Is Free Will Absolute?
Heather’s Highland Mis-chief was a pedigreed West Highland White Terrier.
In the 1960s my mother raised Canadian Kennel Club West Highland Whites. Heather was the matriarch: she bore and raised all the puppies. She lived in the kennel in the back, along with any of the dogs we had not sold yet.
She was mostly a non-nonsense dog, not the playful type. Being the matriarch, she was the authority figure. Her favorite pastime was to sit and gnaw on an old white bone for hours on end. One time when there were three of her adult offspring still around, one of them played a practical joke on her and hid her bone (I never found out where). I watched as she frantically ran from one end of the kennel to the other, looking in all of the sleeping areas for her bone, then up and down the run, yelping in frustration. Her children just sat there with doggie grins on their faces, enjoying the sight.
Eventually, she found where they had hidden it and went back to her usual place in front of the kennels, with her bone held firmly between her paws. This was one angry dog — she was furious at all of them and she showed it. Her glare wiped the smiles right off the other dogs’ faces. Then she went back to chewing. The others were on their best behavior the rest of the day.
In 1536 John Calvin published “The Institutes of the Christian Religion”.
In this book, he wrote about the doctrine of predestination. Predestination means that God has set everything into motion and knows the fate of each of us. According to Calvin,
“There is no random power, or agency, or motion in the creatures, who are so governed by the secret counsel of God, that nothing happens but what he has knowingly and willingly decreed.”
But despite this, Calvin believed in Free Will. What did he mean by that?
“Therefore, God has provided the soul of man with intellect, by which he might discern good from evil, just from unjust, and might know what to follow or to shun, reason going before with her lamp…Adam, therefore, might have stood if he chose, since it was only by his own will that he fell; but it was because his will was pliable in either direction and he had not received constancy to persevere, that he so easily fell. Still he had a free choice of good and evil; and not only so, but in the mind and will there was the highest rectitude, and all the organic parts were duly framed to obedience, until man corrupted its good properties, and destroyed himself.”
So we have free will and yet God predestined everything. At some level, these two processes seem to be incompatible.
Most of us, in our heart of hearts, have a belief that we have free will.
That is, we believe that we, somehow, are freely making choices, even though those choices may be constrained by our environment, our upbringing, or our genes.
But we also believe that the world obeys certain laws. Even if there is some underlying indeterminacy, like Quantum Mechanics seems to imply, we believe that things happen for a reason. We have expectations, like the sun will rise tomorrow. Even if we believe in miracles, there is a reason for them — God did it.
So the universe is determined by its laws, which means I have no choice in the matter. And it doesn’t help to say that there is some randomness in the world. That is not our will at work, that is just a throw of the dice that the universe has added.
So we have this tug of war between free will and determinism. It seems like an insoluble contradiction.
The Copernican Revolution started when Copernicus distributed his Commentariolus (Little Commentary) amongst his friends and colleagues in 1514.
This was later expanded upon in the 1543 publication of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium — On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres.
This was the start of the recognition that the Earth was not the center of the universe. Results by Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler and Galileo showed that the planets orbited around the Sun and that other planets (such as Jupiter) had their own moons orbiting around them too. Newton shifted this to say that the universe was centered around the common center of gravity of the Sun and planets.
By the late 1700’s researchers like Thomas Wright, Immanuel Kant and William Herschel modified this to the viewpoint of the Sun rotating around the Milky Way.
Eventually, the discovery of other galaxies in the early twentieth century by Heber Curtis, Edwin Hubble and others led to the conclusion that there is no absolute center to the Universe. During this time, the observations of Michaelson-Morley and the work of Einstein showed that there was no absolute anything, except the speed of light. Everything was relative to the observer. The observation of relative motion is determined by a reference frame that defines the relationship between the observer and the observed. This reference frame gives us the information we need to determine the state of motion of what we observe.
An act of will is a type of motion.
It is a response to forces internal and external to us. But that does not mean that it is absolute. The best that can be done is to judge an act of will in a relative sense. Free will is free relative to a frame of reference and only as seen by an observer.
Heather was not acting as if the other dogs were automata incapable of modifying their own behavior. Her reaction implied that, as far as she was concerned, they all had free will. Now certainly, you can’t ask a Westie about that. As I had mentioned, Heather was a no-nonsense dog. She was not as open to introspection as most people I have known. So she would not have been a dog that would have been comfortable in a philosophical discussion. Yet she acted as if she believed in free will.
God, on the other hand, knows what actions you will yourself to take, being omniscient. God has knowingly and willingly decreed what you are going to do. But you yourself do not know that. So from your point of view, you have free will, but as God observes you, you do not.
You also presume that other people have free will, to a certain extent. And you can probably grant free will to West Highland White Terriers, too.
It is not that we cannot conceive of the idea of an absolute free will.
It is just that the concept leads to contradictions and antinomies, just like the postulate of absolute space did.
Free will is only as free as we observe it to be free. From our own reference point, we observe the choices we make and the reasons we make them. We see how we have willed our choices. It is difficult sometimes for us to be aware of how our own choices are constrained. But to an outside observer, those constraints are part of their reference frame. Looking from the outside, they can see where we came from, where we are going and the forces that are operating on us.
So free will is not absolute, except (possibly) for God. But for any other actor in this universe, the degree of freedom of the will is different for each observer, depending on their frame of reference.
