39. Proof that we have free will
39. PROOF THAT WE HAVE FREE WILL
Many philosophers and scientists are determinists. How can we prove they are wrong? How can we prove that we really have free will?
Man has free-will; otherwise counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards and punishments would be in vain (1,83, 1).
If we have no free will, all our moral language is meaningless and based on an illusion. It is meaningless to counsel, command, prohibit, praise, or punish a machine. When the soda machine fails to deliver a soda in response to the money we put into it, we do not expect it to feel guilty and go to Confession; we just kick it. (Behaviorist psychologists call this “operant conditioning”, and claim that that’s really all we do to each other too, but in a more sophisticated way. Yes, they actually say that. They are quite insane.)
If we have no free will, the entire spiritual life is meaningless. Machines cannot become saints. If, on the other hand, we do have free will, then the ultimate responsibility is on our shoulders; for God wills for us to become saints, so the only force in the universe that can prevent us from attaining that ultimate end and joy is our own will, our own choices, our own sins. Even the Devil can only tempt us, not force us. And even God cannot force our freedom, for that is a self-contradiction, “forced freedom”. He can only give us grace, to aid and “egg us on”. And even if grace is the first cause of our free choices of good, we are responsible because grace does not turn off, but turns on, nature, and therefore our nature, and therefore our souls, and therefore our souls’ wills, and therefore their freedom.
The practical point about free will is personal responsibility. We are morally responsible for whatever we freely choose, but not for what we do not freely choose. If our choices are determined by our social and economic system, as Marx says, or by our ape ancestry and genes, as materialistic Darwinian philosophers who claim to be only biologists say, or by our animal id rather than by our rational ego, as Freud says, then we are not responsible for sin. There is no sin, and therefore no salvation.
St. Thomas did not know the modern pseudo-scientific arguments for determinism, of course. But they amount to nothing more than a more sophisticated, detailed version of the second argument against the existence of God in ST I,2,3: that natural science claims to be able to explain all human behavior without free will, just as it claims to be able to explain all that exists without God.
So the refutation of this argument from science, in order to convince the scientist, would have to produce some phenomenon that even the determinist admits, but which cannot be explained by determinism.
St. Thomas finds this in the fact that we all assume the meaningfulness of moral language: praising and blaming, counseling and advising, commanding and prohibiting, exhorting and warning, rewarding and punishing. Remember the analogy of the soda machine. Determinists must either stop treating human beings as if they were anything other than machines—in other words, practice the awful philosophy they preach—or else stop preaching it, stop thinking that men are only complex machines. Determinists disprove determinism by their behavior.
This is a dangerous argument, because a purely logical determinist with weak human instincts, confronted with this argument, may embrace the change in behavior rather than the change in thought; may start practicing the insanity he preaches rather than preaching the sanity he practices. St. Thomas is so optimistic about human common sense that he takes for granted the implied premise, which is that we not only do all these things in fact (praising, blaming, rewarding, punishing, etc.) but that we rightly do them; that they are attitudes justified by their objects, i.e., persons; that they are not “in vain”, i.e., not meaningless and pointless, like trying to teach a stone to talk. And this can be only if persons have free will. And only if we have free will can we become saints.