One last critique . . .

Enough of the strange porn critiques. Nobody seems to understand them, anyway. I don't understand them. But I do understand that the word "porn" attracts more visitors than I normally receive. I wonder why . . .

et cetera . . .

Concerning porn,
free expression
is
proof-read session.

Nor this amiss . . .

Concerning porn,
free expression
is
breed regression.

And this . . .

Concerning porn,
free expression
is
freed repression.

And Also Heard . . .

Concerning porn,
free expression
is
freeze expression.

Or so I've heard . . .

Concerning porn,
free expression
is
free sexpression.

I know doggerel's great fun, but I feel compelled to bring this report on free will!

Free Will

I've occasionally, if rarely, discussed free will on this blog, but I'm doing so today because I read an intriguing article by Michae1 Egnor titled "More Than Material Minds" (Christianity Today, September 14, 2018), in which  are discussed the significance of recent findings in neuroscience on the possibility of free will:

Some of the most fascinating research on consciousness was done by . . . Benjamin Libet at the University of California, San Francisco. Libet asked: What happens in the brain when we think? How are electrical signals in the brain related to our thoughts? He was particularly interested in the timing of brain waves and thoughts. Did a brain wave happen at the same moment as the thought, or before, or after?

It was a difficult question to answer. It wasn't hard to measure electrical changes in the brain: that could be done routinely by electrodes on the scalp, and Libet enlisted neurosurgeons to allow him to record signals deep in the brain while patients were awake. The challenge Libet faced was to accurately measure the time interval between the signals and the thoughts. But the signals last only a few milliseconds, and how can you time a thought with that kind of accuracy?

Libet began by choosing a very simple thought: the decision to press a button. He modified an oscilloscope so that a dot circled the screen once each second, and when the subject decided to push the button, he or she noted the location of the dot at the time of the decision. Libet measured the timing of the decision and the timing of the brain waves of many volunteers with accuracy in the tens of milliseconds. Consistently he found that the conscious decision to push the button was preceded by about half a second by a brain wave, which he called the readiness potential. Then a half-second later the subject became aware of his decision. It appeared at first that the subjects were not free; their brains made the decision to move and they followed it.

But Libet looked deeper. He asked his subjects to veto their decision immediately after they made it -- to not push the button. Again, the readiness potential appeared a half-second before conscious awareness of the decision to push the button, but Libet found that the veto -- he called it "free won't" -- had no brain wave corresponding to it.

The brain, then, has activity that corresponds to a pre-conscious urge to do something. But we are free to veto or accept this urge. The motives are material. The veto, and implicitly the acceptance, is an immaterial act of the will.

Libet noted the correspondence between his experiments and the traditional religious understanding of human beings. We are, he said, beset by a sea of inclinations, corresponding to material activity in our brains, which we have the free choice to reject or accept.

The veto is interesting, but I wonder if the fact that it was already decided in advance makes a difference to the outcome. Perhaps the brain wave in this case entailed both the decision to press the button and the decision to veto that decision. Comments welcome.

For the entire article, click here. This article originally appeared in Plough Quarterly No. 17: "The Soul of Medicine" (Summer 2018).

John Milton's Reason says: "Eat it, just eat it."

Weird Al Yankovic
You Tube

I posted yesterday on John Milton's faculty psychology, and I do so again today, but in more humility, quoting from my comments on the Milton List:

I've had second thoughts about how Milton's faculty psychology works.

Yesterday, my point was that even though reason is addressed as though it works on its own, it can be tricked, and thus Adam and Eve have to remain firm and not allow reason to mislead.

But remain firm how?

One might think they would do so through their will, which is free, but the text says the will is free when it follows reason. Milton instead implicates memory as the faculty that reminds one of what God has expressly forbidden. Adam is to remind Eve, and Eve to remind Adam.

Moral reasoning seems to require a community that remembers moral laws - though, presumably, one could also remind oneself.

But only one thing in the garden is expressly forbidden by God - the fruit of the tree of knowledge - and what could reason dictate to the will about that negative command? Aside from the command, reason would find nothing wrong in Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. By reason alone, the tree and its fruit are good. "Eat it, just eat it," says reason (echoing Weird Al Yankovic). Memory countermands that advice.

So, how does Milton's faculty psychology work? From Five Senses to Fancy to Reason to Will, but from Memory back to Will?

Professor Todd Wayne Butler corrected my speculation:

In response to Jeffery's query on how Milton's psychology works, I'd hesitate to offer memory direct access to the will (or vice-versa). Rather, it's through the imagination that the information stored in the memory is recollected to reason. Once the past is thus again immediately present, reason can (much as it does with sensory data) assess this information and, if it chooses, direct action.

I then asked:

So "Fansie" - to borrow Milton's term - is the faculty through which both sense impressions and memories pass to reach "Reason"? . . . Does Milton somewhere make the point that memories pass through Fansie, or is this inferred to Milton's views from what is otherwise known about faculty psychology?

Professor Butler responded:

I'm not aware of any other places where Milton is explicit (at least in detail) about the cognitive mechanics of remembering, though the inference is supported by more specific explications of faculty psychology found elsewhere.

I therefore need to learn more about faculty psychology . . .

My Naive Theological Question . . .

