One of the most unique qualities that make humankind superior to animals and all known life forms is its consciousness and its free will. To make an argument about free will, free will must be defined by the parameters on which it exists. The values of good and evil will then be discussed on the definition of free will. In On Free Choice of the Will, by Augustine, translated by Thomas Williams, an important argument about free will and its relationship to how humans interact and its relationship to evil is discussed between two characters, Evodius and Augutine. The logical conclusions that the two characters come to about free will is reflected in other historical text such as Doctor Faustus, written by Christopher Marlowe. Augustine and Marlowe both clearly illustrate that evil is caused by free will.
Free will is to have understanding; reason and the ability make conscious decisions free from exterior control. Animals do not have free will because when they act, they act out of instinct to satisfy the basic needs of eating, reproducing and self-preservation. Animals may best a human in strength, speed or stealth but humans are the superior species; for a human can suppress his or her will onto an animal by taming it, while an animal will never be able to tame a human. Therefore, humans have a strong mind and soul, on which its foundation is built on reason and understanding, and perceives the world by the mind and soul, and cannot be suppressed by any other force with the exception of God. Augustine verbalized this concept when he tells Evodius
"The conclusion that we have reached thus far indicate that a mind that is in control, one that possesses virtue, cannot be made a slave to inordinate desire by anything equal ...
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...s, by his own free will, to continue to worship the devil "Faustus vows never to look to Heaven, never to the name God, or to pray to him, to burn his Scriptures, slay his ministers and to make my spirits pull his churches down." (Pg. 28, Marlowe) Therefore, there is no single cause of evil and when humankind does evil; it is the cause of its own evil doing.
Augustine makes a statement that connects all of the concepts of free will, the two laws and evil "we have free choice of the will and can not sin without it" (Pg. 29, Augustine) The just and good God gave humankind the ability of free will so that Humankind can choose to do good or evil with it. Whether human kind views certain actions as good or evil, it is the sum of all of its actions that will make humankind good or evil. Only history and God will withstand the test of time to judge mankind’s actions.
In his book, Thomas Hobbes argued that freedom is comprised when there are no outer impediments towards a person when engaging in what he desires to do: “Unregulated agent is that one can engage in what he wills and bear as per desire that liberty is absenteeism of outer impediments.” According to this definition, free will is the ability of a person to make a decision without being prevented or obstructed by any part. Another philosopher (Hume) defined freedom- liberty, as power of doing or of not doing, as per the d...
...on, freedom of the will is needed to clarify that just because one’s actions are capable of being predicated, it does not follow that I am constrained to do one action or the other. If I am constrained though, my will is absent from the situation, for I really don’t want to give someone my money with a pistol to my head, and it follows my action is constrained and decided by external compulsion, rather than internal activity, or stated otherwise, that internal activity being free will, and thus free will is reconciled with determinism.
It has been sincerely obvious that our own experience of some source that we do leads in result of our own free choices. For example, we probably believe that we freely chose to do the tasks and thoughts that come to us making us doing the task. However, we may start to wonder if our choices that we chose are actually free. As we read further into the Fifty Readings in Philosophy by Donald C. Abel, all the readers would argue about the thought of free will. The first reading “The System of Human Freedom” by Baron D’Holbach, Holbach argues that “human being are wholly physical entities and therefore wholly subject to the law of nature. We have a will, but our will is not free because it necessarily seeks our well-being and self-preservation.” For example, if was extremely thirsty and came upon a fountain of water but you knew that the water was poisonous. If I refrain from drinking the water, that is because of the strength of my desire to avoid drinking the poisonous water. If I was too drink the water, it was because I presented my desire of the water by having the water overpowering me for overseeing the poison within the water. Whether I drink or refrain from the water, my action are the reason of the out coming and effect of the motion I take next. Holbach concludes that every human action that is take like everything occurring in nature, “is necessary consequences of cause, visible or concealed, that are forced to act according to their proper nature.” (pg. 269)
Free will is making choices and decisions that is not forced or driven by an external force but, instead comes from a intellect within on right and wrong. If an individual goes too far with his free will or takes advantage of having a free will then that results in the errors that humans tend to always commit. “Descartes thus concludes: 1)There can be both free will and God. 2)We can attain correct knowledge about ourselves and the world if we are careful to never judge anything that we do not clearly and distinctly understand.” (South University
...lighted” Augustine’s body (Confessions VIII. 5, p. 148). In this example, regardless of Augustine’s want to will succumbing to God, he found that his habits had rendered him unable to. His will in favor of the lower things held Augustine tighter than his will for God, which caused Augustine to choose the lesser good, which left him “in the midst of that great tumult I had stirred up against my own soul in the chamber of my heart” (Confessions VIII. 7, p.152). His two wills tore at him until he fully abandoned his earthly lust for the spiritual Godly desires; supporting his conclusion that free will in favor of the lesser goods causes evil. Therefore, free will is the ultimate source of evil.
