I’ve been re-reading Mere Christianity lately, and as C.S. Lewis is arguing for basic morality, it reminded me of an argument employed by J.P. Moreland. Moreland was arguing that atheism does not allow free will, and listed highly respective atheists who say just that. John Serull (spelling?) a professor at UC Berkley (and a leading scientific naturalist) said this, “our conception of physical reality does not allow for the existence of freedom of the will.” Similarly, William Provine, a leading scientist at Cornell university says this, “free will as it has been traditionally conceived, simply does not exist, there is no way the evolutionary process as currently conceived, could produce a being that is truly free to make choices.”
They have to say this because:
Premise 1. Only material things exist
Premise 2. The current concept of free will is intangible
Conclusion: free will does not exist
This clearly does not make sense. If there is no free will, why do we make so many excuses? When we make excuses we acknowledge that we should have done something different than what we actually did. We should have done action (a) instead of the action we actually did (b).
Another clear objection to this “scientific predestination,” is the human emotion of guilt. Whenever you feel this sensation, you admit that the action you took was wrong, and you should have taken another action. This is basically saying, “I feel bad about the action I took, because I had the choice to do action (b) and decided not to.” If there is no free will, we have nothing to feel bad about, it ultimately wasn’t our choice so we don’t anything to worry about.
Now picture this, what if in a courtroom someone who had committed a murder said this, “Judge, I don’t think I should face jail time or the death penalty; because I don’t really control my actions. It wasn’t my choice it was the laws of nature that made me commit the murder. So ultimately I’m innocent, because I don’t control anything. I’m simply an inanimate object that external factors move and use. I’m no different than a rock, if a rock killed someone, would you give it the death penalty?”
Hmm…that’s a tough one… The judge and jury would have a hard time with this case. Don’t you think?
I thought not.
We humans expect something out of each other (we're strange like that). We expect each other to act decently to be kind when kindness is due, and be just when justness is due. C.S. Lewis said this in Mere Christianity, "think of a country where men were admired for running away from the battle field, or were men felt proud of themselves for double crossing all those who had been kindest to him. You might just as well imagine a country where 2 + 2 = 5."
So in conclusion, humans have some sort of free will, label it differently, set different boundaries to it. I don't care, but you have to acknowledge some level of human free will. This concept of free will leads to a lot of places atheists don't want to go.
4 comments:
Great post.
I do disagree with you on one point, however.
The judge and jury would have a hard time with this case. Don’t you think?
I thought not.
Given the way society is heading this actually could be an argument made in court and accepted by the judge and jury. In fact, I will be not be surprised if I hear of a case now when this happens.
That's a corner we're backed into as a society when evolution is embraced - everything becomes permissible (survival of the fittest) and we can't hold anyone responsible because matter is all that is or ever will be (therefore no morals or moral responsibility).
Unless we can show morals to exist we're in trouble. Unfortunately, it's getting so we can't even use logic because "there are no absolutes" and, I would add, people are willingly ignorant of the truth.
Really, any sort of thoroughly deterministic outlook results in the problems you detailed, whether it is naturalistic determinism (where we are just the inevitable cause-and-effect relations of atoms bumping around)or theistic determinism (where we are just jumping to the pull of divine puppet strings).
I believe that B.F. Skinner(an atheist) says much about and agrees with what you've said about atheist "predestination", it's quite interesting.
(by the way, I think it's quite awesome that you got a blog)
John
Interesting post...
"Similarly, William Provine, a leading scientist at Cornell university says this, 'free will as it has been traditionally conceived, simply does not exist, there is no way the evolutionary process as currently conceived, could produce a being that is truly free to make choices.'”
In that case, I really don't like the evolutionary process because it makes us murder, lie, and cheat each other. It also makes us disagree on whether or not it really produced us into beings that don't have a free will! Hmmm...
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