Friday, July 26, 2013

Determinism or Free Will - What Shapes our Ends?

I'm sure I don't know whether it is determinism or free will that prescribes our destiny. The determinist school would have us believe that forces external to our being assume responsibility for what eventually happens to us. The free will school conversely insists that our intellect and will power shape our ends. Both sides have credible supporting arguments. Could it then be that both determinism and free will jointly draw our life map? I'm not sure. Let's look at the arguments on both sides and see if we can make some sense of the entire dialectic.
 
Every person has an intellect - don't worry that some are better than others - in addition to a will. These two things, intellect and will, help each individual to make choices and decisions to guide themselves. They can choose on one afternoon to have ravioli for snack rather than pizza; they can choose to travel to Chicago from Portland by train or by bus. By processing relevant information with the intellect and then resolving by force of will to do something, these individuals go about step by step along their life path, making decisions as they go. Existentialists largely endorse the free will paradigm. For them, an individual is born without a predestination. Such an individual simply surges up in the world based on the conscious choices they progressively make. That being the case, everyone is ultimately responsible for what becomes of them in the end.
 
The determinist paradigm on the other hand posits that everyone, regardless of the fact that they have intellect and free will, makes decisions based on the compelling forces of the environment they live in. Sometimes, they do not even get to make decisions, but decisions are made for them. Depending on the external realities of the space and time in which they live, individuals can proceed on one life path or another. In other words, the fact that person A decided to have ravioli instead of pizza was simply because the cafĂ© down the street had only ravioli at the time; and because they were already running late for work and did not want to upset their boss, they simply went with ravioli. Or, even though person B wanted to take the train from Portland to Chicago, circumstances prevented them from doing so, thus compelling them to take the bus instead.
 
Authors like Rhonda Byrne are more likely to go with the free will paradigm. Some Christian authors as well would go along with free will, probably for different reasons. While authors like Byrne would espouse the free will paradigm because it shows that we are powerful enough to take hold of the Secret of personal success, Christian theologians would endorse free will because it tallies with the concept of individual responsibility for sin. On the last day, what gives God justification in condemning a sinner or rewarding a saint is free will. The sinner consciously chose to do evil, just like the saint consciously chose to do good, and so both are justifiably dealt the hand they deserve. Indeed, the concept of free will is needed to explain the existence of an imperfect world created by a perfect God.
 
Some social scientists, philosophers and theologians on the other hand endorse determinism. They insist that even what appears to be like the free exercise of rational will is simply determinism at play. So for example a person walks into a shop and can choose to have either a bagel or a muffin. They choose to have a muffin. Free will advocates would say, "There you go, you see - they made a free choice!" Determinist scholars conversely would say, "Now hang on a minute - the reason they chose muffin over bagel was owing to the presence of a number of intervening variables: for starters, the fact that there were only two choices, bagel and muffin; if there was say, cake, they might have gone with that instead of muffin. Also, they might already have had bagel for breakfast and wanted a muffin for midday snack. Besides, their doctor might have warned them that they could develop a medical problem or another if they did not refrain from eating muffins.
 
Determinists stretch their argument further by saying that God would not be justified in condemning anyone to hell, or rewarding anyone with heaven for that matter, because no one can actually be held responsible for what they do on earth. The environment alone should be blamed. Yet this argument is inconclusive because two individuals presented with exactly the same environment can behave differently. Take a set of identical twins for example. They are born to the same parents, go to the same school, live in the same house, are taught the same things - everything about them, the same; yet, one could become a good person and the other could be sinister. In such a case, can we not conclude that it was free choice at play? The determinist would say no. We cannot be sure that the two individuals, twins though they may be, had exactly the same experiences. On a certain day, the food one of them ate might have been accidentally poisoned, while the food the other ate might have been sound. Also, some accidental biological mutation occurring in one but not the other could lead that one to do evil, while the other persisted in doing good. If we do not know exactly the biological, social and environmental programming of each, we cannot say for certain that determinism was absent.
 
