Free will

For the music label, please see Free-Will (label).

Free will is the belief or the philosophical doctrine that holds that humans have the power to choose their own deeds. (The concept has also been extended on occasion to animals or artificial intelligence in computers.) Such a belief has been supported as important to moral judgment by many religious authorities and criticized as a form of individualist ideology by writers such as Spinoza and Karl Marx. As typically used, the phrase has both objective and subjective connotations, in the former case indicating the performance of an action by an agent that is not completely conditioned by antecedent factors, and in the latter case the agent's perception that the action was incepted under his or her own volition.

The principle of free will has religious, ethical, psychological and scientific implications. For example, in the religious realm, free will may imply that an omnipotent divinity does not assert its power over individual will and choices. In ethics, free will may imply that individuals can be held morally accountable for their actions. In psychology, it implies that the mind controls some of the actions of the body. In the scientific realm, free will may imply that the actions of the body, including the brain, are not wholly determined by physical causality.

The existence of free will has been a central issue throughout the history of philosophy and science.

Philosophical views on freedom

There are a number of views on the question of whether metaphysical freedom exists, that is, whether people have the power to choose among genuine alternatives.

Determinism is the view that all events are the necessary results of previous causes, that everything that happens has a cause.

Incompatibilism is the view that there is no way to reconcile a belief in a deterministic universe with actual free will. Hard determinism accepts both determinism and incompatibilism, and rejects the idea that humans have any free will.

Opposite to this is philosophical libertarianism , which holds that individuals do have metaphysical freedom and which therefore rejects determinism. Indeterminism is a form of libertarianism that holds the view that people do have free will, and that free will actions are an effect without a cause. Agency theory is a form of libertarianism with the view that the choice between determinism and indeterminism is a false dichotomy. Rather than volition being an effect without a cause, agency theory holds that an act of free will is a case of agent-causation: whereby an agent (person, self) causes an event. It is a philosophy which is distinct and separate from the economic and political theory of libertarianism. Metaphysical libertarianism is sometimes called voluntarism to avoid this confusion.

Compatibilism is the view that free will still emerges out of a deterministic universe even in the absence of metaphysical uncertainty. Compatibilists may define free will as arising from an inner cause, such as thoughts, beliefs, and desires. The philosophy that accepts both determinism and compatibilism is called Soft determinism.

Determinism versus indeterminism

Determinism holds that each state of affairs is entirely necessitated and thus determined by the states of affairs that preceded it. Indeterminism holds this proposition to be incorrect, that is, there are events which are not entirely determined by previous states of affairs. Philosophical determinism is sometimes illustrated by the thought experiment of Laplace's demon, who knows all the facts about the past and present and all the natural laws that govern the world, and uses this knowledge to foresee the future, down to the least detail — but Laplace no longer represents modern scientific thought on the subject.

Incompatibilism holds that determinism cannot be reconciled with free will. Incompatibilists generally claim that a person acts freely only when that person is the sole originating cause of the act and genuinely could have done otherwise. They maintain that if determinism is true then every choice is determined by prior events.

There is an intermediate view, in which the past conditions, but does not determine, actions. Individual choices are one outcome among many possible outcomes, all of which are influenced but not determined by the past. Even if the agent exerts will freely in choosing among available options, the agent is not the sole originating cause of the action, because no-one can perform actions that are impossible, such as flying by flapping one's arms. Applied to inner states, this view suggests that one may choose among options one thinks of, but cannot choose an option that never enters one's mind. In this view, current choices may open, determine, or limit future choices.

Baruch Spinoza compared man's belief in free will to a stone thinking it chose the path it traveled through the air and the spot it landed. In Ethics he wrote, "The decisions of the mind are nothing save desires, which vary according to various dispositions." "There is in the mind no absolute or free will, but the mind is determined in willing this or that by a cause which is determined in its turn by another cause, and this by another and so on to infinity." "Men think themselves free because they are conscious of their volitions and desires, but are ignorant of the causes by which they are led to wish and desire."

Arthur Schopenhauer, concurring with Spinoza, wrote, "Everyone believes himself à priori to be perfectly free, even in his individual actions, and thinks that at every moment he can commence another manner of life... . But à posteriori, through experience, he finds to his astonishment that he is not free, but subjected to necessity, that in spite of all his resolutions and reflections he does not change his conduct, and that from the beginning of his life to the end of it, he must carry out the very character which he himself condemns... ."

You can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing and absolutely nothing other than that one thing.

— Schopenhauer, On the Freedom of the Will, Ch. II

I can do what I will: I can, if I will, give everything I have to the poor and thus become poor myself — if I will! But I cannot will this, because the opposing motives have much too much power over me for me to be able to. On the other hand, if I had a different character, even to the extent that I were a saint, then I would be able to will it. But then I could not keep from willing it, and hence I would have to do so... [A]s little as a ball on a billiard table can move before receiving an impact, so little can a man get up from his chair before being drawn or driven by a motive. But then his getting up is as necessary and inevitable as the rolling of a ball after the impact. And to expect that anyone will do something to which absolutely no interest impels him is the same as to expect that a piece of wood shall move toward me without being pulled by a string.

