The Free Will Argument

Imagine that you are torn between keeping a promise and following a more enjoyable desire. You see reasons to act either way. You take time to think, then you decide. The question is whether you really could have chosen the other option.

This is exactly what the free will defended here means. In the same circumstances, you could have chosen differently. Your decision is your own, even though many things influence it. It is not simply an event that you learn about after it has happened.

This freedom does not mean that we can do anything. We do not choose our birth, every part of our upbringing or every thought that crosses our mind. We also have physical limits and habits. So being free does not mean living without any influences.

An influence can make a decision harder without making it impossible. Fear can push us to lie. A habit can pull us in a particular direction. But the question remains open: can we, at least in some cases, think and decide to resist?

Reason is our ability to understand, compare ideas and judge what seems true. The will is our ability to want something and commit ourselves to an action. Freedom involves both these abilities. We can examine several possibilities, then decide what we are going to do.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, which presents the teachings of the faith, gives this definition:

“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.”^[1]

A deliberate action is one we have considered before choosing it. Forgiving someone after a long hesitation is one example. A simple reflex does not involve the same process. This difference will matter when we discuss experiments on the brain.

The Catholic philosopher Matthieu Lavagna defends this understanding of free will in Soyez rationnel, devenez catholique !^[2] For him, acting on a desire is not enough to prove our freedom. We must also be able to ask whether we could have wanted and done something else.

Other philosophers give the word freedom a different meaning. They believe that a person remains free when acting on their desires without being forced from outside. We will examine their answer later. To understand the debate, we need to keep this difference in meaning in mind.

So there is more at stake than our inner feeling. We can feel free while being affected by influences we do not understand well. The argument asks more than this: are we really the source of some of our choices? This is the ability it seeks to defend.

Here, matter means what bodies and objects are made of. Our brain obviously belongs to the material world. Chemical exchanges are part of how it works. These exchanges involve molecules, small groups of particles that make up matter.

Materialism is the idea that everything that exists is a matter of physical things and how they work. Applied to human beings, it claims that our thoughts and decisions result entirely from physical processes. It allows them no dimension beyond this material reality.

A cause is something that produces an event or helps to produce it. Determinism claims that events are entirely fixed by their earlier causes. If all the conditions are the same, only one outcome is possible. The event cannot happen differently.

Let us apply this idea to a decision. Your brain is in a certain state, itself produced by what came before. This state leads to the next one, then to your action. If everything is fixed in this way, you could not have made a different decision in the same circumstances.

Physical laws describe the rules by which material events happen. A molecule does not think about these rules and decide to follow them. Lavagna then asks a question: how could processes that are entirely forced to happen produce a decision that is not?

He is not asking whether the brain plays a role in our choices. That role is accepted. He is asking whether the way it works is enough to explain choosing fully. The whole difficulty lies in the move from a mechanism we are subject to, to an act of which we are truly the authors.

His reasoning follows four steps:

1. If our decisions are entirely produced by determined material processes, they are fixed in advance by their causes.
2. If they are entirely fixed in this way, we cannot choose differently.
3. Yet we have a real ability to choose.
4. So this kind of material description is not enough to account for human beings.

This first line of reasoning challenges a fully deterministic explanation of our decisions. It does not assume that every material event is necessarily determined. Two answers will be examined next: redefining freedom or appealing to events that are not determined.

Several atheist thinkers accept giving up free will rather than abandoning their explanation of human beings. Being an atheist means not believing in God. This does not mean that all atheists give the same answer to this question.

The philosopher Bertrand Russell writes:

“When a man writes a poem or commits a murder, the movements of the body involved in his act result solely from physical causes.”^[3]

Sam Harris, a philosopher and brain researcher, also argues against the existence of free will. In Free Will, he states:

“Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making.”^[4]

This position is called hard determinism. It holds that our decisions are determined and that free will therefore does not exist. This is not simply a way of saying that we are influenced. It means that we are never free in the sense defended here.

However, materialists do not all agree on this conclusion. Some want to keep a different definition of freedom. Others seek room for choices that would not be entirely determined. So the debate must examine their answers, not only writers who deny all freedom.

The first difficulty concerns the way we reason. Rationality is the ability to guide our thinking by examining reasons. Some ideas can be used to justify others. Reasoning means examining whether this step is valid. Take a step we have already met: if a decision is entirely fixed, it cannot be different under the same conditions.

