Yes, and how is it irrelevant? You employ a very strange logic.
Well, for starters there should be no confusion between the purpose of free will with its necessary condition. The purpose of human free will is love, communion, and moral participation in the good, but for love to be real, it must be freely given; and for it to be freely given, the will must be able to withhold itself.
Therefore the possibility of choosing evil isn’t the reason free will exists, but it’’s inseparable from the kind of freedom required for genuine love of God. A creature that can only choose the good by necessity is not morally free, it’s simply determined, and a determined “love” is not love at all.
That definition is far too thin.
Morality cannot be reduced to whatever rules help a community function, because communities can function around deeply evil practices. If morality were nothing more than socially useful rules, then we would have to call child sacrifice, slavery, or genocide “moral” whenever a society regarded them as necessary for its order and survival. But that is absurd. In Christianity, morality is not grounded merely in social cohesion, but in the objective good: in the nature of the human person, in the order of reason, and ultimately in God. Society may recognize moral truth, distort it, or rebel against it, but it certainly doesn’t create it.
Sure. Moral truth is rooted in God’s nature, reflected in the order of creation, and inscribed in the human person, and that’s why Christianity doesn’t treat morality as something invented by society or the Church, but as something discovered, received, and obeyed. Human beings, as I said, can distort it, weaponize it, or manipulate it for power, but abuse doesn’t determine origin.
The real problem is the ideology of scientism: the claim that the only genuine knowledge is knowledge derived from scientific inquiry. But that is a distortion ( a distinctly modern distortion ) of what science actually is. It is likewise a modern error to treat philosophy and metaphysics as useless in the search for truth.
John C. Eccles for example, inThe Wonder of Being Human: Our Brain and Our Mind (1984/1985), said at page 36: “We regard promissory materialism as superstition without a rational foundation.” — p. 36 . And then he continues like this: “The more we discover about the brain, the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena, promissory materialism is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists”
And Eccles wasn’t exactly a parish priest, he was a neurophysiologist and a Nobel prize.
Also Mario Beauregard (neuroscientist and one of the protagonists of a “manifesto for a post materialist science” I linked above)), in The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul (2007) says, at page 24 (page 40 of the pdf https://quantum-neuroscience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/The-Spiritual-Brain.pdf ): “Philosopher of science Karl Popper has called this line of thinking ‘promissory materialism.’ In other words, if we adopt it, we are accepting a promissory note on the future of materialism. Promissory materialism has been immensely influential in the sciences because any doubt about materialism—no matter what the state of the evidence—can be labeled ‘unscientific’ in principle.”
“For more than two hundred years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Science will prove that living organisms are complex machines, minds are nothing but brain activity and nature is purposeless. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs. The philosopher of science Karl Popper called this stance ‘promissory materialism’ because it depends on issuing promissory notes for discoveries not yet made. Despite all the achievements of science and technology, materialism is now facing a credibility crunch that was unimaginable in the twentieth century.“
And then he continues on, in the very next page, with the following words:
“ The fundamental proposition of materialism is that matter is the only reality. Therefore consciousness is nothing but brain activity. It is either like a shadow, an ‘epiphenomenon’ that does nothing, or it is just another way of talking about brain activity. However, among contemporary researchers in neuroscience and consciousness studies there is no consensus about the nature of minds. Leading journals such as Behavioural and Brain Sciences and the Journal of Consciousness Studies publish many articles that reveal deep problems with the materialist doctrine. The philosopher David Chalmers has called the very existence of subjective experience the ‘hard problem’. It is hard because it defies explanation in terms of mechanisms. Even if we understand how eyes and brains respond to red light, the experience of redness is not accounted for. In biology and psychology the credibility rating of materialism is falling. Can physics ride to the rescue? Some materialists prefer to call themselves physicalists, to emphasise that their hopes depend on modern physics, not nineteenth-century theories of matter. But physicalism’s own credibility rating has been reduced by physics itself, for four reasons. First, some physicists insist that quantum mechanics cannot be formulated without taking into account the minds of observers. They argue that minds cannot be reduced to physics because physics presupposes the minds of physicists.
