The Free Will Question Again

Last week I challenged the New York Times on its suggestion that human free will is no more than an illusion. One of the problems with that viewpoint is that if there is no such thing as free will, there is no such thing as rationality, which is an impossible place to arrive at rationally.

This seems patently obvious to me. The discussion on that post turned rather quickly, though, to a related but different issue: the difficulty of explaining rationality under a materialist view of the world (the view that there is nothing to the universe but matter, energy, and their law- or chance-based interactions; a denial of God and all spiritual reality).

That discussion continues, in fits and starts and with some detours. That's well and good, but I'd like to re-start the original question of free will and rationality here. By the way, the free will issue is not necessarily, at least to some thinkers, connected to materialism. Daniel Dennett believes materialism is not inconsistent with freedom of the will. (I disagree with him on that, but that's another matter.)

Joe Carter blogged recently on that same NY Times article. He closes it this way:

"My favorite line. . . comes from Harvard psychologist Dan Wegner:

"'"[Free will is] an illusion, but it’s a very persistent illusion; it keeps coming back," he said, comparing it to a magician’s trick that has been seen again and again. "Even though you know it’s a trick, you get fooled every time. The feelings just don’t go away."'

"And the cold, deterministic, materialist universe responds: 'Of course you get fooled every time, you bonehead. What'dya expect? After all, it’s not like you have a choice…'"

If you don't have a choice about anything, then you don't have a choice about anything. (That's exactly what the no-free-will viewpoint, or determinism, affirms.) You don't have a choice about what you believe. You don't have a choice about what you believe about what anyone else believes. You don't have a choice about what you believe about what you believe.

That means you cannot evaluate a belief, yours or anyone else's. If you believe you are evaluating a belief, but you cannot choose anything about how your evaluation proceeds, then you cannot choose a better belief over a weaker one. (You don't have a choice about anything, remember?) Your sense that you are evaluating a belief is as illusory as any other illusion you have about free will.

So let us suppose you have studied the experiments and the arguments, and you have concluded that there is no such thing as free will. How have you done this? Presumably you think you have evaluated the possible alternate beliefs; and that you have chosen that belief as somehow superior to the belief that there is such a thing as free will. But as we have just seen, in the preceding paragraph, there is no such thing (under determinism) as genuinely evaluating a belief and choosing that which is superior.

You are in the position of having to say, "After carefully evaluating the different beliefs, the conclusion I have chosen is that there is no such thing as evaluating different beliefs and choosing a conclusion." Or (the same thing in different words), "I have rationally decided that rationality is an illusion." This is as self-defeating as it could possibly be, which is one reason it seems so obvious to me that the no-free-will conclusion is absurd.

Why then do people pursue it anyway? I have my opinions on that, but I'll let you take a turn. Hint: I think it relates back to that materialist view of the universe, and to some sadly self-restricted ways people have undertaken to understand the universe.

Posted: Fri - January 12, 2007 at 09:56 PM |

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The Free Will Question Again

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson