The Strange Case of the One Armed Murderer of Antarctica

Part of an ongoing conversation

A reader with the saintly name of Anna writes in and asks.

Perhaps I should make my question clearer. I am not a materialist. I’m far closer to Idealism, although I have too much appreciation for Incarnational theology to refer to matter or the body as an illusion.

My understanding of free will is that it means a choice is not determined by anything other than the act of choosing. When I say determined, I mean something like “forced”, something like the way that if you draw two sides of a triangle, you have determined the third side – there is one and only one way it can be.

To say that we have free will means that we are not compelled to act according to our motivations, we do not have to do what we want to do. It means that no amount of foreknowledge will give you the ability to accurately predict a choice 100% of the time; God himself cannot know what we will choose except that he sees us choosing it.

Materialism challenges the idea of free will by saying that, in essence, everything that ever happens was determined in the first moment(s) after the Big Bang; that after that initial moment, there was one and only one way that everything could play out (for all of time) according to the laws of physics, just as certainly as there is only one way to connect three points into a triangle once you have drawn those three points.

Now, I have no problem saying that materialism is just plain wrong. But I’ve always figured that this means that there is somehow a loophole in what appear to be immutable laws of physics, or something going on at a level that we don’t understand. That doesn’t bother me – if God can turn one loaf of bread into many, after all, allowing us to make choices and affect what physically happens seems like a relatively minor issue.

But it seems to me that you are saying that the laws of physics *are* immutable, that there *is* only one way things can work out according to those laws, but that somehow there is still free will. This is what I keep trying to understand, because I don’t see *how* both these things could be.

I understand, in an abstract sort of way, your cylinder analogy; I don’t see its application to this question. Yes, we generally talk about either the physical dimension of something or else the moral dimension, without confusing them for each other. Most of our questions about life will be answered by one or the other aspect, without any mingling of the two dimensions. I just don’t see how we answer this one particular dilemma without discussing the relationship between the two; a man cannot choose to verbally insult his neighbor without moving his lips.

This distinction that you try to draw between “determine (push)” and “determine (draw)” is not completely clear to me. By “determine (push)” you might mean something like what I have in mind – that it sets something so that only one option is left? But why would you use “draw” as a modifier/synonym for “determine”? We are drawn in by our motivations?

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“My understanding of free will is that it means a choice is not determined by anything other than the act of choosing.”

Well, first, what is the support or evidence for this view? I am not disagreeing with it, but it does not seem intuitively obvious to me either.

My understanding of the free will is that it is the thing that man have which allowed them to make decisions, take oaths, make contracts, and be held accountable for their actions; madmen are defective in their will, and it is not free by reason of their madness; children have their will not free yet, and is undeveloped by reason of their age; and beasts do not have free will by their nature, and cannot develop it, and yet this in them is not a defect nor an illness but natural to them. They react by instinct and training, sometimes with wisdom, but never due to thought, reflection, deliberation, or the contemplation of an abstraction or remote good.
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