Religion & Spirituality

A Treatise on the Co-existence of both Determinism and Free Moral Agency as necessary components of our physical and cognitive reality.

Both the typical Atheist and the typical Calvinist seem to believe that Determinism and Free Moral Agency are somehow mutually exclusive concepts. Stephen Hawking perhaps deviated from this condition slightly, claiming to believe determinism was real, but then claiming that it may as well not be because we, according to him, couldn't tell the difference. He therefore claimed that we ought to punish criminals anyway, even though he claimed not to believe in Free Will nor God of any kind.

Here's a dilemma for people who reject Free Will/Free Moral Agency. If Free Moral Agency did not exist, it would be irrational to punish criminals since they have no control over their behavior. But if an irrational action were possible, then Free Moral Agency must be real. After all, any irrational behavior is something illogical, and the only way a mortal being could take an illogical action is if they are in fact able to override logic and determinism in some limited fashion. I'll expand on this argument later. Thus, Free Will exists because arguments against Free Will are always irrational, even when framed within physics or other branches of science.

Determinism is like the boundary of a football field. Free Moral Agency is like the playing field, and in football you are allowed to catch a ball even when going out of bounds, so long as one (or two for pros) feet touch the ground simultaneously with the physical act of "catching" the ball.

Additional example of reality being both Free Will and Determinism, imagine two jumpers. One is genetically and physically superior, but he lacks the willpower, determination to practice repetion and technique enough to meet his theoretical maximum potential. the other jumper is genetically and physically slightly inferior, but for whatever reason, by their own free moral agency, they have the willpower, ,determination to practice both techniques and repetition. So the slightly inferior jumper who properly practices ends up being able ot jump higher and farther, literally by willpower alone, than does the supposedly physically superior jumper. This is an example of how free moral agency overlaps and even partially overrides determinism, including physics.

Why can't I fly just by willing it to be so? Why can't i jump all the way to Mars just by trying? Because we have both physical and metaphysical limitations to the context of our own Created existence. Birds on the other hand can fly to certain heights in the atmosphere, limited only by the wind or the air pressure or the temperature of the air that they are willing to withstand. So a Bird is created with different physical potentials than humans, thus regardless of the fact they are evidently less intelligent than humans, they are nevertheless able to execute some feats which are physically impossible to a human, at least excluding the invention of balloons, airplanes, and other flying contraptions. I'll make more exposition on the concept of 'invention" in the context of Free Will later. Angels can fly to other planets and even other "Heavens" within Reality, literally from Earth, through each of the first Five Heavens, according to Enoch anyway. Why is that possible? Because both the physical and metaphysical nature of their created condition allows them to do that. Righteous Humans when we die, become capable of traveling to the Third Heaven, because we will no longer be constrained by the physical limits of a mortal body.

Why should "Jumping' be physically possible at all if Determinism alone were true? after all, what possibly motivated our body to even want to move at all, much less Jump, if we were just a deterministic system? Gravity and the other three fundamental forces are all attractive on the macroscopic scale, which should prevent a deterministic system from spontaneously jumping, after all, but that is only true in the total absence of Free Moral Agency. ON the other hand, since we in fact are Free Moral Agents, we can in fact spontaneously choose to Jump. IN fact we can choose to Jump for any reason at all. We may have a good reason to jump. We may have a bad reason to Jump. We may have no reason to Jump at all, but nevertheless we can choose to Jump. If the Universe were purely deterministic, Jumping shouldn't be physically possible at all, since there is no good reason for a deterministic system to spontaneously Jump. This argument also refutes the claim that the Universe came from a deterministic system which predated itself. IN fact, the Universe could ONLY have been created by a Free Moral Agent, since the Big Bang alone is a deterministic system, and the initial conditions of reality could not spontaneously "Bang" the universe into existence except by Free Moral Agency since Deterministic systems in fact cannot spontaneously do anything at all. That's one of Newton's Laws of Motion, by the way. A body at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by another force. A body in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by another force.

Thus the Universe could not "bang itself into action" spontaneously. It could only have been Created by a Free Moral Agent. The fact I am a mortal man and cannot fully comprehend that manner of Creation is irrelevant to the situation. It is possible to reason in terms which are both specific enough and yet broad enough to cover all possibilities, even when those possibilities are not entirely comprehensible to a mortal.

A Treatise on the Co-existence of both Determinism and Free Moral Agency as necessary components of our physical and cognitive reality.
A Treatise on the Co-existence of both Determinism and Free Moral Agency as necessary components of our physical and cognitive reality.
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