A Meaningful Way to Conceive of Radically Free Will
This post is next in a long series on this site attempting to address (1) why it is challenging to understand how there could be a free will, (2) that it is much more theologically, philosophically, and ethically crippling to reject its possibility, and finally (3) both that it is possible that there is a free will, and that commitment to the reality of free will renews access to some of the essentials of a Christian worldview, including teleology. Posts to date are compiled here.
3.2 Will is an uncaused cause in the universe.
If it is the case that what the will does is actualize potentialities, then the will essentially becomes an uncaused cause. While everything else in the world (except God, of course, whose “in-the-world-ness” is entirely different) is a part of the causal chain of historical events, the free will is capable of interjecting an otherwise uncaused cause into the system.
Of course, it only looks like an uncaused cause because the original act of creating that will is all but forgotten. But as Romans 8:20 implies, even if a free will is entirely uncaused within creation, its presence in creation is evidence of its original cause, God. To say that God creates the will is not though to say that the will’s activity in a particular circumstance can be sufficiently explained in terms of that creation. The will is able to act creatively because and only because God has created it to do so.
In fact, on an individual level, I’m not sure the will is not the sole element God creates in each person which cannot be empirically explained in terms of the rest of creation; that is, it is God’s act of special creation to bring every person-as-a-volitional-being into existence. But as much as I like it, that claim is as yet more than I am trying to defend at length.
One material event is causing another throughout history right down to the grape and Joe, the table and his teeth, and even his hunger and behavioral training that eating the grape will sate him. Then the will intervenes miraculously and produces an inexplicable (in terms of prior sufficient causes) and unpredictable event—whatever Joe’s decision is. In the scheme of freedom, that act is a brand new injection into the causal universe. (I remind readers that the previous sentence is no more theoretically infeasible than God’s original act of creation.)
Aside from the dilemma presented at the outset of this discourse, there is a phenomenological objection to that scenario, and there are a couple of uncomfortable implications that attach to it. The presentation of and response to those objections and discomforts are next in this series of posts.
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