FUN WITH THE PROBLEM OF FREE WILL
Looking at Free Will is not just for scholars. Ordinary folk can enjoy it, since it affects them, too!
BEING FREE TO CHOOSE
Freedom is doing what you want when you want. It is also having the freedom to do those things you don’t want. If you had a choice today: “Eat a chocolate bar?” and you decided to NOT. That would be freedom only if you weren’t fooled, coerced, or programmed to not. It would have to be a legitimate choice. Maybe you decided your diet had a higher priority. Maybe you wanted to save the chocolate bar for your child to enjoy. However, if you had been coerced to not eat the bar … that would not have been freedom of choice at all. This was the ethical problem with The Truman Show, where the unfortunate young man’s whole life had been scripted without his knowledge.
One author puts it this way, “Free will makes evil possible.” For, how can you claim to be good if you could choose nothing else?
So, the God of the Bible is not who we would expect. He allows evil to exist because otherwise we are not choosing goodness, love, or joy. We expect him to require goodness. In a way he does, he requires it of those who love him. He does not force or trick anyone into being good. That seems strange to us. After all, he is all powerful and all wise. He has the power and wisdom to make the right decisions for us. If he did, we probably wouldn’t even know he did. It would merely seem the only logical way to go. Thoughts of doing something else wouldn’t enter our minds.
The problem with that scenario is that we would not be choosing anything. We would not even know there was a thing called evil. We, therefore, would be the same as robots, ethically incapable of disobedience or moral failure. As a young teen I thought that would be better than the world in which we lived. In some ways it would be. Ethically and morally it would be a dismal world in which we would choose only what our master commanded. There’s the issue. Our MASTER!!! We would be ethical slaves with bonds of ought that never loosened.
So, no choice equals slavery. It always has. Even when there’s a “degree” of choice, we are still slaves who can do no other than what our master commands. So, the slave woman whose master decides to marry…. She has no choice but marry him (even if she actually loves him), because he is her master.
Free will is not free will if there is ANY lack of choice. Our freedom must be 100% or it is not freedom.
FREE WILL NEVER ENDS
There is a second issue with free will which few discuss. Can it be called free will if we can never decide against one choice? Isn’t that like the “slave woman wife” all over again? She loves her master, but she must obey him. Almost everyone agrees that she is not basing her decision to marry on free will, there is something else at play here. Love is not enough to break to bond of ought. Because, whether she loves her master or not she has no freedom to reject his advances. She can’t say “No!.”
Some claim limited freedom is no problem. I don’t agree. I say, while it is true that freedom always has limits…we can’t know everything, the value of every product for example, or what tomorrow holds as another example, when we make a choice…our choice must be entirely our own. We may wish we had not decided to buy the car because it is always breaking down. It was still 100% our choice and we are stuck with it until it is paid off. Yet, the freedom wasn’t limited, merely our knowledge and ability to see the future.
Bigger yet is the idea that once I make a decision I have to submit to living with that decision until the end of time. Nope. We get married and say vows to love, honor, and respect the other until death us do part. Then we find we can’t respect our idiot spouse. You are saying that we have to live with the consequences of a poor decision for the rest of our days? I don’t think so. In fact, I know there are “outs” for almost every decision we make. Bankruptcy. Divorce. Tattoo erasure. We move. We change jobs. We change our underwear, for goodness sake. No decision is a forever decision, but can be a daily re-enlistment. So, don’t tell me that if I decide to shop at Kroger today I can’t change my mind tomorrow…I’ll forever be a Kroger shopper!!! That’s not freedom even if I love Kroger.
Some won’t like what I have to say on this subject, but even God changes his mind. He planned to destroy Nineva (they had only 40 days until doomsday) and sent a prophet to tell them so. The prophet was miffed when they repented and God’s mercy extended to preserve them from his wrath. Another? God’s spirit was on King Saul, but Saul was a royal fool and God withdrew his spirit from him. So, just because God’s spirit is in me doesn’t mean that I can’t become foolish enough for God to withdraw and leave me to my own decisions. See, if I can’t be a fool like King Saul was, then I don’t have free will. (Hopefully I won’t be that foolish.)
DETERMINISM STINKS!
Determinism requires a mind to ruin free will. But even if there is no intent to sway behavior and thought, it demands a belief that EVERY event causes a subsequent event and is the natural result of some prior event. If I eat a potato instead of a carrot it causes some specific event somewhere in the world. Nah! My butterfly wings are not big enough. What causes a fender bender has been discovered and defined. Traveling too fast for conditions and too close to the car ahead. Strangely, if your car is the color black instead of white there is a 13% greater probability of that accident. Did the harvesting of the compounds which create black paint have anything to do with that particular vehicle being involved in a fender bender? This is where the whole “deterministic” crap falls apart. What happened in Indochina 4.3 years ago which caused your black car to get involved in a fender bender? I think it would be impossible to show the connection. Thus, determinism takes far more faith than does believing in miracles. [See my post on The Panglossian Trap.]
Hey! SOME things do cause other things. If you drink a glass of water you are less likely to fall over and die in the heat. That can be proved. What can’t be proved is whether your decision to drink water has any impact on any other event in the world.
The last problem with determinism is that it fails to explain evil. If all is determined then evil cannot exist, only outcomes which you don’t desire.
If you are in charge of you, then have fun with the decisions you face.
[PLEASE NOTE that Don is always open to discussing the thoughts and opinions he shares here and welcomes comments as shared in the comment section. He doesn’t use other social media platforms and won’t see whatever you’d like to share with him if you post it elsewhere.
ALSO, Don is always open to offer his thoughts on various topics. If you have a specific request, you can let him know in a comment; he reads – and replies to – them all. ~ Sherry]
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