Pelagius

Wikipedia

Yesterday, I reported that the Southern Baptists are engaged in theological debates over the issue of free will, and I quoted a passage from "A Statement of the Traditional Southern Baptist Understanding of God's Plan of Salvation":

We affirm that, because of the fall of Adam, every person inherits a nature and environment inclined toward sin and that every person who is capable of moral action will sin. Each person's sin alone brings the wrath of a holy God, broken fellowship with Him, ever-worsening selfishness and destructiveness, death, and condemnation to an eternity in hell.

We deny that Adam's sin resulted in the incapacitation of any person's free will or rendered any person guilty before he has personally sinned. While no sinner is remotely capable of achieving salvation through his own effort, we deny that any sinner is saved apart from a free response to the Holy Spirit's drawing through the Gospel.

That raised some questions for me:

Every person purportedly inherits a sinful nature and invariably commits sinful acts, yet the free will of each person is not in any way incapacitated by this sinful nature. How do these two positions fit together, exactly? If a fallen person's free will is not incapacitated, then why couldn't the person be saved through correct moral choices? In other words, why would one need a savior?

An anonymous commentator responded:

Come on, that's not a deep theological puzzle. The world just needs to be stuctured in such a way that at certain inevitable junctions you get no morally sound option, only several sinful acts to freely choose among.

I replied:

It is [a deep theological puzzle] for me, but I'm not so "theologically sophisticated" as you are.

Readers will recall that I admitted as much in my post:

I'm not theologically sophisticated enough to know the finer points of these dogmas . . .

So, don't expect much from me in the way of answers. I have mostly questions. My questions, unfortunately, are not always clear. My anonymous commentator focused on my query as to "why . . . the person [with incapacitated free will couldn't] be saved through correct moral choices" and answered that our world confronts us with tragic choices in which we are forced to choose among various alternatives, each of which requires us to sin in some way or another. That describes the world that we live in, so even a person with a nature not inclined toward sin would be forced into tragic choices and therefore forced to sin.

Except for Jesus, of course, who did not face any tragic choices because his path through the world brought him to confront only morally sound options, such that he was not in all points tested as we are, and was therefore without sin, allowing him to fulfill his soteriological purpose in the world.

But that's a different issue, so let's drop it for now. My real question was this:

Every person purportedly inherits a sinful nature and invariably commits sinful acts, yet the free will of each person is not in any way incapacitated by this sinful nature. How do these two positions fit together, exactly?

I confused the issue with other questions. Let me put it another way. Suppose the world were structured in such a way that we didn't confront tragic choices. The Baptist statement affirms that we would sin anyway because of our sinful nature despite our perfectly free will. Hence my real question, when not conflated with other questions, is this:

How do these two positions fit together, exactly?

I don't know the answer, so I am interested in what others think.

Fallenness in a Darwinian World?

St. Augustine

Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510)

(Wikipedia)

The painting above dates to 1480 and is said to depict St. Augustine at prayer, though his eyes are open. They are, however, directed upward, as though contemplating spiritual realities. This saint, however, also observed earthly realities, such as the radical evil of human beings, which he thought due to the enslavement of the human will by our sinful nature, which he argued was biologically inherited from Adam and Eve, who had fallen from innocence into evil by their violation of God's command not to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

My cyberfriend Bill Vallicella has been blogging on human evil, as I noted in a recent blog entry of my own -- "Fallenness as the Human Condition" -- on an article about "original sin" in the journal First Things:

I'm indebted to my friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, for the link to the First Things article. Bill has been discussing several of the logical conundrums confronting those who take original sin seriously, and he would be well worth reading on the subject, though I've had too little time lately to do so myself, being immersed in teaching and editing.

I emailed Bill to let him know of my implicit 'hat tip' to him, and in noting an intriguing argument presented in the First Things article, I posed a query:

I liked the interesting argument that the consequences of belief and nonbelief in original sin are both bad and thus evidence of our fallen natures. But I do wonder what either original sin or fallenness mean in a Darwinian world . . .

Bill has since responded to my query with another blog post, titled "Original Sin in a Darwinian World." I cannot do justice to his argument by a summary, so I urge interested readers to go directly to his own post, but I can indicate some of his argument as it relates to my query.

Bill rejects Augustine's view that guilt is inherited, so he absolves us of any guilt due to inheritance, what he calls "originated original sin" (following Kant), basing his view on our moral intuition that we are only morally culpable for actions or inactions over which we have control, i.e., libertarian freedom. In place of Augustine's view, Bill offers what he calls "originating original sin" (again following Kant), by which he means that the fact of our evil actions or inactions can be understood as due to our fallenness -- and Bill cites Kant explicitly on this point -- "as though the individual had fallen into it directly from a state of innocence." This distinction is presented in more detail in Bill's post on Kant's distinction "between originating original sin (peccatum originale originans) and originated original sin (peccatum originale originatum)."

Bill also rejects a literal reading of the Genesis account of Adam and Eve, for he takes seriously the evidence for evolution. Hence his response to my query radically reinterprets the meaning of the Biblical account, and he follows Kant in this:

Man enjoys dual citzenship. As a physical being, and thus as an animal, he he is a member of the phenomenal world, the world of space-time-matter. In this realm determinism reigns: everything that happens is necessitated by the laws of nature plus the initial conditions. But man knows himself to be morally responsible, and so knows himself to be libertarianly free. Since everything phenomenal is determined, and nothing free, man as moral agent is a noumenal being who 'stands apart from the causal nexus.'

