Freedom and Determinism and Little Fuzzy.

Within Christianity, there are two general views on the nature of freedom, namely libertarian freedom and compatibilistic freedom.

Let's define a few terms:

Determinism: the facts of the past, in conjunction with the laws of nature, entail every truth about the future. [1] In a theological sense, I am going to extend this definition as follows: the facts of the past, in conjunction with the laws of nature and the input of God, entail every truth about the future. Without that extra bit, it would be deism or naturalism.

Compatibilistic free will: The idea that free will is logically consistent with determinism - i.e. it is compatible with determinism.

Libertarian free will: The idea that an agent could genuinely have done other than what it did.

So, if determinism is true, the past state of the universe, plus the rules governing the universe and whatever God in his sovereignty decides to do results in everything that happens, including whatever choice a person makes. Everything does mean everything.

Many more skilled logicians than me have pointed out how compatiblism cannot show that freedom and determinism are compatible since they must necessarily redefine freedom to do so. Something is compatible with determinism, but it is not freedom as the majority of people understand it, but this isn't my point.

A Little Furry Creature Visits Jack.
Stop now and read about it in the link above. I'm a quick reader so I can read it in about 3-4 hours.
*****SPOILERS BELOW *****
Jack is the futuristic equivalent of a gold prospector on distant world. A company owns the planet and is using it to make money and ship goods back to earth. Their charter(rights to the world) depends on the fact that there is no intelligent life on the planet. Jack finds a little furry creature there who seems intelligent, and the company man, seeing his profits about to vanish comes to investigate.  The company man kills one of the life forms, and Jack kills the company man's bodyguard in defense of his new friend.

Naturally this results in a dramatic trial. If the creature is sapient (i.e. thinking) then it follows that Jack is in the clear, the company's charter is invalid and the company man committed murder. If not it follows Jack committed murder and the company is in the clear. It's a good book, and well worth a read.

They sit around and argue how to define the terms for a while. A rule of thumb used was that a sapient being should be able to 'talk and make fire'. The fuzzy's it turned out could talk (just not in human audible range, so nobody knew). That definition is a bit lacking though. The book isn't up-to-date with the latest research and perpetuates the 10%/90% conscious and unconscious myth, but something struck me:

Two quotes;
"The sapient mind not only thinks consciously by habit, but it thinks in connected sequence. It associates one thing with another. It reasons logically, and forms conclusions, and uses those conclusions as premises from which to arrive at further conclusions. It groups associations together, and generalizes. Here we pass completely beyond any comparison with nonsapience. This is not merely more consciousness, or more thinking; it is thinking of a radically different kind. The nonsapient mind deals exclusively with crude sensory material. The sapient mind translates sense impressions into ideas, and then forms ideas of ideas, in ascending orders of abstraction, almost without limit."

and
"[..]above all, they can imagine, not only a new implement, but a new way of life. We see this in the first human contact with the race which, I submit, should be designated as Fuzzy sapiens. Little Fuzzy found a strange and wonderful place in the forest, a place unlike anything he had ever seen, in which lived a powerful being. He imagined himself living in this place, enjoying the friendship and protection of this mysterious being. So he slipped inside, made friends with Jack Holloway and lived with him. And then he imagined his family sharing this precious comfort and companionship with him, and he went and found them and brought them back with him. Like so many other sapient beings, Little Fuzzy had a beautiful dream; like a fortunate few, he made it real."

To the compatibilist, the illusion of free will comes from the reaction of our brains to external input. We are crude machines, mechanistic and, as defined above, non-sapient. Our imaginations that produce works of fiction like Little Fuzzy are merely the reaction of our beings to external stimuli. In a lot of senses, determinism and naturalism are but a hair's breadth apart. All we have to do to reduce theological determinism to naturalism is to remove God, and I have met quite a few theological determinists who took that easy step.

To the incompatiblist, this is not so, we are agents, limited agents to be sure, but we can imagine. We are creative, having been made in the image of the creative God. Our reasoning and logic is not all there is to our being. When faced with a problem, we don't have to merely weigh up two equally bad options (as the Americans are trying to do now) and try and pick the least bad, we can imagine our way around them. We can search for alternatives.



I will include this bit for the sake of those who think libertarian freedom means you can do anything:
It does not. You are still limited by your capacity to do things. In terms of the fall, your capacity to please God is broken beyond your ability to repair. Suggesting freedom means their are no limits makes as much sense as suggesting that because I can flap my arms quite fast I will take off and fly. There are limits, and freedom always describes a boundary.

For me personally, I think that our ability to ask "What if?" completely refutes compatibilism. Perhaps not, I could be mistaken - I haven't really formed a formal argument here.

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[1] See paragraph 1.3 from this article.