The Free Will Argument

Lavagna gives a simple and operational definition of it:

"Free will is quite simply the capacity to have been able to act differently. For example, I could have chosen to raise my hand ten seconds ago just as I could have chosen not to do so. The idea is that you control your actions and the decisions you take are only the fruit of an act of the will which is not determined by initial conditions."^[5]

In a note, he specifies technically: "An agent A is free if he could have chosen X instead of Y, in the same circumstances"^[6]. This definition is that of metaphysical libertarianism, as opposed to compatibilism (Hume, Dennett) which maintains that one can be "free" while being determined, provided one acts "in conformity with one's desires". The argument defended by Lavagna concerns freedom in the libertarian sense, the only one, he maintains with the Catholic tradition, which truly deserves the name "free will".

The Catechism of the Catholic Church gives a convergent definition:

§ 1731: "Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one's own responsibility."^[7]

§ 1732: "As long as freedom has not bound itself definitively to its ultimate good which is God, there is the possibility of choosing between good and evil, and thus of growing in perfection or of failing and sinning."^[8]

Why is premise 1 ("if atheistic materialism is true, my choices are only a determined chemical process") so little controversial? Lavagna explains it:

"If atheism is true, all your actions and thoughts are only the fruit of a chemical process in your cerebral cortex which influences your 'choices'. Our actions are only the result of what molecular interaction produces in our brains. If God does not exist to give us a free will capable of transcending this material world, well, we are quite simply machines set and determined in advance by the laws which direct our Universe. The particles which govern our thought, according to atheistic materialist ideology, obey particular physical laws, and it is not up to them to choose whether or not to obey these laws. How could there be a sudden emergence of a choice, when these molecules which govern your thought themselves have no choice?"^[9]

Bertrand Russell, one of the greatest atheist philosophers of the twentieth century, explicitly recognised it:

"Materialists use the laws of physics to demonstrate, or attempt to demonstrate, that the movements of man's body are mechanically regulated, and that, consequently, everything we say and all the changes of position we make escape the action of a presumed free will. If this is so, whatever may remain of our free volitions has little value."^[10]

And further on, without detour:

"When a man writes a poem or commits a murder, the movements of the body involved in his act result solely from physical causes."^[11]

The internal coherence of materialism therefore requires the abandonment of free will. This is what is called hard determinism. Its most resolute contemporary defenders recognise it without equivocation: Sam Harris, Galen Strawson and Robert Sapolsky have each, in their own way, drawn this conclusion to the end.

Sam Harris and the radical negation (Free Will, 2012)

The American philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris (born in 1967) published in 2012 Free Will (Free Press, 96 pp.), the sharpest plea of the early twenty-first century in favour of hard determinism. His opening thesis is unambiguous:

"Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making."^[12]

Harris maintains that consciousness always lags behind real decisions, which form in the neurological unconscious before the conscious self has the slightest idea of them. Even the thoughts that seem most personal arise spontaneously, without the subject being their cause^[13]. Morality and punishment must therefore be entirely reinterpreted: blaming a criminal, Harris says, is no more justified than striking a rock that has fallen on your foot.

Apologetic critique: Harris's argument illustrates precisely the paradox denounced by Lewis and Bahnsen. If nobody is the author of his thoughts, Harris himself is not the author of Free Will: his brain produced it, without any possible choice. And his readers cannot choose to be convinced. The act of publishing a book to persuade is therefore performatively incoherent with the thesis he defends.

Galen Strawson and the impossibility of moral responsibility

The British-Irish philosopher Galen Strawson (born in 1952, son of the famous P. F. Strawson) formulated an even more radical version, known as the Basic Argument, set out in Freedom and Belief (Oxford University Press, 1986) and in the article "The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility" (Philosophical Studies, 75, 1994, pp. 5-24)^[14]:

His basic argument can be summarised as follows, without reproducing its text word for word: you act as you act because of what you are; to be truly responsible for your acts would therefore presuppose being truly responsible for what you are, at least in certain decisive mental respects; yet nobody can be truly responsible for what he is, for he would have had to have intentionally given himself that character, which already presupposes a prior character, and so on without end. Ultimate moral responsibility would therefore be impossible^[15].