Kant sees with blinding clarity that nothing imputable to an agent can be caused by factors external to the agent: only that which the agent does or leaves undone freely and by his own agency is imputable to the agent. It follows that sinfulness, guilt, and desert of punishment cannot be inherited: there is no originated original sin. For what is inherited is caused to be by factors external to the agent. So . . . [the claim that there is a universal propensity to moral evil in human beings that is not inherited] is true. But the predisposition to moral evil is nonetheless innate in the sense that it is not conditioned by events in time. It is logically prior to every action of the agent in the time-order.

How is the predisposition imputable? It is imputable because it is the result of a free noumenal choice. And so there is originating original sin. Each of us by an atemporal noumenal choice is the origin of the radical evil which is at the root of each specific evil act. So . . . [the claim that there is a universal propensity to moral evil in human beings that is imputable] is true.

If I understand Bill, then our fallenness, which follows from original sin, is to be understood as a state into which we have fallen due to an originating original sin that each one of us commits by acting (or 'inacting') wrongly at some first time in our lives, an action (or inaction) over which we had free control.

If I have understood Bill correctly, this seems to leave open a question that still requires an answer: Why do we, in our original innocence and freedom, choose evil? Admittedly, the same question can also be posed about the traditional story of Adam and Eve.

Failure of Free Will Defense: Poetic Justice

Matt Harvey

Odd . . . he doesn't look evil.

(Image from Matt Harvey Website)

Much as I hate to admit it, Kevin Kim is completely right. God cannot be omnibenevolent. Why not? Because, according to Jack Malvern, writing for Times Online (May 19, 2010), the Wimbledon Championships has an official poet: "Pressure is on as poet warms up for Wimbledon service"! Be forewarned of this occasional 'poem':

Grandest of Slams

By Matt Harvey

Excuse me. I'm sorry. I speak as an Englishman
For the game of lawn tennis there's no better symbol than
Wimbledon

The place where the game's flame was sparked and then kindled in
Where so many spines have sat straight and then tingled in
Wimbledon

Where strawberries and cream have traditionally been sampled in
Kids' eyes have lit up and their cheeks have been dimpled in
Wimbledon

Where tough tennis cookies have cracked and then crumbled in
Top seeds have stumbled, have tumbled, been humbled in
Wimbledon

Where home-grown heroes' hopes have swelled up and then dwindled in
Wimbledon

The Grand Slams' best of breed, it's the whizz it's the biz
The temple where physics expresses its fizz
There's one word for tennis and that one word is
Wimbledon

Copyright Matt Harvey, The Championships Poet 2010

God forbid that this 'poem' be written! But oh, too late for that. Yes, the 'Good' Lord knew that this would happen! And He allowed it, despite foreknowing that we would suffer through this thing without good rhyme or reason. Matt Harvey should never have been given the "significant freedom" to make such a dreadful mistake. Ours is a possible world that ought never to have been actualized.

But perhaps this 'poem' is redeemable? Can it justify its creation by teaching us something in our suffering and thereby make us better persons?

Let's see . . . the word "in" rhymes with itself seven times. Seven! Truly malicious, using a sacred number in this unholy fashion!

Then, there's the at least more honest use of "Wimbledon," which rhymes with itself six times, the number of imperfection, of evil!

And since these two words are wrought to rhyme with each other, we have thirteen all together, another evil sum, the number of those present at the Last Supper and thus a symbol of betrayal, of evil at the world's beating heart.

But perhaps this 'poem' can serve as a bad example? Hell, no! Its evil is so quotidian, so mundane that we can learn nothing, not even to avoid it, for the banality of its evil infects us all . . . or will, if this post goes viral.

I concede defeat, Mr. Kim. This 'poem' is the proverbial straw that breaks the theodicean camel's back. This wretched verse has made things worse. There's just too much evil in our world, brought on through the needless suffering occasioned by this 'poem.'

God is therefore not omnibenevolent.

Free Will Defense Insufficient?

Alvin Plantinga

Kevin's Nemesis

(Image from Wikipedia)

Kevin Kim has objected to my argument concerning a refutation of the so-called "logical problem of evil." Briefly put, I argued that there is no obvious logical contradiction between the fact of evil and God's omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence because of the possibility that God has a good reason for allowing evil even if we are unaware of this reason.

Kevin raises an objection to my refutation with respect to God's omnibenevolence, arguing that "If the term has any meaning at all, it has to mean that God desires maximal fulfillment for all his creatures . . . . [and that it] cannot mean anything less than this, for anything less would entail less-than-maximal fulfillment for at least one creature."

