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The subject of free will is a fascinating subject; it has many avenues to explore and several layers to peel off, which I intend to do in this four part series. The trouble with assessing free will is that it can easily lead us into much more complex areas of analysis such as: quantum mechanics, probability, relativity, decoherence, mathematics, and other deep physical and ontological issues. While they are the underpinning factors which I will cover in more detail as we progress, first off I want to begin at an elemental level and explore how the subject of free will is likely to resonate in our minds at an everyday level. 

 

In order to do this, we must not make the mistake that many make; that is, we must not attempt to assess free will until we first proffer some descriptive analysis of what it is exactly that we are and the situation we find ourselves in – after all, the deep layers of free will are pointless until we define what we are. Christians believe they have found the truth and purpose of our existence, and for the Christian, this is a world created by an omnipotent, omniscient, all-loving God, who gave us a plan of salvation, and in creating us as free-thinking beings, gave us something that even omnipotence and omniscient could not construct by imposition – creatures whose love He wanted, not as automata, but of their own volition. In other words, God thought it worthwhile creating a world where free-thinking occasions us to go wrong sometimes, because He didn’t want to create creatures that were pre-programmed to love Him.

 

Having established God’s purpose in creating us as He did, I must now explain a little bit about the methods God seems to have used for His creation, and how the complexities of the cosmos presents itself to our cognisance, although as I have already said, I will try not to probe into realms that are too complex too soon. Reality gives the appearance of stochasticity; that is to say, we live in a stochastic universe where at a quantum mechanical level we perceive randomness that is ordered enough to produce greater regularity in the cosmos - randomness underwritten by a created order and a uniformity of nature. In other words, nature seems to show that God used a stochastic process; a system which consists of unpredictable random fluctuations, but which generates order, and clearly, from the Christian perspective, has behind it a cosmic blueprint (conceived and orchestrated by the mind of God) that consists of all the intentions God had for creation. Just as a house has a blueprint, so too does the created order - a blueprint designed by God. Even the deepest physical laws of this creation would be realities and dimensions containing many things that creatures in the created order would only sparsely sample - just as, in lesser terms, when I jump off a step onto the ground I am only sampling a small part of the earth’s (much greater) gravitational laws. 

 

Bearing all this in mind I as a creature in the created order expect to see things that seem random and unpredictable, things that seem uncreated, things that give the appearance of being wasteful and clumsy, and equally importantly, things that seem to have arrived solely from human endeavour. I may know that God had all those things planned in His creation blueprint and in the deeper dimensions of reality, but I don’t expect to do anything other than sparsely sample them from within creation itself:

 

 

Having seen what sort of creation we have, we are now ready to enquire about the nature of human free will. At the surface level there are usually two thoughts about free will. Those who believe that there is no God usually believe that humans are, in the most elementary sense, in complete control of their actions. I say ‘in the elementary sense’ because some argue that the influence of nature herself has inevitabilities beyond those of conscious cognition, but I will return to this point in due course. Those from a theistic vantage point (particularly many of the non-Christian vantage points) often say that despite our free will, nothing will happen if God does not wish it to happen. I think both contentions are unsound. Let us take the second contention first, and with a little thought we can see straight away that the God revealed to us in the Bible, after creating us, chose voluntarily to play a passive and somewhat marginal role - it is one of the covenants He made with us. Therefore He has to allow things to happen that He does not wish to happen or does not enjoy seeing happen. To say that God wished something to happen because it did happen is missing the point of God’s relationship with man. 

 

That was the easy bit - but what of the first contention; that humans are in most cases in complete control of their actions? Even aside from the cosmic inevitabilities, this one is a little more complex. If we define free will in everyday terms - as the capacity that allows us to control our actions - the answer would seem to come down to one of two possibilities; ‘Yes we do have free will’, or ‘No we do not’. Both, however, quickly lead us into contradictions. Suppose you answer with ‘yes’. How would you demonstrate the validity of this statement? You would need to act in a way that would not be predetermined by anything. But how can this ever be, when whatever you do can be traced back to some cause? Say you decide to prove your free will by acting out of character: being terrified of heights, you decide to climb to the top of the biggest building you can find. The very fact that you have decided to act contrary to your usual disposition seems itself to be fully predetermined by the fact that you wanted to do something you would not normally do to prove your free will. The very act of trying to prove free will can strongly suggest that there is none. 

