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A brief history of
determined vs. free will ideas
Cause and Effect
– At about the 5th century BC,
in his work On the Mind,
the Greek Philosopher Leucippus
penned the earliest known
universal statement describing
what we today understand as
determinism, or the law of cause
and effect
“Nothing happens at random,
but everything for a reason and
by necessity.”
Human Will –
The concepts of will and free
will are actually Christian in
orgin. It was Saint Paul in his
Letter to the Romans, which is
dated at about 58 A.D., who
first discovered this thing we
call human will. He came to it
by recognizing that he could not
often do as much right as he
wanted. Saint Paul wrote in
Romans 7:15 that:
“I don’t understand myself at
all, for I really want to do
what is right, but I can’t.” I
do what I don’t want to – what I
hate.” (Translation – The Living
Bible)
Free Will --
Nothing new was said on the
matter for the next few hundred
years until St. Augustine
grappled with the concepts of
evil and justice. Saint
Augustine wrote in his book
De Libero Arbitrio, 386-395
A.D., (translated as “On Free
Will”)
“Evil deeds are punished by
the justice of God. They would
not be punished justly if they
had not been performed
voluntarily.”
The problem he saw was that
if human beings do not have a
free will, it would be unfair
for God to arbitrarily reward or
punish us. St. Augustine
concluded that God could not be
unfair, and so he created the
concept of a human free will,
whereby we earn our reward or
punishment by what we freely do.
Scientific concepts
relating to the determined will
vs. free will question
Classical Mechanics
-- In 1687 Sir Isaac Newton
publishes his “Laws of Motions”
that mathematically describes
the physical universe as acting
in a mechanistic manner
according to the principle of
cause and effect.
Classical Mechanics is a
completely deterministic theory
Heisenberg
Uncertainty Principle
-- In 1925 Warner Heisenberg
describes mathematically that…
We can measure the position
of a particle or the momentum of
a particle (momentum meaning its
direction and velocity), but we
cannot simultaneously measure
the position and momentum of a
particle.
Copenhagen
Interpretation of Quantum
Mechanics -- Niels Bohr
and others make the following
assertions;
1) Particles do not have a
simultaneous position and
momentum.
2) Elementary particles
behave indeterministically, and
are not subject to the principle
of cause and effect.
Believers in free will saw
the Heisenberg Uncertainty
Principle and Copenhagen
Interpretation of Quantum
Mechanics as providing a
possibility for free will to
exist. They asserted that if
elementary particles behave
indeterministically, they are
not subject to the principle of
cause and effect that prohibits
free will.
But, as noted above, it
eventually became apparent that
indeterminism also prohibits
free will.
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