Not wrote in a while. Put that down to a certain Immanuel Kant and his dire attempt at explaining moral motivation. Writing ethics essays has had me involved in thinking about what Michael Smith calls "The Moral Problem".
There seems to be two distinct features morality, that moral judgements are both motivating and objective. We often do things because they are the right thing to do, it's why most of us don't commit murder. We seem as well to think that things like murder or rape are universally wrong, that they are objectively wrong (However, that these things are subjectively wrong yet universal is only improbable, rather than impossible). A third inconsistency rises from David Hume's proposition that beliefs cannot motivate on their own and that we require an accompanying desire. This is all superfluous though, I'm concerned with a different inconsistent relationship.
My problem is with the relationship between free will and what some people would call destiny. Destiny, when not being used in whimsical Hollywood productions is most commonly found in religion. I don't pick a particular religion, they're all equally guilty of taking a fancy for God's plan. Although some atheists might think that if we could trace the path of every subatomic particle we might be able to predict exactly the choices you, I or they might make at any given time, this is not what I am concerned with - although my argument might be of use to those opposed to the calculating atheist.
It seems a common feature of religion (at least the Abrahamic faiths) that we ascribe free will to humans - it's why we got kicked out of the Garden after all. It seems just as common that those same religions explain bad things by saying it's all part of God's plan. Actually, saying bad things are God's plan seems like a pretty good defence in the face of the problem of evil and, rather topically, the problem of natural disasters. Some might say that natural disasters are the result of the best possible way the world we know and love could be constructed, I find this argument weak - isn't God supposed to be all knowing and infinitely capable of using his knowledge. He made the physical laws, so if he couldn't create a perfectly disasterless world because of those laws he could just change them.
Let us consider then the problem of God's plan. If God has a plan which he believes in enough to end the lives of those caught in natural disasters, and God is rational, God will have made the world in such a way that his plan comes to fruition. If you accept the contingencies of the butterfly effect (chaos theory, not the movie) then every little decision matters and will have to be planned for in such a way as to promote the outcomes desired as part of the afore mentioned plan.
If we have free will on the other hand, then God's plan is redundant. If God's plan involves person P dying in natural disaster N at time T, then having free will contradicts God's plan. P might use their free will to go to the place of N at a time earlier than T, or delays it and subsequently cancels after realising they would have died in N.
We can try to reconcile this, maybe God plans for our choices. God knows what choices we will make. Like an awesome psychiatrist, God is supposed to know us better than we know ourselves. But a religious person who maintains we have either free will or that God has a plan cannot reasonably submit to this position. If God plans for our choices in advance, if that is the only possible outcome, then we have to admit we have no free will. If God can see our choices in advance when creating the world and creates it in such a manner to coincide with both his plan and what we see as choice then it is not really choice at all and merely an illusion.
What is the religious person to do - give up free will or give up God's plan? Giving up free will would most likely be easier for religion. Giving up on God's plan leaves the religious person seeking a new answer to difficult questions like natural disasters. To atheists, and myself, it seemed like a cheap get out of jail free card the whole time anyway, but now I can put my finger on why.
No comments:
Post a Comment