In his Hilchot Teshuva (5:3-4), Rambam sets out exactly why free will is considered so important in Judaism:
“This principle is a fundamental concept and a pillar [on which rests the totality] of the Torah and mitzvot…Were God to decree that an individual would be righteous or wicked or that there would be a quality which draws a person by his essential nature to any particular path [of behavior]… how could He command us through [the words of] the prophets: "Do this," "Do not do this," "Improve your behavior," or "Do not follow after your wickedness?"…What place would there be for the entire Torah? According to which judgement or sense of justice would retribution be administered to the wicked or reward to the righteous?”
The impression that one gets from Rambam’s maximalist position is that every aspect of human activity is believed to be governed by free choice. Other rabbinic thinkers, meanwhile, spell out a more nuanced position with Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler writing that, in practice, most of a person’s actions are determined by nature and habit rather than the operation of free will:
“Everyone has free choice – at the point where truth meets falsehood. In other words, behira takes place at the point where the truth as the person sees it confronts the illusion produced in him by the power of falsehood. But the majority of a person’s actions are undertaken without any clash between truth and falsehood taking place. Many of a person’s actions may happen to coincide with what is objectively right because he has been brought up that way and it does not occur to him to do otherwise, and many bad and false decisions may be taken simply because a person does not realise that they are bad. In such cases no valid behira or choice has been made. Free will is exercised and a valid behira made only on the borderline between the forces of good and the forces of evil within that person”. [Strive for Truth vol. 2]
Others have presented the notion of free will like a muscle that people can either exercise and empower to take control of their lives or allow to atrophy and descend into gradual enslavement to the demands of their animalistic physicality.
In the modern era, the notion of free will has increasingly been challenged from the fields of neuroscience and philosophy, which have produced claims that human consciousness in general, and free choice in particular are an illusion. What is really occurring, they argue, can be reduced to electrochemical brain processes meaning that, as Bertrand Russell phrased it:
“[Man’s] origin, his growth, his hope and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve the body beyond the grave…”
These arguments were given a boost in recent decades with a series of experiments performed by neuroscientist Benjamin Libet, which appeared to demonstrate that areas of the brain light up – showing mental activity – before a decision had been made to e.g. turn on a switch. What the experiment – as well as subsequent neuroscientific theories – has failed to show, however, is that the sort of painstaking moral dilemmas which we most strongly associate with free will can be traced to a pre-determined mental process. In the accompanying video we see Fagin in the Oliver Twist musical going back and forth as to whether to reform his criminal lifestyle and become an honest citizen. Are we to suppose that each stage of such difficult decision-making can be traced to an electrochemical prompt?
Science has nothing to answer to this question – at least for now. One thing that we can be sure of is that it will not discover any evidence for a spiritual dimension of a human being – a metaphysical soul which is capable of making choices. This should not be seen as a critique of the scientific process but rather as a recognition of its limitations from the outset. As Professor Sam Lebens noted on this group in a different context:
“Methodological naturalism rules out any theories that use God to explain phenomena. So you can guarantee, before you start your investigation into who wrote the Bible, that methodological naturalism won’t discover a Divine author. But its failure to find a Divine author is not evidence that God wasn’t involved. It’s not a finding. It’s not a conclusion.”
(https://www.facebook.com/.../permalink/3174484782780676/)
Those who reject free will with certainty, do so because they cannot make any sense of it within the confines of their parameters of investigation – natural physical phenomena. Refusal to consider the possibility of anything beyond physical cause and effect is not evidence that it doesn’t exist.
Yet on the other side of the equation is the most powerful human intuition – that of self-existence, thought and choice. While we may be prepared to accept that nature and nurture are able to influence and sometimes limit the scope of our choices, can we embrace the implications of our minds being fully governed by physical phenomena? It would seem that the social dynamics and legal systems of even the most secular societies are predicated upon the moral reality of free choice and humans bearing responsibility for the decisions that they make.Reviewing the situation, here.
First posted to Facebook 22 January 2023, here.
