Freedom and our perception of free will

Those that say free will is an illusion are normally implying that it is we humans that are exposed to an illusion. The trouble here is that we cannot exactly separate ourselves from the illusory image. We are not constrained by the mechanistic properties of our bodies; we ‘are’ the mechanistic properties of our bodies, and given that laws, facts and patterns are inextricably coupled with the structure of mind and probability (particularly given that any assigned meaning or law that is connected to reality requires a mind on which run), I hold the view that cosmic reality is structured by a pre-existing sentience, to which the Person ‘God’ must be attributed. There are, of course, many other reasons why I believe in God, but on this particular subject, reality to me gives the appearance of being one great cosmic sentience. 

 

Let me just remind you that with regard to determinism and freedom, there are those who will complain that strict determinism usurps our own personal choices in every way except in our immediate consciousness. However, this hardly denies the ‘chance’ factor regarding our decisions - after all, if I decide tomorrow that I am going to sell my computer on E-bay, I cannot at this point be sure what the outcome will be. But in the deterministic sense, all thoughts of what ‘should’ or ‘could’ happen are invalidated by the fact that they never actually ‘can’ happen if they are not in the deterministically inevitable reckoning. In fact, even if we only consider our own personal choices, we are still left with events and situations that are not fully chosen by us. If a doctor strikes your knee with a wooden hammer, it does not follow that you have chosen to raise your lower leg. And also, many of the things we choose to do are hardly things that we would call ‘voluntary’ - sudden outbursts of feeling are not exactly voluntary acts. Wherever we look we find that the theoretic life and the active life are swinging like a pendulum; and when it comes to free will and determinism, the rise of either can send the other crashing down.

 

It could be argued that nothing we do is really done with freedom. If something is done ‘of necessity’ then it is not free in the sense of choosing, and if it is done in a way that is not ‘of necessity’, we are still referring to acts that are part of the uniformity of nature and we cannot really avoid thinking this way because there are no exceptions to them. Every act after the big bang is an instance of some causal law or antecedent, and this is the uniformity that we are discussing. We can, of course, alter the contention slightly and bring in a new context; that is, we can say that we as humans are free but the act itself is not - we are free to do some things but not others. We are free to blink whenever we choose, but we are not free to rub our nose on our own elbow (it is physically impossible). So therefore we are free in certain actions only, but of course, we are only free in relation to our own universal laws. Our universal laws, that is, the trajectory of the cosmos since the big bang, has not permitted us to rub our nose on our elbow. We are also free to do an act, but with many acts, we will only do the act if we want to - so in that respect, we are also subservient to the ultimate law, for if the law leads us to a neurogenic disposition where we do not desire to do something, we are conditioned by that law, simply because if we did not want to do something, we may not even think of such a thing. 

When observing the behaviour of humans we see various actions which show the true nature of man’s fragile cognitive fluctuations, particularly when there is limited discipline, either moral or spiritual. For example, we have seen in various psychological experiments how people lose their sense of individuality when put to the test (deindividuation), as observed in crowd surges or mob groups, and we have seen how anonymity changes a person’s feelings towards their counterparts, as observed in internet chat rooms, tribal wars and masked barbarism. It involves the belief that if a man’s identity is stripped from the forefront of his consciousness he is capable of the most base and immoral behaviour. We see this happening with many of today’s youths, they are suffering from a lack of identity, they do not love themselves, they have low self-esteem and they certainly do not love the world or feel very much part of it. The social cascade effect can be found to be operating in most areas of life. Many people find themselves too influenced by other people and their thoughts and actions; thus it is common to think and act on the basis of what others have done or on the basis of what is popular. This is not a direct infringement of the freedom afforded to us, but it does go to show that external influences, however subtle, will have a bigger influence on us than it is perhaps desired. 

 

Those who believe in God are asked to reconcile seemingly chance events with providential determinism, for we Christians agree that the true nature of the universe is written by God and already complete in the providential domain (see Psalm 139 as an example). Spinning a coin involves chance with my perception but certainty with God’s. But we must be careful when thinking about this, otherwise we shall end up thinking wrong things about chance and certainty. Are we saying that God decided which lives would be lost when the Tsunami occurred? Had He already decided that Judas Iscariot would fulfil a prophecy by betraying Jesus and be consigned to Hell for doing so? What we are really asking is this; is God pulling the strings of every event at every moment with a conscious desire that each event happens? Almost certainly not, for I do not think we would wish to say that with a conscious desire God was pulling the string that caused a little girl to fall into a fire and die, or that He was willing the massacres in Burma to take place, or Baby P’s torture and death. 

 

It seems that human-orientated events are the fundamental way in which we can separate the will of God from the actions of His creation, and we should have no qualms about doing so, for we do not say that God ‘is’ everything - we say that God ‘creates’ everything, whether it be God alone in the initial stages or God working through created beings, but we certainly do not say for example that the malfunction of a fax machine is a malfunction of God, or that the tumbling of a rock is the tumbling of God. He does not consciously wish for evils and tragedies, but such is His grace that all occurrences of them are incorporated into His much greater plan; in fact, when there is one element of tragedy, you can be sure that there are more elements of grace than we can possibly envisage.

