on the one hand, have the clear sense that we are. We feel free; we feel like we make all sorts of decisions that lead to both beliefs and actions that are wholly of our own choosing. Like, I had oatmeal this morning because I felt like it. This view — that humans are capable of entirely free actions — is known as libertarian free will.” [Similar to but distinctly different from political libertarianism], “they just think that, metaphysically, we can act freely” ~ Ruth Tallman. Dr. Tallman then notes that, however, most of us also accept that all actions have causes. An action is truly free if the agent (the individual in question) could have done otherwise; I could have eaten cereal, but I chose oatmeal instead.
Modern educational philosopher Alfie Kohn frames the issue thusly: “Free will — in the wildest meaning of the term—is the doctrine that human beings are capable of performing actions that are not determined b forces outside their control, that we are capable of making choices that are not necessitated by antecedent factors.” 20th-century American philosopher John Dewey felt this way about this fundamental issue: “The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.”
“Life is the sum of all your choices.”
Yet, overall, philosophers are not too sanguine that we truly control our own minds, bodies, choices, and lives. “Libertarianism runs counter to what we know about the physical world,” says Ruth Tallman. It’s hard to grasp the following, but free will is not necessarily a “true” thing. The definition of hard determinism is the following: an event is caused by events that preceded it; no other result was possible. Like if one leans over a balcony and releases a baseball, it absolutely has to fall. But there is a succession of unbroken events that preceded the dropping of the ball, and so on, ad infinitum. This view of the world makes a lot of sense, but it gets kinda dicey when one assumes hard determinism is true and then contemplates God, or even one’s daily choices. It seems like it’s just not quite right. If one looks closely enough, it seems hard to escape the feeling that indeed our acts are all caused by something, and that “my will” is not an acceptable answer to the question, “By what?”
Baruch Spinoza is a big name in the history of philosophy, and this is how he came down on this issue: “Men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.” He stated further that “There is no such thing as free will. The mind is induced to wish this or that by some cause, and that cause is determined by another cause, and so on back to infinity.” Unfortunately, uber-thinker Albert Einstein seems to have agreed with him.
“Everything in the universe happens for a sufficient reason, but free will is allowed for in that the reasons for which a human being acts have not the stringent compulsion of logical necessity” is how 20th-century philosophical titan Bertrand Russell characterized the issue. I think what he is pointing out is that comets and planets and even molecules operate according to the laws of physics (though the quantum universe has some elements of randomness and nondetermination, if I am correct), but human beings are somewhat free to make decisions.
“Free will is a corollary of consciousness; to say that we are free is merely to mean that we know what we are doing.”
A hard-core determinist believes that everything from how you feel about the existence of God to what you ate for lunch is predetermined; that is, all of the antecedents to an action are related in one long causal chain. So, for example, one’s choice of ham and cheese on rye wasn’t really a choice, but was the logical outcome of intrapsychic forces and processes that led ineluctably to the decision. I am only partially sold on this idea. It’s definitely right smack in the middle of the brain-mind phenomenon. That is, the brain is a physical thing, and the mind is not even really a thing, if you think about it. Here is a fanstastic and accessible 10-minute tutorial called “Where Does Your Mind Reside,” by Crash Course Philosophy. It’s good.
Here is how Atlantic writer Steven Cave reported on the idea of whether we have free will, and he does a better job of describing the philosophical issues than I can. He thinks there is sufficient reason to believe that philosophy holds that we do not have free will in the way that human beings think about it, “but we’re better off believing it anyway.” He is writing about the aspect of free will that could be termed philosophical, or metaphysical (or ontological, I’m not too sure). He isn’t claiming that a white-bearded, Hebrew-speaking man up in the clouds determines everything humans have ever done, or will ever do. That would be called the theological aspect of the free will/determinism debate.
He also follows up on the article with another useful one, having stated that: “Quite a few of those readers have assumed—understandably, given the article’s title—that I don’t think there is such a thing as free will. But that’s not the case. I report on the idea that free will has been wholly refuted, but I don’t endorse it. I argue that this view is spreading—for example, into courtrooms—and I quote Sam Harris, who defends this view eloquently, and I explore what might happen if this view continues to spread further. But as I say, it’s not my view.” Here is that piece.
“We can conceive of a world in which God corrected the abuse of free will by his creatures, so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when used as a weapon. But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and therefore freedom of the will would be void.”
Compatibilism is a philosophical position that tries to reconcile the freedom the libertarians would like to see with the scientific principle of Universal Causality, which is that every event has a cause, and that cause has a cause, and so on backward in time forever. Philosopher Tom Morris in the handy book Philosophy for Dummies writes this: “Compatibilists define a free act as any event, involving the body or mind of a person, that is caused by an inner state of that person, such as a desire, intention, or decision to so act.” He goes on to say “Free actions arise out of inner choices. It’s just that simple.” Morris is not sanguine about this as a neat hybrid, one that salvages some human dignity. He states: “The compatibilist gives us an inadequate definition of free action and cannot be seen as providing us with the philosophical view of freedom we need after all.” Rats!