 

Given the foregoing analysis, it appears that since we can never demonstrate free will as anything other than a performance in front of a very complex behind the scenes background we are forced to conclude that we may not have it. But this does not necessarily follow either, and feels completely contrary to the whole of human psychology - after all, if I decide I am now going to close my eyes for five seconds and then open them again, I am free to do so. Or am I? This is what we must find out.

 

In the Bible, God and the prophets in the Old Testament, and Christ in the New Testament all spoke as though the future had already been written by the Divine hand - that God lives outside of the linear conceptualism of past, present and future, and that events certainly will happen if they are of God’s will. Now when it comes to creatures like us, we live in a world that is predictable only to the degree that reality itself, or the systems we have created in it, accommodates our predictions. Therefore when it comes to those specific events that are not amenable to accommodation, one thing we know for sure is that no human being, past or present, can predict the specifics of the future without some kind of supernatural guidance, because we know that nothing inside the universe can calculate things faster than the universe itself. When I talk about the future, I mean, of course, specific events that are not already programmed into our understanding of the laws of nature or that are not amenable to certain prediction - so a prediction that it will be dark tomorrow night or that it will rain sometime in 2010 are obviously not the kind of predictions that we are discussing. Nor am I referring to guesswork, or even structured logic. I am referring to specific events which, if foretold correctly and with prescient authority, would be regarded as foretold. 

 

If our future is already mapped out in God’s mind then our perceived free will must be measured by how much we know about certain situations. No human being can have absolute freedom, of course, for each and every one of us is bound by a need to survive; thus, to use one example, we are not free to deprive the body of food and water for very long. And equally we are more manipulated by propagandists than we perhaps like to think. There is a big difference between believing that you have free will and actually having it. Furthermore, freedom, just like probability, follows a fixed rule, but the rule does not always have to be known. People can sometimes act as if they are free without knowing the constrictions that are upon them. Even the act of choosing has prior determinants, such as why we are in the position to do the choosing in the first place. Much of it will be largely unknown to us, it will involve determinants that we never see or hear. Our past is determined but our future has a probability-based predetermination dependent upon our experiential reference points. But as we shall see, God did not create a world in which unknowable things constitute unpurposeful things, nor did He create a world in which determinism deprives us of the capacity to change the course of things. Our changing the course is part of the determinism that we are discussing, for we have a providential guiding hand that is using us to make history and shape future events. In the second place, our capacity to choose and to impact upon the world is dependent upon determinism in the first place; that is, we must have uniformity or at least predictability to realise the course of many of our choices. 

 

Atheists often say that we Christians cannot escape the ‘religious’ conditions under which we have been brought up, but in truth, most faith-based viewpoints cannot really escape the underlying bias that supports them. This isn’t so problematical for many other subjects, but theology is affected by it, as the only way that one could have an entirely non-biased view would be to bring them up in a place that has never heard of the concept of God, and I do not think such a place exists.  But that means the same is true of atheism – whatever reasons one has for being an atheist, those reasons are bound up by their perceptions of deism or theism and the environment in which such perceptions were engendered, so equally the only way that an atheist could have an entirely non-biased position would be if he had never been introduced to any kind of theism or deism. But this, of course, produces a tautology, for if he had had no experience of deism or theism there would be no a-deism or a-theism.  Therefore never let any atheist disparage your Christian beliefs by telling you that they are founded on what you have distilled from your culture because, the truth of he matter is, so are his.  