Suppose you examine an explanation before accepting it. You look for evidence, compare answers and spot a contradiction. You may also recognize that your first impression was wrong. You see yourself as able to correct your judgment in the light of what you understand.

For those who defend the argument, this process requires real control over our thinking. We must be able to examine several answers and judge the reasons for them. If our judgment is entirely forced upon us, they then ask whether we freely recognize that a conclusion is true.

Lavagna offers a comparison with a calculator. It gives results because the way it works is set up to produce them. It does not freely consider the reasons for accepting them. So a correct result and a personal judgment are not exactly the same thing.

This comparison does not claim that a mechanism always gives false answers. A calculator can obviously calculate correctly. The comparison helps to distinguish producing a result from the act of recognizing a truth. Lavagna considers the second impossible without freedom. Recognizing what is true does not mean choosing whatever suits us.

The Christian writer C. S. Lewis raised an objection of this kind in Miracles. Here, he uses the term irrational causes for things that produce a thought without examining reasons. A chemical reaction, for example, does not itself judge the strength of an argument.

“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.”^[5]

For Lavagna, if no judgment can be free, the judgment that defends materialism cannot be free either. This view of human beings therefore removes the rational justification for its own claim. He concludes that materialism cannot justify any of our beliefs, including the belief that materialism is true.^[6]

The same difficulty arises when an author publishes a book to convince readers. The author presents reasons and invites them to reconsider their views. For those who defend the argument, this invitation assumes precisely the freedom to judge that the theory takes away from the reader.

The Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga develops a related difficulty. He examines the hypothesis that our thinking abilities come entirely from selection that favors survival. Favoring survival means preserving what helps a living thing stay alive. This does not directly mean seeking the truth.^[7]

According to this argument, an explanation of survival does not, on its own, guarantee truth. The difficulty also concerns the beliefs used to defend this explanation. Plantinga asks what grounds we then have for trusting our own ability to know things.

These objections are philosophical: they concern what makes a judgment rationally justified. They are not an experiment showing that every result produced by a mechanism would be false. Their conclusion is more specific: according to Lavagna, removing freedom also removes the personal justification for our judgments.

The reasoning thus turns materialism's own explanation of human beings against it. To defend this explanation as true, we must be able to judge the reasons supporting it. Lavagna claims that it deprives itself of this foundation when it reduces every judgment to a mechanism we cannot control.

Moral responsibility means that we can answer for the good or evil we choose to do. It is more than simply noting that an event happened through us. It assumes that the act can truly be attributed to us.

Imagine someone who deliberately breaks a promise. We do not simply note that they failed to keep their word. We ask why they chose to act that way. This question assumes a difference between a personal decision and an event entirely forced upon someone.

If no one could ever act differently, this difference would become hard to maintain. A lie would be the inevitable result of an earlier chain of events. A generous act would be too. According to the argument, both blame and appreciation would then lose their deepest foundation.

Writers who deny free will may accept this consequence. They do not necessarily suggest leaving dangerous acts without a response. They distinguish protecting society from punishment seen as personally deserved. This distinction must be presented honestly.

A prison could still stop someone from harming others. A preventive measure could limit risks. Support could aim to change behavior. But these measures would serve a useful purpose without assuming that the person truly deserves blame for their choice.

This is, in particular, the point of the positions held by Harris and the behavioral scientist Robert Sapolsky. They call for punishment to be rethought in light of their rejection of free will. So their proposal does not remove every social response. It changes the reason why that response seems justified.

The philosopher Galen Strawson takes the difficulty further. In essence, he says that we act according to who we are. To be fully responsible for a decision, we would need to be responsible for the character traits that are decisive for it. These are the ways of thinking and willing on which our choice depends.^[8]

But choosing these traits would already require a character from which to choose them. Even deciding to change assumes earlier tendencies. We would need to be responsible for these, then for those that had guided their formation. We would thus go back from one choice to another without finding the first one for which we were fully responsible.

The Catholic answer recognizes the influence of our character and our past. But it states that a person can understand several possible goods, compare them and decide to pursue one of them. In this view, that ability goes beyond the action of blind mechanisms. A character trait can influence a decision without entirely fixing its outcome.

It also recognizes that freedom can be reduced. Ignorance, fear, violence suffered, habits and certain disorders can reduce or remove responsibility.^[9] So a fully voluntary act is not judged in the same way as a reflex or a forced action.