In comparing Universal Causation with libertarian freedom, Morris concludes: “Scientific determinism seems to run totally roughshod over our natural intuitions concerning the nature of human action. …libertarianism seems to equate freedom with randomness. And compatibilism claims a form of compatibility between natural causation and freedom that it can’t plausibly deliver to satisfy the basic intuitions of most people.” Sigh.
Morris believes that “People can pressure us to conform, circumstances can make some options more difficult than others, but it is truly our responsibility how we live and what we do. Our freedom is that vast. And it’s that important.” Sounds like he is in favor of a kind of free will that preserves human agency and dignity. He distinguishes between event-causation and agent-causation. With “agency theory,” we are free. Put simply: “We cause things. We make things happen. We set things into motion.” He refers to it as a type of libertarianism, and distinguishes it from indeterminism, where evens happen without any discreet cause. Though not without its philosophical critics, Morris believes that:
“I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.” G. K. Chesterton
“On this view of human freedom, our place in the universe is quite distinctive. We can, in fact, initiate wholly new chains of causal action. We can launch new things into the world. We can change things and really make a difference by our creative action. We are not puppets of fate, or of logic, or of science. We can choose our own destinies.” Doesn’t that feel bracing!? Existentialist philosopher and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl maintains this: “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.” I would like to believe he was correct. Famous existential philosopher Irvin D. Yalom adds this: “In its existential sense,”freedom” refers to the absence of external structure. Contrary to everyday experience, the human being does not enter (and leave) a well-structured universe that has an inherent design. Rather, the individual is entirely responsible for — that is, is the author of — his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions. Freedom, in this sense, has a terrifying implication: it means that beneath us there is no ground.” Hmm, most of us who were raised with the idea of God would be mortified to imagine that there is nothing but eerie silence and cold darkness above the sky.
Freedom to make choices is absolutely and inextricably bound up with theological questions about God, whether God exists, and especially the “problem of evil.” Meaning: if God exists, why is evil allowed to flourish? Atheists would be right to ask how it is possible that a god who is allegedly good, omniscient, and all-powerful would allow, say, Hitler to keep on killing, or a person to keep people chained up in his basement. “Probably the most powerful riposte to the problem of evil is the so-called ‘freewill defense’, according to which suffering on earth is the price we pay — and a price worth paying — for our freedom to make genuine choices about our actions”
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche concurs, going as far as to claim that “God, as representing objective values, is our master. If, however, God is dead, the effect is exhilarating …our sea lies open again….” It can be very honest, though not terribly comforting, to come to believe that there might not be a God in the sense that the Torah or the New Testament claims there is. “Since the supernatural must remain forever outside the context of man’s knowledge, a ‘supernatural explanation’ is a contradiction of terms. One cannot explain the unknown with reference to the unknowable” maintains atheist
The freedom to act and be a true agent of causality both in reference to 1) Universal Causality/determinism and 2) God’s preordination are deep and wide topics, and I can’t cover it all (nor do I fully understand either in totality). There is no better 10-minute tutorial on philosophical free will vs. determinism than a Crash Course Philosophy episode, and that is available here.
“I am free in performing an action if I could have done otherwise if I had chosen to.”
You can look up quotes relevant to liberty, choice, freedom, will, agency, or determinism in the free and expansive Wisdom Archive, right here on Values of the Wise. Here are some more quotes for your consideration:
“Thus, a free will and a will under moral law are one and the same.” ~ Immanuel Kant
“When you stop to think of what coercion means and how coercion is the opposite of freedom in action, you can see, I think, that the essence of this freedom lies in action itself. For when a man is coerced he is not acting; he is being acted upon. He is suffering someone else’s action upon him. He is being pushed about, if you will, or moved and he is not initiating the movement himself. Hence this freedom of which we are talking has both a positive and a negative aspect. Negatively, this freedom consists in exemption from coercion.”
“The essence of a free life is being able to choose the style of living you prefer, free from exclusion and without the compulsion of conformity or law.”
“Destiny is a name often given in retrospect to choices that had dramatic consequences.”
“Our lives are purposive if they directed toward the pursuit of important values. And it is the pursuit and attainment of important values that most clearly would give life itself importance. We can immerse ourselves in trivialities in this world, or we can seek to embody and achieve values of importance in what we do.” ~ Tom Morris
“Freedom is most dramatically illustrated in the ‘heroic’ actions, like Socrates’ decision to drink the hemlock rather than compromise; but even more significant is the undramatic, steady day-to-day exercise of freedom on the part of any person developing toward psychological and spiritual integration in a distraught society like our own.”
“We may never know the extent to which we are free, but it seems safe to say that we attribute to ourselves much more freedom than we actually have.”