— Ibid., Ch. III

Schopenhauer's saying, that a human can very well do what he wants, but can not will what he wants, accompanies me in all of life's circumstances and reconciles me with the actions of humans, even when they are truly distressing.

— Albert Einstein, Address to the German League for Human Rights, November 1928. Credo

Friedrich Schiller proposed an articulation of this dilemma in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a series of Letters; this was elaborated further by Rudolf Steiner in his Philosophy of Freedom. Both of these philosophers suggest that individual will is initially unfree, and is so whether individuals act on the basis of religious, ethical and moral principles, or even wholly rationally, on the one hand, or as they are driven by the force of their natural desires and drives, wholly naturally, on the other hand. Schiller suggests that the solution is found in a playful balance between these two extremes of rational principle and bodily desires. When individuals can freely move between various motives or impulses they are free to discover what Steiner calls moral imaginations, or situation-dependent realizations of higher intentions. Free will is thus not a natural state, but it can be attained through the activity of self-reflective yet playful consciousness.

Baron d'Holbach, a "hard determinist".

"Hard determinists", such as d'Holbach, are those incompatibilists who accept determinism and reject free will. "Libertarians", such as Thomas Reid, Peter van Inwagen, and Robert Kane are those incompatibilists who accept free will and deny determinism, holding the view that some form of indeterminism is true.

Other philosophers hold that determinism is compatible with free will. These "compatibilists", such as Hobbes, generally claim that a person acts freely only in the case where the person willed the act and the person could hypothetically have done otherwise if the person had decided to. In articulating this crucial proviso, Hume writes, "this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to every one who is not a prisoner and in chains". Compatibilists often point to clear-cut cases of someone's free will being denied — rape, murder, theft, and so on. The key to these cases is not that the past is determining the future, but that the aggressor is overriding the victim's desires and preferences about his or her own actions. The aggressor is coercing the victim and, according to compatibilists, this is what overrides free will. Thus, they argue that determinism does not matter; what matters is that individuals' choices are the results of their own desires and preferences, and are not overridden by some external (or even internal) force. To be a compatibilist, one need not endorse any particular conception of free will, but only deny that determinism is at odds with free will.

Another view is that the phrase "free will" is, as Hobbes put it, "absurd speech", because freedom is a power defined in terms of the will, which is a thing — and so the will is not the sort of thing that could be free or unfree. John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding stated that to call will "free" is to commit oneself to a category mistake:

Whether man's will be free or no? [T]he question itself is altogether improper; and it is as insignificant to ask whether man's will be free, as to ask whether his sleep be swift, or his virtue square: liberty being as little applicable to the will, as swiftness of motion is to sleep, or squareness to virtue. Every one would laugh at the absurdity of such a question as either of these: because it is obvious that the modifications of motion belong not to sleep, nor the difference of figure to virtue; and when one well considers it, I think he will as plainly perceive that liberty, which is but a power, belongs only to agents, and cannot be an attribute or modification of the will, which is also but a power.

— Chapter XXI, Paragraph 14

The question also arises whether any caused act may be free or whether any uncaused act may be willed, leaving free will as an oxymoron. Some compatibilists argue that this alleged lack of grounding for the concept of "free will" is at least partly responsible for the perception of a contradiction between determinism and liberty. Also, from a compatibilist point of view the use of "free will" in an incompatibilist sense may be regarded as loaded language.

Moral responsibility

Society generally holds people responsible for their actions, and will say that they deserve praise or blame for what they do. However, many believe moral responsibility to require free will, in other words, the ability to do otherwise. Thus, another important issue is whether individuals are ever morally responsible, and if so, in what sense.

Incompatibilists tend to think that determinism is at odds with moral responsibility. After all, it seems impossible that one can hold someone responsible for an action that could be predicted from the beginning of time. Hard determinists may say "So much the worse for moral responsibility!" and discard the concept — Clarence Darrow famously used this argument to defend the murderers Leopold and Loeb — while, conversely, libertarians may say "So much the worse for determinism!" This issue appears to be the heart of the dispute between hard determinists and compatibilists; hard determinists are forced to accept that individuals often have "free will" in the compatibilist sense, but they deny that this sense of free will truly matters — that it can ground moral responsibility. Just because an agent's choices are uncoerced, hard determinists claim, does not change the fact that determinism robs the agent of responsibility.

Compatibilists often argue that, on the contrary, determinism is a prerequisite for moral responsibility — society cannot hold someone responsible unless his actions were determined by something. This argument can be traced to Hume and was also used by the anarchist William Godwin. After all, if indeterminism is true, then those events that are not determined are random. One questions whether it is possible that one can blame or praise someone for performing an action that just spontaneously popped into his nervous system. Instead, they argue, one needs to show how the action stemmed from the person's desires and preferences — the person's character — before one starts holding the person morally responsible. Libertarians may reply that undetermined actions are not random at all, and that they result from a substantive will whose decisions are undetermined. This argument is widely considered unsatisfactory, for it just pushes the problem back a step, and further, it involves some very mysterious metaphysics, as well as the concept of Ex nihilo nihil fit.