Galen Strawson is himself an atheist and a compatibilist "in practice"; he recognises that one can speak of ordinary freedom, but he admits that ultimate moral responsibility, the kind which would really justify deeply deserved punishment or praise, is metaphysically impossible within a purely materialist framework. His argument thus paradoxically joins the Catholic diagnosis: without a freedom anchored in a reality which transcends blind physical causality, moral justice cannot exist in the last instance.

This is the most powerful argument against materialism. It is ancient: traces of it are found in C. S. Lewis (Miracles, 1947, chap. 3, "The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism") and in Alvin Plantinga (Warrant and Proper Function, 1993; Where the Conflict Really Lies, 2011). Lavagna gives the following formulation of it:

"Let us recall a basic definition. Reason is the faculty of intelligence which consists in making a logical judgement on a set of propositions, with a view to arriving at a conclusion. It is a process which depends on free will, for you must have the capacity to make a judgement between A or not(A) and to choose between these two options, in order to say that you have had a rational approach properly speaking. One cannot say, for example, that a calculator which knows how to do calculations has had any rational approach, for it has only given the result for which it was determined (by its maker)."^[16]

The philosopher Greg Bahnsen (1948-1995, American analytic philosopher) formulates it masterfully:

"If materialism is true, then every person who professes materialism does so because his brain has imposed on him, by the laws of physics, chemistry and biology, to say so. It is not as if the person had the freedom necessary to reflect on different theories, evaluate the evidence, and make a choice in order to know the truth. They [materialists] must simply say what they have to say. It is therefore quite ironic that a materialist promotes materialism by trying to tell people that such a worldview is true and that you should believe this and not in God. Indeed, if materialism is true, and your brain depends only on the laws of physics, then you have no reason to believe that materialism is true. It is simply the laws of physics which compel you to say that. […] Just as I am forced by the laws of physics to say the opposite."^[17]

Lavagna draws the conclusion from it:

"The person who denies the existence of free will can have no rational justification for any of his beliefs (including atheism)."^[18]

C. S. Lewis had formulated the objection with striking elegance in Miracles (1947):

"We may in fact state it as a rule that no thought is valid if it can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes. […] Each particular thought is valueless if it is the result of irrational causes. Obviously, then, the whole process of human thought, what we call Reason, is equally valueless if it is the result of irrational causes."^[19]

This is what Plantinga will call, in its analytic version, the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN): if our cognitive faculties have been shaped by a blind natural selection which selects for survival (and not for truth), then we have no guarantee that our beliefs are true, including the belief which says that natural selection is true^[20]. Naturalism bites its own tail.

Why the objection is not limited to a subjective impression

The contemporary debate confirms that free will is not a simple vague impression. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy connects the notion of free will directly to moral responsibility, to the capacity to do otherwise and to the question of whether the agent is really the source of his action^[21]. In other words, the issue is not only psychological ("do I have the feeling of being free?"), but normative: can I be held to be the author of my acts, my judgements and my promises?

This clarifies the apologetic argument. If materialism affirms that every judgement is only a physico-chemical event produced by blind causes, it destroys not only religious or moral freedom: it also destroys the rational claim of the materialist himself. A piece of reasoning is not a clash of molecules; it is an act by which the intelligence adheres to a conclusion because it sees its truth.

The second argument is just as decisive, and explicitly recognised by Russell. Here is how he formulates the consequence:

"When a man behaves brutally, we intuitively regard him as wicked, and we refuse to face the fact that his conduct results from prior causes which, if we went back far enough, would take us well beyond his birth, therefore to events for which he could not be held responsible, whatever effort of imagination we made."^[22]

Lavagna draws the consequences from it:

"If free will does not exist, all our actions are predetermined. That means that the criminal, the child rapist or the terrorist are not, in reality, responsible for their actions, since the latter are the fruit of a deterministic process. You can always put them in prison to prevent them from harming others, but you cannot make them morally guilty or responsible for such acts. Hitler is therefore not guilty of the Jewish genocide and it would be stupid to accuse him of that, for he had nothing to do with it! The molecular interactions in his brain determined him to do it. Are you really ready to believe that?"^[23]

And with a little humour:

"Try the test! Try saying before the court that you are not responsible for the rape of this five-year-old child, because 'the Universe determined me to do it'. I would like to be there to see the judge's face!"^[24]

This second argument joins directly the moral argument: without free will, every notion of moral responsibility collapses. One can then neutralise a criminal for public safety, but one can no longer condemn him morally. This is exactly what Russell ended up admitting.

