If you think about it carefully it seems impossible to reconcile two things which most people would very much like to believe – one, that they enjoy free will and in some ultimate sense are masters of their fate, and, two, that the God of all creation is omnipotent and has a master plan for us all.
The two do not appear logically compatible. Surely there must always be a conflict between human freedom and the infinite knowledge and power of God. Even the angels, Milton tells us, were in “endless mazes lost” when they tried to figure out how God could know in advance what we humans were not programmed to do in advance. Philosophers and theologians have twisted themselves into verbal knots to surmount the problem – finding some favour, for instance, has been the argument for “backward causation:” when we freely act today, we bring it about that God foreknew yesterday that we would so act today. Work that one out if you can.
On the whole the determinists seem to have won the argument. Either everything we do must have been foreseen by an all-knowing God which means that our actions are preordained and therefore are not free. Or, if there is no God, our actions arise inexorably out of the workings of a universe whose laws are set in iron and do not permit any such thing as freedom of the human spirit. Either way what happens, what human beings do, is what was meant to happen since time began.
Yet we know that this is not so. Or rather we feel there must be a way around the logical impasse. We feel this because there is a basic urge to view ourselves as ultimately responsible creators of our own characters and achievements rather than as pawns of nature, fate, or the whims of others, including God. One philosopher has called these feelings “life-hopes.” About them the words of Sophocles thousands of years ago are still appropriate: “We know not whence they come, but they die not.” Even the most powerful arguments cannot conquer the belief that such life-hopes – and others such as the hope for the possibility of unconditional love between humans – can only be fulfilled if we possess free will: an ability to choose values and purposes in a manner which is not pre-determined. There is no good or better that man can do if he is locked in the chains of a necessity that always was. Nothing can be good or bad if it is pre-ordained.
This is not just an academic matter, an intellectual exercise. It is important that people see that life-hopes can be and are fulfilled through the exercise of free will. If it was seen otherwise then all actions are on a par, the struggle to change things for the better is a useless exercise, teaching the children to search for lives and work of merit and concern for others is meaningless. Ultimately, good and evil could not be differentiated, the murder or the saving of a child would have equal value, the rule of tyrants would be as acceptable as the government of compassionate statesmen, and bravery and honesty and gentleness would be a charade. The cause of freedom would mean no more than serfdom’s reign. The universe would become a cold, implacable place where Hitler counts as much, or as little, as any saint.
It may be thought – I certainly think it – that the modern descent into cynicism and behaviour without standards at least partly flows from the fact that the determinists some time ago won the philosophical argument and made their thinking stick, with the result that too many feel that all actions really measure the same and therefore what matters is the immediate, materialistic satisfaction of whatever seems right or profitable or pleasurable or favourable for oneself moment by moment: grab what you can get while the going is good because the going may get bad anytime.
Anyone who has ever thought about the meaning of life – and which of us has not once or twice at least skirted near the question – must have thought about the reality or otherwise of freedom of will. I have come down on the side of believing that freedom of will must exist since morality can have no other basis and without morality life is meaningless and, ultimately, something in me revolts against that belief. So if freedom of will exists those who believe in God must accept that God cannot have fore-knowledge of all future actions. And I am delighted to see that recently theologians in their writings have begun to acknowledge this must be so. The traditionalists don’t like this in the slightest since they think such an admission is a threat to divine providence. But the concession must be made: divine love requires it even if divine power does not admit it.
And if there is no God? Then hidden somewhere in the strange and complex universe of quantum physics and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle there is surely room for human free will to find a place where it can work for the true and the good and the beautiful through all eternity.
