Topics Freedom

Question I have a question regarding destiny and free will. I have never been able to decide upon a solution to satisfy my search and stumbled upon this site and decided to see if a trained philosopher would be able to do the problem justice. Do we, in fact, have free will or do we not? There are two views I can think of that would both say that we do not have free will, while the general belief is that we do have free will and that what we do are products of that free will. Assuming belief in a higher all-knowing power exists, then doesn't it make sense that this being would know the future and therefore your actions are predestined simply by the knowledge this being contains and that there is no way of straying off the path that is known for you? The second belief is a more scientific belief in which no higher power is of existence, yet it is undeniable that quantum mechanics exist and that particles all have a set of laws they follow and that whatever started "everything" whether it was the big bang, or whatever else you may believe, that all the particles have simply been interacting with eachother in ways that these laws not only allow, but demand so that all of our thoughts are not of free will like we would like to believe, but are simply forced according to these laws and that even the belief in free will itself is a forced thought and perception? So I ask, is a certain destiny unavoidable, therefore leaving the idea of free will hopelessly lost and illogical?

Accepted:
May 13, 2006

Comments

It is very difficult to see how free will is possible. The problem your second view raises looks like the problem of determinism. If everything that happens in the world, including all human actions, are determined the laws of nature, then it is indeed difficult to see how we can have free will. Now maybe the laws of nature do not completely fix every event, but only the probabilities of various events occurring. Indeed this is the standard understanding of quantum mechanics, which you mention. But even this 'slack', this element of indeterminism, does not seem to leave any room for free will. If my body just happens to go one way rather than another by chance, that is not me acting by my own free will, since I am not in control.

The first view you mention is rather different. This is the thought that we have no free will if God knows everything we will do. In my view, this idea of foreknowledge is less of a threat to free will than determination by law. For even if someone knows exactly what I will do, that knowledge is not, I take it, restricting me in any way. In that respect, the foreknowledge case seems quite different from the laws of nature case. Think about it this way. As people get to know me better, they get better able to predict what I will do. But my free will does not go down as their knowledge of me goes up. So I am inclined to say that even if there is a God who can read me like a book, that in itself does not threaten my free will, so long as he does not interfere with my thoughts or actions.