Three possible materialist responses

Contemporary materialists do not all respond in the same way. Some assume hard determinism: free will would be a useful or tenacious illusion. Others defend compatibilism: one could remain free if one acts according to one's internal desires, even if those desires are themselves determined. Still others shift the debate towards social responsibility: punishment, prevention and rehabilitation should be retained, but the idea of a deep guilt abandoned.

The Catholic response does not deny conditionings: ignorance, fear, constraint, habits and psychic troubles can diminish the imputability of an act^[25]. But it refuses to reduce every human action to these conditionings. Without this, the difference between a deliberate act, an endured impulse and a mechanical reflex becomes morally illegible.

Lavagna concludes:

"Given that the negation of free will leads to absolutely sulphurous conclusions and that atheistic materialism is incapable of accounting for the existence of free will, we must postulate the existence of a cause proportionate to the effect, namely an immaterial cause which transcends the laws of physics, allowing us to perform true free acts. It is this immaterial, intelligent and free cause which precedes us in existence that we call 'God'."^[26]

The argument rests on the principle of proportional causality already mobilised by Saint Thomas Aquinas: "the effect must exist in the cause in one way or another". Purely blind and determined matter cannot produce beings who are really free and deliberating. A cause is therefore needed which is itself free and intelligent, and which transcends physical laws. This is what tradition calls God.

Faced with the force of the argument, materialists have a strategic recourse: compatibilism, that is, the thesis according to which free will and determinism would be compatible. Its classical form goes back to David Hume (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748, sect. VIII) and was systematised in the twentieth century by Daniel C. Dennett (Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, MIT Press, 1984)^[27] and by P. F. Strawson ("Freedom and Resentment", Proceedings of the British Academy, 1962)^[28].

The central idea is the following: if an agent acts in conformity with his own desires and without external constraint, he is "free" in the sense in which this word really counts. It does not matter that these desires are themselves determined by prior causes, genetics, education, cerebral chemistry; freedom is measured by the absence of external coercion, not by some mysterious causal spontaneity.

The objection of infinite regression

The Catholic and libertarian response is immediate: compatibilism does not answer the question, it shifts it. To say that one is "free" because one acts according to one's desires leaves entirely open the fundamental question: who is responsible for these desires? If my desires have been causally determined by my biology, my childhood and the chances of history, I am no more the author of my acts than a river is the author of its bed.

This is exactly what Galen Strawson's Basic Argument formalises (see above). The American philosopher Robert Kane (The Significance of Free Will, Oxford University Press, 1996)^[29] also recognises that compatibilism cannot satisfy the deep intuition of responsibility: it lacks what he calls SFAs (Self-Forming Actions), those rare moments when an agent forms himself by a choice which is not reducible to his prior causes. Kane attempts to save a form of libertarianism within a naturalistic framework, but he exposes himself to the same objections: in a purely physical universe, it is hard to see how a choice could fail to be determined without thereby being only pure chance.

Why the Catholic tradition rejects compatibilism

The Catholic position does not deny conditionings. The Catechism explicitly recognises that ignorance, fear and habits can diminish the imputability of an act^[30]. But it refuses that freedom be reduced to the absence of external constraint. For Saint Thomas Aquinas, freedom is the dominium of one's own acts: man does not content himself with acting according to his desires; he can know several possible goods, compare them and determine himself to one rather than to another by virtue of a rational judgement. This deliberation is irreducible to any blind chemical or biological causality.

Compatibilism, in the end, changes the meaning of the word "free" rather than defending real free will. It substitutes for the question "could I have acted otherwise in the same circumstances?" the question "did I act without external constraint?": this is an answer to a different question. The Catholic tradition, with Lavagna, maintains that only the first question is the right one.

