Self Inflicted Wound

“The reason I believe in free will is because I believe in an all knowing god who knows every decision we are going to make…”

The assignment was a short, one page opinion essay on the student’s thought as to whether or not we have free will. Very easy, very quick…and most of them screwed it up. Instead of talking about free will they talked about decisions they made or didn’t make. This student wasn’t one of those that screwed up, the essay actually addressed the problem. It would be completely unfair of me to expect an answer to the question of free will, people still write their dissertations on the topic and entire subdivisions of academic disciplines are devoted to it. I just wanted their opinion as briefly as appropriate for an introduction to Philosophy course.

I focus on this student’s essay though not because of this specific answer but because of the general type of answer that it is: a self-refuting argument. Or as I call it, taking inspiration from the podcast God Awful Movies, the “jingly keys argument.” Without delving to far into the problem, the student has essentially stated that there is free will but then the reasoning seems to refute the idea of an indeterminate universe. The difference is that while the student is proclaiming a divinely ordered free will universe, there is also the counter claim that everything is already known. So setting aside the omniscience issue with choice, we’re to accept that while my decision to wear a sweater or not is mine, that choice was already made in the future…and more importantly, already known by a being possessing of perfect knowledge. Therefore, my decision had to be one way and could never have been another. This brings us full circle back to the issue we set aside a few sentences ago: was my choice really free?

This has been addressed by the Philosophical pantheon. Augustine said that there was a difference between knowing that something is going to happen and having made that thing happen–thus he can preserve both his religious beliefs and his belief in free will. It takes some mental work and some cognitive dissonance to hold both beliefs, but there we have it. What I wonder is why even come up with this argument in the first place?

It reminds me of the Epicurean paradox concerning the existence of evil and an all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing god. Epicurus never said it, the Epicureans did not believe in a god that cared and had little awareness or interest themselves in the burgeoning Christian cult when the school was adopted by the Roman intelligentsia. They had no rivals which postulated such a being so it wouldn’t have made sense to them to offer specific arguments against them. The paradox itself comes from a Christian writer named Lactantius who was using the paradox as a polemic against the Epicurean school to say, “look these idiots believe that an all powerful, all knowing, all good god wouldn’t allow evil in the world so they are a bunch of atheists which is why we shouldn’t follow them.”

Does Lactantius answer his own paradox? No. Why then would he write such a damning thing about his own belief?

In both cases we have authors defending their personal beliefs by developing extremely difficult problems for that belief, but doing so thinking that it buttresses their own argument. Augustine, in his defense, is not making the problem up and then arguing against it, he’s making an argument against an external threat. So while I think his position is weak he’s not shooting himself in the foot with it.

However this does not excuse my student or Lactantius from what they have done. Nor does it scream to the motive of why they came up with it in the first place. The only reasonable explanation that I can offer is that they do not understand what they are saying. This could be for two different reasons: the first is that they are merely parroting what someone else had told them. In the case of Lactantius this might be less probable given the lack of knowledge he was sure to have since while his writings indicate an exposure to the other philosophical schools of Rome (Stoicism is his other target in this same work) they also show a lack of understanding of them (which is something I suspect can be attributed to a great deal of early religious writing in the bible–but that is for a much longer and more researched post), it might very well be that Lactantius developed this argument on his own thinking that the Epicureans didn’t believe in any gods, which he would have been wrong about as they were Deists. With the student it’s more probable that this a repeated argument but I can’t make any conclusions as to the certainty, but since it’s an easily searchable claim–in fact, an essay making the exact claim in much greater detail was the first result with the search terms “free will, Christian, omniscience.”

The second, and I think the more probable explanation is that they think it helps their cause because they haven’t considered the implications of it. Lactantius is looking for a slander against the Epicureans for their naturalism and their denial of an involved god so he throws the ancient slander that the Epicureans were “atheists,” why not it worked on Socrates and Aristotle. However, “atheist” didn’t mean then what it did today it just meant that a person didn’t worship the “right” god the “right” way. The student seems to believe that their god gives free will, but then hasn’t considered that such knowledge leads to a deterministic universe unless they didn’t feel like getting into it, which is a bit problematic for their paper. In either case, the strangest thing is that just a little self-reflection on their own assertions would lead them to understand that they are providing ammunition against the very thing that they are arguing for.