Again free will advocates would say, "But in a certain instant, two ordinarily good people may choose to behave differently. So for example person A and person B both got slapped across the face. While person A slapped back, person B did not. Is that not free will at work?" Determinists would say not necessarily. It may be that person A ordinarily would not slap back, but because they had been slapped very many times already that day alone, they had reached their limit, whereas for person B that was their first slap of the day and so it was easy for them not to react. Determinists could also throw in the concept of self perception, whereby person A may see themselves as morally justified in that specific instance to retaliate, while person B might think the contrary. So, the arguments keep going back and forth between determinists and free will advocates.
 
Let's transcend these two schools and see if we can find a way to explain what shapes our ends without resorting to determinism or free will. This transcendent explanation will give God the justification for rewarding the saints and condemning the sinners. It will also make it easier for us to want to do good all the time. This explanation will glorify our rational capacity and make us believe that we are greater than animals, and have the joy of participating in the divinity. I developed this explanation for myself. It is teleological, and I obtained it by mixing a few teachings from Dianetics, Iyanla Vanzant's concept of the soul and Christian theology. It is neither determinism nor free will. Yet it somehow nods to both.
 
Now, imagine conceptual reality as a broad field. Let us take for granted the existence of God. I know in saying this I've already lost those who do not believe in God or the afterlife. A philosopher once said he saw the souls of atheists sleeping deeply at the mouth of hades. They neither entered into paradise nor into hell, because they were conscious of neither. Anyway. For those that believe in God and the afterlife, we shall start by taking for granted the concept of God, and ascribe to this divinity all the attributes accorded by Anselm, Aquinas and Bonaventure. In short, the divinity is infinite in perfection, above which can exist nothing of superior merit. God, the creator of the broad field of conceptual reality has a purpose for it. For the divinity this purpose endures, because of the absence of time in God's mind. Past, present and future - all there was, all there is and all there will be are one and the same for God. All the possible options there are, transcendent of the limitations of time and space, exist in the mind of God. The broad field of conceptual reality - of everything possible - as created by God - infinitely supreme and infinitely perfect - exists inside God oblivious of spatial or temporal limit.
 
Now, we all are made in the image of this God. Ideally then, we all participate in the omnipotent and omniscient eternal spirit, transcendent of time and space. Ideally, we know all things and see all things. We traverse all the realms there are by our participation in God's spirit which lives inside us. 1 Corinthians 6:19a says: "Don't you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God?" This spirit within us makes us God-like. Now, before God gave our souls to be enfleshed, the divinity consulted with us. Because the capacity for say, A was left unfulfilled in soul A, God in consultation with our will entrusted that capacity to us, in an amplified or a reduced state - depending on what soul A did with it previously. The new capacity B, a true part of God's eternal capacity is enfleshed in soul B. All this happens before soul B is born, and in consultation with soul B. In the parable of the talents, the master entrusted his gifts to the servants "each according to their ability" (Matt 25:15). The Greek word for "ability" as used here is dunamis, related to dunasthai, which can be loosely translated as character or will power.
 
Clearly then, the enfleshing of God's capacity is done in consultation with the pre-conceived soul. God has a habit of consulting with us before acting. In Genesis 18:17, God says: "Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?" All through the bible, we see God consulting with common people about the divine plan, to get these people on board: Moses, Joshua, Jacob, Maria Regina Angelorum, and so forth. In view of the foregoing hence, we can argue that the very fact that we were conceived by agreeing to God's enfleshing of part of the divine spirit means that we become ultimately responsible for whatever we do. This reality is both deterministic and free-will-situated. It's like entering into a contract with a firm. At the start of the contract, you append your signature to the legal document on which the contract is written, making a nod of will and intellect to the provisions of the binding agreement. As life goes on, those provisions begin to determine behavioral outcomes.
 