Kevin goes on to object that Alvin Plantinga's free will defense offers no way past this objection. We therefore ought to look at the free will defense to consider Kevin's objection, so let's borrow Tim O'Keefe's convenient version of Plantinga's free will defense:

1. Creatures who are significantly free cannot be causally determined to do only what is right.
2. Thus, if God creates creatures who are significantly free, He cannot causally determine them to do only what is right. (from 1)
3. Thus, if God creates creatures who are significantly free, he must create creatures who are capable of moral evil. (from 2)
4. Thus, if God creates a world containing creatures who are significantly free, it will contain creatures who are capable of moral evil. (from 3)
5. If God creates a world containing creatures who are capable of moral evil, He cannot guarantee that there will not be evil in that world.
6. Thus, if God creates a world containing creatures who are significantly free, He cannot guarantee that there will not be evil in that world. (from 4 and 5)
7. A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more morally good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all.
8. Thus, God has good reason to create a world containing creatures who are significantly free. (from 7)
9. Thus, God has good reason to create a world, which He cannot guarantee will not contain evil. (from 6 and 8)

This is a strong argument, I believe, if one accepts the premise that to be "significantly free" is a great good, great enough to justify the possibility of evil arising through such significant freedom.

Presumably, Kevin would object that such freedom is not justified because this would violate the principle of omnibenevolence since this significant freedom would leave open the possibility that free creatures might have less-than-maximal fulfillment.

But what does Kevin mean by "maximal fulfillment"? I don't find a definition of this expression in his post. Does it entail that God create creatures that are His equal in every way? Surely not, since God must be greater than every other being. How 'maximal', then, is sufficient for maximal fulfillment? But perhaps Kevin is not speaking of a maximal degree of being but of maximal fulfillment of the potential intrinsic to each finite being created by God. This still seems to require too much, for based upon this interpretation, if even a single finite being lacks maximal fulfillment of its potential, this lack would violate God's omnibenevolence. But perhaps Kevin is also not speaking of a maximal degree of potential either.

In fact, what Kevin seems to mean in his post is not that God's omnibenevolence entails "maximal fulfillment" for each creature created but that God's omnibenevolence entails that there be no "creaturely suffering" at all among the various creatures created. But is this really entailed? What if a world in which creaturely suffering can occur offers greater fulfillment than a world in which no creaturely suffering can occur? Perhaps "significant freedom" offers the possibility of greater fulfillment than the lack of such freedom.

The difficult issue would thus be not the fact of suffering per se but an amount of suffering beyond what is necessary for the fulfillment offered by creating finite creatures with significant freedom.

Feeling Willful on the Milton List . . .

Homunculus at Work

"Just eat it, eat it, eat it, eat it

Get yourself an egg and beat it"

(Image from Wikipedia)

In a discussion a few days ago on free will in the thought of John Milton, one of the scholars, an elderly gentleman who works and thinks within the Marxist tradition, made this remark:

"My experience, then, and I would say human experience, is that whenever and wherever we find ourselves, we are always already enmeshed in an ensemble of social relations."

That sounded too familiar, especially the "always already" terminology, so I asked him a somewhat impertinant question and followed it with an account of my own introspective experience:

Is this your experience . . . or your social theory?

My own experience -- and I cannot speak for others -- is that I find myself repeatedly in circumstances presenting alternatives, some trivial, some significant, that require me to make choices and thus demand of me varying degrees of reflection in making those choices, and as constrained as all this may seem, I experience a sense of responsibility, to varying degrees, for the choices that I make, and thus find myself regreting some choices and thinking that I should have chosen differently and that I could have chosen differently, a subjunctive experience that I was free to have done so.

That's my experience. What it implies for the truth or falsity of free will, I don't know, but I don't find any homunculus making my decisions for me.

My reference to the homunculus was to meet his statement that "the concept of 'the will' . . . seems to operate as a sort of homunculus sitting apart from that continuum, making its 'choices'," for I don't see that the concept of "will" implies a homunculus crouched in our heads making cramped decisions for us to act out.

I didn't get a response from that scholar, but I do wonder about other people's experiences . . . whether similar or different than mine.

Thomas Pink: A 'Humean' Defense of Libertarian Freedom

David Hume

Looking rather regal . . .

Portrait by Allan Ramsey (1766)

(Image from Wikipedia)

Toward the end of his short introduction to the issue of free will, Dr. Thomas Pink brings in the thought of David Hume in an argument that had already occurred to me as a potential defense of libertarian freedom. Many critics have singled out the putative 'mysteriousness' of "freedom," but "causation" is perhaps just as 'mysterious':

Hume thought causal power was just as hidden from us as the sceptic supposes libertarian freedom to be. He thought that our experience never actually represents causation to us. All we have direct experience or awareness of, Hume argued, is regularities in nature -- one kind of thing, such as a fire being lit, regularly being followed by another kind of thing, water above it boiling. We never have direct awareness of something else, causal force, as a further feature in the world connecting these. (Pink, Free Will: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, page 121)

By analogy, then, if we are going to accept causation, we should be willing to accept libertarian freedom, i.e., free will. About forty pages earlier, on page 82, Dr. Pink has already made a threefold distinction that is relevant here:

Causally Predetermined . . . so . . . Uncontrolled by us (Causation)

Causally Undetermined . . . and . . . Uncontrolled by us (Randomness)

Causally Undetermined . . . and . . . Controlled by us (Freedom)

By "Uncontrolled," Dr. Pink doesn't mean that we can't interact with causal or random events, but rather that they are not subject to our control in the way that our decisions are. The plausibility of this threefold distinction depends partly on what one thinks about "Randomness." I realize that many people believe that quantum mechanics supports the view that some events are purely random (much as macroscopic physics supports the view that most events are entirely causal), but quantum mechanics may be a limited understanding rather than capturing an ontological truth about nature. One might add that the 'random' events of quantum mechanics are not purely random anyway since they have a certain predictability and follow patterns that express lawlike behavior, which perhaps implies some large degree of causality operating at the subatomic level even if one takes the randomness seriously.

