Free will isn’t something you hold in your hand, nor is it something you can either give or take. It’s a condition of existence–it’s you making choices. Having choices and making choices exerts your free will.
Some of your choices are made by your spirit–your conscious part. If God made that, then He controls it. If He didn’t make it then it was eternal and always existed.
We have dispositions, dictated by our soul, the union of our bodies and spirit. We make choices based on our soul’s inclination. That’s free will.
That is not free will. That is chaos. My “soul’s inclination” is not a moral principle, nor in itself an authentic basis for freedom. I will show this by explaining a little of what actual freedom is.
Let me give you an example of a time three years ago when I exercised my free will. I had recently moved to Florida in an apartment by a lake that has alligators in it. I still live there and they are pretty safe. They mainly just keep in the water and only attack people who make trouble for them, though one of them did show up once on my neighbor’s porch. Anyway, I was pushing my two-month-old daughter in a stroller by the lake and near an alligator swimming by the shore. I occurred to me that I could take my daughter, who was quite bite-size, and cast to the alligator who could gobble her up in moments. There was no external force preventing me from doing that, yet I was totally unable to do to. Why? For the same reason as anyone else: it is totally contrary to my moral nature to kill anyone, especially my child. In fact, it is so opposed to who and what I am that it was literally impossible for me to perform that heinous deed.
I contend that while it was literally impossible for me to toss my daughter to an alligator, while the only option that I was able to choose was to preserve her life, my unwillingness to slay her was purely free. The reason it was free is because it was the voluntary act of a rational being acting in a self-determined way. There was no constraining hand on me. The guiding principles that determined my choice came from my own nature – it is against my humanity and against reason to commit the murder I imagined. Thus it was an act of my own rational will, determining itself without coercion. That makes it a free act.
Now suppose the opposite occurred. Suppose in a moment of sociopathy I did the deed and tossed my infant to the gators. Would that be a free act in the same sense? It would still be an act of my will, for a choice would be involved in it, but it would not be an act that corresponded to the good of my own nature, which loves only the welfare of my children. Thus, there is a principle of my nature, internal to myself that would need to be resisted and opposed for me to have made that choice. Thus my action would not be determined by internal principles proper to myself, but the exact opposite, by violence against my own nature, so that the proper operations of my soul would be interrupted and impeded. This is not a description of freedom.
Now I’m in philosophical trouble. I am saying on one hand that there was a choice involved: I actually had the power to kill my daughter if I so chose. Yet my moral constitution made the opposite choice inevitable; I could never really have done it. That inability made me free. It was unforced and spontaneous, and it preserved my nature from violence. All the characteristics of freedom are here, but without the real possibility of me acting otherwise than I did.
The solution to this paradox relies on developing a more mature understanding of freedom than mere choice. In fact, there is nothing particularly free about choice as such. The real determinant of freedom is
rational choice. Human beings exercise freedom my making decisions that are predicated on a real grasp of reality and a perception of authentic value. Everything else is not freedom. Everything else is destruction. “Choices based on our soul’s inclination” is a sub-human definition of freedom, because it can be said of animal. Dogs act out of inclination; it is action from reason that is authentically human, and spiritual.
When God acts on the human will he acts only in a creative manner, not by “force,” a term denoting violence, but by healing the soul from the violence done to it by sin, so that it becomes newly able to know truly and then act freely. Hence it is called “regeneration.” When that occurs, a person becomes the real author of his or her own moral acts, because the perfection of the moral faculties bring that person inevitably to choose only the good. This is why there is no contradiction in St. Thomas saying “God moves our free will,” since a will that is not moved by God is divorced from reason and thus deprived of freedom. If you think of the problem only in binary terms, that either God created everything and there is no freedom, or God did not and there is only freedom, you can never begin to consider the true, third option, that God is the source of freedom; the universality of his creative power does not destroy but rather ensures the human potential to realize freedom.
The traditional Mormon response to this account of freedom is to dismiss it
prima facie. That is an easy response, because what I propose is intellectually harder to fathom than the agency/force antithesis that Mormonism assumes. But the presence of intellectual difficulty is not a reason to object. We accept this not because it is philosophically convenient, but because it honors God’s glory as universal cause while sustaining human freedom and accountability – two revealed truths we are not willing to compromise. God commands us to serve him “with all your mind,” (Matt 22:37 ) and so we approach problems like these not from a standpoint of skepticism, but of trust that prayer and contemplation can bring us to the intelligibility within even the toughest problems like this.
