What Is Free Will? (Or, Does the Nominal Believer Really Believe?)
The question of free will is whether, and in what sense, rational agents exercise control over their actions and decisions.
-Wikipedia, Free Will
Rational agents, by definition, act based on what they know and believe in order to maximize their expected total enjoyment(/pleasure/utility/etc.). Though intuitively it would seem that not everyone is rational, the definitions of rational and utility are far more expansive than is usually assumed. For example, a thief judges the odds of him getting away times the payoff to be greater than the odds of getting caught times the penalty. This is usually not a conscious calculation, but a subconscious one (Scott Adams has called the subconscious nothing but an odds-calculating machine). And though it may seem utterly irrational to an outsider, it was, based on his (likely flawed) knowledge and belief, the best thing he could have done.
So what of free will? Could the thief have chosen not to steal? For this to happen, there would have to be more thrown into the mix. A moral person judges the moral costs in addition to the purely material costs, balancing the payoff with guilt or shame. The more trepidatious criminal just calculates the odds differently, or assigns a different value to the payoff relative to the likely punishment. This framework of rational choice is actually the fundamental underpinning of all economic study.
Quite simply, free will is not the ability to make random or arbitrary decisions. What would be the point of it then? Free will is the ability to act in your own long-term self interest, and so is a function of (and can be constrained by) two things:
1: Knowledge is fundamental to free will both in the long term and short term. Most stupid actions that people would assume are irrational are just a function of lack of knowledge. Let’s turn back to the thief again for an example: the thief decides to rob a convenience store. The owner has a gun, and shoots the thief in the chest, severely wounding him and sending him to jail. Why did the thief still rob the convenience store? He had no knowledge of the gun. Had he known the owner had a gun and was experienced in hunting, he would not have robbed the store. How many times has the lament “If only I had known” been uttered? Free will is a function of knowledge, and poor decisions are a function of imperfect knowledge.
If you’re still not convinced, then join me on a small thought experiment: Imagine you’re suddenly omniscient. You can see the future, and even see what will happen as the result of any decision. How would you act? You would, of course, act in such a way as to make your life more enjoyable. You could calculate your way up the corporate ladder and become rich and famous, or if you’re altruistic, you could maximize your enjoyment by making the world a better place. Either way, you would act in such a way as to get the most of what you value most. You wouldn’t - you couldn’t - do anything else.
2: Beliefs and Preferences. Preferences are fundamental to short term behavior: if I choose strawberry ice cream over vanilla with no compulsion either way, it means I prefer strawberry to vanilla at that point, for whatever reason. But preferences are just a type of belief: preferring strawberry to vanilla means that I believe that I will get more enjoyment from strawberry ice cream than vanilla ice cream. Material preferences (such as strawberry vs. vanilla) are usually refined over the course of a lifetime to the point that they are rarely wrong, in that you are usually correct that you will derive more pleasure from strawberry than vanilla.
But preferences encompass more than tastes, and beliefs encompass still more than that. Many poor decisions made with complete foreknowledge of the consequences are just a result of preferring short term pleasure over long term pleasure, which can come with an unpleasant wait. These long term preferences are more often wrong than tastes (The deathbed lament “I wish I’d have spent more time with my family”). Thus regrets are the result of wrong (or at least changed) preferences.
Belief, however, is ultimately the most important to the overarching trend of one’s behavior. Morality, for example: many people believe that they will be rewarded after death for good behavior, thus they act in ways that would appear counter to their self interest. Many believe that such behavior is simply good for society, and act generally morally because they value self-respect. Many don’t believe in an afterlife and value their own pleasure over other peoples’ and over society at large; thus we get “immoral” (in the traditional sense of the word) people.
This is the reason that much of the world considers religion and faith as synonymous. Most religions believe in an afterlife - more specifically, Heaven and Hell. Most also include requirements for escaping Hell and going to Heaven (or at least attaining the best afterlife). It is of course in our best interest to assure for ourselves the best afterlife - even a minute improvement magnified by eternity outweighs even the most enjoyable of lifestyles. One must have faith in the religion in order to believe in these requirements. Thus true believers are thus much rarer than one might imagine. True belief in God and in the severity of choices affecting ones’ afterlife would require nothing less than a full life commitment.
So why don’t we see this? Most religion is built on a series of external incentives. In the Muslim world, you are often ostracized for converting out. Many televangelists promise a healthy and wealthy lifestyle after converting in. Even more than that, there are often social benefits for appearing devout (but not too devout), namely peer respect and involvement with a close-knit group of people.
Hence, because choice springs directly from belief and lifestyle is the aggregate of choice, we can see that the nominal believer is not a believer at all. Their motivation is not belief in God or the divine of any sort: the lack of assumption of the costs of religion to one’s lifestyle shows the fact that their goal is to reap the social benefits (self-deception on this point is, I would guess, much more common than consciously and deliberately impersonating the religious). To narrow the discussion to within the Christian circle, Romans 10 speaks specifically to the point that choice is directly influenced by knowledge and belief. Salvation comes by faith (belief), faith comes by hearing (knowledge), and hearing from the Word of God. Furthermore according to James, faith without works is dead, for true faith means we believe that works are the evidence of the Holy Spirit and that the Holy Spirit is the evidence of salvation. And what is more important to the true believer than securing and assuring his own salvation?
So what exactly is salvation, and what does it do to free will? Belief is always informed by knowledge. Our faith comes by hearing that the Word of God is the way to salvation, and a belief that this is true, imparted by God Himself. This is the point at which we receive the Holy Spirit (This means depravity is a result of imperfect knowledge and belief, in that we cannot act to please God (which is in our ultimate self-interest) without proper knowledge and belief).
A cursory reading of Romans 8, a discussion on living by the spirit vs. the flesh, might lead one to believe that the Spirit removes our free will and substitutes it with God’s. This is not the case at all. Our will is not free to begin with, due to a lack of knowledge and/or belief. We cannot act in our own long-term self-interest, that is, get to Heaven and escape Hell, without knowledge of how to do so and the belief that that knowledge is correct and reliable. Thus when we are imparted the Holy Spirit, He teaches us our self-interest primarily through knowledge of the Scriptures, gives us the faith to believe it, and changes our preferences accordingly (no longer does short-term sinful pleasure outweigh the consequences thereof). The knowledge and true belief imparted over time by the Holy Spirit that eternal rewards outweigh short-term sinful pleasures will, without fail as God Himself, produce a Christian with a freer will.
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One Response
Aug 17 at 5:45 pm
Both Aristotle and John Calvin would be proud of you!
Mainly, the hard things to account for in contemplating these ideas are: what about those who do seemingly great things? Are we willing to say that Ghandi was ultimately selfish? Ghandi’s actions were not necessarily aligned with a religion, nor was he acting in his own self-interest (of course, one could argue that we don’t know his true intentions, which is a valid point, but this would be speculative at best).
I really appreciate your point on the rewards/consequences model of salvation however. Thinking critically about our motives for salvation is a very healthy thing…especially in the Church. Many people consider salvation in a selfish manner…which really flies in the face of many of Jesus’ teachings.
One thing I would like for you to further delve into (because the determinism vs. free-will debate is something I’ve been especially interested in lately, on a personal level): how do you account for responsibility in a deterministic mode, both on an individual and communal level?
Also, if salvation is somehow connected with reason/knowledge, how does one account for the community of the mentally challenged?
Lastly, there is a subset of culture which tends to run counter to normally accepted logical ends, beginning with the author of Ecclesiastes…those who equate strife, pain, difficulty, etc…with beauty or gain. I think there are answers here which get overlooked, especially in our self-focused culture.