The Cosmological Argument and Free Will

[Mudhammam]

@Pickup, I already posted a link to the big bounce.

Ah, good looks. I overlooked that.

Pickup,

Bill Craig's Molinist position is that God has chosen to actuate a world where people's free choices are compatible with the outcomes that God wants to achieve. So the Molinist seeks to find a balance between man's free will and God's sovereign determinacy. It's a form of compatiblism. But in terms of causation, the will is the cause of the action. Usual Christian thinking is that the cause of the will to do evil is something that has gone awry with us back in the mists of time, something often known as the 'fall'. It was debated early on in Christianity with Nestorius arguing that we might have the potential within us to avoid evil. He was condemned by the Western, but not by the Eastern Church. The Western Church, especially under the influence of Augustine, took a bleaker view of humanity than the Eastern Church. This state of 'fallenness' is something many of us find though; that though on one level we may 'will' to be and do good, on another level we, at the moment of decision, act in a way that is contrary to our stated intention. In Freudian language it is the battle between the id and the super-ego, with the ego, bruised, stuck between the battling two. But Freud was describing conflicts that have long been known about, as Paul wrote in his letter the Romans, 'For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate'.

Personally I find free will a challenge both theologically and scientifically. I find it enough to say that we have 'agency', that we are the agents of our actions (unless coerced), and so we are the ones accountable for our actions. I think we have to accept that, if only with a certain amount of 'faith', certainly as the general norm, in order for society to function. Abandon the notion of personal agency and accountability and I think we'd end up in a very strange and disordered place.

What about you - how do you see 'free will', 'agency' or 'accountability'?

Thanks for the additional info, Mike. I always enjoy reading your thoughtful remarks. I'm pretty much with you on your personal views, and would probably ascribe to compatibalism myself, though we are often rightly accused of redefining "free will" (William James calls it something to the effect of a "quagmire of evasion"). I think compatibalism is correct to point out 1) the unintelligibility of free will as in a will disconnected from all prior causal relations and 2) the problems that arise, even if solely practical, in the belief that no freedom exists.

I view agency, if we're talking about "personal agency," as a manyness-in-oneness of sorts, the oneness being our conception of self and the manyness being the breakdown into the various agents that comprise the self, namely, all the genetic and environmental causes. Each factor that precedes the present moment, that contributes to this self, is an agent of causation in the foregoing chain of events. I think this eradicates any possibility of "ultimate responsibility" but I think you'd agree that's also the case within the context of a "Fall" or "Original Sin," which none of us can be held ultimately responsible for.

So, for me, free will is basically the freedom to act, even if the source of those actions are not ultimately found within ourselves, so long as no causal forces external to those that can be properly said to compose our "self" interfere with our actions. Another way I look at it is that I like to think of each person as a collection of forces (genetic and environmental). We don't choose our, say, "impersonal-personal forces"* (we don't choose our "self") but the effects of those forces are our own, and we must claim them, unless another collection of forces (another being) directly intervenes. All that being said, it does make me more sympathetic to those who act in ways I could never fathom, especially when certain of those "personal forces" seem to exhibit an unusual amount of influence over the others (as when some action is traceable to say, a brain tumor, or something of that sort, which, admittedly, is not in principle different from other "impersonal-personal forces")

*Impersonal because those forces are not themselves personal, but personal because we must own them--they define us, and our wills.