Without God, Is Freedom of Choice Denied?

Freedom and determinism are still at odds in many people’s minds. The argument behind the conflict is the notion of human license over liberty. Fyodor Dostoevsky once wrote, that, “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted.” Science dictates that since, “Every cause has an effect, therefore true free will is an impossibility.” Without religion we would go savage; with science we’re just automatons. Your alternatives are God or blind chance, however, there is The Law of Actual Options, which states, “If someone rejected one sort of idea in the face of scientific evidence for another sort of idea, a rational process is the existent arbitrator in the dispute and produces concrete freedom to decide for or against one idea or another.”

This is essentially about mind, and reason does not compel a person to decide, no matter how compelling the evidence. If a monkey could conceptually think and had real fundamental intellectual alternatives, it would have free choice in some areas of its life, and not be merely suffering from, “The illusion” of being free.

Let us suppose that we were all atheists and a group of philosophers, (let’s call them Positivists or Skinnerians), convinced us to believe that we were determined, that we had no real freedom of choice whatsoever. That factor alone would change everything which we do, and in a most unfortunate and drastic way. We’d stop taking responsibility for our decisions.

When Michel Onfray states, (In Defense of Atheism), “When a court functions without religious symbols, it nevertheless operates in accordance with . . . biblical metaphysics . . . The child-rapist is free; he has the choice of engaging in normal sexual  relationships with a consenting partner or of inflicting horrifying violence on a victim . . .” I assume this applies to thieves who refuse to work for a living and the junkies who rebuke the straight life with the needle?  This is a version of Sam Harris (The End of Faith), Steven Hawkins (The God Delusion) and other Leftist atheists’ broken-circuit argument. He, like all intellectuals who deny human freedom, want the argument both ways. Is a pedofile not free to chose? Then let’s uproot this monster before he again acts on his compulsion. Or is he really sick and has broken circuits? Then how can he be treated anymore than a healthy heterosexual appetite could? It’s just a fact like a smoking gun! Some immutable disposition you’re born with. Onfray implies that the child-rapist shouldn’t rot in prison but be treated. After treatment, maybe we could resettle him in Onfray’s neighborhood. The pedofile will at any rate not be given the chance “to confront the disease he suffers from.” Excellent. He doesn’t suffer from a disease anymore than if he was a farm boy mating with ponies. It is learned behavior, that’s why in the history of pedofile crime we see not immediate compulsion but an escalating from fantasy to actual assault. Hyperbole argument to the pedofile example doesn’t change the fact that Onfray and his ilk’s obnoxious contention is that male rapists are sick and aren’t really committing a criminal act by stealing sex with power and brutally, that we’re either born lucky (mentally healthy) or unfortunate (mentally diseased),  and indeed, that all immoral behavior is mental disease.

Some say that if God did not exist and everybody knew it; people would go native; if we were all atheists, everything would be permitted, and the world would look like Los Angelus. However, look at it this way, if people know a stock will go up tomorrow . . . it will go up today. (Malkiel’s Law). Or look at it another way: if we all could get rich in the stock market, entertainment, horse racing or by using some other equally, exciting or easy techniques, then the slow tedious expensive method of accruing our economic future with higher education would be for the most part, forsaken, and the result for humankind, would be a disaster. In other words, we all react to the information at our disposal.

Students just stepping out into the world, especially so.

What does this say about free choice? We want it thrust upon us no matter what the cost, but do we really have it?

Ultimately freedom in humans is dependant on individual creativity. While every later act or thought is dependent upon former decisions or speculations, we create ideas and then act on these original events. This way, bona fide freedom is achieved. This creativity – this value judgement – this focusing and weighing of evidence, (this carving of a rock into a wheel), is choosing between one thing or another with reason as the judge between right and wrong. This sets us free from many compelling determinative factors.

Reason is the fundamental value in ethics. It is the arbitrator for harmony and cooperation of the emotions, passions, instincts, intuitions, impulses and whatever other states arise in people. Reason can resolve conflicts between these often chaotic aspects, and bring about the greatest satisfaction to a person, helping manage their lives in attaining personal happiness and building moral character so that they are not always reacting emotionally, (or out of control as it were).

People can be creative and invent original ideas of their own –  rational or otherwise – they're abounding with hypotheses, theories and opinions, most of them wrong, but nonetheless, to a high degree, creative. Protagorean Man is the measure of all things. Rendering of much of the modern problems of subjectivity, moral relativity and scepticism are often patently impossible as so many logically necessary connections can demonstrate. We are subjective, that's a given, but with almost any effort, we can attain outside information, and change direction. Going with the flow is just a lazy inclination which at any rate is exposed to be a false one.

Turns out that unless you lock yourself in a dark closet (or have one singular source of knowledge about everything), you are receiving and transmitting, therefore constantly changing, direction. The only question is, "Do you want to be a good driver or blind at the wheel?" Do you want to use reason, or the alternative, (feelings, faith, hunches and etc.,) to decide? It is about self-managing not about judging. You are free either to be a slave to your emotions or liberated by your powers of reasoning, but don't be misconceived, you are, as Jean-Paul Sartre long ago coined, "Condemned to be free," along with every other human being.

As a scientist and atheist, you rejoin, If one is responsible for this certain thought, X, then this thought X must be anteceded by X1 + X2 and so forth. Or so the theory goes. The process is determined and no thought is ex nihito (or comes about from spontaneous combustion as it were).

No such determination is made by volitional awareness which results in original creative thought, especially focused thinking determined and arbitrated by reasoning. It is a long process, the chronicle of which is the history of ideas. For instance, history isn’t determined by technology, ultimately, technology is invented by the human mind, nonetheless, in part, history is determined by technology. Free will is the event that is sometimes the deciding factor in a formula which includes, perhaps, 90 per cent physical and 10 per cent mental.

Here, what seems intuitive, is the rapid end of a process. What seems determined is also freedom to act on original ideas. What is a result of mystifying human behavior sometimes has a prime mover.

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was like a mystical event after years of super intensity in the dimension of focused awareness. Where is his freedom? Many Einstein-types at the time in Germany, with perhaps even greater IQs, joined the Nazi Party. What moral culpability did they have? On the one side is a Jew who is the exact epitome of a scapegoat. On the other, the dark movement clouded in blood instinct. Notice Relativity and Nazism aren’t rocks rolling down the hill. They’re explanations and events caused by ideas. Einstein and Hitler originated and refined them. The one? The other? Neither really determined completely, nor free, but the result of the human mind in process.

The creation of idea doesn’t guarantee morality but only human freedom itself. Reason – the act of focus on necessary connections – guarantees human free-action. Atheism and freedom are not incompatible. Science and free-choice are not at odds. The existence of free will is not a resounding fact to exclude all others, but a fact notwithstanding. So this is the science of free will: the more it is mastered, the greater the likeliness of self-control; the more you are resigned to the inevitability of fate, the lesser the likelihood that you’ll master your own fortune, thus caving into whims, even ones like serial murder, child-rape and democide.