Problems Understanding Free Will?

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waanju

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Okay, so I’m taking my very first college level philosophy class, on Responsibility, Guilt, and the Person. It’s a really interesting class, but it’s raised some serious questions about my faith. Everyone in the class but myself and one other student automatically assumes materialism to be true (and completely unopen to debate. The professor literally LAUGHED my classmate into silence). As a result, they’ve all slowly adopted a deterministic point of view.
For the first couple of weeks, this presented no serious challenge to my faith. I simply took the fact that our deep-rooted sense of free will’s incompatibility with a purely materialistic worldview was evidence in support of the soul. I acknowledged that to believe one argument takes just as much faith as to believe the other, and was thus able to hold onto belief.
However, every reading we do in support of free will seems, to be frank, really pathetic. Even those that suggest the non-material aspect that I was previously thinking of seem to flop once I think them through all the way. Basically, my problem is that if free will IS an action of the soul, what do we make each decision based on? Because our emotions, rationality, ect is from our past/genetic makeup/environment (right?), so it would have to be something else, and that seems kind of… random. Also if our free will was on the basis of our soul and we each have the same soul we’ve always had, would it even be fair that people that are less able to resist temptation are just as guilty of the sins they commit as someone with a “strong” soul? Or if all souls are equal, then the strength or weakness of resisting temptation would come from stuff that was outside the person’s control, so how is that fair?
Again, I REALLY REALLLY hope somebody can just point out where I"m being totally illogical. I just have this nasty feeling that all the arguments for free will sort of stem from the same desperation to rationalize it that I’m feeling and that they don’t stand up too well. I’ve looked and looked for what the church has to say, but everything seems to just say how free will is compatible with omniscience (like Boethius, but I understand THAT).
Sorry if this is me just being ignorant… I’ll be the first to admit I’m nowhere near intellectual maturity.
 
Determinism applies to material phenomena, Will (free or not) applies to spiritual ones.
So each one reigns in its own realm and there is no contradiction/collision.

The soul can make decisions related to either material or spiritual reality. Decisions about material reality have more chances to succeed if they are based on the knowledge of the deterministic laws. Decisions related to spiritual realm are better when they take into account the will and the powers of the key players. For example, you’d better take a knife rather than a spoon if you want to cut a piece of cheese, and you’d better bring about materialistic explanations if you want to please your professor.

But no matter what is the base of a soul’s decision, the point is that there must be a decision - even if it is always the same. Material objects behave without decisions at all.

There is kind of “determinism” in the animated world, but it points to the fact that Somebody’s will prevails. The difference is that this is an enforced order, not spontaneous chain of events.

I hope now you are confused even more 🙂
 
Here’s a question materialists tend to hate but can’t avoid: If what you think is determined entirely by mindless, material forces, wouldn’t it just be a sheer accident if it turned out to be true? If you can’t help thinking what you think, what does ‘intelligence’ mean? If no one can think differently, then why are people criticized for being wrong (-as if they could help it!) but not, say, for having brown eyes instead of blue or being male rather than female or having leukemia?
How can a PHILOSOPHER give DIFFERENT grades to students when EACH student’s test results (or paper) was equally determined by impersonal forces?

Think like that, see where it takes you. Should take you to some hard questions for a materialist to answer. (Don’t be a jerk about it, just ask questions that arise from the theory of materialism.)
 
Philosophy is all about making distinctions, and we should start by making one here.

First of all, determinism is a broad concept covering many shades of argument. There are, for example, versions of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ determinism and libertarianism that are often nuanced by philosophers. When we talk about free will, we’re not simply limited to ‘either-or’ propositions. You can a very good sense of this distinction and subtleties in arguments in the book Free Will (edited by Robert Kane) which brings a collection of essays together covering a range of opinions on the questions and problems of free will.

It sounds like your professor is doing a great disservice to you and so you will have to engage in some independent research and study to properly inform yourself. In the first instance, the question of free will is not a satisfied discussion in either philosophy or science and the debate and research into this field is on-going. An intellectually honest professor would help his students see this and allow them the freedom to explore the issues and a range of positions.

In the meantime, you can rest assured that you, as a believer, are in good company when it comes to accepting the reality of free will. In fact, more and more philosophers are accepting the reality of free will and plenty of contemporary psychological analysis supports our good reasons to accept that we are genuinely free agents.

Your starting point should be your own experience. What does experience tell you? We certainly have the experience of being free and of responsibility for our actions. Don’t allow anyone to detach you from your own experience of reality, which is the first method of truth. We also experience guilt and hesitation. If hard determinism is true, none of these experiences can be adequately accounted for. Moreover, the experiences of guilt, hesitation before a decision, indecisiveness, satisfaction, not to mention the concepts of honesty and deciet, lack any coherence at all in a determinist world-view. From whence cometh guilt or the distinction between honesty and dishonesty if we have no control over our choices? Why would a determined agent be determined to think that he is free? And if there is no such thing as free will, what is the metaphysical foundation for our having a concept of freedom? Furthermore, if hard determinism is true, why is your professor trying to convince you of it? Surely if we have no free will, then his belief in determinism is itself determined, no less than your own belief in free will. Philosophical arguments then become nothing more than meaningless mechanical reflections to determined chemical conditions. But this is in itself makes no sense, because if we were simply reflexive, why do we enjoy the sensation of not being reflexive or of right and wrong answers to things?