 

Almost every aspect of our personality and behaviour is derived from our culture; genetics does influence personality, but it only shapes what nurture provides (the phenotype is the genotype interacting with the environment, a bit like how a piano and pianist come together to produce beautiful concertos). However, I would suggest that it is more accurate to say that genetics provides the medium and potential to which the environment (nurture) gives form; the different impacts of genetics and nurture on the personality phenotype is, as most things, a question of balance.

 

The brain is different from other organs.  Although its general structure is determined by genetics, the embryonic constituent grows as a big mass of interconnected nerves, which is sculpted by our genetics, and which kill certain regions to give the common human brain architecture.  Moreover, the brain changes considerably more over time than other organs, due to plasticity.  Throughout life, experience dictates the strengthening and weakening of neural connections, and whilst the macroscopic architecture of the brain stays much the same (although this can also change) the specific connections from which our personality arises are very much a matter of nurture.  In other words, when I said a moment ago that genetics shapes what nurture provides, I meant that the genetic components of, say, mental illness and antisocial behaviour (as determined from separated twin studies) is merely a factor but not a basis in personality.  Take, for example, the short MAOA gene variant which correlates with antisocial behaviour.  Not all people with this gene variant become anti-social; it is mostly only those that have had a traumatic childhood.

 

In summary, the actions of a man are never really free; they are always the necessary consequence of his temperament; of the received ideas; of the notions of happiness, either true of false, which he has formed himself; and of his opinions, strengthened by example, by education, and by daily experience. Man, then, is not a free agent in any one instant of his life, he is necessarily guided in each step by those advantages, whether real of fictitious, that he attaches to the objects by which his passions are roused. These passions themselves are necessary in a being who unceasingly tends towards his own wisdom, security and happiness. So we really do see that the world which atheists claim exists is not really the world that actually does exist. For if by existence they are claiming that the future has no inscrutable happenings hidden in its pocket - that the reality we called ‘the past’ and ‘the present’ is the only totality that we can consider with certainty, then they are living in a very different world to the one I am living in. 

 

Although the cognitive framework around which I build my Christian sense-making is affirmed and choreographed by the Holy Spirit living in me, the choices I have remain ambiguous as far as anything goes beyond the initial moment of choosing; Psalm 139:16 says that God knows all our days in advance, yet we live one at a time. Let us say for example that I am now getting ready to go out for the evening, and I have to choose in which of two pubs I shall spend the evening - The King’s Head or The Red Lion. And now, let us make the impossible situation real - the situation that the choice is made twice over and each time a different pub is chosen, so we get to observe the results of both choices. Imagine that you see the result of my first choice, say, The King’s Head, and then the result of my second choice, The Red Lion - you are observing two alternative realities. You see me in The King’s Head and the other me in The Red Lion. 

 

Now if you have a deterministic viewpoint regarding the universe, it means that you believe one of these alternatives to have been impossible all along; impossible because of the intrinsic accidental irrationality somewhere involved in it. But observing both, you cannot say which one is accidental or irrational. Even the most fervent determinist could not have the first clue as to which one was impossible; in fact, it is beyond the scope of man. It is distinctly probable that each alternative (after the fact) would seem as plausible as the other, so therefore there is no criterion by which we can judge one as certain and one as a matter of chance. 

 

Suppose we now assume my choice, once made, to be forever. I arrived at the King’s Head, and good determinists should say that therefore I could not have gone to The Red Lion, and had I have done so it would have been a huge incongruity in the whole of nature. Before my choice, either pub seemed perfectly natural, but the deterministic hypotheses is not wholly satisfactory. There would have been, in my mind, through my experiences, something stronger within my instincts that directed me towards one pub or the other, and the things that would be directing me would be things that favoured one particular pub. 

