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Article Excerpt
The most astonishing logical paradox ever to be cherished by man is
presented in the circumstance that the theologists, convinced that God in his omnipotence had predetermined the fate of every man, and in his omniscience had from the beginning of time foreseen that fate, should yet hold to the belief that he nevertheless holds every man responsible for his action, rewarding him either with eternal beatitude or eternal punishment. For theology the invention of free will to which culpability could be assigned only formalized the complete abandonment of reason in order to keep the system in operation. --Homer W. Smith, Man And His Gods
Long after they have cast aside their belief in gods and angels and fairies, many people still cling tenaciously to a stubborn belief in one last will-o'-the-wisp--the phantom of free will. To challenge the doctrine of free will is to stir up a storm of protest so intense as to make one think, by comparison, that publicly denying the existence of the gods themselves could not produce a breeze strong enough to dislodge the dew from a lightning rod on a church steeple. Many otherwise rational people think it immoral--or at least un-American--to deny that people act "freely" when acting willfully. Although I risk inciting to disaffection many of the people who have expressed admiration for some of my previous articles, I must now focus my 'Probing Mind' upon the question, "Can will be free?"
Let me answer the question straightaway with a firm "no," and then attempt to support my conclusion. But to reassure my horrified readers that at least I was not born a free-will miscreant, and to fix the blame for my present debauched state, I must note that for a year or so after I had become an Atheist (at Kalamazoo College), I still defended the idea of free will in my disputes with theists and Atheists alike. It was only after I had transferred to the University of Michigan that I became convinced that the idea of free will was indefensible. The blame for my fall from grace rests firmly upon Homer W. Smith, whose book Man And His Gods [Grosset's Universal Library, 1952, 1956] ranks along with Alfred Jules Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic [Dover Publications, Inc., 1946] as one of the two most influential books I have ever read.
Although Smith devoted 444 pages to a summary of the evolutionary interaction between philosophy, religion, and science, he needed only several paragraphs to dispatch from my mind forever the notion that will can be free. I would like to quote the relevant paragraphs here--and leave it to my readers to estimate how many philosopher's clocks have been cleaned by Smith's lucid logic.
To challenge "free will" was to challenge the foundations not only of orthodox theology, but in large measure of all transcendentalism. If human decisions, however directly or deviously arrived at, were 'determined' solely by pre-existing knowledge, predilections, predispositions, emotions, memories, desires, by any or all of the multiplicity of mental images afforded to consciousness by the external and internal organs of sense, then it followed that an individual elects one course of action in preference to another, not by 'willful choice,' but simply because consciousness presents a balance positively weighted on the side of the selected action. Hence personal culpability would cease to exist, divine punishment and reward would be both monstrous and absurd, morality would be a convention, sin would be an arbitrary condemnation, the grace of the church would be superfluous and that institution could better devote itself to liberal education. For the naturalists, free will was a countersense, a verbal contradiction. To 'will' is to choose a course of action in which more than one course is potentially presented, and to choose one course of action as opposed to another requires not only knowledge of alternatives, but reason for the choice. Decision (de + caedere, to cut off) without reference to cause or consequence of that which is rejected or accepted could only refer to an act occurring in a referential vacuum, and if such could be conceived it could only be designated as an action issuing from nothing at all, ab nihilo, from absolute ignorance. Since willing can never be free of knowledge of either cause or consequence, it can never be free at all. (Man And His Gods, pp. 409-410)
Theoretically, I could end this article right here, and let Homer Smith's argument stand by itself. But so much has happened in the realm of science since 1952 when Smith wrote the above, and the implications of the argument are so far-reaching, that I must expand the discussion.
Before we consider specific problems inherent in the notion that will can be free (i.e., uncaused or indeterminate), it is worth noting that psychology as a science would be impossible if behavior could occur without causation. If I may be permitted to ignore the complex and confusing case of quantum physics, it can be said that all of science is a quest seeking to relate effects to their causes. Psychology would either cease to...
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