St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Romans addresses the question of moral responsibility as follows:

"Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?"

— (Romans 9:21).

In this view, individuals can still be dishonoured for their acts even though those acts were ultimately completely determined by God.

A similar view has it that individual moral culpability lies in individual character. That is, a person with the character of a murderer has no choice other than to murder, but can still be punished because it is right to punish those of bad character.

Some interpretations of moral responsibility also assume that a person is one being from birth to death, despite physical and mental changes. Thus Stanley Williams age 52 was executed for a crime committed by Stanley Williams age 28.

Compatibilist theories and the could-have-done-otherwise principle

The philosopher of ideas Isaiah Berlin claimed that for a choice to be free, the agent must have been able to act otherwise. This principle—van Inwagen calls it the "principle of alternate possibilities"—is said to be a necessary condition for freedom. In this view acts performed under the influence of irresistible coercion are not free, and the agent is not morally responsible for them.

However some compatibilists, such as Harry Frankfurt or Daniel Dennett, argue that there are stark cases where, even though the agent could not have done otherwise, the agent's choice was still free, because the irresistible coercion coincided with the agent's personal intentions and desires, as in the old saw, "Now, you hold the shotgun on me, and force me to take a drink." In Elbow Room, Dennett presents an argument for a compatibilist theory of free will. He elaborated further in the 2003 book Freedom Evolves. The basic reasoning is that, if individuals do not consider God, or an infinitely powerful demon, or time travel, then through chaos and pseudo-randomness or quantum randomness, the future is ill-defined for all finite beings. The only well-defined concepts are "expectations". Thus, the ability to do "otherwise" only makes sense when dealing with expectations, and not with some unknown and unknowable future. Since individuals certainly have the ability to do differently from what anyone expects, free will can exist. Incompatibilists claim that the problem with this idea is that heredity and environment amount to irresistible coertion, and all of our actions are controlled by forces outside ourselves, or by random chance.

The philosopher John Locke denied that the phrase "free will" made any sense. However, he also took the view that determinism was irrelevant. He believed that the defining feature of voluntary behavior was that individuals have the ability to postpone a decision long enough to reflect or deliberate upon the consequences of a choice. More sophisticated analyses of compatibilist free will have been offered, as have other critiques.

William James, both philosopher and psychologist, gave the label soft determinism to the position nowadays known as compatibilism, and complained that soft determinist formulations were "a quagmire of evasion under which the real issue of fact has been entirely smothered." But James' own views were somewhat ambivalent. While he believed in free will on "ethical grounds," he believed there was no evidence for it on scientific or psychological grounds. Moreover, he did not believe in incompatibilism as formulated above, not believing that the indeterminism of human actions was a requirement of moral responsibility. In his classic work Pragmatism published in 1907, he wrote that, "Instinct and utility between them can safely be trusted to carry on the social business of punishment and praise" regardless of metaphysical theories. He did believe that indeterminism is important as a "doctrine of relief" — it allows for the view that, although the world may be in many respects a bad place, it may through individuals' actions become a better one. Determinism, he argued, undermines that meliorism.

The science of free will

Throughout history, people have made attempts at answering the question of free will using scientific principles. Early scientific thought often pictured the universe as deterministic, and some thinkers believed that it was simply a matter of gathering sufficient information to be able to predict future events with perfect accuracy. This encourages individuals to see free will as an illusion. Modern science is a mixture of deterministic and stochastic theories. For example, radioactive decay occurs with predictable probability, but it is not possible, even in theory, to tell exactly when a particular nucleus will decay. Quantum mechanics predicts observations only in terms of probabilities. This casts some doubt on whether the universe is deterministic at all. Some scientific determinists such as Albert Einstein believe in the hidden variable theory, that beneath the probabilities of quantum mechanics there are set variables (see the EPR paradox). This theory has had great doubt cast on it by the Bell Inequalties, which suggest that "God may really play dice" after all, perhaps casting into doubt the predictions of Laplace's demon. The leading contemporary philosopher who has capitalized on the success of quantum mechanics and chaos theory in order to defend incompatibilist freedom is Robert Kane, in The Significance of Free Will and other writing. Kane's arguments, however, apply equally well to any "unthinking" entitity that behaves according to quantum mechanics.

