A MATTER OF CHOICE

In the initial post I said that becoming an agnostic was not a choice that I made.  Rather, it was a choice that occurred to me.  Let me try to explain what I meant by that.

First of all, by choice I mean free will.  I know that I spent entirely too much time my freshman year of college arguing with friends about free will versus determinism.  But I have to admit to fond memories of those nights spent sitting around dorm rooms interminably debating these things.  Each of us, I’m sure, felt that he had the better argument, but no one convinced anyone else and no one changed his mind--at least not at the time.  Sound familiar?  

By that point in my life, I always found myself arguing on the side of determinism or at least the denial of free will. 
That’s where we may differ.  Based on comments and reactions that I have received from family and friends, I may be the only person I know well who accepts that free will is an illusion.  

Just to step back a moment, you may ask what this has to do with skepticism.  And I will say that my denial of free will is fundamental to, or at least a basic consequence of, my worldview and is very much interwoven with my views on religion.  In that regard, I hope you will understand that my goal here is not to change your mind about free will but rather to help you understand how my views on free will are related to the other beliefs I hold, particularly concerning religion.  It might also give you a little insight into how I think in general.  I hope you will bear with me on this one.

So now I’m asking you to go back and revisit those arguments and ask yourself what your reasons were for supporting free will.  Was it because you had been taught that you were created by God with the freedom to choose?  Remember that I am not impressed by appeals to authority:   accepting the truth of something simply because a trusted authority--the Bible, religious leader, parent, teacher--proclaims it.  I don’t say that to be contrary or hurtful.  It is simply fundamental to my worldview that any assertion needs to be substantiated through observation, experimentation, and rational argument.  This is, if I might say it, the essence of skepticism.

Or does your belief in free will stem from the idea that God is just and merciful and that it would be unfair, even cruel, if He had created us without the freedom to choose, left to trudge through life in accordance with a plan, if you will, to an end that was ordained all along.  Frankly, if God were loving--or even if He were evil or capricious--wouldn’t He get bored with a humanity that was just acting out a pre-scripted play?  If I were God, I know that I would want to leave things open.  Otherwise, it would be like watching the replay of a baseball game when I already know the final score.  Again, without an acceptance of belief in God, this argument doesn’t have much appeal.  You might contend that a compelling need for freedom of choice supports belief in God.  If we had neither freedom of choice nor a personal God to turn to, life might just be too brutal.  To which my response would be that, unfortunately, that’s just the way it is.  More on this later.

Of course, there’s the counterargument that our actions are determined because God is omniscient.  Because He knows the end from the beginning, He foresees what we are going to do, and therefore, though we may have a compelling sense of freedom of choice, it is just an illusion.  I suppose you could say that, since God can do anything, He could deny Himself that knowledge, sort of like our avoiding hearing how a game turned out until we watched the replay on TV.  Or you could just say that God simply isn’t omniscient.  After all, I suppose we can conceive of God any way that we want.  It should be clear to you that for evident reasons these arguments against freedom of choice have never had much appeal for me.

At this point you may say that, by denying the existence of God, I am setting my own rules for this debate and that, since you accept God’s existence without equivocation, you don’t need any additional evidence for the existence of free will.  I hope I have not lost you over this one.  Remember that I am not trying to change your mind about free will (though I wouldn’t mind a convert here or there).  Rather, I am just trying to have you understand my worldview and how my point of view on religion has informed my beliefs on a number of other issues.  I am only asking that you put your beliefs aside just long enough to follow me on this brief journey.

The most prevalent arguments in favor of free will that are not based on appeals to authority or on our conception of God, seem to be based simply on observation, this powerful feeling we have that we are the master of the choices that we make.  I think you will agree that this sense of control can be compelling.  For example, you go to a restaurant and look over the menu.  After deliberating, you select an entree and something to drink, and you order them.  Throughout the process you have this powerful sense that you are in control, that you considered a number of options and voluntarily made the choices that you did.  But of course there are any number of observations that seem self-evident that you now realize are not how things really are:  The world is not flat; the sun does not go around the earth; powerful optical illusions abound; you enjoy getting fooled by sleight-of-hand artists, knowing that you shouldn’t believe your eyes.  I’m not saying that none of our observations can be relied upon.  I’m just saying that they need to be viewed with skepticism and a demand for corroboration.

The real culprit here, I think, is consciousness.  I’m willing to bet that you don’t feel the same way about all the other activities that the brain controls or otherwise regulates.  You don’t feel you are exercising free will over routine autonomic responses, such as your heart rate or digestive activities.  And that is because they are not part of your consciousness.  You can become aware of these activities but, except for breathing, it is a passive awareness.  You don’t have a sense that you can voluntarily control them.  It is those activities that are in our “active” consciousness that we feel we have control of, that is, free will over.  So most people who believe in free will would be willing to accept, I think, that it doesn’t apply to unconscious activities.  Perhaps it is not too much to say that there’s a one-to-one correspondence between conscious behavior and free will--we have free will over whatever behavior we are conscious of.