The most frequent popular objection comes from the neurosciences: "the brain decides before us". It refers above all to the experiment of Benjamin Libet published in Brain in 1983. Libet asked subjects to perform a small voluntary movement and to report the moment when they became aware of their intention; the readiness potential measured by EEG preceded this conscious moment by several hundred milliseconds^[31].

This experiment is important, but its metaphysical interpretation is often exaggerated. It concerns very simple gestures, without moral stakes, without long deliberation, without conflict of values. It does not measure the choice of a pardon, a lie, a conversion, a promise or a sacrifice. Libet himself maintained the possibility of a conscious veto: the prepared impulse can be stopped before the action^[32].

Later work has further weakened the strong determinist interpretation. In 2012, Aaron Schurger, Jacobo D. Sitt and Stanislas Dehaene proposed in PNAS a stochastic accumulation model: the readiness potential can reflect spontaneous neuronal fluctuations which reach a threshold, rather than an unconscious decision already formed long before consciousness^[33]. At a minimum, the neurosciences establish cerebral correlates of simple acts; they do not refute rational and moral freedom.

Robert Sapolsky and hard determinism (Determined, 2023)

The American neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky (born in 1957), professor at Stanford, pushed determinist reasoning to the end with Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will (Penguin Press, 2023, 528 pp.), the most documented work of the decade on this subject. His thesis is clear:

"All human behaviour is the resultant of everything that has happened in your biology, in your genes, in your environment, since well before your birth."^[34]

Sapolsky mobilises endocrinology, genetics, developmental neurobiology and evolutionary psychology to show that every human decision is causally explicable, without remainder. He calls for reform of the penal system accordingly: if nobody is the author of his acts, deserved punishment makes no sense.

Two decisive limits:

1. Pragmatic self-refutation: If Sapolsky's determinism is true, his book itself is not the fruit of a choice but of a neurobiological process. He could not decide to write it, and his readers cannot choose to be convinced or not. The act of publication as persuasion is performatively incoherent with the thesis he defends.

2. The irreducibility of deliberative acts: Sapolsky argues principally from simple or reflex behaviours. Truly deliberative acts, forgiving an enemy after mature reflection, resisting torture, honouring a vow at the price of a sacrifice, imply a hierarchy of intentions which raw neurobiological description does not capture. As J. P. Moreland notes^[35], intentional mental states, "believing that p", "wanting x", "promising to do y", have a logical structure irreducible to physicalist description.

Even the compatibilist Daniel Dennett reproached Sapolsky with a "pre-scientific hard determinism" which confuses levels of explanation: behaviours can be determined at a physical level and nevertheless real, intentional and meaningful at their own level of explanation.

Caution is therefore necessary: it is legitimate to say that human freedom is embodied, cerebral, vulnerable to habits and pathologies. It is much stronger, and not demonstrated, to conclude that man is never the author of his acts.

One of the most famous apologetic uses of free will is Alvin Plantinga's Free Will Defense, set out in God, Freedom, and Evil (Eerdmans, 1977). It is no longer here an argument for the existence of God, but a response to the principal argument against it, the logical problem of evil formulated by the atheist philosopher J. L. Mackie in his article "Evil and Omnipotence" (Mind, 1955).

Mackie maintained that the three traditional attributes of God (omniscience, omnipotence, perfect goodness) are logically contradictory with the existence of evil. Plantinga replies:

1. Omnipotence does not consist in doing what is logically impossible.
2. Yet creating beings who are really free who would never choose evil may be a matter of logical impossibility: if the choice is forced towards good, then it is no longer free.
3. The value of a universe containing really free creatures is sufficient to justify, in God's eyes, the risk that they make bad use of this freedom.
4. Therefore there is no logical contradiction between the existence of God and the existence of moral evil^[36].

Plantinga's argument has been massively received: most contemporary philosophers, including atheists, recognise that it has refuted the logical version of the problem of evil, which nevertheless remains defended in its probabilistic version (by William Rowe notably)^[37].

This defence joins the Augustinian tradition. In De libero arbitrio (388-395), Augustine already replied to the Manichaeans (who saw two opposed principles, the good and the bad): in substance, God is not the author of the evil that man commits, for sin comes from the free will of the creature, which can turn away from the good and bears responsibility for it for that reason^[38].