 

An Atheist’s Perspective: A god’s anger negates its omnipotence

The last couple of posts I deal with De Ira Dei and the anger of god. Mostly I countered it with the Epicurean ideal–a philosophy among the four classical schools that I favor the most, it’s pretty consistent internally with only one sticky problem–that of free will. As a quick reminder the Epicureans did not fear the anger of god(s) because their belief was that if the gods were so perfect there would be nothing for them to get angry about. Their minds would be above and beyond the petty annoyances of us mortals and whether or not we lived or died, paid them homage or heresy; it would not bother them one bit. Not only that, but the evidence of the world doesn’t bear it out either: the good and wicked both die in sea storms; they both succeed and fail in life if there was a god that cared this would not be the case. 

Another of the four classical schools, the Stoic, also believed in the impossibility of the anger of the gods (I should note that I have a bit of a dilemma here: I don’t know whether or not to use “gods” or “god.” The Stoics argued about a single divinity but argued in a polytheistic society so I may bounce back and forth a bit. Nevertheless, their criticism applies to any personal god that can be imagined) but for a different reason entirely. Like the Epicureans they believed in divine perfection, but unlike them they believed in a god that was active in the world–a hand of providence to use a more modern parlance. Their god however was not vengeful or angry, it is impossible that this be the case but for a very different reason and it relates to their view on what exactly vice was. 

The Stoics were determinists, that is a philosophical term for someone that does not believe in free will. There are two kinds of determinists: hard and soft. Hard determinists believe that everything is fated, all material and thought it pre-ordained. Soft determinists believe that physical causes are ordained but allow the wiggle room for thought. The Stoics lean more toward the latter, every choice you have made is ordered by fate, but how you mentally react to that choice–emotionally, is up to you. This is where vice enters into it morally. See, moral choices are about attitude not action. If you are having a hard life, but you maintain a good disposition about it, you are a good Stoic. Conversely, if you are a miserable person who is constantly chasing what they cannot have or wishing that the way things are were otherwise you would be an immoral Stoic. When I teach this outlook, the free will issue usually turns my students off, they simply don’t like not choosing their own life. However, the value of Stoicism is to teach the student that accepting fate will make the person much happier than wishing the world was different. Anger for the Stoics is a vice because it represents the person unwilling to accept the nature of the world. We get angry at events because they are counter to what we would like them to be rather than accepting that the world is a certain way. 

For example, whenever the first snowfall of the year hits, everyone on the road drives like an idiot. It’s almost as if they had never seen snow before, and every time this makes me angry. Why? I know it’s coming, and I know that the people on the road are going to drive badly. What a good Stoic would do is accept this as a fact of the world in order to lessen their anger or not drive that day as to avoid the frustration. People that complain about the cold in the winter or the heat in the summer are the same way: being angry at the weather is being angry at something that no individual can change, so accepting it is merely the only option since the individual is going to have to live through the weather anyway (weather not climate).

This is where god comes in. See the god in this philosophy bears a large similarity to the modern conception of the monotheistic religions–it’s the master of the world. Yet that mastery comes with its knowledge of fate and the universe. If god were to get angry about homosexuals (or substitute any of the religious offenses: infidels, heretics, pig-eaters, alcohol drinkers, those who do things on Saturday night, work on Sunday, get tattoos, or wear wool jackets with silk liners) it would mean that god has no mastery over his own expectations and emotions. It would mean that god expected one thing and got another which would deny the omnipotence characteristic usually applied. It means that god has needs that go unfulfilled. In short it means that god is no divine being but merely a more powerful king that sends his wrath down when we don’t do what is expected. 

It also means that god is more like Zeus, Jupiter, and Odin; than modern theists would like to admit in that he, too, is also subject to the whims of fate. Zeus was subject to the fate of the world, he says so several times in the Iliad referring to how even he could not prevent the fall of Troy, and Odin was subject the weavings of the Nords who foretold his death at Ragnarok. If god is to get angry and frustrated at my unbelief, it seems foolish to grant me that much power being able to anger him so. God does not have the mastery over us, his anger is evidence of this. 

The counter argument to that last point is that sin is allowed in order to give us free will. It’s a good point but only addresses the last implication, and something that I would rather address in a different post due to the length involved in the free will discussion (dissertations are written about this). While I am not necessarily partial to the Stoic view on life, it does offer some benefits and places in their divine being an actual divine outlook–one of beneficence that is incapable of anger. One that cannot experience the spite necessary to exercise vengeance. Which is exactly why Lactantius and those like him dislike this philosophy. 