Like physicists, biologists have also frequently addressed the question of free will. One of the most heated debates of biology is that of "nature versus nurture". This debate questions the importance of genetics and biology in human behaviour when compared to culture and environment. Genetic studies have identified many specific genetic factors that affect the personality of the individual, from obvious cases such as Down syndrome to more subtle effects such as a statistical predisposition towards schizophrenia. However, it is not certain that environmental determination is less threatening to free will than genetic determination. The latest analysis of the human genome shows it to have only about 20,000 genes. These genes, and the reconsidered intron genetic material, and the newly-described MiRNA, allow a level of molecular complexity analogous to the complexity of human behavior. Desmond Morris and other evolutionary anthropologists have studied the relationship between behavior and natural selection in humans and other primates. The synthesis of these two fields of inquiry is that human genetics may be sufficiently complex to explain behavioral tendencies, and that evolutionarily advantageous environmental factors such as parental behavior and cultural standards modulate these genetic factors. Neither of these phenomena, genetic complexity nor advantageous cultural behaviors, require free will to explain human behavior. However, the presence of genes that play a role in some forms of behavior, for example some mental disorders, does not make such a behavior automatic, studies suggest, such as for example people who have a genetic predisposition to more explosive, violent behavior don't necessarily have the behavioral trait. It appears that sometimes more than one gene is needed and possibly an additional enviromental "turn-on" mechanism in order to express the trait; this suggests that both nature and nurture or environment play a very important role in our behavior. Some may argue in this context that some relative form of free will may still exist because the environmental factor in free will may allow a person to manipulate that environment in a such a way that this manipulation implies an engagement with one's own body and/or mind. Because a single best known action doesn't exist, similar or comparable motivation to both acts exist and the genetic factors allow any of those two or more actions to be taken at a given moment or situation but only one at a time. That engagement may signify a non-random event, at least in some instances, the argument implies. The nurture part here may be in conflict with new short-term information, so it doesn't necessarily predict or explain the outcome of the course of action to be taken. Yet others may argue that those factors alone can explain behavioral outcome without the need for "free-will". Research on the subject is still in progress.

It has also become possible to study the living brain and researchers can now watch the decision-making "machinery" at work. A seminal experiment in this field was conducted by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s, wherein he asked subjects to choose a random moment to flick their wrist while he watched the associated activity in their brains. Libet found that the unconscious brain activity leading up to the conscious decision by the subject to flick his or her wrist began approximately half a second before the subject consciously decided to move. This build up of electrical charge has come to be called readiness potential. Libet's findings suggest that decisions made by a subject are actually first being made on a subconscious level and only afterward being translated into a "conscious decision", and that the subject's belief that it occurred at the behest of their will was only due to their retrospective perspective on the event. However, Libet still finds room in his model for free will, in the notion of the power of veto: according to this model, unconscious impulses to perform a volitional act are open to suppression by the conscious efforts of the subject. It should be noted that this does not mean that Libet believes unconsciously impelled actions require the ratification of consciousness, but rather that consciousness retains the power to deny the actualisation of unconscious impulses.

A related experiment performed later by Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone involved asking subjects to choose at random which of their hands to move. He found that by stimulating different hemispheres of the brain using magnetic fields it was possible to strongly influence which hand the subject picked. Normally right-handed people would choose to move their right hand 60% of the time, for example, but when the right hemisphere was stimulated they would instead choose their left hand 80% of the time; the right hemisphere of the brain is responsible for the left side of the body, and the left hemisphere for the right. Despite the external influence on their decision-making, the subjects continued to report that they believed their choice of hand had been made freely. Libet himself , however, does not interpret his experiment as evidence of the inefficacy of conscious free will — he points out that although the tendency to press a button may be building up for 500 milliseconds, the conscious will retains a right to veto that action in the last few milliseconds. A comparison is made with a golfer, who may swing the club several times before striking the ball. In this view, the action simply gets, as it were, a rubber stamp of approval at the last millisecond.

In the scientific view, the whole conscious experience is contingent upon neuronal activity— a rough blow to the head will serve to demonstrate this point, as will documented cases of neurological lesions. Free will, then, must be grounded in neuronal activity , and is responsible for voluntary actions (i.e. influencing other neurons). The initial neuronal activity which gives rise to free will, is either deterministic or probabilistic, depending on the interpretion of quantum mechanics that is preferred. In either case, the initial 'cause' of free will would be outside of one's control. The only conceivable way to remedy this is to propose that free will causes the initial neuronal activity, but we then are left with the question of where this initial force came from. Neurology would have us beleive that still other neurons must cause this force - and again we find that the root of our actions is either deterministic or probabilistic. If the nature of a cause determines the nature of an effect, then our free will would be deterministic or probabilistic. Not enough is known about the brain be certain whether or not there is free will, but a revolution is necessary in the way scientists understand causality before free will, if it exists, is understood.

It may or may not be possible to achieve a final scientific realization concerning the possibility of free will through pondering the origins of our conscious thoughts. The brain consists of hundreds of billions of neurons, with trillions of synaptic connections between them. On a biochemical level, the primary task of a neuron is to propagate electro-chemical impulses to other neurons forming an "integrated circuit" constantly receiving inputs from the senses (sight, smell, touch and taste), and providing output to the control of muscles and organs. Only 10% of the neurons in the nervous system deal with sensory inputs and control of muscles; the remainder serve to integrate, refine and process input/output-signals.

The experience of free will is thus theorized to arise from some combination of these neurons, but how is it that this build-up of neurons, which are nothing but thin threads of fat with the potential to send and receive electric impulses, can give rise to our consciousness, emotions and feelings? How can it be that the concept of "you" and your free will can control neurons and your behavior, if the brain is merely a lukewarm soup of fat,cholesterol and neurotransmitters? This unanswered mystery continues to dominate the modern debate over the existence of our consciousness and the possibility of a free will.

