I’m currently a sophomore in college majoring in biology, and the more I learn the more I wonder if we have free will. For instance: a honey bee will live its life differently depending on what role it was born into, as well as what age it is. From an outside perspective, I can see how the honey bee is limited in acting for itself as it has evolved certain behaviors to benefit the hive. Now how much of this reasoning can be applied to humans? We like to think we are in control of our actions, but are we really? People who are selfish can be ridiculed for their behavior, but from an evolutionary standpoint, selfishness increases their ancestral odds of survival instead of being altruistic. So can it not be concluded that selfishness is simply another niche mechanism of survival?
Furthermore, how much of our physical biology is limiting our free will? The popular case study on Phineas Gage shows that our frontal lobe is responsible for many things like impulse control. Without it, he became very aggressive instantly and was altogether unpleasant to be around. Can we attribute this to his free will acting in such a matter, or simply that his biology limited it?
Lastly, does any of this even matter? If our free will is limited, how much does God take that into consideration for the acceptance or rejection of Jesus and our damnation to hell?
Free will is a hard nut to crack! And it hasn’t been for lack of discussion and attention to it, as you can see if you look up past threads around here. I choose (?!) to think and live as if I do have free will because … that just seems healthier and more inline with what I understand of God as revealed in Christ. But nobody has ever been able to entirely nail down what human consciousness and will is all about in every important sense. Sure - some choose to deconstruct it to being all merely biology or strict determinism (which tends to get associated with the conclusion that ‘free will’ would just be an illusion then.) Nobody can prove that wrong (or right either).
But here’s my question: What would you/we do with the answer if we knew? If the answer was “no we don’t” - just what exactly do we gain by knowing that? It would seem pretty depressing (to me) to live with that conviction always hovering. Whereas assuming that we do have free will (which most people at least live as if they believe that, I’m pretty sure) seems like a better choice to encourage attitudes of personal responsibility. And usually that’s a virtue to cultivate - right? Maybe not all the time perhaps. But a world of people who don’t believe in any actual responsibility seems like a bleak world to me.
On the theological side, I find Romans 7 fascinating for this question. Paul insists that when he doesn’t do what he knows he should, then “it’s not him” but sin living in him. All of us have personal experience with our own sin. Am I the one who does it? Or the devil? Or my biology? When Paul uses the word “flesh”, I’ve heard scholars say a better modern translation for that would be “ego”. There are times when my pride or my desires are so deeply embedded (in my heart we might say), that even though my head may know better, the heart still tends to steer my feet. It’s been said that an ounce of emotion is worth a ton of facts. Or … the heart hath its reasons that the head knows not of. So it has been a live question from ancient times, even if we now inject more science and psychology jargon into it.
The answer depends (at least partly) on the definition of the free will.
My understanding is that we have limited (or restricted) free will. Our choices are restricted to few alternatives at a given point but we have a freedom (possibility) to choose among the few alternatives that we have at the moment of decision.
Whatever decision we make, it affects what choices we have in the following point where we need to make a decision. That is why I like to compare free will to a path, rather than something we can or cannot decide at separate moments. We walk along an imaginary path through our life. Every small decision we make is like choosing which direction to take when the path furcates to different directions. Most decisions are small but the cumulative effect of the multiple decisions can bring us to quite distant endpoints.
I assume that we are responsible for the decisions we can make, not for the matters where we cannot choose.
Edit:
Paul paints in his letters salvation as a transfer from one location to another, from darkness into Christ. Our path ends at the point where we are saved and starts again ‘in Christ’, as Paul expresses it. The new location and guidance by the Holy Spirit gives us new possibilities and directs our path to a different endpoint. As long as our path stays ‘in Christ’, we are within salvation although we can still make stupid decisions that may lead to suffering.
That is just judaism to a tee. Everything is being controlled by those above us. It is fatalistic and not worth arguing against. God’s will is paramount, and if you are not with God then The Devil (or sin) takes over. We have no freedom at all. It is just what is.
Now, if you want to migrate that to Christianity because of Scripture, then you wuld not be alone. Calvinism is the most extreme version but you will see it in anyone who beleives in a fallen race. It is all out of our hands.
It would seem to take courafge to contest such a world view.
I have never seen God in that way or light. I have always seen God as “standing at the door knocking and waiting” rather than bulldozing all in His path. I have seen God frustrated by the freedom He has allowed. but refusing to overule and dictate.
The Net reult is that you either beleive in freedom, in all its form or deny it.