An Atheist’s Perspective: The Materialist Conundrum

If you do not believe that there is sufficient evidence to establish the existence of a divine being, you may also not believe in the spiritual realm either. The commonality between the two is that we are dealing with an immaterial/material interaction that needs to be explained if there is to be a consistent metaphysics underlying reality. For spirituality we have to first define what that means, and then we have to explain how it works. For any kind of theism the same dual fold issue remains: yet the theist usually has recourse to magic. Both of these viewpoints have something in common with atheism (deism for this post is within the purview of theism for obvious reasons).

Hard materialism states that we are merely a conglomeration of material and gaps between the material allowing for both motion and change–this is the immaterial. In simpler terms there is only things and nothing. Call them atoms, call them monads (although the followers of Leibniz will have a stroke if you try and use the term this way), it doesn’t matter: there is material and nothing. Forces emit from the material, e.g. gravity, but without the material there is only void. With only these two categories of stuff, the hard materialist will then have to claim that all of the stuff is subject to some kind of law of nature in order to make sense of the material. This is the goal of modern physics, to determine the laws by which the universe behaves so that we can understand it and use it to make predictions. 

Our science has done a pretty good job of this, we can make large bodies of metal float and fly through the air. I can use this computer on this internet all because we understand a good deal of the behavior of the stuff of the universe. Biology, chemistry, and now physics allow us to shape our world. So we understand the biological causes of each of us, how we came to be alive. We understand the chemical causes with gametes and DNA; and to some extent we also understand the physical causes with the bindings of molecules to each other. The hard materialist will smile using all of these things as examples of natural things being subject to the natural laws. Using occam’s razor, they can literally shave all of the supernatural causes that were once used to explain the world. There is no place for them as they exist outside the natural order. 

As unsettling as it sounds, atheists have to eat a bullet here–a bullet that theists are more than happy to supply. Hard materialism offers no room for free will. At last no room that can be proven with any kind of consistency. The most famous of the early materialists were the Epicureans, and Lucretius, the second most famous of the Epicureans, wrote that the atoms–which construct all material objects–would somehow swerve and in this swerve would create free will. I should note here that this “Swerve” is not in the existant writings of Epicurus it seems to be wholly an invention of Lucretius in his “On the Nature of Things.” The problem for this belief is that any swerving of the atoms is either subject to some natural law that we are not aware of and thus we are back to predetermination and a lack of free will, or it is entirely arbitrary in which case it is difficult to determine how it is free will to begin with, i.e. if the swerve determines our free will then is it really free will? Some cite features of quantum physics in which free will is based on the uncertainty principle, or the unique results of experiments were sub-atomic particles appear in two different locations at the same time as being evidence that there exists materialist free will; those explanations are lacking in that for the former it relies on a misunderstanding of the term “observe” within quantum mechanics and the latter is an example of a deficiency in our ability to explain an outcome, e.g. there is something we are missing that we have yet to explain. The alternative is to just accept that there is no free will but that our perception of it is what really matters. We may never be able to prove either way so what, in the end, is the difference?

If free will is an illusion, we will never know. If there is free will, we will never truly know that either. In both cases our behavior would be exactly the same. Materialism, if it is to remain consistent: has to accept one of two propositions. The first is that all action is governed by laws and that what we call free will is also governed by these laws. The second, is that we don’t know. 

The second is risky only because accuracy and consistency is a burden that only atheists seem to be forced to carry. By claiming that we don’t know, the theists seem to think we’ve fallen into some kind of trap in that they have an explanation for what we don’t. Their explanation of course is magic. Free-will and the material/immaterial divide is granted through divine fiat and that unexplainable explanation is their solution. It’s a fallacy of course, an appeal to ignorance or what is also known as the “god of the gaps” argument but they don’t see it that way. They use divine revelation to explain where that information comes from, but it’s never their divine revelation it’s always at least third hand. 

The important thing to remember as an atheist is that admitting you don’t know is not a weakness, it’s honest. That kind of answer is much better than accepting an answer because you find the alternative unsettling or using magic to fill in the holes. Perhaps one day we will understand, or perhaps not; either way we don’t know now and that’s the best any of us can truly say.