What Most Christians Seem To Argue
I’ve heard it said that my choices are meaningless if the Christian’s view of free will isn’t true. When I inquire as to what this definition of free will is, the answer usually is one that seeks to completely absolve God from the guilt of our choices. “Free Will” is independent and not dependent, for many Christians, on circumstances or any determination from God. The benefit of this free will, for these Christians, is that it is ours. We have, to some degree, independent control over our choices. Without this independent control, most Christians continue, there are no real “choices” – only predetermined outcomes. And such predetermined outcomes would make choices themselves somehow meaningless; we’d be like robotic machines.
Why I Disagree
That last part is a bit difficult for me to get my head wrapped around. I will admit that knowing I will experience the direction I go in my life does push me forward. But the motivation behind this direction is a construction of my experiences. It’s not divorced from my biology, my likes and dislikes, my desires, etc. Every motivation I have is firmly attached to that whole arena of experiences.
And I want it to be.
I mean, if I’m making a decision, like, “Where do I want to go in my career?” I want to look at all the circumstantial factors. I’m going to look at my desires, my circumstances, different trends, etc. All these factors, and several more, will determine where I want to go in my career and how I’m going to get there. And even if I don’t make the best possible choice, that decision would also be determined by the knowledge (or lack thereof) of my circumstances I had at hand – like my desires, my likes and dislikes, my biology, and a whole history of experiences.
In other words, the reason why you may look at all the factors that go into making a decision is because you know that the actions you take or don’t take will determine the actions you take or don’t take in the future. And you know this because of the way you’ve learned how decisions you’ve made have been determined by circumstances in the past.
What I’m trying to say is that it’s not at all unusual for us to think that choices are determined by several factors, and that the most rational choices are the ones that seem best at recognizing that they are determined by several factors. According to the logic of this Christian free will, however, your choices are, at one point or another, not determined by several factors; at some point, they are completely independent of circumstances. Following this Christian “Free Will” logic, that point where the choice would be independent of circumstances, that “free” point, would be like a missing link in a causal chain. It’s a part of your decision process that can’t be rationalized – you can’t say, at the point that you have this free will at, “I did this because x,” because “x” would be a circumstance. If you don’t believe me, try to rationalize a free will choice without connecting it to a factor outside of free will. If you can do it, put it in the comments. If you can’t, please read on.
Because the exercise of your Christianity-defined free will wouldn’t be attached to circumstances, you would have to simply say “I did this” or “I thought this” in regards to an instance of free will without there being any answer or rationale as to why that decision had anything to do with your environment. Thus, the decision would be less rational than the result of a coin flip. There is no reason to trust it or depend on it, because any reason would have to appeal to some reference point outside of this free will — and if it died, that free will and would no longer be “free.”
Responses To Christian Rebuttals
Normally Christians break in here and say, “Wait a minute! Free Will is NOT divorced from circumstances.”
Well, if “free will” is dependent on circumstances, and if God made the circumstances, then the choices we made with “free will” are God’s fault. Right? If you can’t divorce free will from circumstances, then the choices we make with free will would clearly have to be God’s fault. That seems to be the clear logic of the situation.
I feel I also need to clarify something. A Christian may say, “Well, I’m not talking about circumstances. I’m saying free will is attached to the PERSON.” Well, remember that I’m including everything in the person in circumstances – everything the person didn’t make themselves. Their brain, their heart, their body chemistry and makeup, their genes – all that is under the purview of “circumstances.”
From here, a Christian will often say that there is a separation here between the physical and the subjective, and “free will” is located in the subjective part of the mind. Now, there’s a rather long argument one could have to say that subjective experience is an emergent quality of matter in rebuttal, but there’s also a shorter way to respond to this. Even if we accepted for the sake of argument that there is a separation between the subjective world of experience and the actual physical world, things in that subjective world, like “free will,” would still be caused by other things in the subjective world, like “pleasure and pain.” Your subjective decisions would still have to be constructed and motivated by subjective data in order to make sense. Even if you were to take dualism for granted — whether your decisions are determined by your experiences or constructed by physical matter, your decisions are still being determined. And if God exists, they were ultimately determined by the “first mover” – the all-knowing God.
Now there’s another argument here. The Christian may argue, “Free will is completely separate from circumstance. Completely. And there is no necessary rationale for it; God is simply separate from it.” But not so fast. If there is no necessary rationale for it, then it’s random. And it’s not any created person’s fault that they’re random; none of us threw the dice, so to speak. God blaming things on us when he set the randomness into motion is analogous to a gambler blaming the dice for a bad roll. The randomness is ultimately God’s fault.
So, yeah. The Christian concept of free will does not rubber-stamp choices as rational – choices would have to be irrational for the concept of free will to be viable. But either way you slice it – whether God determined everyone or He gave everyone “free will” – God ends up being responsible for everything people do. There doesn’t really seem to be a way around that, if you think about it.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRIcbsRXQ0o[/youtube]
P.S. I know there are several definitions of “Free Will” that do not coincide with this Christian definition. Feel free to discuss them in the comments below — this was a response to one very specific definition of the concept.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQxJi0COTBo[/youtube]