As we learn more about the mind and the effects of environment and genetics on our decisions, we attribute an increasingly greater amount of our decisions to these factors, leaving less room for the common-sense explanation of the ultimate cause of our actions to be “free will”.
Religions generally maintain that free will allows for us to be responsible for our actions from a god’s-eye point of view. At least, there is an implied teaching that we ultimately hold enough responsibility for our actions and that God sees us from a perspective where it makes sense to label us as good or evil.
The problem of free will poses a challenge to religions: without free will, morality and in turn, the teachings of religions that depend on free will, fall apart. Although we (society) can still discuss morality because of the benefits to society, we can’t claim that we are morally responsible “from a god’s-eye point of view” if we are not the ultimate cause of any part of our decision making process, but are merely cogs in a machine.
We can speak about responsibility that only exists from our limited perspective, but not from the perspective of a omniscient being, who would both completely understand and determine our behavior as a function of a predictable cause-and-effect system. In this system (the universe), which is completely controlled and understood like a simple machine by an omniscient being, it would not make sense to speak about our actions as “good” or “bad” with respect to the system’s creator.
The thoughts in this post are inspired by William Ramsey‘s intro philosophy course at Notre Dame and Shuan Nichols‘ work.