 

God has a plan for us and He already loved each and every one of us even before we were born. The reality of existence is that often things are random and unpredictable to us but not to God. But that does not tell the whole story. There are many things in biology, physics and chemistry, which are random and unpredictable. All my genes are determined by my father and mother and it was a chance process that caused fertilisation. But this does not mean that the chance factor of my DNA was not guided by my Creator, far from it. As humans with a limited and very sparse sampling of the whole reality, we must acknowledge that the ‘whole’ plans of the Divine are by their very nature beyond human analysis and are a total picture beyond human understanding. Every moment of your life consists of thousands of unknown factors which played a small part in your being where you are at any particular moment. 

 

We live in a world where unpredictability plays an important role in our own analysis of things but where God’s will surpasses our understanding of things. Bad things can happen which are part of a chain of events which bring about very good things. Every nation has a unique place in the world today; each one is very different and plays a very important role in world affairs. Each nation is how it is today because of hundreds of billions of decisions made throughout the history of time; and, of course, in this country alone we could change just one tenth or one twentieth of all those decisions and see the whole nation changed beyond recognition.

 

It seems to me that there are things which are so inevitable that one cannot change our own perception of them. Do you remember at school when teachers showed you the famous Hering illusion? It consists of two vertical lines superimposed on various other lines, all of which radiate from one point. Even though we know perfectly well that the vertical lines are straight (they can be checked with a ruler), we still see them as curved. Similarly there are many other diagrams in psychology which present an image which is perceived by us to be wholly different to that which we are actually seeing. If it is inevitable that I am going to see two straight lines as curved lines in the Hering illusion, then I do not have the freedom to change what I see. Perhaps the best explanation for the situation I have just described and other enforced perceptions is that we have evolved over a period where our perceptual methods force us to see things in a certain way; thus, in the case of the external world and the things we observe, we know of atoms but we have not been brought up to see things at an atomic level. If we had, our perception of things like density, capacity and solidity would be very different.  

 

We certainly feel that we are free agents. As I sit here, there is very likely nothing stopping me from walking to the shop for a pint of milk. Even the things which are deterministically unknown to me do not stop me from feeling free to take such an action. I should imagine that the scientists who are convinced that free will is a complete illusion would have a hard job proving it beyond reasonable doubt. My desire for a pint of milk (in the internal realm) is able to bring about a seemingly unimpeded action to go to the shop and buy some milk (in the external realm). Thus I do not think it is possible for scientists to prove that this crossing from the realm of desire to the realm of doing is an illusion; it certainly seems that it is no illusion. 

 

If we feel that we are free, it makes us free unless we enter into the foray of intangible realities, such as - what it is that made me think of buying some milk, or indeed, of desiring some milk. It might be true that at a sub-neurological level (a level beyond our conscious control) we are bound by deterministic factors; in fact, that might even be true of our own feelings, after all, as I have said, we cannot stop the occurrence of feelings such as anger, jealousy, guilt or insecurity when they occur. But despite our inability to consciously control or construct certain facets of our emotions, there is another sense in which we can act against our free will, and it this that I will look at next. 

Being our all-loving Creator who knows how to bless us, God has laid down various instructions for us to live the best life possible, many of which are contrary to the wishes of those who do not have a relationship with Him. There are many things that God does not permit that national law does not permit either, so according to both God’s law and parliamentary law, I am not free to steal or vandalise people’s property or murder. But there are, of course, actions that the law of the land does not prohibit but that God’s desire for my betterment and my good health would prohibit, such as selfishness, uncharity, rudeness, getting drunk, smoking or overeating on junk food on a regular basis. God does not want me to do these things because He wants the best for me, just as He doesn’t want me worshipping false gods, becoming materialistic, or losing my temper quickly (all of which I am perfectly entitled to do as a free citizen in this country). So in the sense that I am living for God first and not for myself, I have made a decision not to exercise my free will in various areas of my life if such actions are not of His will, or if they do not confer His blessing upon me. 

 

By forgoing some of the things that my free will enables me to do, I am assenting to God’s will and living a life that will give me blessedness and wisdom. God loves us enough to give us freedom, after all, a bothersome God who was tangibly present in every decision we made would be not so loving, He would be forever convicting us of thought crime, the absolute definition of a tyranny. Real freedom allows us to experience things as a result of our thoughts and actions. In that sense we are free; free to understand the consequences of good thoughts and actions and bad thoughts and actions putting them together so that we grow into better creatures. Real virtue, real pleasure and real growth can only come to beings that were free to go wrong. All the things that God has made special are things which we can experience by growth. 

 

And this is it; this has been the point of creation all along. We are to the greatest degree free to live as we please (human imposed limitations excepted), but pleasure - true pleasure - comes from knowing our God who created us and gave us such freedom. The religion of self-worship is all very nice while it lasts, but it cannot last; nobody was created to worship the self. Our freedom was given to us in the hope that we would choose the miraculous; that we would come to see that the world is full of miraculous activity, if only we will look around for it. If we are predisposed to reject the miraculous, we shall very likely disbelieve in it even if a miracle occurs, after all, the senses are not infallible and they are the only tool for observing miracles. It is not so different to sleep. Light sleepers are often in an in-between state; that is, half way between stuporous and awake. Belief that you are awake is only valid if you really are awake - there are many factors occurring in sleep that can make you think you are awake. 

 

And that is how we should approach the miraculous dialectic between free will and Divine guidance, we should look for evidence that both freedom and Divine guidance is occurring. And just as it is true that for every true claim of the miraculous there could well be many more that are either hallucination, illusion or a lie, it is equally true that each time we feel (or think we feel) the Divine hand at work, we are not just gazing at a truth that simply makes a strange coincidence out of an event, we are stumbling upon the truth of creation itself.