Catholics have always defended the existence of true free will in human beings against any who would deny it. But whenever one is attacking any error in defense of a truth, one is always prone to falling into the opposite error, the error on the other side. Occasionally some Catholics talk about free will in such a way as to give the impression that they have fallen a bit into an error I am calling First-Causal Libertarian Free Will (let's call it the FCL view of free will for short).
The idea of "libertarian" free will is often defined as the idea that a free choice is one where the chooser is truly able to make a choice other than the one he in fact ends up making. So, for example, I choose to eat a salad for dinner rather than a hamburger, but I could have chosen to eat the hamburger. The ability to choose otherwise must always be in my power, or I do not have true free will.
So far so good. But this libertarian formulation has the potential to be interpreted in different ways. The correct and harmless way to interpret it is that it is recognizing that a true choice is the settling of a preference between multiple options. I have a rational mind that can deliberate on my options and then make a decision based on that deliberation. In choosing option A, I have the faculty of mind and will to have chosen option B as well. I was not determined to go with option A by any kind of force or influence that would have obliterated or circumvented the deliberation and decision-making of my mind and will, so that my act of going with A rather than B was truly a product of my use of those faculties. This idea is not only harmless and consistent with truth and with orthodox Catholic faith, it is essential to a true understanding of free will and to orthodox Catholic faith. To deny this idea would be heretical, because it would contradict the essential nature of human personhood, moral responsibility, etc.
But sometimes people take libertarianism a step further and posit a kind of absolute independence in the choice of the will. In reality, a free choice is part of a nexus of causes and explanations that are subject to the providence of God and to the characteristics of human psychology. Going back to my salad and hamburger example, if we ask why I chose the salad, there are sufficient explanations to be had. I chose the salad because, all things considered, I wanted it more than I wanted the hamburger. When I was deliberating on my options, I weighed all the factors involved and how they related to my desires. Those desires were the product of all sorts of causal influences, including my genetics, my upbringing, my previous experiences (both remote and recent), all the myriad specific circumstances of my present situation, etc. I found after weighing all of this that, overall, I preferred the salad. That act of concluding my deliberations and settling on a preference we call "making a choice." So, according to human psychology, there is going to be a kind of causal connection (in a broad sense) between the state of my desires and what I choose. If you knew absolutely everything about me and my thoughts and desires at the moment of my choice, you could predict with 100% accuracy what I would choose. And thus my choices are also included in the nexus of divine providence. For it was God who brought everything into existence and thus set the parameters of all that would be and would happen. In creating the world, he couldn't but create a history for that world down to its smallest detail, for he knew 100% all the effects of everything he chose to do. This is why historic Catholic thought has never had a problem holding both free will and divine foreknowledge and predestination.
The FCL position, however, holds that for a choice to be free, it must be absolutely undetermined in any way by any causal influences of any sort. This position takes the idea of "ability to choose otherwise" and blows it up to something much grander metaphysically than the more modest libertarianism. In addition to saying, rightly, that, in order to make a free choice, I must have faculties of mind and will capable of deliberating and choosing between options, the FCL view says there must be an absolute metaphysical possibility of any choice being made regardless of any causal influences acting on the one making the choice. In this view, my choices are viewed as truly random events, not the product of my mind settling on preferences rooted in my desires. Regardless of what I most want overall, it must be possible for it to happen that I might choose something different. So if, upon deliberation, I decide that, overall, I prefer the salad to the hamburger, it has to be that it might actually happen that I might totally randomly, for no reason, decide to choose the hamburger instead. (I say that choice would be "for no reason" because any psychological reason for the choice would amount to something in my desires influencing my overall preference.) Critics of this view have rightly pointed out that, while on the surface sounding grand ("Not only can I choose what I want, I can even choose what I don't want! Look how free I am!"), this idea actually obliterates the very nature of free choice and makes "choosing" something that happens to one without one's will. It's more like getting struck by lightning, from a psychological point of view. If you try to picture it, it leads to absurd sorts of scenarios like this one:
I am at a party, and I have a choice between eating chocolate ice cream and eating rice pudding. I happen to utterly detest rice pudding, but I love chocolate ice cream. There is absolutely no reason why I should choose anything other than the chocolate ice cream, let's suppose. There are no bad consequences for choosing what I most prefer. As one who holds the FCL view, I know that since I am free, it must be possible that I should choose against my strongest motives and strongest preferences, and that my choices are ultimately not determined by or inseparably tied to my preferences. I begin to get nervous, hoping that I won't choose against my preferences this time and get stuck with eating rice pudding. It has been known to happen. I warily and quickly approach the dessert table, reaching for the chocolate ice cream. But then, right before I can get my hand around the serving spoon, it happens! My FCL free will kicks in and I find myself, to my dismay, choosing the rice pudding! "Aarrgh," I think to myself, "I hate it when this happens. I would really love to be eating the chocolate ice cream, but my accursed FCL freedom is once again going against my strongest and deepest preferences!" So I spend the next ten minutes freely eating my rice pudding while staring longingly at the ice cream.
