Going Downhill and Excelerating

Since 1960 the divorce rate has doubled, the teen-suicide rate has tripled, the recorded violent crime rate has quadrupled, the prison population has quintupled, the percentage of babies born to unmarried parents has sextupled, and the rate of cohabitation without marriage (which is a pretty good predictor of eventual divorce0 has increased sevenfold. The rate of serious clinical depression has more than tripled over the last two generations, and increased by perhaps a factor of ten from 1900 to 2000. Is it any wonder children are violent? What makes you think anything will change for the better.

Free Will

Free will is the ability of agents to make choices unconstrained by certain factors. The principle of free will has religious implications. In the religious realm, free will implies that individual will and choices can coexist with an omnipotent divinity. We believe salvation is only for those who freely choose Jesus as their savior and choose to follow his instructions and human evil is an unavoidable byproduct of God's gift of free will. If free will goes, so do those beliefs.

 

Do we really have "free will?" "Free will" is defined as: at the moment when we have to decide among alternatives, we have free will if we could have chosen otherwise. In other words if we could re-do  our life up to the moment we make a choice, with every aspect of the universe configured identically, free will means that our choice could have been different.

 

Some believe this sort of free will is ruled out by the laws of physics.

 

Our brain and body, the vehicles that make "choices," are composed of molecules, and the arrangement of those molecules is entirely determined by our genes and our environment. Our decisions result from molecular-based electrical impulses and chemical substances transmitted from one brain cell to another. These molecules must obey the laws of physics, so the outputs of our brain—our "choices"—are dictated by those laws. (It's possible, though improbable, that the indeterminacy of quantum physics may tweak behavior a bit, but such random effects can't be part of free will.) And deliberating about your choices in advance doesn't help matters, for that deliberation also reflects brain activity that must obey physical laws.

 

To assert that we can freely choose among alternatives is to claim that we can somehow step outside the physical structure of our brain and change its workings. We can't do that. Like the output of a programmed computer, only one choice is ever physically possible: the one we made.