There will be natural or contextual limits to things but that does not impinge on whether I can choose for myself what i do or think at any one time. Within the limits of reality, I have as much freedom as I need or want. (IMHO)
For now we can overlook voluntsry loss of freedom or chooice due to faith or other circunmstances
As @knor suggests, one needs to be careful about how one defines “free will”. Usually it does NOT mean “free to do anything I can imagine regardless of circumstances”. For example, I may wish to fly like a bird, but I lack wings…but one would not normally say that humans lack free will because they lack wings. In other words, the “range of options” any person is faced with is limited by our circumstance in time and place, and by existing as physical beings, with certain traits as a result of evolution.
Christians/ philosophers generally recognize two types of freewill: “compatibalist” and “libertarian”. There has been much doctrinal debating between these two perspectives as different denominations tend to hold to one versus the other. Reformed theology which stresses a more deterministic universe in which God ordains and controls everything by primary or secondary causation (e.g. Thomas Aquinas) lands on “compatibalist”–that God works in-and-through us, empowering us to act according to the desires and will he has preordained/created in us (like clearing the roadblocks so that we can act how we want to act–with the idea that God has fundamentally arranged us and the universe to want to act in a certain way).
Other Christian theologians have complained that “primary and secondary causation” is incoherent and so they say that to be morally responsible, humans need libertarian free will. This means a real choice to do A versus B. In other words, humans need to be able to sometimes act AGAINST their wills and desires…(not just act in accordance with them as compatibalist free will assumes).
In terms of actual neurobiological testing of free will in the lab—I think the jury is still out on what the results and experimental designs really mean. Consciousness has been notoriously difficult to nail down.
We also see Bees, even as clones, within the same job force, such as foragers, with very different personalities. They even see some that seemingly favor different types of flowers or patches, including going to patches further away than needed.
Ultimately, I don’t think anyone will ever know if we truly have free will. Magic does not exist, and so every choice we make happens biologically. Thoughts are materialistic things. Not supernatural clouds of concepts floating in our heads. So immediately thoughts are restricted to our brains, any maybe some cellular memories elsewhere. Diseases can affect the way we think because it can affect different parts of our brains. Same for trauma and medication. Genes may affect everything. Like do you choose to like apples more than oranges or vice versa, or is it genetic or is it because someone told you as a kid and so on.who knows.
For example my dad hiked a lot when I was a kid. When we were in Arizona , before I can remember. My dad would go on jogs with me in a running stroller type of thing. By the time I was old enough to remember stuff we were in Alabama and on a farm. I grew up playing with chickens, pigs, horses and so on. We lived out in the country and so it was not until around 1998 until we got cable. So I grew up playing outside a lot. I grew up breaking in wild horses. I grew up home schooled for large periods of the time. Dad worked out of town. So often I rode my horse for 10-15 miles,camped at the beach with other similar kids for a few days and then came back home.
So throughout my entire life I’ve been very outdoorsy because if circumstances. Now as an adult, I still into hiking, kayaking and so on.
Now we grew up with farm animals but no one was vegetarian. I ended up becoming about 80% vegetarian as a kid. Like around 14-15. I then became fully vegetarian for a few years before becoming vegan. Part of that was because of the abuse I saw animals
Go through. Pigs you feed watermelon too, and animals you sometimes slept outside with at night in fall, and taught to play ball. Then you see them get their throats slit, then a chain and hook in their legs and they get dipped in boiling water making their skin bubble off. Then they get gutted, dissected and so on. So did I make a choice or was it just traumatic enough I could not turn a blind eye to it. Did I decide to be more emotionally attached to them? Who knows.
Tell me, why do you insist on bringin in evolution to everything?
There is no need. We are what we are with whatever physical restarints included. A person with one leg is not the result of eveolution, probably disease or accident, but maybe the consequence of someone else’s free will.
The original poster includes evolution in his discussion. Plus, evolution, religion and free will are often conversations grouped together. Especially by Christians who accepts evolution.
II disagree. Freedom is basically a philosophical argument. You can argue religion into it, but science? It has little or nothng too do with it other than basic biological limitations. So, unless you are going to insist that our biologcal make up must be due to evolution (Which will upset anyone who thinks it is to do with God, not chance) there is no relevance.