FCL, while trying to defend free will, thus ends up destroying it.
This doctrine of free will is also incompatible with the sovereign providence of God over the creation--which is a part of Catholic dogma. If my free choices are truly random--not the product of anything logically preceding them at all--then we have being in the world that is not ultimately traceable to God, contrary to God being the First Cause of all reality. And since the choices are random, God can't control them, and he can't even know about them apart from actually seeing them happen. This is why the most logical proponents of this view often end up denying not only God's sovereign providence but also God's complete foreknowledge of the future. History is the result of a mix of what God has decreed in his providence on the one hand and what random chance has added to the mix on the other. There are really two gods operating in this view--God and Random Chance. The very foundations of monotheism are destroyed.
So this view makes nonsense out of human psychology, destroys the very nature of free choice it is supposed to be protecting, and obliterates classical monotheism itself. It is obviously imperative, then, that Catholics avoid this view just as much as they avoid the opposite error of denying free will. Sometimes, though, I hear Catholics saying things that make me think that this view might be influencing their thinking to some degree--though, usually, it is more of a vague, unconscious, confused influence which hasn't really been thought through much at all. Oftentimes these kinds of statements come out in connection with trying to explain why bad things happen in the world. For example:
"God chose to create a world of free creatures. But there was a price. Once you create free creatures, you can't control what they do. You can't guarantee they will choose what you would like them to choose. You have relinquished some control over what happens. That's why sin exists in the world. God would like it if there was no sin, but, without overriding and destroying free will, there's nothing he can do about it. He can't make a person choose good or evil. He can invite, he can encourage, but he can't guarantee what they will choose. He has to take what he gets."
This is seriously problematic, because it seems to be denying the absolute sovereignty of God over all creation--as if, in creating free creatures, God has given up control over the outcome of events, so that how things turn out is not in accordance with his overall providential plan. But, as I've pointed out, this is contrary to Catholic doctrine and even to monotheism itself. Also, in taking the will, and the choice of good or evil, out of the control of God, this statement undermines the idea of salvation by grace. It is Catholic dogma that, when we choose what is good, and particularly when we choose God as our Supreme Good and thus move ourselves into a right relationship with him, this good choice is both our choice and is also a product of God's grace. The good will itself is a gift of God. But in the view of this statement, God can't give us a good will. All he can do is try to encourage us to make good choices, but he can't actually cause us to do so. He just has to sit back and watch to see if we will make a good choice or a bad choice. He cannot exercise any kind of causal power there. But this makes any good choices we make ours in an exclusive sense, excluding those choices also being gifts of God. Sure, the ability to choose is still a gift of God (though how God can give the ability to someone to produce uncaused, random events is a serious question), but not the good choice itself, contrary to Catholic teaching.
Now, there is certainly truth in the statement. It is true that, in making us free, God has given us space to choose. He respects our freedom and doesn't override it or destroy it. He does not use coercion upon us or cause us to choose in any way that would invalidate or circumvent our minds and wills. He does not cause my good choices in the same way he causes water to fall from the sky in rain. In the latter case, the causation is physical and involuntary. In the case of my good choices, the causation is of a sort suitable to the nature of the will. It moves and influences me to choose in a persuasionary sort of way, not in a mechanistic sort of way. We can understand this difference even from looking at how we humans influence things. I use one kind of causality when I'm moving a rock from one place to another. I use a very different kind of causality when I persuade a friend to watch a movie with me. Usually the latter sort of causality is less than 100% guaranteed, but that is only because I do not have full control of all the factors of influence. If I knew everything about my friend, and not only that but I was also the ultimate determiner of all the influences that affected his desires (as God is for us), I could have 100% certainty of effectively persuading him to watch the movie without any violation of or circumvention of his free will. So the essential difference between these two kinds of causality does not, in principle, lie in how guaranteed their effectiveness is, but in the nature and kind of the causation itself. (With regard to bad choices, Catholic doctrine says that God does not actively bring these about as he does with good choices, but rather he allows them to occur. That is, knowing that if he sets things up in certain ways, we will make certain bad choices, he chooses to allow that to happen in some cases based on the sovereign, overall purposes of his providence.) So our statement above is right in pointing out that God does not coerce, or violate, or circumvent our freedom which he himself has given to us. And it also rightly points out that our freedom is what makes evil possible. There could be no creaturely good or evil without creaturely free will, for free will is what makes moral acts and moral responsibility possible. But the statement is wrong in then concluding from this that God has no guaranteed influence over our choices. (Of course, recognizing that God is still in control over his creation does bring to the forefront the question of why sin and evil--and their consequences--exist in the world. For more on this, see here and here.)
So, in conclusion, while Catholics should be zealous in defending free will, they should avoid the FCL definition of free will as contrary to the truth and to Catholic faith.
Published on the feast of the First Martyrs of the Holy Roman Church.
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