This man receives sinners…

A week or more ago (link) I wrote of choice and consequences, the first a gift from God to us, the second the results of choices made by us. To be sure, free will implies its abuse. That then constellates, in some minds, the problem of evil. God knew that evil would result from his gift; that past tense is just a linguistic nod to our sense of time here. Therefore God approved of that evil? My conclusion was, Not so! Knowledge is not approval. But free will is so great a gift that its price, namely its abuse, is worth it.

Got to thinking about that later along these lines. As knowledge is not approval, so also it is not indifference. And God is not only omniscient, he is also omnipotent. Therefore, in the long run—and never mind “fallen” concepts like eternal hell fire—I have no doubt that in the Great Plan all created beings will be saved. That might, of course, take a long time—but what does time matter in eternity? And also, to honor that great gift, free will, ultimately the created beings will have to choose. But they will. Be sure of it. They will. That God both knows and yet still cares is signaled by the tale of the prodigal son, told in Luke 15:11-32.

That episode is introduced by a brief note about Pharisees and scribes (and I am one of those, a scribe) who, seeing tax collectors and sinners drawing near to Jesus, observe with disapproval: “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” Then follow the parables of the lost sheep, of the lost coin, and of the lost son. In the first case one sheep of a hundred is lost, in the next one coin of ten, in the last one son of two, the younger—which in that culture then meant the less valuable. Rather like that progression. In each case major effort is expended on finding what is lost—or, in the case of the son, lavishly celebrating the prodigal’s return. The older son is angered—but he, of course, is the inheritor: “All that is mine is yours,” his father says.

Now, of course, a dry doctrine of choice and consequences leaves out one of the aspects of God, omnibenevolence. God is love. There is, therefore, more to that choice = consequences equation. Along with free choice we have another great gift, which is God’s absolute love. And it is, in subtle ways—subtle enough not to interfere with the gift of choice—all around us and streaming across the borderzone to envelop us all around. Grace. The first step in being found again would appear to be cultivate our powers to listen for the faint, faint sound of it. But once heard its power grows in guiding us home again.

Even Concerning Free Will—We Have a Choice

The world is hopelessly divided, come to think of it. There are General Motors people and Ford people, Honda people and Toyota, Platonists and Aristotelians, Scotists and Thomists—and, which it is my object to examine today, Voluntarists and Intellectualists. The last are two ways of looking at free will. Neither denies that free will exists—or to put it another way, both affirm that the will is free, but voluntarists put will at the summit, intellectuals put the intellect at the peak. So how exactly does this work?

The problem arises because, as souls, we are a unity but have different powers. We also clearly experience these powers as distinctly real. A commonplace example is when someone says, “I am of two minds about that.” The statement is ambiguous enough to illustrate the problem. Does it mean that the person experiences two intellectual conceptions of some situation too close to one another to signal, clearly, which is right? Or does it mean that the pictures are clear enough, but the person has not yet decided which one to choose as relevant?

The intellectualist view of free will holds that the ultimate decider is the Intellect—and free will is the power that executes the intellect’s lead in choosing some perceived good. Free will is therefore a function of an intellectual appetite or desire. Here acting wrongly is assigned to the intellect. It values a lesser good rather than the higher. But whatever the person chooses he or she desires, therefore the emphasis is on something perceived. Appetite comes form the Latin for “desire toward.” This is the view held by Thomas Aquinas (link).

The voluntarist view is that free will is, in a manner of speaking, sovereign. Nothing compels it. It is quite capable of acting contrary to the intellect’s leaning. This is the view of John Duns Scotus (link). He argues that the will cannot be said to have genuine freedom unless it is capable of acting contrary to the intellect’s desire. Furthermore, the will stands above the intellect because it directs the attention to whatever subject it selects to understand. In the source I cite for Scotus is this interesting observation:

Scotus means to show not just that the will is a higher power than the intellect, however. He argues for the remarkable claim that the will is unique among all created powers because it alone acts freely.

                                                              [Jeffrey Hause, John Duns Scotus (1266-1308)]

This would mean that the will is the essential characteristic of the soul, making it what it is. The human being may be coerced into actions it does not will, but its decisions cannot be changed by external force.

Now, of course, when we look at the unity of the soul—even if it may be of two minds at any one point—we are looking at a something that has multiple powers. The Medievalists like to single out intellect and will, but feeling, imagination, and intuition are also present. We can distinguish them by observation. But, as Duns Scotus observes, these distinctions are “formal,” meaning that they point to “realities” that are present in a unity but inseparable from it. How can we possibly select one to be the primus inter pares? The answer, of course, is that we can choose one. Quite a potent power that, free will.

As for me, I feel quite comfortable with General Motors, Honda, Plato, and Scotus. The addition of the last name to this list I owe to a hint I found on Siris the other day (link). It came in handy in enlarging on the concept of free will I had planned to undertake after writing the last post.

Is Life a Kind of Test?

To answer that question with Yes is to assent to a certain cosmic model. God sets the creature a test—e.g., that tree in Paradise. Humanity fails. Humanity is expelled from the Garden. We’re now undergoing the second test. Succeed: heaven. Fail: hell.

