One response to my post the other day on free will (or the nonexistence thereof) seems like a good illustration of a phenomenon I think I’ve noted in this space before, which I call “the shadow of faith”: It is the vehement assertion that there is no God, coupled with a vague worry that you may be damned to hell for saying so.
I choose the term just because it’s most familiar from the context of religion. You’ll often hear the faithful worry, for instance, that if God did not exist, life would be without purpose and morality would become an empty joke. Yet, notably, actual atheists almost never cotton to this view. The exceptions tend to be young people who’ve only recently, and incompletely, shaken off a religious upbringing. More generally, the “shadow of faith” is present when the abandonment of a once-cherished belief seems to leave the world in a Very Bad Way, but only by lingering standards embedded in the old belief, To slightly bastardize an example from philosophers Paul and Patricia Churchland, it’s like being distressed that there’s no such thing as élan vital, since this entails that we all must be dead.
In the post linked above, Jason provides a good summary of what people typically find unsettling about the denial of (radical, causally unfettered) free will:
To my mind, this renders all human endeavors to be somewhat of a bad joke. What’s the point in punishing someone for doing something when there is really no free agent there who “did” that thing? What’s the point of even having this conversation? You may be compelled to respond, but just keep in mind that “you” don’t exist. You are a living, breathing player piano. There is no changing your tune.
As he puts it in the comments, it may even come to seem on this view that one’s own consciousness is “an illusion.” Now, the problem here is that while Jason purports to disbelieve in free will, I don’t think he takes his own disbelief seriously enough. Jason is focused on how bad things look if (as is probably not the case) the universe is fully deterministic: Our actions are scripted, and what we think are our choices are merely the upshot of impersonal, immutable physical laws playing out. But as philosophers have long observed, indeterminism doesn’t seem to leave us in a much more satisfactory situation. Perhaps some of my actions are influenced by the probabilistic behavior of quantum particles that make up my brain, say. But this would just make my actions random, not free: They escape the shackles of causality at the cost of coming unmoored from agency, from a connection with my reasons and motives.
But think about what this means: If both these alternatives are incompatible with this sense of “free will,” then it’s not that “free will” is some attractive, well-understood feature that—too bad!—we contingently lack. Rather, this radical sort of free will is exposed as just a kind of conceptual nonsense, a square circle. Can it really be so bad to lack this sort of impossible property? Put another way: If life without free will is supposed to be a pointless joke, you’ve got to accept it as a standard for what it might take for life to have a point. But if the concept is incoherent, how can it possibly provide the correct standard? Am I supposed to be upset that I lack the all-important property of frizbanontosity if frizbanontosity is just a bit of gibberish?
The claim that consciousness is an “illusion” suggests a helpful analogy. There’s a clear sense in which a convincing holographic image can be described as an illusion. On the other hand, it’s still a real hologram. Whether it’s apt to describe it as illusory will depend on your background beliefs about what you’re looking at. Am “I” “really” “deciding” what words to write just now? Well, sure, in the same sense that when my laptop carries out a floating point operation, the “computer” is “really doing” a “calculation.” Once you stop fantasizing about heaven, you tend to find the world we have is enough.
Bonus: Will Wilkinson provides a handy cheat sheet in which he provides quick answers to all the central questions of metaphysics. His take on free will, incidentally, sounds different from mine on face, but I think this is probably more a question of emphasis than a real disagreement.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Grant Gould // Jan 3, 2007 at 5:53 pm
It’s reasons like this that I call myself an “apostate” rather than an atheist or an agnostic. Of course the self-designation is absurd — apostasy is only a meaningful term when uttered by the religious — but it’s convenient. My views are sufficiently informed by my religious upbringing and training that they color my atheism.
For the worries about hell, though, I fall back to my old friend, the Euthyphro. If God is not the ultimate moral arbiter, then for moral questions you should be indifferent to divine commands whether they are real or not. That you might or might not suffer eternally in Hell is of no consequence — to act wrongly in fear of damnation is simply to have been blackmailed into moral error.
I find that I no longer care whether or not God exists — I am not an atheist as such, nor really an agnostic, but apathetic. If there turns out to be a god, well, that’s Its lookout, not mine.
2 Jason // Jan 3, 2007 at 6:29 pm
I will need to think about this before posting a detailed response (and don’t get your hopes up, because I am neither as smart or as well read in philosophy as my co-blogger over on The Bellman). However, my initial reaction is that you are presenting a false dichotomy between determinism and an indeterminism where our actions are random.
It seems to me that you are leaving out the (ridiculous to atheists and highly improbable to me) possibility of what I will call the “soul.” The idea that there is a part of us that has agency and responsibility (even if we have a hand tremor that we cannot control) is pretty basic to enlightenment thought, and, I still think, wiped out by hard determinism.
3 Austen // Jan 3, 2007 at 7:51 pm
I don’t know, I doubt what you say would be much solace to those who don’t believe but yearn to believe in free will, in some robust sense of ‘free will’. If determinism is disturbing when applied to human agency–even, say, when determinism is understood in a modern way that accounts for complex decision making, the inner experience of choice, etc, (‘cus ultimately we’re still just meaty robots)–then it’s disturbing regardless of whether the theories we take to be competitor theories are any better, or make coherent sense. The failure of ‘non-determinisms’ does nothing to make determinism less unsettling.
4 LP // Jan 4, 2007 at 6:09 pm
Austen wrote:
“I doubt what you say would be much solace to those who don’t believe but yearn to believe in free will, in some robust sense…”
I take Julian’s post, and the whole problem generally, in a different way: This is one of those happy areas where everyone is free (haha) to believe whatever they prefer to believe — all the metaphysics and cognitive science in the world will never provide a meaningful answer, because there’s something the matter with the question. Plus, there’s some nice Pascalian reasoning here about the risk-benefit analysis: If you ‘choose’ to believe in determinism and are wrong, then you lose out on the most crucial experience of being human. But if you choose to believe in free will and are wrong, then you didn’t ‘choose’ in the first place, so there’s no sense in worrying about it. And, a belief in free will has the advantage of allowing you to live in harmony with your actual day-to-day experiences of making choices. (For a good time, ask an existentialist whether it’s possible to reject choice.)