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Chapter 6: Free Will
1) Free Will certainly doesn’t make sense.
2) Yet, I find myself believing in it anyway…
3) And since it doesn't make sense, to believe in Free will is to believe
in magic – which is another first step towards believing in God,
and then maybe Jesus.
4) I’m suggesting that if you believe in free will, your faith in
science needs reassessment.
5) Here’s why believing in free will is the same thing as believing
in magic.
6) When we claim that a person has free will, we’re
claiming that he has responsibility for his actions, and is justifiably
blamed for his actions.
7) When we blame someone for something, we attribute the behavior to a
particular trait, or traits. We say that said person is lazy, mean, cowardly,
dishonest, whatever.
8) Yet, unless this person chose to possess
this trait, we are not logically justified in blaming him for the trait.
9) And, if we can’t blame him for the trait, we surely can’t
blame him for the behavior it causes. Tell me where I’m wrong…
10) See. If our traits are simply given to us by heredity,
and/or environment -- or even if they are given to us by G-d -- we can’t
be held responsible for them. And, if I’m not responsible for being
dumb or mean, I’m hardly responsible for where these things lead
me.
11) But then you might think … ‘Well, maybe
we do sort of chose our own traits…’
12) But if we do, on what basis would we do that? On what
basis would we chose a particular trait?
!3) If this choice is to be our responsibility, it has to be made on the
basis of a sort of ‘pre-trait’ we possess.
14) And then, we have to ask ourselves, are we responsible for this pre-trait?
Did we choose this pre-trait?
15) And, you can see where this leads...
16) So logically speaking, we do not have free will and
are not responsible for anything.
17) Now, if you don’t believe that, you have just
found a flaw in your purely scientific, mechanistic, impersonal worldview.
If you believe in free will, and also open-mindedness, you’ve got
a metaphysical problem here and need to rethink.
18) Here's a slightly different way to think about it.
19) If you believe in free will, you are (unwittingly,
I assume) making an impossible assumption.
20) Because, in order to believe in free will, you have to assume that
you were responsible for what you were at the very beginning of your life…
21) For, if you were not responsible for what you were then, you were
not responsible for what you did then.
22) If you were not responsible for what you did then, you were not responsible
for what you became as a result of what you did then.
And, if you were not responsible for what you became, you were not responsible
for what you did as a result of what you had become…
Etc., etc.
23) So, in other words, I can prove that no one is responsible
for anything.
24) The extent to which you seem to be responsible
for your choices/behavior is the extent to which your traits and values
are responsible for your behaviors. Your traits and values are what you
bring to the situation. The rest is the surrounding situation, and outside
of your control (except to the extent that your traits and values are
responsible for the surrounding situation.)
25) But then, unless you chose your own traits and values, you are not
responsible for them. If, for instance, you inherit your traits and values,
no one can blame you for having them, and therefore no one can blame you
for whatever your traits and values cause you to do…
26) So, in order to be responsible for anything, you have to chose your
own traits and values -- or at least some of your own traits and values.
27) But, these are choices, and for you to be responsible for them, they
must be based upon your own traits and values… (Nothing)
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