And so if someone were to ask me for example, "Samuel, are you sure you are acting of your own free will in this instance?" If I said yes, I would be right, because from the get-go, even before I was conceived, I freely agreed to become human, so as to do God's will. If I said no, I would also be right, because my soul's circumstances are fashioned in such a limited way as to ensure I do God's will and learn my soul's lesson. By being conscious of that eternal purpose and its lesson, freedom of choice is increased, and vice versa. This situation of yes and no being both correct for a yes-and-no question is called the no-wrong-answer situation, and it reminds one of a classic statement made by Henry Ford: "Whether you think you can or you can't - either way, you're right."
 
So, if you wonder why such and such a bad thing happened to such and such a good person, the answer is that the very fact that they agreed to become a human being made them responsible for the hazards of the form, humanity. Think of the Holocaust, which we talked about yesterday. Imagine a young Jewish girl - imagine say, Anne Frank. On the day the Nazi eventually surprised her and her family, they were probably doing everything right, "choosing" all the right actions: making less noise, conducting their affairs in quiet, and so forth, but the police-folk came for them still. Or take the example of Job in the bible. He did everything right. Whenever his children had dined together, he would perform their cleansing ritual. He always walked blamelessly and prudently, and yet God sent him vicious plagues; plagues so painful that he cursed the day of his own birth. Yet all he was doing was unknowingly participating in the divine plan, having previously signed on to become human.
 
But you may ask: What possible lesson could the 6 million Jews that lost their lives in the Holocaust be slated by God to learn? I don't know. Each soul's lesson is unique, and the path each takes toward learning it is similarly unique. Some lessons are also attained in community, and some people learn by observing the fortunes or misfortunes of individuals or communities. All of this is in the mind of God who, though we humans do not know everything, does know all there has been, all there is and all there will be. Aquinas sees the universe in all its ramifications as being perfectly adequated to the mind of God, albeit imperfectly adequated to ours, with some human minds being more in tune with the universal truths than others are. For Aristotle, the gradation of the human intellectual capacity for abstraction from particulars to universals is ratified by what Aquinas would call the "degrees of perfections of things," his fourth thesis in his proofs of the existence of God.
 
The broad concept of reality perfectly contained in the mind of God, whose spirit dwells within us, and to which we subscribe willingly through faithfully participating in God's plan for creation is temporally delimited for each individual soul by God - and is in that sense deterministic - but is also freely chosen ab initio by us and God, for our own good, and is in this sense free-will-situated. Regardless of what happens to us in life, through faith, as long as we are doing our best to tow the path God wants for us, we may rest assured that it is for our own good and in keeping with the agreement we entered into with God even before we were "formed in our mother's womb" (Jer 1:5). Recall in this regard that "all things work together for the good of those that are called to God's purpose (Rom 8:28). The broad concept of reality that we can never fully know as humans is made manifest to us through faith in God that can and does know it. Our task is therefore to ask the divine will for guidance in prayer, and strive to satisfy ourselves that to the best of our limited knowledge we are doing its will. Jesus said several times in the Gospel that all he was concerned about was to do the will of God. This also should be our paramount concern. I think it was Augustine that said: Love, and then do as you please. Similarly, with a foundational desire to do God's will, all our actions, proceeding from this place of cooperation with the divine will, will be good to the best of our knowledge. And God will judge us based on this, our conscience bearing witness to the same.
 
So, ultimately for me the argument is not about whether it is determinism or free will that prescribes our destiny. For me it is our agreement with God, whose all-knowing spirit within us guides our actions, and our faith in the divine will plus our willingness to do its bidding that shapes our destiny for the good. Conversely, our refusal or disdain for the divine will means that we perennially grope in vain for illumination; that we deny the presence of the abiding intellect, Augustine's inner teacher, Aristotle's agent intellect, and Aquinas' perfect adequation. We may excuse sin as simply a product of determinism; we might say that our actions are only beholden on us if they fall into the category of profligate human will and not mistakes or indiscretions made due to limited knowledge or ontological actions determined by forces external to our souls. But whether we want our souls to sleep for eternity at the mouth of hades, or join the saints in heaven or the sinners in hell, we can be sure I don't know whether determinism or free will determines our ends. All I have is faith in a perfect God.
 
 

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