If quantum mechanics should turn out to be incomplete and subatomic particles discovered to be entirely causal in their interrelations, the threefold distinction collapses into a twofold distinction unsupported by science and thereby somewhat less plausible, though this twofold distinction would continue to receive the support of our firsthand experience and of a Humean emphasis upon the 'mysteriousness' of causality.

Thomas Pink: Critique of Hobbesian 'Free' Will

Drug Addiction

Rational Scale to Assess the Harm of Drugs

Mean Physical Harm and Mean Dependence

What about mean loss of freedom and mean dependence?

(Image from Wikipedia)

Dr. Thomas Pink explains the Hobbesian view of 'free' will as action driven causally by desires if that action is unobstructed by external constraints. Dr. Pink acknowledges that this Hobbesian view has a certain plausibility . . . but also a central problem:

Hobbesian freedom, remember, is no more than unobstructed desire. The only thing, according to Hobbes, that can remove our freedom, is some obstacle to satisfying our desires. Our freedom can never be taken away by our desires themselves. But common sense thinks of freedom quite differently. It sees freedom as something that can perfectly well be taken away from us, not merely by obstacles to our desires, but by our desires themselves. Consider drug addicts, for example. A drug addict is a person imprisoned, not by obstacles to desire satisfaction such as locked cell doors or chains, but by his own desires. A drug addict lacks the freedom not to take the drug to which he is addicted. And he lacks this freedom not to take the drug because his own desire to take it, and not any external constraint, is forcing him to act. The addict is acting exactly as he desires to act. But despite the lack of any obstacle to acting as he desires, he is still not acting freely. He is still not free to act otherwise. And it is his very own desires that have taken that freedom away. (Pink, Free Will: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, page 68)

An interesting objection to Hobbes: one's desires can obstruct one's freedom even though Hobbes defines the will as nothing more nor less than one's desires.

But, the Hobbesian might object, is the desire caused by drug addiction an entirely internal desire? Some might counter that the drug is introduced from outside the body. I'm not sure that this objection would be valid, however, for the Hobbesian view hasn't distinguished between imposed and unimposed desires. But even if one grants the distinction, what about unimposed desires that can tend to compel us against our will? On Hobbesian principles, this can't even be properly expressed, for the will is nothing more than desire, which would mean that our desire is compelling us against our desire -- or our will against our will. Moreover, we may find multiple, competing desires.

Are we legion? For we sound like many. And it's beginning to get a little crowded in here.

Free Will: Medieval Spirit-Matter Hierarchy

Philosophy

Seated among Seven Liberal Arts

Hortus Deliciarum (12th century)

Herrad von Landsberg

(Image from Wikipedia)

I've not yet found Dr. Thomas Pink's explicit reason for seemingly treating mental acts and physical acts as the same sort of activity, but it seems to be a post-Hobbesian formulation in which the will is not a distinct, spiritual 'substance' but also, in some sense, 'material'.

Dr. Pink notes the difference in the free will problem for Medieval philosophy:

The medievals' belief in the immateriality of decision-making prevented them from seeing the free will problem as we do -- as mainly a problem about how to reconcile freedom with the likelihood that actions are events within a physical world, subject like events of any other kind to physical causation. Instead, the medievals generally saw the world as a cosmic hierarchy -- a hierarchy in which spirit or the immaterial outranked matter. And because spirit or the immaterial outranked matter, immaterial processes, processes such as reasoning or deliberate human action, could not be determined or necessitated by physical or material causes. (Pink, Free Will: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, page 40)

Interesting. The medievals were 'blind' to the mind-body problem that we moderns see whenever we investigate the possibility of free will, for they saw spirit as intrinsically superior to matter and thus necessarily to be obeyed by matter . . . as a matter of course, one might put it. A bit like a lord commanding a knight to enter the field of battle. The knight obeys out of a sense of duty legitimated by a medieval hierarchy in which a lord outranks a knight. Understanding that -- for the medievals -- posed no 'interaction' problem.

The medieval free will problem lay solely in reconciling the free will of humans with the omniscience and providence of God.

Thomas Pink: Free Will

Dr. Thomas Pink

Department of Philosophy

(Image from King's College London)

On Tuesday last week, I visited Kyobo Bookstore at Ewha University to pick up a copy of the textbook for my Research Writing class and happened to notice a book section devoted to Oxford's Very Short Introduction series, so I browsed and selected three booklets -- one on the crusades, one on terrorism, and one on free will.

The one on freedom of the will is by Dr. Thomas Pink, who seems to be an expert. His academic site at King's College London states that "[t]he two past moral philosophers from whom Pink has learnt most are probably David Hume and Francisco Suarez" -- two very different thinkers, I might note. If I recall, Hume denies free will, whereas the earlier thinker, Suárez, follows Luis de Molina in defending it. However, I'm no expert on either Hume, Suarez, or Molina.