It would be foolish to deny the existence of consciousness.  It is totally private, but we all experience it.  I have a field of vision; I hear sounds and make sense of them; I can fantasize; I dream.  The question is, What does consciousness do?  And I have convinced myself that it, in fact, does nothing.  What I mean by that is that I believe all of our behavior is the result of the biochemical activity of our nervous system and that consciousness, whatever it is, is simply along for the ride.  The name for this is epiphenomenalism.  (You can look it up if you like.)  Not everyone whose secular views I generally admire goes along with the idea of epiphenomenalism.  But the idea is basic for me, if only to help me to reconcile the absence of choice with the existence of consciousness.  

OK, perhaps we have drifted pretty far from our main goal and have wound up in water deeper than I intended.  I hope you don’t mind.  At the risk of confusing you even more, let me extend this argument just a bit further.  (If you’re bored, just skip the next couple of paragraphs; I don’t want to lose you altogether.)  

Take a simple physical act such as making a fist.  The making of a fist is a direct result of the contraction of certain muscles in your forearm.  That contraction, in turn, is the result of electro-chemical activity occurring between the muscles and the nerves running to those muscles.  Those electro-chemical reactions, in turn, are the result of other neural activity (really just more electro-chemical activity) extending down those nerves.  Ultimately, this activity can be traced back to the brain.  Pretty much nobody disputes this cause-and-effect sequence up to this point.  It’s in the brain that things get complicated, for certain.  However, based on the laws of chemistry and physics, it would seem that there is an unbroken chain of events leading back--everything that happens is the result of the prior state of events.  To suppose that there is a point in the process where the individual imposes his will is to argue that the will is outside of the operation of the laws of nature; otherwise the successive states of events before, at, and following the point of such “intervention” would have been caused by prior events, and so on going back in time.  Arguing for the intervention of the will is equivalent to saying that the laws of chemistry and physics work all the time everywhere except inside the human brain and only then when there is consciousness accompanying that brain activity.  I don’t buy it.  In short, the laws of nature operate with the same inexorable effect inside your brain as they do outside.  After all, our brains are just made of matter (atoms, molecules), just like everything else.

I know that the concept of determinism has run into trouble with the development of quantum physics which, among other things, posits a fundamental indeterminacy in the physical world.  Particles don’t in practice have a definite location or velocity, and at some level there is a true randomness in how the physical world works.  (Whether this is in fact the actual state of the world or is just a convenient operating model has been the basis for perhaps the greatest scientific debate of the last hundred years.) This indeterminacy principle has been used as a weapon in the battle in favor of free will.  However, regardless of whether indeterminacy really exists, I don’t think it helps the free will crowd.  To say that the future is not completely determined is not the same as saying that an individual has the ability, through some agency that he controls (the will), to override the laws of nature and change the course of the future.  Quantum physics posits an indeterminacy that leaves the future “open,” whereas free will assumes a nonrandom intervention--quite the opposite.

Maybe because I just can’t help myself (and of course if you have followed me this far, you know that I believe that I can’t), let me offer you one final line of argument.  Most people who believe in free will in humans would probably admit that a “lower” organism, such as an amoeba or a bacterium, does not have free will.  Would you argue that a particular strain of influenza virus chooses of its own free will whether to attack a human?  Admittedly, the biochemical reactions are complex, but that is all that they are.  Then it is a question of where to draw the line.  Do oysters have free will?  What about the venus fly trap?  Or a spider?  A cat?  A dog?  A chimpanzee?  Do you see how the increase in the likelihood of consciousness correlates with the sense of increased likelihood of freedom of choice?

At this point you may be thinking that I’m one of “those guys.”  For most of my friends, arguing against free will is seen at best as being difficult or dense and at worst as being intentionally contrary or argumentative--disagreeing with something that is self-evident just for the sake of disagreement.  Maybe this is not something we should argue about--no one ever changes his mind anyway.  Does anyone even listen?  If this topic comes up, does anyone really listen openly to the other point of view or does everyone just spend his time outlining arguments in favor of his own position, waiting for an opportunity to make them?  Besides, as we age we tend to interpret everything that happens to us as confirming rather than casting doubt on our existing point of view.  (I’m as guilty as the next person in this regard, though I at least am aware of my limitations.)  So it becomes even that much less likely that any argument is going to change or even give nuance to that worldview.  So why am I even rehashing this old debate?  Because, as I said, my denial of free will is fundamental to my worldview, and if I am going to explain my personal journey, then this needs to be a part of that.  

All of this raises a number of interrelated issues of extreme importance to me:  First, if we live in a godless universe without freedom of choice, do our lives have any meaning?  Second, how do we conduct our lives in the face of such a state of affairs?  What rules should govern our behavior?  Third, given that we do not have freedom of choice, how do we assign responsibility for our actions?  I hope you will stick with me on this.

© 2013 John M. Phillips