Free will and baby

I went to play with baby a while tonight. It was fun. One of her favorite games is when I hand her some toy, and she attacks it savagely with her mouth. At times like this, she reminds me of a dog: if she can't fit a thing in her mouth, caress it with her tongue, and gnaw it, then it has no value to her, and she will toss it away. Come to think of it, she usually tosses it away before too long, anyway. Nothing seems to satisfy an infant for very long.

I had a ball. The funny thing is, I wasn't too keen on it at first. I wanted to come down to the study, waste time on the internet, write in the weblog—you know the drill. Anything but deal with baby. It's not that I don't like playing with baby; it's that I wanted to do something else that I like, something that would provide me with a superficial, easy-to-grasp pleasure rather than a profound one that requires effort.

It was hard to choose the right thing, and I'm not proud of the fact that it took such effort to choose it. But there's no question in my mind that I chose.

This isn't a rant on free will, but rather on what free will is not. Earlier today, I read the following:

In heaven, it seems, all tears will be wiped away and we will be free of pain and suffering. We will also be free of freedom—necessarily so, because if freedom were to exist in heaven, we would merely replicate our lives on earth and start doing terrible things to each other again.

(Proponent's name left out, but it was quoted from an article on the excellent Religion and Science Yahoo! mailing list.)

Well, no, it's not necessarily so.

Does the fact that I chose the right thing earlier this evening mean that I wasn't free to choose the wrong thing? I don't think so. It certainly didn't feel so. There have been too many occasions where I was in exactly the same situation and didn't choose the right thing. If one accepts freedom of the will, then that freedom does not depend on how often one chooses the wrong thing. It simply means one has the freedom to choose.

I chose to spend time with baby because I knew my wife wanted a break, and I love my wife. Does that impinge on my freedom? Some would argue yes, because I did so to gain a reward from it—namely, the knowledge that I would please my wife, a knowledge that is pleasurable in itself—and people do things for the purpose of pleasure. But I didn't think about gaining pleasure at all; I thought about my responsibility to her, and the implications of love. As I noted above, I most certainly did not gain as much of one kind of pleasure from playing with baby that I would have gained from tapping away on the weblog. This is why there are so many irresponsible fathers; they choose one kind of pleasure, easy and immediately rewarding, over another, difficult and delayed in reward (if it is ever received).

The problem with talking about free will is that people have forgotten what it means. I even suspect that a secondary cause of many of the world's ills (original sin being the primary) is that people have the wrong idea entirely of what it means to have a free will, and because of it many people have become determinists. It's the same as a lot of atheism: I'd reject that notion of free will, just as I'd reject that notion of god.

Let me admit frankly that I don't know how to explain it very well. I'm not really competent to argue it, which is why I'm exploiting my baby for the analogy. ;-) One year of philosophy in a Catholic seminary, and a clumsy paper comparing and contrasting the teachings of Augustine and Aquinas on free well, may make for a learned-sounding blowhard, but they do not a learned philosopher make. Nevertheless, I do insist on the following:

• free will is not the same as either chaos or randomness, a position put forth in one argument I read to justify free will, comparing it to the unpredictability of quantum mechanics;
• in some Catholic thought, free will is damaged by sin, including by original sin, so that our sins make us less free (I seem to recall that St. Augustine put this forward in De Libero Arbitrio);
• similarly, God's grace makes us more free, because it enables us to choose what is right, which we cannot always do when we are under the domain of sin;
• a man chooses evil because of his self-love, but chooses good because of his love of God or of neighbor.

In heaven, therefore, when we have been purified from sin and are truly free, we can still reject God, but we don't, because our love has been purified. I suppose a more philosophically correct statement would be, "our will has been purified", but as I said, I am not that much of a thinker, and I wish to emphasize the fact that we do what is right when we truly love others, rather than seek to gratify ourselves. My personal conviction is that temptations remain in heaven—God forgive me if I am speaking heresy—but we are finally free to reject them, and we always will, because we love God purely in heaven—and, since we see God as he is, it is not difficult at all to choose him over those lesser things that now, blinded by sin, we misjudge as better than they really are.

There. Now, if you want some serious philosophy by someone who knows what he's actually talking about, go to Brandon's weblog.