Free Will

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Free Will (Summer Repeat)

"[On religion] ‘Well, what's odd about that is that it seems, there seems to be a tremendous tension between the idea that determinism is true. And any religion that has a story about punishment and reward in the afterlife. Because in determinism, as it's been said, is the view that absolutely everything you do was determined to happen, you know, hundreds of years before you were born.

In fact, if determinism is true, everything you do is determined to happen by the Big Bang. Right? And, but somehow, somehow this got, gets into written [?]. In fact, you find it certainly in Christianity, you find it first in St. Augustine. And second in Calvinism. The idea that although this is true, although everything you're going to do is determined before you were born, some of us are still going to go to heaven forever, and others are going to go to hell forever. And it seems, what's extraordinary is that the view of determinism has managed to combine itself with religion at all, because that seems profoundly unfair’

‘Why did they want to, why did they take it on?’

‘I'm not quite sure. Part of it is Augustine. He started and certainly Calvin picked up on on St. Augustine's views. I think part of the explanation is that he was an extremely sensual man and found it incredibly hard to give up his very, very sensual life. And so he, that meant that he was really keen on the idea of original sin. Because that's what provided for him a kind of explanation on why he-’

‘Where God could make him change but not yet’...

‘He had this view that none of us could ever do anything good without a specific intervention of grace by God. So basically, left to ourselves, we would always do bad things. And so the only time we ever did anything good, God helped us. But then the question arises, how can it possibly be fair to punish or reward us? And that's a tension that is not resolved, and it's not resolved in Calvinism...

The Dutch Reformed Protestants are some of the purest examples today. Lot of them in America, and I've met such people. And, you know, as you grow up and become a child, you you learn that it's already fixed, you're either going to go to heaven or to hell. Nothing you can do about it. It must be a very weird, psychologically, because you might think, oh, well, if I'm already elect, elected to go to heaven, I can do what I like and have, do bad things. No, probably not. Because if I do bad things, that's kind of a sort of evidence that maybe I'm not chosen to go to heaven. It must be psychologically difficult to live with’...

‘Doesn't determinism lead to the notion that everything can be excused and free will lead to a notion that you're responsible for everything?’...

‘Another way to think about it would be to consider the standard kind of incompatiblist argument which says, look, the reason why determinism robs us of free will is that it robs us of the ability to do otherwise. Everything that I do, that's the only thing I could have done, there's nothing else I could have done.

And compatiblism will say, well, why should we think that the inability to do otherwise really robs us of our freedom? So a standard example, Martin Luther being told to recant by the Holy Roman Emperor, Martin Luther, allegedly, but probably not in fact, said, here I stand, I can do no other.

And Daniel Dennett points out famously that it looks like what Luther absolutely wasn't trying to do there was duck out of moral responsibility. He wasn't saying, hey, guys, you know, this really isn't my fault. You know, that's just the kind of person I am. Don't blame me. He was exactly saying, this is a decision for which I take full moral responsibility’"