Neurology and psychiatry

There are several brain-related disorders that might be termed free will disorders: In obsessive-compulsive disorder a patient may feel an overwhelming urge to do something against his or her own will. Examples include washing hands many times a day, recognizing the desire as his or her own desire although it seems to be against his or her will. In Tourette's and related syndromes patients will involuntarily make movements, such as tics, and utterances. In alien hand syndrome, which is also called Dr. Strangelove syndrome, after the popular film, the patient's limb will make meaningful acts without the intention of the subject.

Determinism and emergent behaviour

In emergentist or generative philosophy (see emergence) of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, free will is the generation of near-infinite possible behaviours from the interaction of a finite, deterministic set of rules and parameters. Thus the unpredictability of the emerging behaviour from deterministic processes leads to a perception of free will, though free will as an ontological entity does not exist.

As an illustration, the strategy board-games chess and Go are rigorously deterministic in their rules and parameters, expressed in terms of the positions of the pieces in relation to other pieces on the board. Yet, chess and Go, with their strict and simple rules, generate great variety and unpredictable behaviour. By analogy, emergentists or generativists suggest that the experience of free will emerges from the interaction of finite rules and deterministic parameters that generate infinite and unpredictable behaviours. In the view of, dynamical-evolutionary psychology, cellular automata, and the generative sciences, social behavior can be modeled as an emergent process, and the perception of free will external to causality is essentially a gift of ignorance.

In Hindu Philosophy

As summarized by Swami Vivekananda: "mind is an integral part of the nature which is bound by the law of causation. Because mind is bound by a law, it cannot be free. The law of causation as applied to mind is called Karma." The Advaitin philosopher Chandrashekhara Bharati Swaminah says in a dialogue recorded in the book Dialogues with the Guru by R. Krishnaswami Aiyar, Chetana Limited, Bombay, 1957

Fate is past karma, free-will is present karma. Both are really one, that is, karma, though they may differ in the matter of time. There can be no conflict when they are really one.

— Chandrashekhara Bharati Swaminah in Dialogues with the Guru

To a question that should one resign ourselves to fate, the Swaminah replies that in fact one should devote oneself to free-will and elaborates,

Fate, as I told you, is the resultant of the past exercise of your free-will. By exercising your free-will in the past, you brought on the resultant fate. By exercising your free-will in the present, I want you to wipe out your past record if it hurts you, or to add to it if you find it enjoyable. In any case, whether for acquiring more happiness or for reducing misery, you have to exercise your freewill in the present

— Chandrashekhara Bharati Swaminah in Dialogues with the Guru

Thus, as per Hindu philosophy, there is no conflict between fate and free will since they are both forms of karma of the individual.

In Buddhist Philosophy

Thanissaro Bhikkhu taught: "The Buddha's teachings on karma are interesting because it's a combination of causality and free-will. If things were totally caused there would be no way you could develop a skill - your actions would be totally predetermined. If there was no causality at all skills would be useless because things would be constantly changing without any kind of rhyme or reason to them. But it's because there is an element of causality and because there is this element of free-will you can develop skills in life. You ask yourself: what is involved in developing a skill? - it means being sensitive to three things basically: 1) is being sensitive to causes coming from the past 2) is being sensitive to what you're doing in the present moment and 3) is being sensitive to the results of what you're doing in the present moment - how these three things come together."

In theology

The theological doctrine of divine foreknowledge is often alleged to be in conflict with free will. After all, if God knows exactly what will happen, right down to every choice one makes, the status of choices as free is called into question. God's already true or timelessly true knowledge about one's choices seems to constrain one's freedom. This problem is related to the Aristotelian problem of the sea-battle: tomorrow there will or will not be a sea-battle. If there will be one, then it was true yesterday that there would be one. Then it would be necessary that the sea battle will occur. If there won't be one, then by similar reasoning, it is necessary that it won't occur. This means that the future, whatever it is, is completely fixed by past truths — true propositions about the future. However, some philosophers hold that necessity and possibility are defined with respect to a given point in time and a given matrix of empirical circumstances, and so something that is merely possible from the perspective of one observer may be necessary from the perspective of an omniscient. Some philosophers believe that free will is equivalent to having a soul, and thus that, according to those that claim animals lack a soul, they do not have free will. Jewish philosophy stresses that free will is a product of the intrinsic human soul, using the word neshama, from the Hebrew root nshm נשמ meaning "breath".

In Christian thought

In Christian theology, God is described as not only omniscient but omnipotent; a fact which some people, Christians and non-Christians alike, believe implies that not only has God always known what choices individuals will make tomorrow, but has actually determined those choices. That is, they believe, by virtue of His foreknowledge He knows what will influence individual choices, and by virtue of His omnipotence He controls those factors. This becomes especially important for the doctrines relating to salvation and predestination. Other branches, such as Methodists, believe that while God is omnipotent and knows the choices that individuals will make, He still gives individuals the power to ultimately choose (or reject) everything, regardless of any internal or external conditions relating to the choice. For example, when Jesus was nailed on the cross, the two murderers, one on each side, were about to die. Only one asked Jesus for forgiveness while the other, even at the end of his life with nothing else to lose, mocked Jesus. In the view of Methodists and others who believe in free will, this was a free choice of everlasting death over everlasting life.