The difficulty lies in moving from this reality to a general denial of all freedom. Showing that a choice is influenced is not enough to establish that it is entirely forced upon us. This question connects with the moral argument: to answer personally for good and evil, we must be able to act personally.

Compatibilism is the position that freedom and determinism can go together. It gives the word freedom a different meaning from the one used at the start. We are free when we act on our own desires without being forced from outside.

The philosopher David Hume defended a classic form of this idea. Daniel Dennett developed it in the modern debate, as did P. F. Strawson. The latter is a different philosopher from Galen Strawson, whom we met earlier. Their answer does not simply deny our experience. They seek to explain what kind of freedom really matters in human life.

Take a promise again. If you keep it because you want to, your act comes from your intentions. If someone forces you to keep it, the situation is different. For the compatibilist, this difference remains real even if your intentions themselves have earlier causes.

This position allows us to keep our ordinary language of choice. It distinguishes what we want to do from what we do under pressure. It can also maintain practices that hold people responsible. It does not consider it necessary to be able to act differently in absolutely identical circumstances.

Lavagna's response concerns precisely this last point. If my desires are entirely fixed by events beyond my control, in what sense am I their author? According to him, acting on these desires is not enough to establish true freedom.

He does not deny the difference between a willing action and a forced action. He asks whether this difference answers the whole question. Someone can follow a desire without being forced from outside. We still need to understand whether they could examine this desire and truly resist it.

So the disagreement cannot be settled by repeating that we do what we want. Both positions can accept this description. They disagree about the source of this willing and our control over it. This is the heart of their disagreement.

The philosopher Robert Kane seeks another answer. He defends the existence of choices through which a person helps to shape their own character. These choices would not be entirely fixed by earlier events.^[10] They would help us understand how we take part in shaping who we become.

But a new difficulty appears. If an event is not determined, is that enough to make it a free decision? An event produced by chance would be no more under our control. So the freedom we are looking for must be something other than a mixture of mechanisms we cannot control and accidents.

The Catholic answer presented here places this freedom in the person who can understand and will. A choice can have reasons without being forced upon us like a mechanical result. Keeping a promise despite a conflicting desire helps us grasp what this explanation seeks to preserve.

Dennett points out that the same behavior can have several explanations. For him, an intention can be real and play its part even if it depends entirely on physical causes. Thinking things through is then one of the causes of the decision. So, for him, saying that a decision is determined does not mean that it happens without thought.^[11]

Lavagna replies that this real intention is not enough to establish the ability he defends. Could the person have wanted something else in the same circumstances? Compatibilism preserves a difference between a willing act and a forced act. But it does not preserve this other possibility, on which Lavagna fully grounds our responsibility.

Neuroscience studies how the brain and nervous system work. The nervous system includes the organs and cells that transmit signals in our body. This research sheds light on the practical conditions of our actions. It is often used to argue against free will.

The best-known experiment is Benjamin Libet's, published in 1983. Being conscious of an intention means being aware of what we want to do. Participants had to make a small voluntary movement. They also had to report when they became aware of their intention. Meanwhile, the researchers recorded their brain activity.^[12]

A signal appeared before the time reported by the participants. It came several hundred milliseconds before their awareness. A millisecond is one thousandth of a second. This signal was called the readiness potential: brain activity that comes before a movement.

It is easy to see why the objection seems strong. If the brain starts before the person is aware of deciding, the decision seems already underway. Consciousness might then be only a witness to a process started without it. This is one of the proposed interpretations.

But we need to look at exactly what the experiment studies. It concerns simple movements without lengthy thought or moral stakes. It does not measure the decision to forgive, keep a promise or change one's life. So moving from these movements to all our choices requires a further argument.

Libet himself left room for a conscious veto. An impulse could be prepared without the action finally being carried out. He considered the possibility that the person could still stop it.^[13] This possibility complicates the picture of consciousness as always watching and entirely powerless.

In 2012, Aaron Schurger, Jacobo D. Sitt and Stanislas Dehaene proposed another explanation for the observed signal. Spontaneous changes in brain activity could build up to the level needed to trigger the movement.^[14] So the signal would not necessarily reveal a decision that had already been made.

Nerve cells, called neurons, can show such changes in activity. The proposed model describes how these build up before a movement. It encourages us to distinguish preparation in the brain from an unconscious decision already made. These are not equivalent claims.

This does not amount to experimental proof of free will. It shows that the observations allow an interpretation that makes a smaller claim than a general denial of free will. We know that brain activity accompanies and prepares certain movements. This experiment alone does not tell us that every personal decision is an illusion.