Moral evil is therefore not God's work, but that of free creatures who turn away from him. And the freedom which makes evil possible is also the freedom which makes love, merit and holiness possible. A universe without free will would be a universe without true love, and therefore without the highest good.

Free will is one of the foundations of Christian anthropology, to the point of being solemnly defended by several councils:

• The Council of Carthage (418), a particular council which brought together the bishops of Africa, against Pelagius and his inverse extremism (which made free will the exclusive cause of salvation, without grace). Its condemnation of Pelagianism was then confirmed for the whole Church by the ecumenical Council of Ephesus in 431.
• The Council of Orange II (3 July 529), a provincial synod gathered in Gaul under the presidency of Caesarius of Arles, against semi-Pelagianism. Its canons on grace and free will were then confirmed by Pope Boniface II.
• The Council of Trent, an ecumenical council, session VI (13 January 1547), Decree on Justification: chapter V (DS 1525) describes the preparation of the adult for justification, and canon 4 (DS 1554) declares: "If anyone says that man's free will, moved and excited by God, does not cooperate at all […], let him be anathema"^[39]. Canon 5 (DS 1555), distinct from the preceding one, condemns for its part the thesis according to which man's free will would be lost and extinguished since Adam's sin.

The magisterial synthesis is given by the Catechism:

§ 1730: "God created man a rational being, conferring on him the dignity of a person who can initiate and control his own actions."^[40]

§ 1733: "The more one does what is good, the freer one becomes. There is no true freedom except in the service of what is good and just. The choice to disobey and do evil is an abuse of freedom and leads to 'the slavery of sin'."^[41]

§ 1734: "Freedom makes man responsible for his acts to the extent that they are voluntary. Progress in virtue, knowledge of the good, and ascesis enhance the mastery of the will over its acts."^[42]

The Catholic position thus avoids two symmetrical pitfalls: neither materialist fatalism (which denies free will) nor Pelagianism (which makes it self-sufficient for salvation). Man is really free, but his freedom is "rooted" in a nature received from God, and it is by orienting itself towards God, source of all good, that it attains its fullness.

Saint Thomas Aquinas: freedom as rational judgement

Saint Thomas does not define freedom as a spontaneity without reason. In the Summa Theologiae, he connects free will to rational judgement: man acts freely because he can know several possible goods, compare them and determine himself to one rather than to another. His formula is clear: man possesses free will, without which counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards and punishments would be in vain^[43].

This approach avoids two caricatures. Freedom is not the absurd indifference of a will which would choose without motive; nor is it the simple mechanical resultant of the strongest desire. It is the capacity of a rational subject to govern himself according to a known good, even when his passions and his habits really weigh on him.

The free will argument presents three remarkable strengths:

1. Intuitive self-corroboration: every human being lives his free will at every instant: every interior deliberation, every conscious choice, every feeling of regret bears witness to it. It is one of the most immediate evidences of human experience.

2. Internal coherence with the moral argument: the two arguments mutually reinforce each other. Objective morality presupposes responsibility; responsibility presupposes free will; free will presupposes a reality which transcends material determinism.

3. Admission of adversaries: coherent materialists (Russell, Sam Harris) recognise that their position implies the negation of free will, and the general public, for its part, cannot accept this negation without abandoning every notion of justice, responsibility and merit.

4. Convergent force: the argument is part of a network of arguments which mutually reinforce each other. Cosmological fine-tuning establishes an intelligent design in physical nature; the cosmological argument shows the necessity of a first cause; the moral argument establishes the existence of objective norms; the free will argument establishes that there exists a real moral subject capable of responding to them. These four arguments point towards the same horizon: a personal, free and intelligent reality at the origin of the cosmos. The convergence of independent proofs considerably increases their cumulative force.

As Lavagna writes in synthesis of his whole work, the coherent materialist must accept, among other things, "that free will is an illusion, and therefore that: (a) we are not morally responsible for our acts; (b) we are not free to choose truth rather than error with a view to performing true reasoning (abandonment of the notion of rationality)"^[44]. A very heavy price to pay.

• The moral argument
• The existence of God: overview
• The Kalam cosmological argument
• Cosmological fine tuning
• The Divine Will
• Luisa Piccarreta

Main sources