Freedom vs. Determinism

Materialism and Determinism

A Materialist believes that the Cosmos (which includes us) consists only of matter and is governed solely by material forces known as the physical laws of cause and effect.  All reality is immanent; there are no Transcendent realties--no God, no angels, no soul, no spirit, no universal Natural Law that governs moral behavior, and no man made in the image of God with Free Will.  Determinism logically proceeds from Materialism since matter (including the brain with which we made those “decisions” we spoke of earlier) cannot transcend the necessary effects that proceeds from its antecedent causes.

Materialism is not new.  The Greek philosopher, Democritus, who gave us the idea of the atom, was also a materialistic philosopher.  Materialism never really caught on in the West because of the influence of Christianity and for the common sense observations of  “design” in nature, which suggested a “Designer.”  This was challenged by Charles Darwin’s book, On the Origin of Species, of which the modern-day biologist, Richard Dawkins, has remarked:

“An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: ‘I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.” I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.’

So for Dawkins, and other Scientific Materialists, the problem of  “design” in nature invoking a transcendent Designer has been resolved by an immanent “designer” of natural selection which is made of the same stuff as nature itself: the Necessity of physical law and the possibility of chance.  There is nothing in the epistemology of Science that mandates Materialism, but many have come to think so.  Materialism is methodological assumption within Science, but for a good many scientists it has become an ontological assumption as well as the noted Biologist and Scientific Materialist, R.C. Lewontin observed:

“It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

And with this Scientific Materialism has come Determinism, not just for the design of the physical and living world, but also for the world of the individual human being, for their interpersonal relationships, and for societies.  Let’s now discuss Determinism and it’s consequences in more detail.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the world is governed by determinism, if and only if, given a specified way things are at time t, the way things go thereafter is fixed as a matter of physical (material) law.  In an absolute sense every event in space/time throughout the history of the universe was determined necessarily by a prior cause leading back to the origin of the Big Bang.

Many notable scientists and philosophers hold this Deterministic view: 

“Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.”
~ Charles Darwin

“Everything is determine, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control.  It is determined for the insect as well as the star.  Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.”
~Albert Einstein

This strict determinism includes human actions since humans are made of matter and are thus subject to the same physical laws which govern all matter in the universe.  Such a view precludes human freedom and free will and is acknowledged as such by those who hold this view of the universe.

"You will say that I feel free. This is an illusion, which may be compared to that of the fly in the fable, who, upon the pole of a heavy carriage, applauded himself for directing its course. Man, who thinks himself free, is a fly who imagines he has power to move the universe, while he is himself unknowingly carried along by it." 
~Baron d'Hobach

"The first dogma which I came to disbelieve was that of free will. It seemed to me that all notions of matter were determined by the laws of dynamics and could not therefore be influenced by human wills."
~Bertrand Russell

Biological determinists likewise reject transcendent notions such as free will on the basis that it is inconsistent with modern view of genetics.  They hold the view that human behavior is governed by the genome.

"What are all of us but self-reproducing robots? We have been put together by our genes and what we do is roam the world looking for a way to sustain ourselves and ultimately produce another robot ­ a child."
~Richard Dawkins

Determinists, who have the courage of their conviction, embrace the consequences of a world without freedom and the necessity of choosing between right and wrong.  The Development Psychologist, Peter Gill, imagines a world in which humanity is freed of the delusion of free will:

"The enormous value of the concept of free will in relieving parental shame and guilt is the only and overriding reason, in our opinion, that the lie of free will is well nigh universally taught to all children. If and when we can convince parents of total determinism, so they are freed from their own shame and guilt, they will no longer need to teach the vicious lie of free will to the world's children. A new world will be born.”

Next: The Brave New World of Determinism