Leaders Of The Free World

I quite wanted an early night on Tuesday night. Turns out I ended up talking about free will with my new housemates until pretty late. I've done quite a lot of that since I've been in York; I wrote my final essay of my degree on the subject. After wrestling with the concept of free will for three years, in the end I became satisfied that free will is only really the presence of a felt choice; it's an illusion of sorts (at least compared to what we might usually think it is).

Christians get pretty worked up and frustrated when it comes to free will. It's not surprising if they want to believe in a creator who is both powerful and knowledgeable and who also intervenes in the course of human history. Free will looks like pretty slim pickings if this is the case; if God knew and created the world exactly as it was, then he surely knew exactly the consequences of his creation, which happen to include every choice I make. A lot of Paul's writing in the New Testament talks about us being 'predestined' and 'elect' by God. That bothers people.

I have a few observations about free will that I've come to accept over the last few years.

The first thing is that no one is in a particularly good position. Whether you're a theist or an atheist, free will is difficult to account for. It's not only God that makes free will difficult, the physical world poses some issues as well. The physical world is a world of causes; all physical events are caused by previous physical events. So if all there are is physical things (which I assume most atheists would want to say), then the laws of nature and the past dictate perfectly the contents of the future. It doesn't look like there's much room for free will there either; your actions are just the consequences of a physical system of causes and effects.

So if you want to maintain that there is 'free will' in the strong sense, you must deny that free agents are part of the physical system of events. And even then, you must also deny that there is a God who knows and controls the universe. As far as I know, there aren't many people whose philosophy of human beings and of the universe would allow free will in this strong sense. No one is in a particularly good position to argue for free will in this strong sense of being 'totally uncaused'. Even if we did come to the conclusion that in actual fact human actions were uncaused, it strikes me as a kind of freedom that I don't really want- actions are merely the consequences of randomness if they are uncaused.

The second thing I've noticed, is that we aren't always on the same page when it comes to talking about free will. When we talk about free will, we usually mean it in this strong sense of being 'uncaused'. But actually we aren't very clear on what we really mean by free will most of the time. I think, if pushed most people would be happy with the kind of free will I endorse. I came to the conclusion that all that we can mean by free will is the feeling of choice. And that is quite enough. It's quite enough for me to decide what I'm going to do next Tuesday, it's quite enough for me to choose what I want for my lunch. It's quite enough for me to choose to follow Jesus. It's my intention that matters rather than what caused it. I could never really know what caused my action after all.

The third thing is that at times we all have to hold in tension that our actions are both caused and free. Sometimes this doesn't make much sense when we try to reconcile it. But maybe we shouldn't try and reconcile it at all. I wonder if the problem is one of perspective. Metaphysically speaking my actions are caused; in other words- zoom out to the level of looking at the universe as a whole, on that level everything causes everything else; the future is just a part of the track that the train of the universe hasn't got onto yet. On that level we're caused. But free will is not something which we can discover on that level at all. Actually free will is something which occurs on a very everyday level; we need to zoom in a lot to get to me at 7 O'clock on a Monday morning choosing which one of my housemates' cereals to steal; I'm perfectly free to choose any of them. Free Will is an everyday thing, it is something that occurs at the level of consciousness and human existence, and not at the metaphysical level. I agree that there is still some sort of tension there, but it's one I'm happy to hold.

The fourth thing I think that is important to think about from a Christian perspective is that at times we have been guilty of constructing human theories around Scripture. When Paul speaks about the things God prepared for us in advance to do, or when he speaks about Christ preordaining our salvation, he firstly and foremost makes a pastoral point. The purpose of most of the New Testament, which is where we get a lot  of our theology on free will from, is primarily to encourage and build the Church. It is to build up leaders and fix people's eyes back onto Jesus. It is a great encouragement when we feel like we are worthless, or that we aren't good enough, to know that actually God has chosen us to be a part of his plans. Of course there are theological consequences of this. But I wonder if it's sometimes risky to take these letters of encouragement, and then take poetic lines from the Psalms, which are beautiful pieces of poetry written to glorify God, and couple them together to make complex metaphysical points about our free will. I'm not saying that these ideas are not there in the Bible, I just sometimes wonder if we're danger of skewing the purpose of some texts in order to build a nice, solid humanly understandable systematic theology which ties all the ends together.

The last thing, and perhaps the most important thing I've observed about free will is that it makes little difference. The causal state of my being makes little difference to which cereal I want tomorrow morning. You see the thing is that tomorrow morning the Calvanist, the humanist, the determinist, the libertarian, the Christian and atheist will all live their lives with perfectly free will. What I mean by that is that as soon as we put down the books, as soon as we stop discussing and debating the level of free will of the human being, we discover that free will is unavoidable. It is right there in front of us as Sartre might say- it is at the heart of our being. On a basic, everyday level, whatever you think about free will has little bearing on what you actually do and how you actually behave. I mean this as an encouragement; sometimes free will is actually not worth worrying about too much, it does not alter how you live, it does not come into play at an everyday level really. I guess we'll never really know how free we are, and it strikes me that we ought to not let it mess with us too much, we ought not to let it cripple us. I don't think anyone actually knows at the end of the day.

I'm free on any sort of level that matters. I find it difficult to dispute that. It's pretty obvious to us that we are free, we're free to choose almost all the time. It's what we do with our freedom that's important, it's how we choose and what we do with our lives.