Ontology & Free Will. Ontology & Free Will. Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will? The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. Is free will an illusion? Some leading scientists think so. For instance, in 2002 the psychologist Daniel Wegner wrote, “It seems we are agents. It seems we cause what we do… It is sobering and ultimately accurate to call all this an illusion.” More recently, the neuroscientist Patrick Haggard declared, “We certainly don’t have free will.
Not in the sense we think.” Many neuroscientists are employing a flawed notion of free will. Such proclamations make the news; after all, if free will is dead, then moral and legal responsibility may be close behind. Indeed, free will matters in part because it is a precondition for deserving blame for bad acts and deserving credit for achievements. Leif Parsons When Haggard concludes that we do not have free will “in the sense we think,” he reveals how this conclusion depends on a particular definition of free will. Does One Crime Justify Another? Understanding why God hardens Pharaoh's heart. Reprinted with permission from The Torah: A Women's Commentary, edited by Tamara Cohn Eskenazi and Andrea L. We Also Recommend Weiss (New York: URJ Press and Women of Reform Judaism, 2008). God's hardening of Pharaoh's heart in Exodus 10:1 presents a theological problem on two levels.
First, if God is the agent of Pharaoh's behavior, what does that imply about Pharaoh's free will? Commentators, equally bothered by this thorny moral dilemma, have provided inspired interpretations. With Adversity Comes Strength The hardening of Pharaoh's heart might also be viewed as a paradigm for what Fran Burgess calls the "transformative power of adversity. " Did you like this article? Please consider making a donation today. Rabbi Singer currently serves Temple Beth El in Riverside, CA as rabbi and educator. Science and Free Will. The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. The Stone is featuring occasional posts by Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, that apply critical thinking to information and events that have appeared in the news. Could science prove that we don’t have free will?
An article in Nature reports on recent experiments suggesting that our choices are not free. “We feel that we choose,” says the neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes, “but we don’t.” The experiments show that, prior to the moment of conscious choice, there are correlated brain events that allow scientists to predict, with 60 to 80 percent probability, what the choice will be. But my wife might be 100 percent certain that, given a choice between chicken livers and strip steak for dinner, I will choose steak.
This is not necessarily because freedom is some mysterious immaterial quality that is beyond the ken of science. The Brain on Trial - Magazine. Advances in brain science are calling into question the volition behind many criminal acts. A leading neuroscientist describes how the foundations of our criminal-justice system are beginning to crumble, and proposes a new way forward for law and order. On the steamy first day of August 1966, Charles Whitman took an elevator to the top floor of the University of Texas Tower in Austin. The 25-year-old climbed the stairs to the observation deck, lugging with him a footlocker full of guns and ammunition.
At the top, he killed a receptionist with the butt of his rifle. Two families of tourists came up the stairwell; he shot at them at point-blank range. Then he began to fire indiscriminately from the deck at people below. The evening before, Whitman had sat at his typewriter and composed a suicide note: I don’t really understand myself these days.
By the time the police shot him dead, Whitman had killed 13 people and wounded 32 more. For that matter, so did Whitman. Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will? Divine Providence. According to some thinkers, God only watches over people in a general way; according to others, divine providence extends to the minute details of life. The discussion below begins in the Middle Ages and then goes back in time to discuss talmudic ideas. The author does this because the questions surrounding divine providence are more explicit in medieval sources. Reprinted with permission from The Jewish Religion: A Companion, published by Oxford University Press. The Hebrew term for divine providence, hashgahah, was first used by the medieval Jewish theologians who, under the influence of Greek philosophy, preferred abstract terms to denote ideas found in concrete form in the Bible and the rabbinic literature.
General and Special Providence The abstract discussions of the medievals were largely around the scope of divine providence. These thinkers thus allow the recognition that there is a random element in nature. Did you like this article? Please consider making a donation today. Free Will Problem in Judaism. Our experiences indicate that we have free will. We Also Recommend When we do a particular action, we have the sense that we have chosen that act from an array of alternatives. However, there are theological, philosophical, and scientific reasons to think that this sense of choice is illusory. The idea that God controls the world, determining the trajectory and details of its history, is strong in Judaism and is one of the theological issues that contributes to the Jewish problem of free will.