But Dr. Pink, who defends free will, occasionally expresses himself in ambiguous ways:

Our freedom, we must remember, is a freedom of action -- a freedom to do things or to refrain from doing them. (Pink, Free Will: A Very Short Introduction, 5)

I wouldn't put the point quite like that, for action can be quite limited by circumstances beyond our control. Earlier on the same page, Pink states the point more to my liking:

Freedom of action may even depend on freedom specifically of decision-making -- on a freedom of will. (Pink, Free Will: A Very Short Introduction, 5)

To my way of thinking, we may freely decide on a course of action that is then forcibly prevented in some manner. Our inability to follow through would not mean that our will was unfree but merely that our actions were constrained.

Possibly, Dr. Pink is simply using the term "action" in a loose way that mirrors our everyday use, in which something that we decide and something that we do are both 'actions', for we speak both of acts of the will and acts that we carry out, but there is surely a distinction between a mental act and a physical act, as Dr. Pink himself implies in his reference to "freedom . . . of decision-making" and "[f]reedom of action," and I suspect that he will have some things to say about this difference.

Perhaps, then, I'll be reporting on my reading of this very short text, which goes only up to 132 pages . . . though I may also be reporting from Holbrook Jackson or Herman Melville in ways that might restrict my freedom.

Divine Sovereignty and Human Freedom VI

King Saul and David

Rembrandt

(Image from Wikipedia)

An intriguing instance of a counterfactual seems implicit in 1 Samuel 23:9-13, where David is hiding in the city Keilah but hears that Saul is plotting to attack:

9 When David learned that Saul was plotting against him, he said to Abiathar the priest, "Bring the ephod." 10 David said, "O Lord, God of Israel, your servant has heard definitely that Saul plans to come to Keilah and destroy the town on account of me. 11 Will the citizens of Keilah surrender me to him? Will Saul come down, as your servant has heard? O Lord, God of Israel, tell your servant." And the Lord said, "He will." 12 Again David asked, "Will the citizens of Keilah surrender me and my men to Saul?" And the Lord said, "They will." 13 So David and his men, about six hundred in number, left Keilah and kept moving from place to place. When Saul was told that David had escaped from Keilah, he did not go there. ("1 Samuel 23 - New International Version," Blue Letter Bible, 1996-2009)

As we see from this example, David uses the ephod (something like divine dice) to ask God to reveal what the future holds, and God tells him what the future holds: Saul will come down to Keilah, whose citizens will surrender David.

David therefore leaves Keilah, and the events foretold by God do not occur.

The counterfactual that I understand is this: God foretells what will happen -- on the assumption that David should choose to remain in Keilah. Left unstated is what will happen if David should choose to leave Keilah, but David chooses to leave and escapes unharmed.

I don't have a sophisticated argument here, but this passage seems to make more sense if one reads it in light of libertarian freedom than divine determinism. The passage seems to presuppose a true counterfactual in this world (rather than some other, possible world): if David remains, then Saul will capture him, but he leaves, so Saul does not capture him.

Assuming that David has libertarian free will, then David's choice could make either outcome true (though God, being omniscient, knows what David will choose).

By contrast, if David lacks libertarian free will, and God divinely determines every event, then God's statement of the foretold events would seem to me to be false, for God knows that he has determined David to choose to escape. If we assume divine determinism, God would seem to be making a false statement.

I don't pretend that I've made a rigorous argument that libertarian free will is implicit in 1 Samuel 23:9-13, but it seems intuitively more likely to me.

Other interesting passages to consider are Jeremiah 38:17-18, Matthew 17:27 and 26:24, and John 18:36.

Divine Sovereignty and Human Freedom V

William Lane Craig

(Image from Reasonable Faith)

In a comment left on my first post in this series, Dominic Bnonn Tennant noted the following point about an omniscient being (in the context of interpreting Matthew 11:23):

Moreover, how does Jesus know what Sodom would have done? That is, what grounds his knowledge? The Calvinist says that counterfactuals are grounded in God's knowledge of what he would have caused to occur in some other possible world. Hence, Jesus can know certainly what Sodom would have done in the possible world where he performed such signs in it. But if you are making an argument for libertarian free will -- specifically an argument which presupposes as necessary the principle of alternative possibility [PAP] -- then what grounds exist for this knowledge? Was Jesus just guessing? If PAP obtains, then in principle Jesus could not possibly know (that is, he could have no certainty) that Sodom would have repented. There just doesn't seem to be any way for him to know this, given that it didn't actually happen. Furthermore, even if some account for the grounds of his knowledge can be given, the problem remains as to how God can have knowledge grounded in anything but himself. How can he be genuinely omniscient if some of his knowledge is contingent upon his own creation? This would seem to destroy both his simplicity, and his status as the ontological grounds of knowledge itself (see John's use of the term logos).

As Bnonn's comment shows, this is a complex issue. Even setting aside the problem of how Jesus would know things available only to an omniscient being (given Jesus's presumed kenosis), as Bnonn suggests, there remains the question as to how God could be "genuinely omniscient if some of his knowledge is contingent upon his own creation."

Perhaps I've misunderstood, but Bnonn seems to be distinguishing between two sorts of omniscience: authentic and inauthentic:

Authentic omniscience: God's omniscience is grounded solely in divine determinism.

Inauthentic omniscience: God's omniscience is grounded in more than divine determinism, e.g., also upon contingencies of creaturely freedom.