That would be contestable assertion. Slefishness has nothing to do with freedom of self. It might impinge on the freedom of others but that isnot what freedom is primarily about. If someone takes away your freedom that does not change the existance of freedom, or even you ability to make free choices. Having gun pointed to your head will affect your choice in terms of knowing the outcome. but is freedom only about the outcome? Or is it being able to make the hoice in the first place? If you do not know the consequence of the net action then there is no constraint onwhich to choose. Your choice of clothing perhaps?
Well there is obviously a relationship huh? The OP mentions it in their opening post. I mentioned it without reading anyone else’s and at least one other decided to mention it.
As you nicely described, the ‘compatibalist’ vs. ‘libertarian’ dichotomy has strongly dominated the philosophical / religious debates about free will. IMHO, this strong dichotomy, including defined subclasses, has limited thinking in the debates too much. We might get new insights by thinking out of the box, rather than repeating what has been written multiple times during many centuries.
One interesting idea comes from the eastern orthodox (Byzantine) teaching related to theosis (‘deification’). Part of the teaching is that the spiritual growth or ‘sanctification’ of the believer happens in close synergy with the Holy Spirit. The starting point might be described as ‘libertarian’ but during the spiritual growth, the close holy synergy transforms the motivation and hopes of the believer more and more towards a reflection of God. This could be seen as introducing somewhat ‘compatibalist’ elements to the ‘libertarian’ frame.
Another interpretation would be to classify everything in this process to the ‘libertarian’ category because the believer retains free will in the process despite the changing motivation and the acts of God in-and-through us. The teachings of the ‘Desert fathers’ often lifted up the idea that they have done nothing as they would have wanted, in other words they chose to act according to their ideals instead of their personal desires and hopes.
A similar idea to the “deification” of the EO church also exists in the “Holiness” movement in the western churches, which was a strong thread in my own (Anabaptist/Mennonite) upbringing. For example, this excerpt from Wikipedia " The Holiness movement is a Christian movement that emerged chiefly within 19th-century Methodism,[1][2] and to a lesser extent influenced other traditions such as Quakerism, Anabaptism, and Restorationism.[3][4] Churches aligned with the holiness movement teach that the life of a born again Christian should be free of sin.[5][6] "
I recall there was a question about free will in heaven somewhere else in this forum? This makes me think that there comes a point (if we allow the Holy Spirit to continue to transform our wills and our habits) that our character becomes solidified, aligned with God’s own. At that point our libertarian free-will desires would become perfectly compatible with God’s own.
Life after resurrection is likely to be quite different than our current life, as we have left behind this body with its desires and needs. In addition to having a different kind of body, we probably know much more than now and can see also matters of the spiritual world. Seeing God is alone a factor that may change everything. It is ‘natural’ that our hopes are then different and the factors that drive our decisions are different. I hope we can experience it.
“An interviewer questions Thomas Harbor, the man who scientifically proved the existence of an afterlife, a discovery that led to an extremely high suicide rate.”
I think John 3:16 indicates we do have free will. We are given the right based on that scripture if you want to accept the gift of eternal life or not. Some do and some don’t.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
One physics prof read that in class at the start of a section on quantum mechanics.
[Guess which interpretation he held to!]
A psychiatrist friend once commented that four-fifths (or more) of what happens in our lives is beyond our control – and a major key to mental health is accepting that.
Thinking of the Robert Frost poem, I’ll say “You can’t go back – but you can go forward”.
Romans 7 is about grace. By “Judaism” you usually intend a derogatory connotation associated with cruel legalism; Romans 7 isn’t about that at all.
That’s Romans 7 (with the caveat that the image of Jesus “standing at the door knocking” does not depict His relationship to unbelievers but to straying believers).
How you can twist that chapter to make it about God “bulldozing all in His path” is just bizarre.
Interestingly, I listened to a lecture about theosis by an Orthodox theologian that reversed that relationship! He said we have less freedom when we first begin to walk with Christ, and more as we go along. One element was that as we grow in Christ we see more of the good works that God prepared for us to walk in and so our horizons are expanded which increases our freedom. So at first we only see the ways our habits have tied us to, but as we grow we see those but also good (altruistic) paths that we weren’t able to see before.
I think that the view you set forth is tied to the “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life” meme as though God has laid out each life as a train schedule. I have seen great damage done to lives this way, perhaps the most drastic being a guy who decided that God’s plan had been for him to marry a different woman, so he left his wife and kids and ended up ruining the marriage of the person he was “supposed to” marry. I side with Bill Gothard on this: wherever you are now is the starting point for God’s will for you; don’t go try to change the past but move forward.