Proponents of the "free will" view would make the point that knowledge of a future happening is entirely different from causing the event to happen. Proponents of the "determinist" view would agree, but question whether knowledge of the future is possible without the presence of a determining cause (see Boettner, below). Thus the definition of predestination varies among Christians.

Free will is also a point of debate among both sides of the Christian communist theory. Because some Christians interpret the Bible as advocating that the ideal form of society is communism, opponents of this theory maintain that the establishment of a large-scale communist system would infringe upon the free will of individuals by denying them the freedom to make certain decisions for themselves. Christian communists adamantly oppose this by arguing that free will has and always will be limited to some extent by human laws.

In Calvinism

Calvinists embrace the idea that God chose who would be saved from before the creation. They quote Ephesians 1:4 "For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight." One of the strongest defenders of this theological point of view was the Puritan-American preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards.

Edwards believed that indeterminism was incompatible with individual dependence on God and hence with his sovereignty. He reasoned that if individuals' responses to God's grace are contra-causally free, then their salvation depends partly on them and therefore God's sovereignty is not "absolute and universal." Edward's book Freedom of the Will defends theological determinism. In this book, Edwards attempts to show that libertarianism is incoherent. For example, he argues that by 'self-determination' the libertarian must mean either that one's actions including one's acts of willing are preceded by an act of free will or that one's acts of will lack sufficient causes. The first leads to an infinite regress while the second implies that acts of will happen accidentally and hence can't make someone "better or worse, any more than a tree is better than other trees because it oftener happens to be lit upon by a swan or nightingale; or a rock more vicious than other rocks, because rattlesnakes have happened oftener to crawl over it."

It should not be thought that this view completely denies freedom of choice, however. It claims that man is free to act on his moral impulses and desires, but is not free to act contrary to them, or to change them. Proponents, such as John L. Girardeau, have indicated their belief that moral neutrality is impossible; that even if it were possible, and one were equally inclined to contrary options, one could make no choice at all; that if one is inclined, however slightly, toward one option, then they will necessarily chose that one over any others.

Non-Calvinist Christians attempt a reconciliation of the dual concepts of Predestination and free will by pointing to the situation of God as Christ. In taking the form of a man, a necessary element of this process was that Jesus Christ lived the existence of a mortal. When Jesus was born he was not born with the omniscient power of God the Creator, but with the mind of a human child - yet he was still fully God. The precedent this creates is that God is able to abandon knowledge, or ignore knowledge, while still remaining God. Thus it is not inconceivable that although omniscience demands that God knows what the future holds for individuals, it is within his power to deny this knowledge in order to preserve individual free will.

However, a reconciliation more compatible with non-Calvinist theology states that God is, in fact, not aware of future events, but rather, being eternal, He is outside time, and sees the past, present, and future as one whole creation. Consequently, it is not as though God would know "in advance" that Jeffrey Dahmer would become guilty of homicide years prior to the event as an example, but that He was aware of it from all eternity, viewing all time as a single present. This was the view offered by Boëthius in Book V of the Consolation of Philosophy.

Loraine Boettner argued that the doctrine of divine foreknowledge does not escape the alleged problems of divine foreordination. He wrote that "what God foreknows must, in the very nature of the case, be as fixed and certain as what is foreordained; and if one is inconsistent with the free agency of man, the other is also. Foreordination renders the events certain, while foreknowledge presupposes that they are certain."[1] Some Christian theologians, feeling the bite of this argument, have opted to limit the doctrine of foreknowledge if not do away with it altogether, thus forming a new school of thought, similar to Socinianism and Process Theology, called Open Theism.

In Catholicism

Theologians of the Catholic Church universally embrace the idea of free will, but generally do not view free will as existing apart from or in contradiction to grace. St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas wrote extensively on free will, with Augustine focusing on the importance of free will in his responses to the Manichaeans, and also on the limitations of a concept of unlimited free will as denial of grace, in his refutations of Pelagius. Catholic Christianity's emphasis on free will and grace is often contrasted with predestination in Protestant Christianity, especially after the Counter-Reformation, but in understanding differing conceptions of free will it is just as important to understand the differing conceptions of the nature of God, focusing on the idea that God can be all-powerful and all-knowing even while people continue to exercise free will, because God does not exist in time (see the link to Catholic Encyclopedia below for more).

In Oriental Orthodoxy

The concept of free will is also very important in the Orthodox Churches, particularly the Oriental Orthodox ones, and especially the Coptic affiliated ones. Quite similar to the concept in Judaism, free will is regarded as axiomatic. Everyone is regarded as having a free choice as to in what measure he or she will follow his or her conscience or arrogance, these two having been appointed for each individual. The more one follows one's conscience, the more it brings one good results, and the more one follows one's arrogance, the more it brings one bad results. Following only one's arrogance is sometimes likened to the dangers of falling into a pit while walking in pitch darkness, without the light of conscience to illuminate the path. Very similar doctrines have also found written expression in the Dead Sea Scrolls "Manual of Discipline", and in some religious texts possessed by the Beta Israel Jews of Ethiopia.