By "divine determinism" is meant that God causes to occur or could cause to occur. If I understand Bnonn's point, then God's omniscience would be inauthentic if it were partly dependent upon the free acts of created beings. Why? Well, perhaps Bnonn means because God would then not know what would have happened if a created being had acted differently.

If that is the case, then would God's omniscience exclude knowledge about possible worlds that entail creaturely freedom? Would this mean -- to 'misquote' Robert Browning -- that God's "reach must exceed his grasp"? God's omnipotence, which includes his power to actualize possible worlds in which creaturely freedom is actualized, exceeds his grasp to know what would result in such possible worlds?

If so, then "authentic omniscience" would seem to exclude knowledge of some possible worlds.

Perhaps William Lane Craig's explication of middle knowledge (scientia media) offers a way of understanding how God could have knowledge of all possible worlds. Here is a long passage from his article "No Other Name":

Largely the product of the creative genius of the Spanish Jesuit of the Counter-Reformation Luis Molina (1535-1600), the doctrine of middle knowledge proposes to furnish an analysis of divine knowledge in terms of three logical moments. Although whatever God knows, He has known from eternity, so that there is no temporal succession in God's knowledge, nonetheless there does exist a sort of logical succession in God's knowledge in that His knowledge of certain propositions is conditionally or explanatorily prior to His knowledge of certain other propositions. That is to say, God's knowledge of a particular set of propositions depends asymmetrically on His knowledge of a certain other set of propositions and is in this sense posterior to it. In the first, unconditioned moment God knows all possibilia, not only all individual essences, but also all possible worlds. Molina calls such knowledge "natural knowledge" because the content of such knowledge is essential to God and in no way depends on the free decisions of His will. By means of His natural knowledge, then, God has knowledge of every contingent state of affairs which could possibly obtain and of what the exemplification of the individual essence of any free creature could freely choose to do in any such state of affairs that should be actual.

In the second moment, God possesses knowledge of all true counterfactual propositions, including counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. That is to say, He knows what contingent states of affairs would obtain if certain antecedent states of affairs were to obtain; whereas by His natural knowledge God knew what any free creature could do in any set of circumstances, now in this second moment God knows what any free creature would do in any set of circumstances. This is not because the circumstances causally determine the creature's choice, but simply because this is how the creature would freely choose. God thus knows that were He to actualize certain states of affairs, then certain other contingent states of affairs would obtain. Molina calls this counterfactual knowledge "middle knowledge" because it stands in between the first and third moment in divine knowledge. Middle knowledge is like natural knowledge in that such knowledge does not depend on any decision of the divine will; God does not determine which counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are true or false. Thus, if it is true that

If some agent S were placed in circumstances C, then he would freely perform action a,

then even God in His omnipotence cannot bring it about that S would refrain from a if he were placed in C. On the other hand, middle knowledge is unlike natural knowledge in that the content of His middle knowledge is not essential to God. True counterfactuals of freedom are contingently true; S could freely decide to refrain from a in C, so that different counterfactuals could be true and be known by God than those that are. Hence, although it is essential to God that He have middle knowledge, it is not essential to Him to have middle knowledge of those particular propositions which He does in fact know.

Intervening between the second and third moments of divine knowledge stands God's free decree to actualize a world known by Him to be realizable on the basis of His middle knowledge. By His natural knowledge, God knows what is the entire range of logically possible worlds; by His middle knowledge He knows, in effect, what is the proper subset of those worlds which it is feasible for Him to actualize. By a free decision, God decrees to actualize one of those worlds known to Him through His middle knowledge. According to Molina, this decision is the result of a complete and unlimited deliberation by means of which God considers and weighs every possible circumstance and its ramifications and decides to settle on the particular world He desires. Hence, logically prior, if not chronologically prior, to God's creation of the world is the divine deliberation concerning which world to actualize.

Given God's free decision to actualize a world, in the third and final moment God possesses knowledge of all remaining propositions that are in fact true in the actual world. Such knowledge is denominated "free knowledge" by Molina because it is logically posterior to the decision of the divine will to actualize a world. The content of such knowledge is clearly not essential to God, since He could have decreed to actualize a different world. Had He done so, the content of His free knowledge would be different.

The difficulty in this system of middle knowledge lies in understanding how God could know what free agents would freely do. Yet, an account of this would seem to be necessary if God's knowledge about the details of all possible worlds is not to be incomplete. Molina saw this problem and attempted to deal with it, perhaps unsuccessfully, but his suggestion led to further theological reflections:

Molina (Concordia, pp. 290, 303) transferred the medium of God's infallible knowledge to the supercomprehensio cordis (kardiognosia, the searching of hearts). In virtue of this supercomprehension, God knows the most secret inclinations and penetrates the most hidden recesses of man's heart, and is thus enabled to foresee with mathematical certainty the free resolves latent in man's will. This unsatisfactory explanation, however, met with the natural objection that the mathematically certain foreknowledge of an effect from its cause is nothing more or less than the knowledge of a necessary effect; consequently the will would no longer be free (cf. Kleutgen, "De Deo Uno", Rome, 1881, pp. 322 sqq.). Therefore, the opinion, gradually adopted since the time of Francisco Suárez (but repudiated in Molina's work), maintains that, by the scientia media, God sees the conditioned future acts in themselves, i.e. in their own (formal or objective) truth. For, since every free act must be absolutely determined in its being, even before it becomes actual or at least conditionally possible, it is from all eternity a definite truth (determinata veritas), and must consequently be knowable as such by the omniscient God with metaphysical certainty. (Joseph Pohle, "Molinism," The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 10 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911))

I freely admit that I don't understand all of this, for I haven't read enough and perhaps also lack sufficient metaphysical insight, but this series of posts is, after all, merely an investigation.

