A.P.L. Free Will The question of whether man has free will or not has been asked since before the time of Aristotle, thousands of years ago. Even many Christian theologians have struggled with this same question. It would seem at first as though the answer would be that of course man has free will, how else would God be justified in passing judgment on people, if man is not responsible for his actions then how can he be held accountable to them. However, what is to be made of passages of scripture in which God directly influences the actions of men and the post-modernist viewpoint that an individual is simply a confluence of various external forces. Free will is a somewhat vague term, it is best described for purposes at hand as the ability of an individual to make a choice. Free will is generally considered to have two requirements: understanding and control. This eliminates young children and mentally retarded people to not fully possess free will. Children often do not understand the consequences of their actions and those with mental disabilities can either lack the understanding of their actions or may not be in full control of their emotions or actions. Aside from those two categories humanity has generally been considered as having free will, it is at the heart of our justice system and is at the heart of the conventional view of faith. People should not be punished for things that they did not commit of their own free will. There are exceptions to the legal system if someone was coerced by force or by undue persuasion. For the conventional view of Christian faith, people are regarded as choosing of their own free will to follow Christ and to repent of sins committed by their own free will. At the heart of these two systems is the assumption that the choices that humans make are our choice and are made of our own free will. Society itself is built
A.P.L. upon this assumption. People are respected or condemned because of their actions, but this is dependent on the assumption that our actions are our own. If it were not someone’s choice to perform a commendable action then society would not admire him or her because of it. Modern sociological and psychological theory supports the theories held by people such as postmodernists or Thomas Hobbes that see people not as an individual of personal construction or design but rather as a composite or confluence of the various forces around them. Few people would deny that forces such as environment, culture, or social pressures influence a person’s personality or choices, but there are those that say that nothing is of yourself, your individuality is determined by previous choices, which were solely determined by external forces. Humans are born with genes giving them certain tendencies which when combined with a child’s initial environment would make them naturally progress towards something else and some other environment and the process goes on. If this is entirely true, if man is simply a product of external forces, then man is not free. Nothing is his own so he cannot be held accountable for his actions, since they are merely a result of his initial circumstances. In order for there to be free will from this perspective, man would need to have a say in his personality and tendencies that is not influenced by any external force. In addition to external physical forces, there is also the issue of God’s influence on man’s actions. Scripture states "The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever he will." (Prov. 21:1, NRSV). This verse states that God is in direct control of the king’s heart, that God will turn it wherever he wants. This raises a question though, can a man under God’s control be held accountable for his actions since
A.P.L. they are not his own? Thomas Aquinas responded to this by saying that when God controls the actions of a man he does so by changing the nature or personality of the person, so the act is still performed by the person within their own nature but God is still the source of the action. However, I would counter this by saying that this is the same as God forcing the action of a man. If God changes the nature of a man, then the part of that man that would have rendered him capable of performing an action of his own free will, his individual nature, is influenced by an external force and then it is no longer completely his own action, as it was determined by God not by the man’s nature. Another argument against free will has to do with the fact that God already knows everything we’re going to do in advance. The bible says that God knows all things in advance, so how can our actions be free is they are already determined in the mind of God ahead of time. It would seem as though we are simply following a path that has already be set instead of making free choices and determining that path ourselves. This also seems to have other implications after we recognize this. After we recognize it, it would seem that we could now look back on all of our previous actions and say that we had no control over them, that it was fated that we were to do that. In addition, it would seem that all of our future actions are set and whatever we are going to do in the future cannot be changed because it is already set in the mind of God. To respond to this I would say that since God has not revealed any specific future actions we would still have the choice to betray our future actions. However, since God’s foreknowledge cannot be wrong, we will all simply choose the same actions that God has predicted, thus allowing God’s future knowledge to be always correct but still leaving the possibility for free will.