Freedom of the Will

Let me treat in this essay one of the great absurdities of recorded thought, something that has befuddled the minds of thinkers, including theologians, philosophers, historians, and even many scientists, all of whom should have known better. What is that absurdity? I will tell you. It is the notion (and that is all it amounts to) that there is no such thing as free will, or, to put it another way, everything under heaven and earth is determined (or, in terms of theology, predestined).

Having stated the proposition, I am now going to proceed with a refutation of that absurdity, which, I might add, is long overdue, though it has been attempted, but never accomplished in ages past.

Pieter Geyl's Napoleon: For and Against (1949) is my starting point. If determinacy or predestination reign in the affairs of mankind throughout history, what sense does it make, using but one example from the countless lives of people on planet earth, to either praise or blame Napoleon for his actions (if he had no control over them)? Having asked as much, another question comes to mind. How could anyone else in the past, present, or future, ever be praised or blamed either, if everything they had ever done or will do is predetermined or predestined? This question, if answered in the wrong way, makes a mockery of the words Good and Evil both. For, neither can have any force (or meaning really), if everything from birth to death is determined or predestined.

But, let me continue. If there were no such thing as free will, it would be necessary to invent it, as Voltaire said of the concept of God. Yet, I would contend here that free will is much more than an"invention" of the mind, but a fact. For it would be pointless even to try for change, much less the improvement in anything or anyone, if there was no such thing as freedom of the will. Put another way, the microcosm of our world can not be a place without the reality of free will. Or, is this proposition beyond comprehension?

Let's hope not! But, let me proceed. In support of the certainty of freedom of the will--the evils (often horrors really), which have been inflicted on innocent people, not to mention children, in the wars of history (here, let me offer up the atrocities of only two of them--those of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) in Germany and World War Two (1939-1945) with the Holocaust), could never have happened, unless many men (and some women too, such as the"Bitch of Buchenwald") had not been free (to some extent at least) to commit those horrendous acts. I am maintaining here, such actions can not be explained in terms of any theory or mental construct based upon either determinism or predestination.

I will tell you (not just offer an opinion) why such notions can have no validity. If evils, or Evil in a cosmic sense, which it seems to me might well exist, were of a predetermined or predestined nature, that would free all perpetrators in history of their responsibilty for immoral, often extremely cruel actions. Now, that can not be, if we have learned anything at all from the world's religious traditions, including the one of my persuasion (Christianity), namely that God is just.

Of course though, as might be objected, perhaps there is no God of the universe, but it seems to me, there are at least intimations of God (some things beyond faith) from mankind's history, as it has been revealed from the vantage points of science, religion, and philosophy, along with the insights of literature, including its poetry, that would indicate that a just God exists.

Now, certainly, it must be added at this point in the argument, reason alone will never, unassisted by faith (or, perhaps, it could be said, intuitive thinking) be able to prove the existence of God, just or otherwise. Yet, I would quickly affirm, neither can anyone ever disprove God's existence. For, to put it simply--it is impossible to prove a negative.

Before ending this train of thought, however, the following must be considered--from what we know of the world and cosmos as a whole by now, especially from the findings of modern physics, including Werner Heisenberg's formualtion in 1927 of the principle of indeterminacy in the behavior of subatomic particles, I would maintain that it has become more difficult to deny the existence of God than to accept the proposition.

Another argument for the fact of free will in human beings--if there were no such thing, that would (to some extent at least) be tantamount to making God responsible for evil and that, quite frankly, can not be accepted. Now, on this point, I could care less what all the thinkers from antiquity to the present have offered as arguments on the other side of the question regarding free will, they are all dead wrong! I would go further. The arguments in support of determinism or predestination (borrowing too from the title of Martin Luther's work Servile Will in 1529) are all an affront both to sound reasoning and to God.

One more argument for free will, which space will not permit me to elaborate, can though be suggested. It comes from evidences for animal intelligence, even for volitional behavior, in complex life forms, such as mammals and birds, which have been and are still being amassed. For an excellent survey of this material, see George Page's Inside the Animal Mind (1999). For one thing, that narrator of the long-running PBS series Nature makes abundantly clear that models, based upon deterministic/mechanistic constructs, intended to explain animal behavior, or the long-held belief that animals act only on the basis of instinct (to put it simply), are not able to explain adequately the observed facts of some actions taken by animals, both in the wild and under the conditions of controlled experiments.

By way of a conclusion, the following is offered as a corollary to my proof that the will is free; probably even for animals, but certainly for human beings. That is: Individuals make history, not groups. I will give but one example for the sake of brevity. If the world had waited upon a group (or, heaven forbid, a committee) to come up with the famous formula E=mc&pow2;, it would never have been conceived. It took the mind of Albert Einstein (an individual) to derive the equation from his own brain; and, no group (the word is really only an amorphous construct--not a tangible thing--I care not for what many, if not most sociologists would maintain here), could ever have devised such a brilliant and parsimonious"statement" for one of the deepest realities of the universe. So, let us in this, the new millennium, abandon the age-old" chestnuts" of determinism and predestination and begin to breathe a breath of fresh air.