No. I’m not trying to belittle the Judeo-Christian-Muslim faiths—or any other. The great myths can be (and are) understood in very sophisticated ways. A more sophisticated rendition of that model is to view God creating humans and giving them free will. Without it, surely, they would be little more than automata (as Descartes, for instance, described animals). Are animals undergoing some kind of test? Surely they are not. They do not have any kind of choice. Therefore free will is an integral element of the model, indeed sufficient to support a test-model. We don’t need paradises, forbidden fruit, temping snakes, expulsions, or any other of the vividly painted machinery of the creation myth. The mere presence of genuine agents, thus agents with consciousness and free will, is good enough. For that model to work we don’t even need a material realm. There are angels within these traditions, said to be pure spirits—but also endowed with freedom. And, sure enough, some of them rebelled. Let me introduce you to Lucifer. The only environment they require is that of Mind.

The more subtle aspects of that question begin to emerge at this point. The creation of free agents, as such, does not automatically mean that God intends to test them. The intention clearly is that the agents will have choice. And with that power of self-determination given, all that flows from it is, of course, necessarily known by an omniscient Creator. Therefore God gives his creatures freedom, and other necessary concomitant abilities, like consciousness—and the rest is up to the creature. Here also rises another ghost, the Problem of Evil. Does the gift of free agency mean that God approves all of the evil that such agency produces when it abuses its freedom? This conundrum creates another question: Is knowledge equivalent to approval? No. Obviously not. We create all kinds of new “freedoms” legislatively—knowing full well that some will abuse them; knowing that does not demand omniscience; therefore penalties are also put in place for abuse, or let’s just call them consequences. Acts have consequences. That is also inherent in the concept of choice.

Let’s look at that word more closely. Choices are directional—in a kind of higher dimension. Choosing the good leads to light, development, and greater powers; choosing the bad leads to darkness, deterioration, loss of powers. If all choices had the same consequences, freedom of will would lose all meaning.

Is Life a Kind of Consequence? Well, that question may be closer to the truth if we take life to mean life here on earth. If I make the wrong kind of choices and find myself in a desolate space—and an angel with a flaming sword blocks the way back—well, that’s a problem, isn’t it. But am I being tested? Not in the least. I’m just experiencing consequences, limits. I can make better choices the next time I act. If I experience this life as a test, one cause of it might well be that I, ah, volunteered, manner of speaking.

The Freedom of Free Will

Free will is one of those abstractions rarely examined in its vast complexity. Its existence is denied in the materialistic conception of reality. Let me spell out the reasons why. Any action whatsoever is traceable to antecedent stimuli; these can be viewed both as causing the choice and as themselves caused by others. In any purely brain-based conception of action, we can trace the “decision” back to two kinds of cell structures: those hierarchically arranged and those based on what might be called legislative structures; concerning the last, a brain node will only fire if a majority of brain cells forming it signal yea. These structures may operate alone or in combination, but all of them respond to stimuli ultimately traceable to physical causes. And in that thoughts themselves are mirrored in brain action, they can be reduced to brain activity alone, the seeming immateriality of thoughts declared as illusory. In this view all action is chemico-mechanically determined. What we call freedom of will therefore translates into saying that we’re ignorant, unconscious, of the precise process that necessarily leads to this action rather than to that one. The roots of the action are theoretically—but not practically—traceable to a status quo ante in which everything experienced by the actor up to that point contributes something, however minimal, including habits, memories, even forgotten memories—the last by absence.

This view of the matter is strongly compelling because, in most of our day-to-day decisions we do act pretty much as above described. Real choices, free choices (assuming they exist) are rare. These rare, free choices do, of course, also habituate us, form memories, attitudes, and leanings that later produce moral behavior automatically. Free choices therefore also become part of the deterministic background that produces our total behavior, most of which arises from our animal heritage. The question that looms, then, is this: How can we discover that we really do have free choice. The curious answer, I would suggest, is that we cannot do so by looking at the will as such. The answer comes from another source, the examination of intelligence or, put more broadly, consciousness. It must have freedom to function.

The basic premise I want to present here, and I’ll cite the source for it in a moment, is that thoughts may be legitimately viewed as mechanical presentations of a brain mechanism, the brain drawing material from memory by association. This presentation, of course, is on a much more sophisticated level than a computer’s search based on key words, for instances, but functionally equivalent. Now if a stimulus produces such a presentation, selection of some part of this presentation for relevance to our situation must take place. Just as Google can and will present a vast number of items in answer to a search, it cannot and does not select the relevant answer. That selection involves an activity outside of the system that produces the thoughts themselves.

David Bohm, the physicist, develops this approach in his book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Routledge, 1996, p. 50-53). Let me quote from the cited passage:

There is in this mechanical process [of stimuli producing thoughts] no inherent reason why the thoughts that arise should be relevant to the situation that evokes them. Then perception of whether or not any particular thoughts are relevant or fitting requires the operation of an energy that is not mechanical, an energy that we shall call intelligence. This latter is able to perceive a new order or a new structure, that is not just a modification of what is already known or present in memory. For example, one may be working on a puzzling problem for a long time. Suddenly, in a flash of understanding, one may see the irrelevance of one’s whole way of thinking about the problem, along with a different approach in which all the elements fit in a new order and in a new structure. Clearly, such a flash is essentially an act of perception, rather than a process of thought…, though later it may be expressed in thought. What is involved in this act is perception through the mind of abstract orders and relationships such as identity and difference, separation and connection, necessity and contingency, cause and effect, etc.

We have thus put together all the basic mechanical and conditioned responses of memory under one word or symbol, i.e. thought, and we have distinguished this from the fresh, original and unconditioned response of intelligence (or intelligent perception) in which something new may arise.

Now if the exercise of intelligence, of consciousness, requires an act that arises in an unconditioned (read free) order, the will, which is part and parcel of consciousness, is also rooted in that same order and is, therefore, capable of acting freely.