Later this week I’m heading to Poland for the “What is Life: Theology, Science, Philosophy” conference. It will be a chance to connect with my dissertation adviser, meet some new people, and take in some interesting presentations (and, I hope, enjoy some good Polish food and drink!). I’m presenting a version of my paper Towards a Critical Realist Theology of Law, Neurobiology and the Soul. This paper in many ways serves as a sketch of my dissertation project, which I’m sure will change and develop as I proceed. I’ll post portions of it in this series of posts. Below is Part VI, and here are links to Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V.
Are Neurobiology and Theology Both Right About Free Will?
If the theological category of “sin” appears to resonate with neurobiology, only on reflection to exist in some tension with it, the category of “responsibility” seems in conflict with neurobiological accounts of the will, only on reflection to find more commonality.
The Christian Tradition’s treatment of “freedom” and “responsibility” seems to conflict at a basic level with neurobiology. “Responsibility” in Christian theology is not merely a human construct. Rather, it flows out of our relationship to God as created beings. We are “responsible” for our actions because we belong to God. God’s law proceeds from God’s transcendent character and will, which does not depend on human social constructs.
Christian moral theology thus emphasizes human responsibility. As Catholic moral theologian William Mattison notes, “Moral theology is all about understanding and evaluating free actions, the things we do intentionally in our quest for happiness in life.”[1] For Mattison, responsibility and freedom go hand-in-hand: “when people act freely,” he says, “they are responsible for their actions, and we may praise or blame them depending on the sorts of actions they perform or the purposes they hold.”[2] This connection between freely chosen intentionality and moral responsibility seems alien to neurobiology. At least for neurobiological reductionists, intentionality is illusory, a ghost in the machine, and responsibility is a social construct shaped by evolutionary history.
Yet, the Christian tradition’s efforts to grapple with the relationship between “freedom” and “responsibility” resonates in many respects with the same dynamic in neurobiology. When we dig deeper into the Christian Tradition, we notice that our “folk” conceptions of “freedom” and “intention” do not entirely cohere with theological categories. As political scientist Larry Arnhart notes, the notion of “‘free will’ as uncaused cause is a Gnostic idea that treats the human will as an unconditioned, self-determining, transcendental power beyond the natural world . . . . Such a notion contradicts biblical religion, because the only uncaused cause in the Bible is God.”[3]
St. Augustine wrestled directly with how the relationship between God’s sovereignty and human freedom impacts our understanding of the purposes of law. In the Book V of the City of God, he summarizes the stoics’ argument against divine foreknowledge:
If there is a certain order of causes according to which everything happens which does happen, then by fate, says he, all things happen which do happen. But if this be so, then is there nothing in our own power, and there is no such thing as freedom of will; and if we grant that, says he, the whole economy of human life is subverted. In vain are laws enacted. In vain are reproaches, praises, chidings, exhortations had recourse to; and there is no justice whatever in the appointment of rewards for the good, and punishments for the wicked.[4]
Augustine responded to this critique by referring in Aristotelian fashion to the order of causality:
it does not follow that, though there is for God a certain order of all causes, there must therefore be nothing depending on the free exercise of our own wills, for our wills themselves are included in that order of causes which is certain to God, and is embraced by His foreknowledge, for human wills are also causes of human actions; and He who foreknew all the causes of things would certainly among those causes not have been ignorant of our wills.[5]
Similarly, in characteristically stark terms, the Reformer Martin Luther stated in On the Bondage of the Will that
This, therefore, is also essentially necessary and wholesome for Christians to know: that God foreknows nothing by contingency, but that He foresees, purposes, and does all things according to His immutable, eternal, and infallible will. By this thunderbolt, ‘Free-will’ is thrown prostrate, and utterly dashed to pieces.[6]
We might change Luther’s first sentence to refer to the brain instead of to God and attribute it to a modern neurobiologist.
Yet Luther also famously proclaimed that “[a] Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to everyone.”[7] How did Luther reconcile these notions of predestination and freedom? He refers to spiritual freedom, in contrast to bodily slavery:
Man is composed of a twofold nature, a spiritual and a bodily. As regards the spiritual nature, which the name the soul, he is called spiritual, inward, new man; as regards the bodily nature, which they name the flesh, outward, old man. . . . The result of this diversity is, that in the Scriptures opposing statements are made concerning the same man; the fact being that in the same man these two men are opposed to one another; the flesh lusting against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh.[8]
True “freedom” results only in the inward man when a person receives justification by faith in Christ. “Freedom” is not libertarian free will, but rather the uniting of the person’s inward nature with God through faith, which produces the ability to do good works in accordance with God’s will. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it:
“The more one does what is good, the freer one becomes. There is no true freedom except in the service of what is true and just. The choice to disobey and do evil is an abuse of freedom that leads to the ‘slavery of sin.” (cf. Romans 6:17 ) . . . . By deviating from the moral law man violates his own freedom.”[9]
“Freedom,” then, is not libertarian freedom — the freedom to do anything at all — but the increasing flourishing of the human person who pursues the good. Once again, there is consistency here with neurobiology – we are not “free” in terms of folk psychology – but there is divergence in that the Christian concept of “freedom” seems to require a much richer metaphysic than materialism offers.
[1] William C. Mattison, III, Introducing Moral Theology: True Happiness and the Virtues (Baker 2008).
[2] Id.
[3] Larry Arnhart, “The Darwinian Moral Sense and Biblical Religion,” in Evolution and Ethics, supra Note 69.
[4] City of God, Book V.
[5] Id. He concludes: “[w]herefore our wills also have just so much power as God willed and foreknew that they should have; and therefore whatever power they have, they have it within most certain limits; and whatever they are to do, they are most assuredly to do, for He whose foreknowledge is infallible foreknew that they would have the power to do it, and would do it.” Id.
[6] Martin Luther, On the Bondage of the Will, available in the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/luther/bondage.titlepage.html?highlight=luther,bondage,of,the,will#highlight.
[7] Martin Luther, ON the Freedom of a Christian, available in the Modern History Sourcebook at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/luther-freedomchristian.html.
[8] Id.
[9] Catechism of the Catholic Church, ¶¶ 1733, 1740, available at http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism/ccc_toc.htm (last visited March 12, 2010).