Board index ‹ Free Will

[Maxwell's Hammer]

> "We understand by definition that love and free will can only coexist as long as there is no violation."

Which is why it's loving to let your children exercise their free will and never eat vegetables, brush their teeth or sleep. Wait, uh...?

[jimwalton]

Funny. I assume you're joking, but maybe in your joke you're making a serious point—that love always interferes with free will.

You're missing the distinction between free will and discipline. With discipline and socialization we do our best to teach our kids to eat balanced diets, exercise proper hygiene, and get enough sleep to keep them healthy and alert. Sometimes parents bring down the hammer pretty heavily to coerce their compliance. I've learned something about caring for children: you can make them go to bed, but you cannot make them sleep. A parent can motivate a child's behavior, but not their attitude. You can tell me what to do, but you can't tell me (despite your attempts) what to think.

God exercised, throughout history (and even in the garden of Eden), some pretty heavy-handed hammers to motivate compliance: "If you eat from this, you will SURELY DIE." Whoa. But God can't force what they think, or what their attitude is. If he does, he will violate them in the deepest sense of what it means to be human.

[Be Thou My Vision]

> "You really only have two choices: pull the rip cord, or don't pull it. Does that mean it's not a real choice? On the contrary, it's a VERY real choice.

Is it? Desire has an effect on our decisions. Even if I could conceivably choose not to pull the ripcord, the only situation I could imagine where I make that choice is if I do desire to die for some reason or another. I cannot imagine an occasion where I would choose not to pull the rip cord in a situation where I desire to pull the ripcord, have the physical ability to, and have no stronger conflicting desire.

The example I often use in describing the effect of our desires on our will is choosing to get out of the bed in the morning. I desire to stay in bed in the morning, but I have a stronger conflicting desire for a paycheck and continued employment, so I get up and go to work. However, imagine if I won the lottery tonight. If that happened, then tomorrow morning my desire to stay in bed would be stronger than my desire for continued employment. A change in external circumstances affected my desires, which affected the choice I made.

[jimwalton]

Oh, I agree with you. Desires and circumstances both affect our decisions, but desires don't control us. Though they may bully me, I still (and always) have free will against them. The desire may change which decision I make, but it doesn't change that the decision is mine to make. And while external (or even internal) circumstances play a part as well, I still make the choice. Free will is always at play, even though there are strong warriors battling to influence the direction of free will.

[Bagel Man]

What I notice about all this is that the Bible doesn't say we have free will. It's all fluffy liberal interpretations of various random bits of scripture.

Indeed Calvinists believe we are determined, for some reason.

[jimwalton]

The problem with determinism is that you cannot decide to be a pure determinist. If you decided to be a pure determinist, then you’re not a pure determinist. If you’re a pure determinist, then you don’t believe it for rational reasons. You believe it because you were determined to believe it. It is impossible to believe it for rational reasons. The only way you can believe in determinism for rational reasons is if determinism is false. If determinism is true, then it doesn’t make any sense for you to say that determinism is true, because if it is true, then you are assuming there are rational reasons for believing it. Fine, believe it, but if you’re right, then your position is no better than the opposite, rationally, because you believe people believe things aside from any rational basis. You can only believe it because it is an effect working in you. In that case, reason, morals, and love are all impossible.

[Mr. Bojangles]

You are not giving examples of controlling desires, you are giving examples of one desire being stronger than another. You have no control over which desire will be stronger, because that would require a whole new will of its own. You can't decide what to want without wanting to decide what to want. Libertarian free will leads to an infinite regression of prior deciders. It's a logically incoherent concept which can't actually logically exist. You will always do what you want to do the most, and you have no control over what you will want to do most. It's like trying to decide what your next thought will be.

[jimwalton]

I have experienced in myself a ping-pong match of desires at war in me, vying for me to decide to which one I will lean. I am torn at times between competing values, competing pleasures, or even competing depravity, and any mix of them. While I cannot control what my next thought will be, I always have control over what I will do with it. If I am ruled by my desires, then rationalism is impossible, because I only choose what I must as dictated by my desires, and therefore I don't hold to any position for rational reasons. I only choose what my desires force upon me, and it is impossible to choose for rational reason. I can only believe in what you are saying if what you are saying is false, a classic self-contradiction. If my desires determine every choice I make, then my choices are not rational, for there were no rational options in making the choice. I am a helpless slave to my desires, and constructs such as rational and irrational, true or false, right or wrong are totally meaningless. I can only decide things because it is an effect working in me.

The teaching of the Bible is that God, being non-determined, created man as a non-determined person. We are not programmed, or slaves to our desires,but have the ability to choose and an option of self-determination and self-control. If I am a slave to my desires, I am reduced to machine programming; it is to conclude that humanity is an illusion. The Bible teaches the very opposite.

[Bagel Man]

> "The problem with determinism is..."

I think you could do a better job of explaining that if you gave it some thought. I'd like to see you try again.

[jimwalton]

Sure, I'll give a whack at it.

If we have no choice but to give in to our desires, then free will is only an illusion. But this can't be true. If free will is only an illusion, we can't know what's true and what's not, because we haven't come to this conclusion by virtue of rational thought. It just must have been a desire in us that we have no control over. If that's the case, and I have no control over the thoughts that come to me, then "rational thought" doesn't even exist. I am a slave to what comes to me, and thinking it through does no good (or isn't even possible). So if I have no free will, but am only in a automaton state with my desires, and there is no such thing as reason, morality, or love.