Early in the Bible, for example, God tells Abraham that his descendants will be oppressed as slaves in a foreign land; God will punish their oppressors, however, and Abraham's children will leave with great wealth and return to the land of Canaan (Genesis 15). In the book of Exodus, God repeatedly hardens Pharaoh's heart so that he will not release the Israelites from slavery. The medieval philosophers struggled with how to reconcile divine providence--known as hashgahah--with human choice. Hardened Hearts: Removing Free Will. The Bible records several problematic instances of God hardening human hearts, seemingly stripping them of free will. Excerpted and reprinted with permission from "Freedom, Repentance, and Hardening of the Hearts: Albo vs. Maimonides," published in Faith and Philosophy (1997, 14:4). On several occasions in the Bible, God "hardens the heart" of individuals.
"Victims" of divine hardenings include the Egyptian king Pharaoh (Exodus 4:21; 7:3; 9:12; 10:1, 20, 27; 11:10; 14:4, 8, 17, and arguably 14:5, 18), the Moabite king Sihon (Deuteronomy 2:30), and the army of Canaan in the time of Joshua (Joshua 11:20). Proverbs 21:1 informs us, indeed, that "the heart of a king is in the Lord's hands like streams of water; He will turn it to whatever He wants"; and without referring to hardening per se, the prophet Elijah insinuates that God has led the hearts of the sinning Israelites astray (I Kings 18:37).
Interfering With Free Will We may call this the "free will deprivation problem. " Dr. Hardened Hearts: Some Explanations. Medieval commentators suggested justifications for God's hardening Pharaoh's heart. In several places, the Bible reports that God hardened human hearts (most notably, Pharoah's), apparently stripping these agents of free will and manipulating their choices. There are a number of problems with this: 1) Why would God do this? 2) How could God hold a hardened agent responsible for his actions? 3) Why would God prevent one from repenting? 4) How can a good God be the cause of an evil act? A "solution" to [the philosophical problems raised by God's hardening of hearts] must satisfy two criteria. Reinterpretation of the Term Some exegetes, including Saadia Gaon (Book of Beliefs and Opinions, IV:6) and Rabbi Yitzchak Arama (chapter 36 of his Akedat Yitzchak), deny that the term "hardening of the heart" has anything to do with interference in motivational systems.
The Modest Solution Did you like this article? Please consider making a donation today. Dr. Free Will in Judaism 101. If humans do not have free will--the ability to choose--then actions are morally and religiously insignificant: a murderer who kills because she is compelled to do so would be no different than a righteous person who gives charity because she is compelled to do so. Jewish tradition assumes that our actions are significant. According to the Bible, the Jews were given the Torah and commanded to follow its precepts, with reward and retribution to be meted out accordingly. For Judaism to make sense, then, humans must have free will.
The Free Will Problem There are theological problems with the idea of human free will. There is also a philosophical problem, which derives from the conception of God as omnipotent and omniscient: If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, then God must know what we will do before we do it. Modern science has raised yet another problem. Responding to the Free Will Problem Did you like this article?
Please consider making a donation today. Becoming Free in Judaism. From the beginning of biblical time, man has struggled to break his binding ties in order to become free, independent, and fully human. Excerpted from You Shall Be As Gods with permission of the publisher (Henry Holt and Company). Man is seen as being created in God's likeness, with a capacity for an evolution of which the limits are not set. We Also Recommend "God," a Hasidic master remarked, "does not say that 'it was good' after creating man; this indicates that while the cattle and everything else were finished after being created, man was not finished.
" It is man himself, guided by God's word as voiced by the Torah and the Prophets, who can develop his inherent nature in the process of history. What is the nature of this human evolution? Incestuous Bondage Its essence lies in man's emergence from the incestuous ties to blood and soil into independence and freedom. Adam and Eve at the beginning of their evolution are bound to blood and soil; they are still "blind. " Social Bondage. Responding to the Free Will Problem in Judaism. If humans are to be held responsible for their actions, they must have free will, the ability to choose right from wrong. However, ideas about God's providence and foreknowledge and scientific notions of biological and psychological determinism create problems for the presumption of human free will. How have Jewish texts and thinkers responded to these problems? The Bible does not engage this issue in a philosophical manner.