But I am out of time for today.

Divine Sovereignty and Human Freedom IV

Augustine of Hippo

Sandro Botticelli, c. 1480

(Image from Wikipedia)

I have the image above from Wikipedia, which confidently informs me that "Augustine of Hippo wrote that original sin is transmitted by concupiscence and enfeebles freedom of the will without destroying it." The anonymous contributer then cites an article on "Free Will" in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford University Press, 1997), edited by F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone. The statement that Augustine 'affirmed' free will surprises me, for I thought that he had denied it. Unfortunately, I cannot check the article to see what the anonymous Wikipedia individual was referring to, for I do not have the book that contains it.

Well, that's my opening gambit, and it ain't much of one, but I liked the image of Augustine -- his eyes lifted up -- deeply engaged in moral and theological reasoning, for it's indicative of the deep waters into which I've gotten myself (my eyes also lifted up as I sink beneath the waves).

For instance, in an earlier post defending free will, I had innocently noted that "a 'should' entails a 'could.'" To this, Dominic Bnonn Tennant posted a response, asking:

[O]n what basis do you say that a "should" entails a "could"? All men should be perfect. Are you arguing that all men could be perfect? An imperative in no way leads one to infer an indicative.

I've been hesitating to reply to this because I felt that I needed better grounding in the philosophical thinking on this issue. I don't want to go about reinventing the wheel. The wheel has already been invented, improved, possibly even 'perfected', so my own wheel is likely to be a crude one, vastly inferior. But I'll make some suggestions and ask some questions.

First, the suggestions.

Bnonn's statement that "All men should be perfect" is a Christian one, probably based on Matthew 5:48:

Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. (King James Version)

ἔσεσθε οὖν ὑμεῖς τέλειοι, ὥσπερ ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς τέλειός ἐστιν (Textus Receptus)

I borrow this verse, both in English and Greek, from the Blue Letter Bible, as one might have expected. I admit that I've always been somewhat puzzled by this imperative, for it seems to be exhorting people to be something beyond their power. Possibly, one should understand the imperative to mean, "Try to be perfect, and you will learn that this is impossible, for the law is intended to teach you that you will fail" -- if one were to apply a Pauline hermeneutic here (cf. Romans 5:13-17 and Galatians 3:19-25, among other places). But maybe the point goes a bit further, namely, that perfection is possible, ultimately, if one accepts the grace offered and the glorification promised (again applying a Pauline hermeneutic, cf. 1 Corinthians 15:42-54). Perhaps one needs help to be perfect, but if one should be perfect, then one ought to accept that help.

I'll get to my questions in a moment, but I should note an example that Bnonn provided to illustrate that an "ought" does not always imply a "could":

Say a man embezzles a million dollars, and is subsequently caught. At trial, because of mitigating circumstances, the judge agrees to defer jailtime if the man simply pays back the money. Unfortunately, most of it has already been squandered. Surely we'd agree that the man ought to pay back the money (in fact, even if he were not so ordered, he still ought to pay it back) -- yet certainly he cannot pay it back. The imperative does not imply an indicative.

I think that the issue would be more complex than this. Of course, the man should not have embezzled the money in the first place, and presumably, he had a choice about that. Since he is guilty of a crime, he must make some sort of restitution or be punished (or both). One way would be for him to repay the money, and he should do this if he can. If he lacks the funds now, he could be required to pay back in installments. There is some possibility of repaying, even if the man currently lacks the money. By contrast, we would never say of a murderer that he should bring the dead man back to life, for that is not only currently impossible but also utterly beyond all human possibility. Returning to the embezzlement case, if for some reason -- let us assume -- we know that the man would not, ever, be able to repay, then the legal system could provide for punishment instead. The reasoning would be: "Since the man is guilty, then he should repay the funds if he can, but since he cannot repay the funds, then he should be punished with prison time." A legal system would be foolish to insist that the man should repay if he cannot. It would, rather, insist that the man serve time in prison.

Now for my questions.

How would an imperative make sense if the act demanded were impossible? I can understand that an imperative might be given to teach a lesson, e.g., "Okay, be perfect by your own efforts if you think that you can be (but you'll find that you cannot)." But would that be a genuine imperative? Or rather a means of teaching a lesson? In the embezzlement example above, however, the moral assumption is that the man had a choice between embezzling or not embezzling. If he were forced at gunpoint to embezzle, we would likely not hold him responsible. Or, to put things another way, we would not hold the man's computer responsible for the embezzlement, for the computer had no choice, being merely an instrument of the man's will. Would we say that the computer should not have carried out the man's will? Wouldn't that be demanding of a computer that it ought to act in a way that it cannot act? Would such a demand make any sense?

I'm not sure if I've adequately responded to this part of Bnonn's objections to my view that an "ought" implies a "could." Probably, I've merely chiseled a rough-hewn wheel from philosophical stone.