Second, the most ambitious unified theories of physical reality, string and M-theories, with ten and eleven dimensions respectively, take science into completely new territory. Strangely, as Stephen Hawking tells us in his book The Grand Design (2010), ‘No one seems to know what the “M” stands for, but it may be “master”x miracle” or “mystery”.
According to what Hawking calls ‘model-dependent realism’, different theories may have to be applied in different situations.
Each theory may have its own version of reality, but according to model-dependent realism, that is acceptable so long as the theories agree in their predictions whenever they overlap, that is, whenever they can both be applied.
String theories and M-theories are currently untestable so ‘model-dependent realism’ can only be judged by reference to other models, rather than by experiment.
It also applies to countless other universes, none of which has ever been observed. As Hawking points out, M-theory has solutions that allow for different universes with different apparent laws, depending on how the internal space is curled. M-theory has solutions that allow for many different internalspaces, perhaps as many as 10500, which means it allows for 10500 different universes, each with its own laws . . . The original hope of physics to produce a single theory explaining the apparent laws of our universe as the unique possible consequence of a few simple assumptions may have to be abandoned. Some physicists are deeply sceptical about this entire approach, as the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin shows in his book The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next (2008).
String theories, M-theories and ‘model-dependent realism’ are a shaky foundation for materialism or physicalism or any other belief system, as discussed in Chapter Third, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, it has become apparent that the known kinds of matter and energy make up only about four per cent of the universe.
The rest consists of ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energyand rk ener. The nature of 96 per cent of physical reality is literally obscure (see Chapter 2). Fourth, the Cosmological Anthropic Principle asserts that if the laws and constants of nature had been slightly different at the moment of the Big Bang, biological life could never have emerged, and hence we would not be here to think about it (see Chapter 3). So did a divine mind fine-tune the laws and constants in the beginning?
To avoid a creator God emerging in a new guise, most leading cosmologists prefer to believe that our universe is one of a vast, and perhaps infinite, number of parallel universes, all with different laws and constants, as M-theory also suggests. We just happen to exist in the one that has the right conditions for us. This multiverse theory is the ultimate violation of Occam’s Razor, the philosophical principle that “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity’, or in other words, that we should make as few assumptions as possible. It also has the major disadvantage of being untestable. And it does not even succeed in getting rid of God. An infinite God could be the God of an infinite number of universes. Materialism provided a seemingly simple, straightforward worldview in the late nineteenth century, but twenty-first-century science has left it behind. Its promises have not been fulfilled, and its promissory notes have been devalued by hyperinflation. I am convinced that the sciences are being held back by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas, maintained by powerful taboos. These beliefs protect the citadel of established science, but act as barriers against open-minded thinking.”
And this is the end of the citation.
I would encourage everyone to read the works of both Beauregard and Sheldrake in their entirety; they are extremely interesting.
The problem, as I said, is that a materialist sect has effectively taken control of science and steered mainstream opinion toward treating materialism as the default truth. This has gone so far that even people who are not themselves materialists often become timid and overly “respectful” in the face of materialist dogmas (As if they were the weirdos with bizarre beliefs, while materialism is regarded as the creed of “people who know things” and therefore automatically commands respect lmao) despite the fact that materialism is merely one philosophy among many. It has been elevated to the status of the apparent “standard of truth” simply because it aligns with the spirit of the age.
Most excellently said.
I’ve struggled with wondering how much my will is free if a weekend of forgetting to take my morning meds changes how I see the world, or how not getting enough sunshine alters my ability to think clearly: if such simple things make a difference in how my brain works, how am I free?
FWIW, Singer’s views are hardly new; anthropologists can point to entire societies which have thought the same way. I vaguely recall one where an infant was not considered to have a human spirit until it spoke its first word – bizarre to us but to them it was good sense.