If you would, please, read this article and give your thoughts:
samharris.org/blog/item/free-will-why-you-still-dont-have-it/
My question relating to this is, how important is the notion of free will to our faith, and what do we make of findings and ideas like this one?
It is vital to our faith. If we can’t decide not to sin, then we cannot decide to accept or reject God, and therefore God would be damning us to hell for something that was out of our control. Catholics cannot believe in predestination.
First, I do not know what I will think next, as thinking is not acting. Thinking is a cause which emits an effect, but the effect is not controlled by the cause, which is why we have a brain. We think of an event before acting, though we do not have control of what we think. That is not what free will is, as the writer is correct, I have no more control of what I think in reality as what I do in a dream unless I condition myself to think of something else in a particular situation. The difference, however, between my dream and my reality is in a dream I am not limited by reason, and as a result I do crazy things that are impossible in reality. In reality however, I am limited by reason and physical reality, and as a result I think of an action before performing it. The thought is the precursor to the action. Take this, for example: about eight seconds ago an idea came into my mind. I can mistype. So, in this sentence, I will mistipe the word mistype. Now, is there a biological cause for me to mistype the word mistype? Of course not, though the cause of the idea is unknown and seemingly occurred as a response to a stimuli, but actually typing the word is a separate thought that originated from the first thought, and then I used a separate part of my brain to actually type it. That was not out of my control, for I determined that I would mistype the word mistype many seconds before I performed the action of mistyping.
The author either literally does everything he or she thinks, or does not understand free will. The author thinks choice is in some way not free will because it is dependent upon the uncontrollable conception of a previous thought, but free will does not imply that everything we think is under our control.
I can will to do what is harmful to me, which is biologically absurd, so such an idea would not be engrained in my DNA. If I have curable cancer but decide I would rather die than undergo chemotherapy, then that is a product of my own free will. The thought “I don’t want to go through chemotherapy,” and then naturally arriving at the thought of “I will not do chemotherapy” may originate uncontrollably in my brain, but the action of not having chemotherapy, which is equivalent to the author’s “not getting out of bed” example is entirely against my biological nature to survive until I can procreate.
As a side note, dogs do have free will. Anything with a conscious brain has free will. Obviously not to the capacity to determine morality, but certainly to the capacity to know that certain actions result in negative consequences, but to still do the action despite the negative consequences.
Free will does not mean free will in all actions; it means free will in all conscious actions. I cannot decide that I am sexually attracted to a man, but I do have the control not to have sex with the man even though it is completely contrary to my (evolutionary) biology.