Yet Robert Sapolsky defends a general denial of freedom in Determined, published in 2023. Biology is the study of living things. He connects behavior to biology, genes, development and the environment.^[15] Genes are parts of the body passed on by parents. His explanation seeks to trace the conditions of our actions further and further back.

This approach highlights the influence of our past and our body. The answer given in this article does not ask us to ignore it. It challenges the move from these many influences to a sweeping conclusion: no one would ever be the author of anything.

The philosopher J. P. Moreland points out a further difference. A belief is about something: we believe that a statement is true. A promise commits someone to doing something. So promising to do something does not merely describe an event in the brain: it expresses a personal commitment. For Moreland, this meaning cannot be reduced to a physical description of events.^[16]

The objection about seeking truth then returns. Sapolsky's book offers reasons for changing our judgment. According to the argument defended here, persuading a reader assumes that they can examine these reasons and judge freely. Denying this ability removes the rational foundation that this approach requires.

The conclusion must remain precise. Our freedom works through the brain and can be weakened by its condition. However, the experiments discussed do not show that all our thoughtful choices are entirely fixed by their physical conditions. This general denial goes beyond what they establish.

We now reach Lavagna's conclusion. If some of our actions are truly free, their source must be able to account for this freedom. The earlier criticism leads him to reject determined mechanisms as a complete explanation. Chance does not solve the difficulty either: an accident is not a choice under our control.

Lavagna then adds a principle about causes and their effects. An effect is what a cause produces. According to this principle, what appears in the effect must be present in its cause in one way or another. Our intelligence and freedom must therefore be explained by something their source possesses.

So he rejects a source that would be only a set of blind mechanisms. To produce intelligent and free persons, the cause we seek must itself possess intelligence and freedom. He concludes that there is a cause that goes beyond matter and physical laws, and exists before us. He calls this intelligent and free cause God.^[17]

In this reasoning, the brain remains a practical condition of our actions. But studying it does not describe the whole person. Lavagna distinguishes material functioning from the personal ability to understand, judge and decide. His conclusion concerns the source of this ability.

So the argument moves in two stages. It first rejects determined mechanisms and pure chance as sufficient explanations of our freedom. Then it applies the principle about causes to conclude that our source is intelligent and free. The second stage gives the positive content of his answer: God is the source of our freedom.

This line of thought is one of the arguments for the existence of God. It does not claim to present, on its own, everything the Christian faith teaches. It addresses a specific question: what source can explain beings who can understand and choose?

It connects with other lines of thought, each of which offers a particular conclusion. According to those who defend these arguments, the fine-tuning of the Universe points to an intelligence behind its physical organization. The cosmological argument concludes that there is a first source of everything that exists. The moral argument holds that there is a good that does not depend on our preferences.

The free will argument adds the existence of a person truly able to respond to this good. These arguments start from different realities: the Universe, its origin, good and our freedom. For their defenders, their conclusions support one another because together they point to a personal, intelligent and free source. Each thus adds something that the others do not directly examine.

An objection appears at once. If God gives us freedom, why does he allow us to use it to do evil? Moral evil means the evil that people commit through their actions. Here, it is distinguished from suffering that does not come directly from a human choice.

The atheist philosopher J. L. Mackie presented a difficulty in logical form. God is said to know everything, be able to do everything and be perfectly good. Yet evil exists. According to this objection, these claims could not all be true together.

Alvin Plantinga answers this charge of contradiction. He is not trying here to prove God's existence. He asks whether the existence of evil makes God impossible. His answer is known as the free will defense.^[18]

He starts with a distinction. Being all-powerful does not mean being able to bring about a contradiction. Likewise, forcing a decision and leaving it entirely free do not mean the same thing. The difference does not disappear when we speak about God.

The difficulty concerns a guarantee: that all creatures would always freely choose good. Plantinga considers the possibility that God cannot secure this guarantee for the creatures he creates. Forcing their response would remove the freedom we are trying to preserve.

This does not mean that a free person must necessarily choose evil. Freely choosing good remains possible. The question concerns guaranteeing these choices for all creatures, not a requirement to act badly.

If this hypothesis is possible, God may have a reason to create free persons despite the evil they commit. The value of this freedom provides the reason Plantinga considers. This is enough to challenge an absolute contradiction between God and the actual existence of moral evil. This defense offers a coherent possibility without claiming to know all the reasons for God's choices.