 

We do not live in a world that is wholly deterministic or wholly non-deterministic, nor a world with wholly chance factors, nor wholly random either.   So we are left with a mix of all four – a world perceived by humans as laws and facts, with the whole mix of determinism and non-determinism and chance and randomness overseen by our Creator God. And depending on the levels at which we perceive things, we shall see differing levels of complexity and predictability. Nature presents us with a multitude of phenomena which appear chaotic and random until we ascertain particulars of events and crystallise them into a true exhibition of their structure. In one sense, knowing as we do that God is behind the created order and created it with a clear blueprint in mind, our primary sense-making processes involve looking at phenomena as if there were messages or information or instructions waiting to be deciphered. And of course, in order to do this we must be aware of an a priori sense of logic underwriting the whole creation process – a set of truths on which such laws and facts can run. Interestingly enough the role of intelligence in determining how this sense-making is encoded and from which sets of messages or information or instructions the ontological framework is constructed means that to the greatest degree reality is implicit in mind, and this is why I favour an Idealist philosophy – a philosophy that the external world is itself mind; reality is the mind of God, and creation is one vast thought in the Divine mind. 

 

Given the foregoing analysis, it is not too difficult to contemplate the concept of God’s guiding hand (the deterministic element) and man’s free will (the unpredictable element) working together contemporaneously. The closer we get to uncovering the supposed mystery of determinism and randomness existing contemporaneously the more the situation sits concomitantly with the Divine supervision – in fact, we can certainly see how with the will of God they are compatible, because there is something else we must now consider.

 

Having seen how determinism and randomness work together, we must now consider a very important correlative question; how does God load the quantum dice to have a random yet uniform world as well as having the difficulty of human minds that can affect things in the cosmos with God kindled free will? Do you see the problem we are faced with?  Is the future really left up to us while all the time being guided by God? If we answer yes, we are saying that there is purpose without precise preordination. We can say that whatever happens as a result of our free choices it is all going to lead to an outcome which is both planned and supervised by our Heavenly Father. God created time and masters it, while allowing us free will within our linear understanding of creation.

 

Now obviously when it comes to things within God’s creation, we are not going to be able to see everything that is behind those things; therefore there will be seemingly random patterns that are non-probabilistic to the Creator but probabilistic to humans zooming in at the earthly level. And certainly, as I have already suggested, if you go back a few thousand years there will be laws, regulations, events and circumstances that we were totally ignorant about, that now we know the ordinances behind - that is to say, with greater knowledge laws, regulations, events and circumstance become less probabilistic as we develop the technology to zoom in on them or frame them in their wider context. 

 

Having established earlier that a stochastic system can produce the ‘random yet uniform’ cosmos, we are now ready to tackle the question; what about free-thinking minds - how do they fit into the picture? It might be helpful to see how God harmonises the two by thinking about it in the following way; regarding an electron in quantum mechanics a position measurement is indeterministic because it is free to choose among a limited range of possibilities. On the other hand the measuring itself is contingent on whether one is measuring ‘position’ or ‘momentum’ - that is to say, the nature of the alternatives is fixed by an external agent - the one doing the measuring. To make this clearer, imagine a game in which you have to guess which whole number I am thinking of between 1 and 250 - you only have 20 questions or guesses and I can only answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Imagine your questions begin as follows….

 

Imagine your questions begin as follows….

 

The Divine analogue here is that God determines certain uniform facts about creation and what other options are available in any given system, but a variety of subsystems in which randomness plays a part too in choosing among several alternatives. The freedom of the individuals’ choices is much the same; it is freedom within a set of ordinances that are statistically part of a uniform plan - an end result that has already been predetermined by God outside of creation. To use a simple coin-tossing example, even though God already knows which way the coin will land before I throw it, for a mind like my own, subjected to the limitations of creation, the result is still beforehand an unpredictable 50-50. 

 

God has set up creation, generating a system in which determinism, randomness, chance and free will are compatible, and as we have seen, this makes for an exciting reality to contemplate, as well as a fairly clear concept of free will. The key to understanding both has been in beginning the enquiry the right way round, by asking the three most fundamental questions first; Who are we? Who created us? And what system did He put in place?