Does Free Will Prove God?

A large portion of articles from the conservative Town Hall attempt to prove the existence of God or slam atheism. (This is yet another example of how the conservative movement is captured by the religious right.) A recent example is Ben Shapiro's "Why Atheism Is Morally Bankrupt."

Here is Shapiro's argument:

[W]ithout God, there can be no moral choice. Without God, there is no capacity for free will.

Thats because a Godless world is a soulless world. Virtually all faiths hold that God endows human beings with the unique ability to choose their actions -- the ability to transcend biology and environment in order to do good. Transcending biology and our environment requires a higher power -- a spark of the supernatural. As philosopher Rene Descartes, put it, Although I possess a body with which I am very intimately conjoined [my soul] is entirely and absolutely distinct from my body and can exist without it. [A direct quote?]

Gilbert Pyle, the atheistic philosopher, derogatorily labeled the idea of soul/body dualism, the ghost in the machine. Nonetheless, our entire legal and moral system is based on the ghost in the machine -- the presupposition that we can choose to do otherwise. ...

According to atheists, human beings are intensely complex machines. Our actions are determined by our genetics and our environment.

Shapiro's claim about atheists is obviously false. Many atheists reject determinism.

But notice the basic form of Shapiro's argument: "I cannot explain X as part of the natural world, therefore God exists." This argument has been repeated in many forms over the centuries. "I cannot explain [lightning, weather, causal laws, gravity, the origin of species, morality, free will] as part of the natural word, therefore God exists."

But an inability to explain something does not justify the move to Making Stuff Up. Lack of knowledge about the natural world does not demonstrate the existence of a supernatural world.

I do not pretend to have the final answer to free will. (I don't pretend to have the final answer to gravity or many other things, either.) Yet it is obviously the case that an account of free will need not invoke God, because two major theories of free will avoid doing so. Objectivists such as Leonard Peikoff argue that mechanistic causation does not exhaust the nature of causation, and that certain things in the universe -- people with rational consciousness -- are capable of self-causation in important ways. Others, including Daniel Dennett, make a case for compatibilism, the view that free will operates within a deterministic world. I hope to return to this issue squarely within the next couple years.

The unassailable fundamental is that we do have free will. We obviously can "choose to do otherwise." We can observe the phenomenon of choice within ourselves. The fact that science cannot explain free will with finality does not disprove free will any more than a lack of understanding about gravity allows us to float freely above the earth with no upward force. The point of science is to explain aspects of the natural world, not rationalize away their existence.

Shapiro claims that atheists cannot explain free will in the context of natural law. His solution? Conjure a God not bound by natural law. He counts his ignorance as his proof: we don't understand something, therefore, God. Yet even within that rationalistic framework Christians have struggled to explain free will. Many influential Christians were determinists. Indeed, Christianity is driven to its own form of compatibilism: God must simultaneously have perfect knowledge -- including a perfect awareness of the future -- and grant humans free will. Neat trick. The upshot is that Christians reject compatibilism based on a competing theory of compatibilism. But the absurdities of the supernaturalist framework are secondary: the main point is that there's no reason to accept a supernaturalist framework, and the attempt inherently defies reason.

Perkins vs. D'Souza: Morality

In his fourth essay criticizing Dinesh D'Souza, Greg Perkins notes that D'Souza accuses atheists of rebelling against moral rules. After summarizing why that's not the case for atheists who know what they're talking about, Perkins adds:

[T]he religionists are themselves guilty of the sin of moral subjectivism. The essence of subjectivism is acting on whim -- wishing, assuming, feeling, or declaring that facts will align themselves with thoughts and lives. Of course, this gets it exactly backwards: thoughts and lives must align themselves with the facts because facts are absolutes to be discovered, not declared. Merely hoping or asserting something is good doesn't make it so, and it doesn't matter whether we're talking about the whim of a lone subjectivist deciding what is good or bad, the whim of an entire civilization voting on it, or the whim of a "supernatural" mind decreeing it. So the religious who claim to have an absolute morality are really only subjectivists of a supernatural stripe. The trouble for them is that their sort of subjectivism is just as false as any other: God telling Abraham that it is good to slay his innocent son Isaac doesn't make it good. His ordering the enslavement of entire peoples in the Old Testament doesn't make that good.

While Perkins only hints at the full case behind his arguments, he starts down the right track and offers a useful reading list.

There is a point that Perkins doesn't make: D'Souza is psychologizing. He is postulating some psychological rebellion that, in most cases, simply does not exist. (Perkins correctly claims that many atheists resort to the theory of subjectivism, but that's a very different charge.) Thus, D'Souza's argument on this point is not only wrong but ad hominem.

Norris: Christian Ranger

Ordinarily, I don't care what actors think about politics. But I do care about actors who espouse popular conservative views on popular conservative forums. Especially when those actors endorse relatively successful politicians who promise us faith-based politics.

Townhall.com has published at least a couple of Chuck Norris's articles praising Mike Huckabee. Here is one segment from Norris's recent piece about murder in our society:

We teach our children they are nothing more than glorified apes, yet we don't expect them to act like monkeys. We place our value in things, yet expect our children to value people. We disrespect one another, but expect our children to respect others. We terminate children in the womb, but are surprised when children outside the womb terminate other children. We push God to the side, but expect our children to be godly. We've abandoned moral absolutes, yet expect our children to obey the universal commandment: "Thou shall not murder."

Once we weed out the platitudes, we are left with the following substantive claims: the teaching of evolution as science, abortion, irreligion, and moral non-absolutism are responsible for murder.

In other words, Norris believes that those who reject mythological explanations of the creation of the world and of life, those who find a distinction between a fertilized egg and a person, and those who decline to subordinate their lives to an invented supernatural being, all promote murder. And let's not look at the history of what those who believe the opposite tend to do.

Norris also wishes us to believe that the foundation of moral absolutism is mythology and supernaturalism. Perhaps it requires the sensibilities of one trained in the art of make-believe to see beyond the distinction between rigorously imposed religious rules and objective moral absolutes.

But Norris delivers the knock-out blow in his closing paragraph: "If Psalm 33:12 says, 'Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord,' then what will be the state of blessedness for the nation that abandons God and his moral code of conduct?" Who can argue with logic like that?