It asserts God's active role in the world as well as the possibility of human choice, without reconciling the two. Rabbinic literature doesn't provide solutions to the free will problem either, though it does seem aware that providence and choice are somewhat incongruous. Rabbi Hanina ben Hama tried to distinguish these two domains in his famous proclamation that, "everything is in the hands of heaven except for fear of heaven" (BT Berakhot 33b). Did you like this article? Please consider making a donation today. The Free Will Problem: Modern Solutions.
Modern thinkers have addressed the free will problem by questioning the authority of science, acknowledging the limits of freedom, and asserting the transcendent importance of choice. Medieval Jewish thinkers were concerned with reconciling the contradictions between human free will and divine providence and foreknowledge. Modern Jewish thinkers, on the other hand, have been primarily concerned with the challenges to free will posed by the natural and social sciences. Physics and Ethics are Distinct Discourses For Hermann Cohen (1842-1918), the scientific paradigm of mechanistic causation, which affirms that every event in the physical world must have a cause, was troubling when juxtaposed with the notion of human choice.
Following Immanuel Kant, Cohen resolves this problem by questioning the status of the mechanistic causation so central to the worldview of the physicist. Choice is Required, But Not Guaranteed Did you like this article? Please consider making a donation today. Psychological Determinism and Free Will. Can we choose our way? The idea that our actions are, to a large degree, determined by our psychological make-up may be viewed as a threat to traditional notions of free will. We Also Recommend In what follows, Solomon Schimmel creates a hypothetical dialogue between psychologists, particularly Freud, and two traditional religious thinkers, the medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides and his near-contemporary, the Christian Thomas Aquinas. Excerpted and reprinted with permission from The Seven Deadly Sins: Jewish, Christian, and Classical Reflections on Human Psychology.
It is not the free‑will model but determinism [i.e. the denial of free will] which dominates scientific conceptions of man. Thoughtful psychologists and social scientists know that there will always remain significant domains of human behavior that are unpredictable and beyond external control. Medieval Philosophers: Humans Can Rationally Choose However, we believe that man has been endowed with reason and will. Dr. The Free Will Problem: Medieval Solutions. In the Middle Ages, Jewish thinkers struggled to reconcile God's knowledge of the future with human choice. Reprinted with permission from The Jewish Religion: A Companion, published by Oxford University Press. A problem that exercised the minds of the medieval Jewish philosophers was that of reconciling God's foreknowledge with human free will.
We Also Recommend This problem, called the problem of "knowledge versus free will," can be baldly stated. If God knows, as presumably He does, long before a man is born how he will behave throughout his life, how can that man be blamed and punished for his sinful acts and praised and rewarded for his virtuous acts? Solution #1: God Has No Foreknowledge Gersonides, unwilling to compromise in any way human free will, posits as a solution (The Wars of the Lord, iii. 6) that God does not know beforehand how a man will behave in particular circumstances. Solution #2: Humans Have No Free Choice Solution #3: Divine and Human Knowledge Are Incomparable. The Denial of Free Will in Hasidic Thought. According to some Hasidic thinkers, human free will is an illusion; God causes all human actions. According to medieval mystic Isaac Luria, God needed to contract before creating the world. We Also Recommend Some Hasidic thinkers conceive of this as an "epistemic" contraction, a withdrawal in the realm of knowledge and perception, which caused the perception that God is separate from the world--which, as discussed in this article, has ramifications for the free will debate.
The other key concept explored below, relevant to the denial of free will, is the importance of intention over action per se. There were at least two distinct clusters of ideas in Hasidism congenial to the denial of free will in one form or another, and which historically exerted pressure in that direction. There Is Nothing Separate From God According to the Ari, prior to Creation "all was filled from the undifferentiated light of the Einsof (the 'Infinite' [i.e. But this was not the real truth. Professor Yehuda I. The Free Will Problem: Early Solutions. Argument from Free Will. Noach_5772.