In Mormonism

See Agency (Mormonism) for main article.

Mormons or Latter-day Saints, believe that God has given all humans the gift of free will and agency where the ultimate goal is to return to His presence. Having the choice to do right or wrong was important because without the choice, returning to the presense of God would not have meaning. Before this Earth was created, this dispute rose to such a level that there was a "war in heaven" resulting in Lucifer and his followers being cast out of heaven.

In the New Church

The New Church, or Swedenborgianism, teaches that every person has complete freedom to choose heaven or hell. Emanuel Swedenborg, upon whose writings the New Church is founded, argued that if God is love itself, people must have free will. If God is love itself, then He desires no harm to come to anyone: and so it is impossible that he would predestine anyone to hell. On the other hand, if God is love itself, then He must love things outside of Himself; and if people do not have the freedom to choose evil, they are simply extensions of God, and He cannot love them as something outside of Himself. In addition, Swedenborg argues that if a person does not have free will to choose goodness and faith, then all of the commandments in the Bible to love God and the neighbor are worthless, since no one can choose to do them - and it is impossible that a God who is love itself and wisdom itself would give impossible commandments.

In Jewish thought

The belief in Free will (Hebrew: bechirah chofshith בחירה חפשית, bechirah בחירה) is axiomatic in Jewish thought, and is closely linked with the concept of reward and punishment, based on the Torah itself. Verse 30:19 of Deuteronomy states "I [God] have set before you life and death, blessing and curse: therefore choose life". Free will is therefore discussed at length in Jewish philosophy, firstly as regards God's purpose in creation, and secondly as regards the closely related, resultant, paradox.

The traditional teaching regarding the purpose of creation, particularly as influenced by Jewish mysticism, is that "This world is like a corridor to the World to Come" (Pirkei Avoth 4:16). "Man was created for the sole purpose of rejoicing in God, and deriving pleasure from the splendor of His Presence… The place where this joy may truly be derived is the World to Come, which was expressly created to provide for it; but the path to the object of our desires is this world..." (Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, Mesillat Yesharim, Ch.1). Free will is thus required by God's justice, “otherwise, Man would not be given or denied good for actions over which he had no control” [2]. It is further understood that in order for Man to have true free choice, he must not only have inner free will, but also an environment in which a choice between obedience and disobedience exists. God thus created the world such that both good and evil can operate freely [3]; this is the meaning of the Rabbinic maxim, "All is in the hands of Heaven except the fear of Heaven" (Talmud, Berachot 33b).

In Rabbinic literature, there is much discussion as to the contradiction between God's omniscience and free will. The representative view is that "Everything is foreseen; yet freewill is given" (Rabbi Akiva, Pirkei Avoth 3:15). Based on this understanding, the problem is formally described as a paradox, beyond our understanding.

“The Holy One, Blessed Be He, knows everything that will happen before it has happened. So does He know whether a particular person will be righteous or wicked, or not? If He does know, then it will be impossible for that person not to be righteous. If He knows that he will be righteous but that it is possible for him to be wicked, then He does not know everything that He has created. ...[T]he Holy One, Blessed Be He, does not have any temperaments and is outside such realms, unlike people, whose selves and temperaments are two separate things. God and His temperaments are one, and God's existence is beyond the comprehension of Man… [Thus] we do not have the capabilities to comprehend how the Holy One, Blessed Be He, knows all creations and events. [Nevertheless] know without doubt that people do what they want without the Holy One, Blessed Be He, forcing or decreeing upon them to do so... It has been said because of this that a man is judged according to all his actions.” (Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Teshuva 5:5)

The paradox is explained, but not resolved, by observing that God exists outside of time, and therefore, His knowledge of the future is exactly the same as His knowledge of the past and present. Just as His knowledge of the past does not interfere with man's free will, neither does His knowledge of the future [4]. One analogy is that of time travel: The time traveller, having returned from the future, knows in advance what x will do, but while he knows what x will do, that knowledge does not cause x to do so; x had free will, even while the time traveller had foreknowledge. This distinction, between foreknowledge and predestination, is in fact discussed by Maimonides' critic Abraham ibn Daud; see Hasagat HaRABaD ad loc.

Although the above represents the majority view in Rabbinic thought, there are several major thinkers who resolve the paradox by explicitly excluding human action from divine foreknowledge. Both Saadia Gaon and Judah ha-Levi hold that "the decisions of man precede God's knowledge" [5]. Gersonides holds that God knows, beforehand, the choices open to each individual, but does not know which choice the individual, in his freedom, will make. Isaiah Horowitz takes the view that God cannot know which moral choices people will make, but that, nevertheless, this does not impair His perfection. See further discussion in the article on Gersonides.

The existence of free will, and the paradox above (as addressed by either approach), is closely linked to the concept of Tzimtzum. Tzimtzum entails the idea that God "constricted" his infinite essence, to allow for the existence of a "conceptual space" in which a finite, independent world could exist. This "constriction" made free will possible, and hence the potential to earn the World to Come. Further, according to the first approach, it is understood that the Free-will Omniscience paradox provides a temporal parallel to the paradox inherent within Tzimtzum. In granting free will, God has somehow "constricted" his foreknowledge, to allow for Man's independent action; He thus has foreknowledge and yet free will exists. In the case of Tzimtzum, God has "constricted" his essence to allow for Man's independent existence; He is thus immanent and yet transcendent.

