What Is Free Will? (Or, Does the Nominal Believer Really Believe?)

The question of free will is whether, and in what sense, rational agents exercise control over their actions and decisions.
-Wikipedia, Free Will

Rational agents, by definition, act based on what they know and believe in order to maximize their expected total enjoyment(/pleasure/utility/etc.). Though intuitively it would seem that not everyone is rational, the definitions of rational and utility are far more expansive than is usually assumed. For example, a thief judges the odds of him getting away times the payoff to be greater than the odds of getting caught times the penalty. This is usually not a conscious calculation, but a subconscious one (Scott Adams has called the subconscious nothing but an odds-calculating machine). And though it may seem utterly irrational to an outsider, it was, based on his (likely flawed) knowledge and belief, the best thing he could have done.

So what of free will? Could the thief have chosen not to steal? For this to happen, there would have to be more thrown into the mix. A moral person judges the moral costs in addition to the purely material costs, balancing the payoff with guilt or shame. The more trepidatious criminal just calculates the odds differently, or assigns a different value to the payoff relative to the likely punishment. This framework of rational choice is actually the fundamental underpinning of all economic study.

Quite simply, free will is not the ability to make random or arbitrary decisions. What would be the point of it then? Free will is the ability to act in your own long-term self interest, and so is a function of (and can be constrained by) two things: knowledge and values.

Knowledge is fundamental to free will both in the long term and short term. Most stupid actions that people would assume are irrational are just a function of lack of knowledge. Let’s turn back to the thief again for an example: the thief decides to rob a convenience store. The owner has a gun, and shoots the thief in the chest, severely wounding him and sending him to jail. Why did the thief still rob the convenience store? He had no knowledge of the gun. Had he known the owner had a gun and was experienced in hunting, he would not have robbed the store. How many times has the lament “If only I had known” been uttered? Free will is a function of knowledge, and poor decisions are a function of imperfect knowledge.

If you’re still not convinced, imagine you’re suddenly omniscient. You can see the future, and even see what will happen as the result of any decision. How would you act? You would, of course, act in such a way as to make your life the most enjoyable, based on your values. You could calculate your way up the corporate ladder and become rich and famous, or if you’re altruistic, you could maximize your enjoyment by making the world a better place. Either way, you would act in such a way as to get the most of what you value most. You wouldn’t – you couldn’t – do anything else.

Of course, that thought experiment assumes that values exist independently of knowledge. Values are the fundamental determinant of ends, which are particular instances of general values, and ends employ knowledge in their service to create action. But values are also future-oriented beliefs; a kind of knowledge themselves: if I choose strawberry over vanilla ice cream, it means I believe that I will get more enjoyment from strawberry ice cream than vanilla ice cream, whether because it pleases my tongue better, or because of social pressures which I value more highly.

The praxeological disciplines, in treating values as “ultimate givens”, carry on as if knowledge and values do exist separately. The sensual pleasures – food, touch, and so forth – probably do have some element of individual “ultimate given” status determined by biology. Such preferences are usually refined over the course of a lifetime to the point that they are rarely wrong, e.g., you are usually correct in whether you will get more pleasure from strawberry or vanilla ice cream. But these are a small part of the constellation of values in any particular person. Most values are (or can be) heavily influenced by knowledge and belief. With perfect knowledge, your values would not be the same as they are now. Some things you strive for now would come to seem trivial, and others which previously held little sway now appear with pressing urgency. You would still strive to get the most of what you value most, but those values are not absolute.

And these values are not necessarily concordant – indeed, they are often contradictory. Many poor decisions made with complete foreknowledge of the consequences are the result of a short time horizon (a sort of meta-value) – that is, valuing short term pleasure over long term pleasure, which comes with a wait. Regrets are often the result of changed values, or the arrival of a time horizon for which one did not invest (“I wish I had spent more time with my family”, etc.). This is the heart of Paul’s lament in Romans 7: “The good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want.” Though we as Christians know and believe what the ultimate Good is, we nevertheless struggle with short time horizons and fragmented values.

Barring time horizon, however, belief is ultimately the most important to the overarching trend of one’s behavior. Many people believe, for example, that they will be rewarded after death for good behavior, thus they act in ways that would appear counter to their self-interest – hence moral behavior. Others believe that such behavior is simply good for society, and act generally morally because they value self-respect. And others still value their own pleasure over, or even against, other peoples’; thus we get “immoral” (in the traditional sense of the word) people.

This is the reason religion and faith are often considered synonymous. Most religions attest to an afterlife contingent on one’s earthly life – Heaven and Hell. Many also include requirements for escaping Hell and going to Heaven, or at least for attaining the best afterlife. It is, of course, in everyone’s best interest to assure for himself the best afterlife: even a minute improvement magnified by eternity outweighs the highest pleasures of earth. Believing in the attestations of a religion is faith. True believers are thus much rarer than one might imagine. True belief in God and in the severity of choices affecting ones’ afterlife would require nothing less than a full life commitment.

So why don’t we see this? Most of what we see as religion is built on a series of external incentives. In the Muslim world, people are ostracized and often threatened for converting out. Televangelists promise health and wealth after converting in. And it doesn’t even require high-flying earthly benefits: most personal religion is based on the more modest, but much more imminent social benefits to appearing devout (but not too devout). History shows what lengths people will go to for the sake of identitification with a group. And for many, the practice is simply habit.

Hence, because choice springs directly from belief, and because lifestyle is the aggregate of action, we can see that the nominal believer is no believer at all. His motivation is not belief in God, but rather approval of men, or even habit. The fact that the lifestyle of most Christians is a far cry from “Deny yourself and take up your cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23) shows their goal is to reap social benefits (self-deception on this point is, I would guess, a greater factor than deliberate impersonation of the religious).

Romans 10 speaks specifically to the point that choice is directly influenced by knowledge and belief. Salvation comes by faith (belief), faith comes by hearing (knowledge), and hearing from the Word of God. Furthermore according to James, faith without works is dead, for true faith means we believe that works are the evidence of the Holy Spirit and that the Holy Spirit is the evidence of salvation. And what is more important to the true believer than securing and assuring his own salvation?

So what exactly is salvation, and what does it do to free will? Belief and values are always informed by knowledge. Our faith is imparted by God himself when we hear through the Word of God and believe that God is the telos of creation and of the self, the summum bonum; that man is alienated from that Good, and that God has come into the world to reconcile us to himself. This is the point at which we receive the Holy Spirit (This means depravity is a result of imperfect knowledge and faulty values, in that we cannot act to please God (which is in our ultimate self-interest) without proper knowledge and values).

A cursory reading of Romans 8, a discussion on living by the spirit vs. the flesh, might lead one to believe that the Spirit removes our free will and substitutes it with God’s. This is not the case at all. Our will is not free to begin with in any sense, due to a lack of knowledge and faulty values. Nor could it ever be “free” in the metaphysical sense that prevenient grace is supposed to enable. We cannot act in our own long-term self-interest, that is, get to Heaven and escape Hell, without knowledge of how to do so and the belief that that knowledge is correct and reliable. Thus when we are imparted the Holy Spirit, He teaches us our self-interest primarily through knowledge of God through the Scriptures, gives us the faith to believe it, and changes our values and extends our time horizons accordingly. The knowledge and true belief imparted over time by the Holy Spirit that eternal rewards outweigh short-term sinful pleasures will, without fail as God Himself, produce a Christian with a freer will.