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From: hedrick@topaz.ARPA (Chuck Hedrick)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Re: C.S. Lewis and reason -- AARRGH!
Message-ID: <129@topaz.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 3-Jan-85 03:48:35 EST
Article-I.D.: topaz.129
Posted: Thu Jan  3 03:48:35 1985
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Please excuse me if I am duplicating comments made before.  Our machine has
just come onto netnews, so I saw the end of a discussion.

As you may guess, reconciling free will, causality, and responsibility is a
classic problem in the philosophy of religion.  As with many other
philosophical questions, a real solution is likely to hinge on a careful
examination of what you mean by the terms.  Many people (including some
contributors to this group) think free will means the following:  You are
free only if your decision is not determined by any outside agency.  If you
accept this, then free will is by definition incompatible with a
deterministic (or even partially deterministic) model of the universe.
However this is probably not a sensible definition.

In common discourse the term "free" is used to describe a decision which is
not subject to outside constraint.  If a person is tied up, or if a gun is
held to his head, we say he was not free.  If a person is not so
constrained, we say that he was free.  This is a simple enough distinction
to observe, and has useful consequences.  For example, we do not want to
blame someone for doing something when he had no choice in the matter.
However some analysts (who for convenience I will call Arminians) want to go
further than this.  They say that even if a person had no constraints on his
behavior, there can be more subtle kinds of unfreedom.  Suppose his decision
followed from his own desires and his moral principles, but those desires
and moral principles were influenced by his heredity and his environment.
Then his decision is still indirectly determined by an outside agency, and
is not free.  By an Arminian analysis free will must not only be free of
constraint.  It must also have no determining influences from outside.  

I do not want to turn this posting into a full-scale treatise, so I will not
give a complete discussion of these alternatives.  However I am convinced
that the Arminian definition of free will is not justified.  It is no longer
observable, and the resulting distinction is not as useful in practical
matters as the simpler one.  It would lead to the conclusion that people who
are insane or random are the most free, because their decisions have the
least connection with the outside.  I prefer to think of freedom as a sort
of "transparency".  A decision-maker is most free when his decisions most
accurately reflect his own principles and the inherent logic of the
situation.  In some cases (where we know the person, and the logic of the
situation is clear) this may mean that the freest decisions are the easiest
to predict.  I do not think C.S. Lewis would disagree with this.  You just
happened to catch him when he was not thinking carefully.  In fact in a
number of places he has commented on this paradox that when you are the most
free your decision has this transparent obviousness.  (See in particular his
discussion of his conversion experience, in Surprised by Joy.)

[The arguments in this posting are based directly on an elegant treatise by
Jonathan Edwards written sometime in the 18th Century.  It has some obvious
title, like On Freedom of the Will.  The basic outline of the argument was
laid down by the time of Augustine, in his various discussions of
predestination.  (Note that predestination was never intended to deny
freedom of the will, when freedom is properly analyzed.)]