Your professor’s belief in determinism of course will quickly evaporate and expose itself for what it is if you stood up in class and told him to F-off. He would be horrified and expel you from the classroom. But why, if you are simply determined to swear at him? What is the value in his sense of disgust or anger? Determinism is nothing more than sophistry detached from genuine experience. We have the experience of free will and a commensurate experience of right and wrong and responsibility.

Not only is determinism sophistic, it is not scientific. This, despite the fact that determinists try to claim science on their side. In fact, determinist (that is, materialist) attempts to explain the experience of free will from a materialistic point of view totally fail, both scientifically and philosophically. For example, Sam Harris among others argue that science now tells us that the brain’s motor activity can be detected 300 milliseconds before a person is conscious of making a decision to act and that this supposedly proves we do not freely chose. This argument, and similar chemical predictive arguments have been exposed as false and properly explained by, among many others, neuroscientist Raymond Harris (see “Aping Mankind” for a detailed debunking of the materialist account of free will).

There is growing evidence and support not only for a justified belief in free will but in the fact that materialism is totally inadequate as an explanatory force for human experience and consciousness.

As Nobel Laureate Heisenberg pointed out more than fifty years ago, science—especially quantum mechanics—no longer support a purely materialist view of the world. Materialism is passé. Your professor is an intellectual dinosaur. Don’t let him bully you into joining him in his intellectual darkness.
 
Thanks all of you, I’m using all your sources to et a more rounded out perspective. Also, I KNOW there are different types of determinism… my classmates/professor (with the one exception) just all happen to be very adamant about hard determinism… like we could make a computer to predict human behavior and tell the future style determinists… it’s actually kind of a stifling class.
 
waanju said:
Okay, so I’m taking my very first college level philosophy class, on Responsibility, Guilt, and the Person. It’s a really interesting class, but it’s raised some serious questions about my faith. Everyone in the class but myself and one other student automatically assumes materialism to be true (and completely unopen to debate. The professor literally LAUGHED my classmate into silence). As a result, they’ve all slowly adopted a deterministic point of view.
For the first couple of weeks, this presented no serious challenge to my faith. I simply took the fact that our deep-rooted sense of free will’s incompatibility with a purely materialistic worldview was evidence in support of the soul. I acknowledged that to believe one argument takes just as much faith as to believe the other, and was thus able to hold onto belief.
However, every reading we do in support of free will seems, to be frank, really pathetic. Even those that suggest the non-material aspect that I was previously thinking of seem to flop once I think them through all the way. Basically, my problem is that if free will IS an action of the soul, what do we make each decision based on? Because our emotions, rationality, ect is from our past/genetic makeup/environment (right?), so it would have to be something else, and that seems kind of… random. Also if our free will was on the basis of our soul and we each have the same soul we’ve always had, would it even be fair that people that are less able to resist temptation are just as guilty of the sins they commit as someone with a “strong” soul? Or if all souls are equal, then the strength or weakness of resisting temptation would come from stuff that was outside the person’s control, so how is that fair?
Again, I REALLY REALLLY hope somebody can just point out where I"m being totally illogical. I just have this nasty feeling that all the arguments for free will sort of stem from the same desperation to rationalize it that I’m feeling and that they don’t stand up too well. I’ve looked and looked for what the church has to say, but everything seems to just say how free will is compatible with omniscience (like Boethius, but I understand THAT).
Sorry if this is me just being ignorant… I’ll be the first to admit I’m nowhere near intellectual maturity.
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Here is two cents to consider:

First Consideration
Free will does not refer to what one is doing or did, instead it is referring to what a human will choose to do in the future.

So the question becomes can a person determine with 100% accuracy exactly how, why, and what all s/he will do tomorrow? If a person limits the number of interactions with other humans to zero, then perhaps it is possible. However, given a greater number of interactions with a greater number of other humans will demonstrate that it is impossible to know what we will will.

Second Consideration
The statement: “Our will is always based on experience, genetics, upbringing, and environment,” is a line of Wisdom, which is all-encompassing. So it is absolutely true, however, it is not defining “free will,” instead it is defining “our will.” One extension to the proposed definition I include is: “Human will is the choice decided based on experience, genetics, upbringing, and environment.” Since human will is a choice, there were options, therefore it was free.

One additional concept to consider: Our God, the Judge, is Perfectly Just. He judges with complete fairness and empathy. Try to rid of the thoughts of determining who deserves to be where.

Thank you very much for the fun food for thought! I look forward to further discussion!
 
waanju said:
Thanks all of you, I’m using all your sources to et a more rounded out perspective. Also, I KNOW there are different types of determinism… my classmates/professor (with the one exception) just all happen to be very adamant about hard determinism… like we could make a computer to predict human behavior and tell the future style determinists… it’s actually kind of a stifling class.
Click to expand...
Ask the professor about grading. Is he determined to give you a certain grade no matter what you do or does what you do determine the grade he gives? If the latter—and he has to go with that choice–you might ask him how it is that marks on paper ‘determine’ his thoughts. If the marks do the determining, how can any writer be misunderstood?

More simply, "If everyone reads the same translation of, say, Plato or Kant, how can they have different interpretations of those thinkers? (In other words, how does the same stimulus generate different responses?)
 
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