A promise helps us understand the value at stake. Receiving a freely given promise is not the same as hearing a forced response. Likewise, loving involves more than carrying out a behavior. Freedom makes refusal possible, but also the gift of oneself.

Saint Augustine was already defending free will in his work De libero arbitrio, written between 388 and 395. He was responding to the Manichaeans, who explained the world through two opposing principles, one good and the other evil. For him, God is not the author of the evil that human beings choose to commit.^[19]

So the existence of freedom received from God does not make God guilty of every misuse of it. A person can turn this freedom away from good. They then bear responsibility to the extent that their act is voluntary. The gift and its misuse must be distinguished.

Plantinga's defense has been widely accepted as an answer to the problem of contradiction. Another objection is still debated, notably in the work of William Rowe. It asks whether the amount and severity of evil make God's existence unlikely.^[20] This is a different question, which this defense does not claim to settle fully.

So the answer given here has a precise scope. It shows how moral evil could exist without contradicting God's goodness and power. Freedom makes refusal possible, but also true love. Removing this freedom would also remove the possibility of freely choosing to give oneself.

The Catholic faith holds two claims together. Human beings possess real freedom. But they cannot, on their own, reach God and live fully in goodness. Their freedom is received, fragile and called to grow.

Grace is the help God freely gives to human beings. It does not replace their personal response. It enables them to respond to God. Salvation here means being saved and living with God.

Holding these two claims together avoids two errors. The first removes human freedom. The second acts as though human beings could save themselves by their own strength alone. The Catholic answer rejects both the removal of our will and its complete independence from God.

Several gatherings of bishops have clarified this teaching. The Council of Carthage opposed Pelagius, whose position gave free will the sole role in salvation. His condemnation was later confirmed by the Council of Ephesus. The Council of Orange II also defended the need for grace.

Sin means deliberately turning away from the good that God wants. The Council of Trent states that human beings can cooperate with God's help. It also rejects the idea that free will has completely disappeared since Adam's sin.^[21]

Saint Thomas Aquinas explains freedom in terms of our ability to judge. We can recognize several possible goods, compare them and decide on one of them.^[22] This does not require a will without reasons. Our choice can be reasonable without being merely a mechanism we cannot control.

He also stresses the place of freedom in our relationships. Giving advice, asking someone to make an effort or reminding them of a promise assumes a person able to respond. These practices would lose their particular meaning if no personal response were possible. They express our trust in this ability.

So Christian freedom does not mean choosing at random. Nor is it simply following the strongest desire. It enables us to recognize a good and commit ourselves to it. We can thus act despite conflicting desires.

This control can grow. A good habit can help us stick to what we have decided. By contrast, a bad habit can make us more dependent. So freedom is not measured only by the number of possibilities before us.

The Catechism puts it this way:

“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'.”^[23]

Here, the image of slavery describes freedom that allows itself to become trapped. Being able to choose evil does not mean that this choice sets us free. We can use our freedom in a way that later weakens our control. Good, by contrast, can help it grow.

This does not allow us to judge people hastily. The Catechism reminds us that circumstances can reduce or remove responsibility for an act. So recognizing freedom also requires recognizing the ways it is wounded. Standing firm about what is good goes together with paying attention to what each person is going through.

Ultimately, freedom received from God does not leave us alone. It makes possible a response to his love and cooperation with his help. To continue exploring this Christian path, Ignispedia also offers articles on the Divine Will and Luisa Piccarreta.

• Free will here means the real ability to choose differently in the same circumstances.
• Being influenced does not necessarily mean being entirely determined.
• The search for truth and responsibility are at the heart of the argument.
• Compatibilism keeps a differently defined freedom without resolving the disagreement about the ability to choose differently.
• Experiments on simple movements do not prove that every thoughtful decision is an illusion.
• For Lavagna, real freedom requires a source beyond material mechanisms: God.
• The Catholic faith affirms our freedom while recognizing its fragility and our need for divine help.

The free will argument brings us back to a familiar experience. We think, we promise and we sometimes resist what attracts us. The question is whether these actions are truly our own. For Lavagna, reducing these actions to mechanisms we cannot control destroys the foundation of our judgments and our responsibility.

The Catholic answer recognizes in this a gift from God. Our freedom can be wounded, but it is neither useless nor abandoned. It can grow with his help. Above all, it enables us to give a response that is not forced upon us: to choose good and to love.