Assuming that a God exists: This subject is readily accessible to atheists as well, as the question of free will is of interest to most anyone.
Free will is perhaps the most intimate aspect of the human person, defined as the ability to choose between two or more possibilities open to us without that choice being forced (Norman Swartz: “Lecture Notes on Free Will and Determinism”), and as the ability to mentally control and have final say on whether or not we will perform a certain behavior despite the existence of strong environmental and physiological and mental influence toward a behavior( Existential psychology: “Abnormal Psychology”, Rosenhan and Seligman, 1989).
The notion of free will is important to assigning praise and blame, and for holding persons morally responsible and accountable for their actions. (Swartz) In our justice system and in many aspects of everyday philosophy, a person commits and act and behave a certain way because they WANT to do so, and that despite the existence of internal and environmental pressures, it is assumed that we all have the mental ability to resist those pressures, to choose to go the other way. Today, I do not deny or resist this assumption (as I did in the past), but I think that when it comes to the argument of free will, it is important to lay out one might want to look into the ONTOLOGICAL, rather than operational, conditions of free will.
In other words, how does one believe that will, as a mental faculty, exists in the first place?
If one is a materialist or reductionist, then mental phenomena are “nothing but” physical phenomena, or effects of physical phenomena, such as how the brain creates consciousness.
If one is anti-materialist or non-reductionist, then mental phenomena is more than just physical phenomena and can exist despite or even in the absence of the existence of brains.
Then there are views that subsume some aspects of both views. Consider David Chalmer’s “panprotopsychism”, or the view that the universe consists of two layers: a physical external layer underlaid by a mental layer, such that consciousness is not created “ex nihilo” by neurons but has always existed as “mental particles” that are inside physical particles, but that can combine to form what we know as the subjective aspect. This is a version of nonreductive materialism, that denies that mental stuff is “only just” physical stuff, but holds that the mental is an intimate part of the physical in virtue of being it’s “internal”.
At any rate, the free will argument in terms of ontological arguments about how we get will in the first place ultimate can be separated into a spectrum.
On one end of the spectrum is what I call: epiphenomenal existentialism, or the view that consciousness (and will as an aspect of consciousness and cognition) is not created by the brain and simply exists all on it’s own, popping into existence in such a way that it luckily connects to environmental information and necessity: i.e. the will to eat ice cream pops into existence in beings that CAN eat ice cream and that SEE ice cream in their vicinity: it is conceptually coherent that in principle, the person could have willed to ice skate instead in that particular place and time)
Epiphenomenal existentialism is strictly anti-materialist. It holds that mental phenomena exist within physical bodies, but are not the same thing as the stuff that makes up the body, and cannot be created by the physical. Some Judeo-Christian religious doctrine is epiphenomenally existentialist in this way. God cannot be blamed for the existence of human evil precisely because the will to do harm pops up by accident, is not created by the brain, and is beyond the control and dominion of God and can only be avenged or punished by him. There are secular versions of epiphenomenal existentialism: existential psychology is an example, as are some new age philosophies stressing freedom of the self from environmental and genetic influences on behavior.
On the far end of the spectrum there are two views: secular reductionism and theological reductionism.
Secular reductionism holds that all of our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, will and choice, etc. are nothing more than the accidental effects of atoms. Mental phenomena are seen as “nothing but” physical phenomena and subjective experience is largely eliminativist, holding that they are delusional or do not exist. Everything is physical. The universe is one large cause-and-effect machine and human will and decision is nothing more than a product of past causes. Secular reductionists deny, therefore, notions of free will on the base of causality (cause-and-effect), holding that brains are nothing more than a cog in the universal machine.
Theological reductionism (supported by Calvinism and myself in my own brand of “Supertheism”) agrees with secular reductionism in the nonexistence of free will (at least as the epiphenomenal existentialists hold it), and is only “reductionist” in the sense that everything is “reduced” to cause-and-effect between fundamental entities, rather than there being “just” physical material. Theological reductionism holds that human will and decision, as well as the evolution of the physical world, is ultimately determined and controlled second-by-second by the will and power of God(the Judeo-Christian God).
On this view, God determined (pre-determined) the course of the universe, including every human interaction and event. While Calvinism remains silent about the role of human evil in this theological overdetermination, Supertheism claims that the existence of human evil is no more or less a part of a grand chemistry experiment, or an exercise in psychological alchemy. Psychological alchemy in this sense can be more or less understood to be God’s deliberate intention to create human evil in order to TRANSFORM the minds that support such dispositions into minds that are incapable of evil through a rational evolution, with reasons to do the first replaced by reasons to live the second.(to be continued)
MORE TO BE ADDED.