Free Will Expounded

Free will necessitates the freedom to make any conceivable choice at any spontaneous moment, but it also demands that the choosing agent is capable of choosing the 'right' choice, that is, the choice of greatest good, etc. In every choosing scenario there is a greatest good choice.  In every situation, the right decision is the one pleasing and praising to God. If this choice is reckoned unavailable to the natural, unrepentant man then free will is equally unavailable.

It is not enough to see the ability to choose as the definition of free will. No. Free will demands that the one freely making the choice can choose the 'correct' choice, that is, the choice of most rightness, i.e. God. But because of sin, man is not able to make the very choice they need to; the freedom to choose the right choice is forfeited. As such, free will is rendered unavailable to the natural man.

Only if the natural man is transformed, reborn as it were, can he posses the freedom of will to choose God. Some would say that the natural man has a certain free will in his ignorance, but knowledge is insufficient to transform the natural man. Knowing I cannot move my limbs does nothing to make them more usable; a quadriplegic cannot run a marathon without new legs!

Desire is the determinant for decision making. It is cognitive desire which assesses the greatest desired end that becomes the discriminating factor between two like choices. For instance, if I can choose between a carrot and a cheeseburger, my choice will almost always be the cheeseburger because my own personality sees that as the greater choice; my own desire determines which choice I will make.

Moreover, the natural man will not choose God for he understands that he stands condemned already. If all the choices of the world were stacked up alongside the choice of God, the natural man will most certainly choose anything other than God because his nature constrains him to reject and spurn anything of God. He is not only unable to choose God but, even more so, he is determined against God in his heart, meaning he would not choose God even if he were able to do so.

If I am unable in my flesh to choose God or even to be able to please God then we must say that I do not have freedom of will in the utmost sense. If our ability to choose means that I must have the right to choose the ultimate good then any deficiency in this regard should be carried through the entirety of the system.

If I cannot choose God then I do not actually possess free will because I am utterly incapable of choosing that which is the ultimate definition of choice. Why would Jesus say man must be born again if it is not because the man as is will not be able to willfully choose God. Only a reborn man can choose God at all.

Additionally, if the unbeliever can only make choices that do not please God and is unable to do otherwise, then we must conclude that he does not have free will on the true sense. The decisions and choices made are but shadows and perceptions of choice, they are not actual choices because he is unable to make the only choice that matters: to love God.

Taken altogether it can be reasonably asserted that free will, as we might conceive of it, is an ability, it turns out, that only the man called and transformed by God possesses.  Any conception of free will that neglects the fact that the freedom to choose God must be present would be, as it were, a deficient concept amputated of freedom and of will.  While this may seem like philosophical philandering, it does affect how we do life and how we understand the human condition.  We would do well to dwell on what we mean by choice, freedom, will, et al.

Grand Illusion of Free Will

Free will is an illusion.  It is a human fancy that can be supported neither by logic nor by the constraints of reality.  Free will is defined, traditionally, as the individual moral agent possessing the ability for spontaneous choice.  Simply put: a person can choose whatever they want whenever they want it.  The key elements, thus, for free will's definition are spontaneity and choice.  This is to say that free will only exists if the elements of spontaneity and choice are present.

However, if we consider the two things necessary for 'free will' then with some reasoning it can be seen that neither of these things exist in the scope of space/time.  Because both of these things are to be considered necessarily present for free will, they need to be addressed as one.  The point, I submit, is that neither of them actually exists as we may think of them.

Spontaneity means that we may have the ability to make any momentary snap decision desired and that a variety of choices must be present at the moment of that decision's making.  But by that very definition, spontaneity cannot be present while allowing for the maximum number of choices because at any specific moment only a limited number of choices are available.  I cannot wake up and go to sleep at the same time.

We are constrained by reality, then, to limit the number of choices available to the spontaneous chooser, but does this in itself challenge the reality of free will?  Consider a hypothetical scenario to illustrate the point.  For this let us limit the available choices to two in an effort to perhaps address the concepts of spontaneity more acutely.

Say there are only two options on a menu.  Both items are specialties of the restaurant but, nonetheless, any patron may order either one or the other, not both.  One of them is a sweet dish, the other a salty one.  A patron sits down at the booth and makes a spontaneous decision.  However, I submit that the decision is not spontaneous but was in fact predicated upon a number of contributing factors (think preference, health, et al), meaning that the choice was not, in the most rigid sense, a free choice but was in fact a highly predictable one.  In this sense, although the individual experiences a spontaneous choice, there was, in actuality, no real free choice made.

Additionally, we must consider the reality of time, particularly the moment present, that is, the precise instant that past and future meet in the present passing moment as a defined and definite historical mark in time.  If we consider that time is a passing of successive moments and the past is the historical logging of the finite certainty of those moments, then we can say that the past has a defined certainty.  Simply put, once the moment passes it is gone and it can not be re-lived.

In reference to free will this is of particular interest.  Choices are not choices in the past, for once a decision is made in space/time it was the only choice that could have been made.  Once something is written in the record of history, it cannot be re-written.  Because of this certainty, we cannot look back at choices made as hypothetical; we can only see them as sure realities that have passed.

So, in reference to past decisions, we are constrained to say that the definite nature of the past compels us to understand that in the light of history spontaneity and the availability of choice are irrelevant indicators of the presence of free will.

In summation, free will is an illusion because its dependence upon spontaneity and choice cannot be carried throughout the system.  And, as choice meets present that passes into past, we must say that merely the presence of a definite, unalterable past inhibits our understandings of free will.

In the end, will is always impeded by the limitations of reality at the very point that the 'free willing agent' meets the present passing moment.  This is not, obviously, to remove at the very least the appearance of choice, however, it is meant to highlight inherit challenges to conceptions we hold towards the human construct of free will.  To be sure, this has been a less-than-exhaustive look into free will but perhaps it may stir up more consideration of this important categorical assertion of the human condition.