In Jewish thought, Free will is often discussed in connection with Negative theology, Divine simplicity and Divine Providence, as well as Jewish principles of faith in general.

In Islamic thought

Islam teaches: God is omnicient and omnipotent; He has known all for eternity. But still, a tradition of free will there is, for man to recognize his responsibility for his actions, which has trinculated from The Qur'an. Such is written in the Qur'an: "no one shall bear the burden of another."

As in many religious doctrines, the content is determined by interpretation. Although it seems, prima facie, that the Qur'an teaches free will, it is not this straitforeward. For example, the Qur'an, said to be the words of God himself, could be, in some cases, empathizing with the common human perspective since it is, according to islamic thought, meant to instruct mankind. One possible interpretation is that, when man's free will is implied in the Qur'an, Allah is simply referring to the human perspective of free will (since his omnipotence allows him to know who will go to heaven and who to hell). A less often taken position regards the attribute 'omnipotence'. Allah may not actually be all-knowing, but, when compared to man, his knowledge is so vast that he may be considered omniscient. These and a myriad of other interpretations demonstrate that, like many other religious doctrins, the words of the Holy Qur'an could fit a number of scenarios, depending on the interpretation of the text.

In fiction

One of the most famous stories about free will is Frank R. Stockton's 1882 short story "The Lady or the Tiger", which ends (spoiler warning) with the protagonist faced with a free will choice.

Larry Niven's science fiction short story, "All the Myriad Ways", takes the multiple universes theory of free will to a reductio ad absurdum.

In the The Matrix series and The Devil's Advocate many references to free will are made, and the importance of making one's own choices.

In Bruce Almighty the main character Bruce Nolan was given the powers of God for a time, with a proviso that he cannot "mess with free will".

In the series Legacy of Kain one of the main characters, Raziel, is the only one with free will. all the other characters are burdened by the wheel of fate, and as such, their timelines were written from the beginning to end while Raziel has opprotunity to change his timeline how ever he chooses via various time machines.

In the movie Donnie Darko, the main character is able to see what God plans for people to do, an implication of Christian thought of free will.

References

• Bischof, Michael H. Kann ein Konzept der Willensfreiheit auf das Prinzip der alternativen Möglichkeiten verzichten? Harry G. Frankfurts Kritik am Prinzip der alternativen Möglichkeiten (PAP). In: Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung (ZphF), Heft 4, 2004.
• Muhm, Myriam: Abolito il libero arbitrio - Colloquio con Wolf Singer, in: L'Espresso,19.08.2004 http://www.larchivio.org/xoom/myriam-singer.htm
• Morris, Tom Philosophy for Dummies For Dummies
• Lawhead, Willaim F. The Philosophical Journey: An Interactive Approach McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages
• Inwagen, Peter van An Essay on Free Will Oxford: Clarendon Press
• Schopenhauer, Arthur, On the Freedom of the Will, Oxford: Basil Blackwell ISBN 0631145524

See also

Consciousness, Christian anarchism, Christian communism, Determinism, Daniel Dennett, Elbow Room, Freethinking, free will theorem, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Robert Kane, Philosophy of Freedom, Predestination, Prevenient grace, Problem of evil, Newcomb's paradox, Randomness, Responsibility assumption, Self-ownership, Baruch Spinoza, The Sirens of Titan, Slaughterhouse-Five, Stapp, Henry, Teleology, Theodicy, Freedom of thought

External links

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Free Will
  • Incompatibilism
  • Divine Foreknowledge and Free Will
• The Nature of Free Will by Peter Voss
• Garden of Forking Paths - a blog by philosophers working on philosophy of action and free will
• Article at Roman Catholic Encyclopedia
• Article at Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Article at Determinism and Freedom Philosophy Website
• Article at h2g2
• An Introduction to Free Will and Determinism by Paul Newall, aimed at beginners.
• Augustine's Concept of Freedom: The Dynamic of Sin and Grace by Gregory S. Neal
• Is human free will compatible with divine omniscience? An essay at the Galilean Library by Robert P. Taylor
• Article at Jewish Encyclopedia
• Free Will from a conservative Calvinist perspective
• Repentance and Predestination in Jewish Thought
• The Paradox of Free Choice from a Jewish perspective, Discussess Determinism, Robotism, Prescience, Omnipotence, Oneness and Primal Cause
• Super Free Will: Metaprogramming and Quantum Indeterminism
• Libertarian Accounts of Free Will, by Randolph Clarke (electronic version of print book ISBN 019515987X)
• egodeath.com Ego Death and Self-Control Cybernetics - A discussion of dissociation, cybernetics, determinism, and metaphor.
• The incompatibility of human freedom and Christianity
• The Free Will Theorem (Conway, Kochen)
• Freewill, Determinism and Santa Claus by Leigh Brasington, a Buddhist meditation teacher