Kane, Robert. "Free Will: Ancient Dispute, New Themes." Feinberg, Joel and Russ Safer-Landau. Reason and Responsibility: Readings in Some Basic Problems of Philosophy. Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2013. 425-437. Print.
“Please tell me: isn’t God the cause of evil?” (Augustine, 1). With this question to Augustine of Hippo, Evodius begins a philosophical inquiry into nature of evil. Augustine, recently baptized by Saint Ambrose in Milan, began writing his treatise On Free Choice of the Will in 387 C.E. This work laid down the foundation for the Christian doctrine regarding the will’s role in sinning and salvation. In it, Augustine and his interlocutor investigate God’s existence and his role in creating evil. They attempt not only to understand what evil is, and the possibility of doing evil, but also to ascertain why God would let humans cause evil. Central to the premise of this entire dialogue is the concept of God, as relates to Christianity; what is God, and what traits separate Him from humans? According to Christianity, God is the creator of all things, and God is good; he is omnipotent, transcendent, all-knowing, and atemporal- not subject to change over time- a concept important to the understanding of the differences between this world and the higher, spiritual realm He presides over. God’s being is eidos, the essence which forms the basis of humans. With God defined, the core problem being investigated by Augustine and Evodius becomes clear. Augustine states the key issue that must be reconciled in his inquiry; “we believe that everything that exists comes from the one God, and yet we believe that God is not the cause of sins. What is troubling is that if you admit that sins come from… God, pretty soon you’ll be tracing those sins back to God” (Augustine, 3).
Humans have always question if we have free will or if we are unconsciously control by someone, and to understand or to answer the question, first we have to understand what is free will. According to the oxford dictionary, free will is the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one’s own discretion. However, most philosophers have decided that there might not be one single concept for the definition of free will.
Before we dive into what Augustine has to say about free will, we must first understand what the problem is. In The HarperCollins Dictionary of Philosophy, the problem of free will is defined as:
Imagine starting your day and not having a clue of what to do, but you begin to list the different options and routes you can take to eventually get from point A to point B. In choosing from that list, there coins the term “free will”. Free will is our ability to make decisions not caused by external factors or any other impediments that can stop us to do so. Being part of the human species, we would like to believe that we have “freedom from causation” because it is part of our human nature to believe that we are independent entities and our thoughts are produced from inside of us, on our own. At the other end of the spectrum, there is determinism. Determinism explains that all of our actions are already determined by certain external causes
Author Claudia Gray stated, “Self-knowledge is better than self-control any day” (Goodreads). Evil and sin exists in our world today and the temptation they bring bounds many human’s spiritual being. Finding the root of all evil is a hard and torturous concept to understand, but knowing one’s own free will helps bring understanding and deliverance from the evils of the world. Throughout the book Confessions Saint Augustine “ponders the concepts of evil and sin and searches the root of their being” (Augustine 15). The existence of evil is one of the most worrisome challenges a Christian or any individual deals with throughout life. Saint Augustine’s beliefs concerning the root of all evil and sins transforms as he begins to grow and develop in the knowledge of his free will and spiritual being. Early on, he believes “God created all things and evil is a thing, therefore God created evil” (Augustine 73-74). From this he conceives the notion that God cannot be good if he knowingly created evil. As Augustine begins to grow in his spiritual walk, his views begin to evolve as he questions his Manichee’s beliefs and explores the concepts of good and evil. From his inquiring Augustine develops the question, what is evil and what if evil did not need creating? He asks, “Do we have any convincing evidence that a good God exists” (Augustine 136-137)?
It is because of his definition of evil that Augustine buys into the free will defense. Augustine attributes all evil, both moral and natural, to the free actions of human beings created by God with the capacity to do either good or evil. While God is the embodiment of goodness and cannot make the decision to be anything but good, other members in the Great Chain of Being do have the ability to willfully alter their predisposition... ... middle of paper ... ... l, and knowing, suffering should not exist in the world.
Since the foundation of philosophy, every philosopher has had some opinion on free will in some sense, from Aristotle to Kant. Free will is defined as the agent's action to do something unimpeded, with many other factors going into it Many philosophers ask the question: Do humans really have free will? Or is consciousness a myth and we have no real choice at all? Free will has many components and is fundamental in our day to day lives and it’s time to see if it is really there or not.
The concept of free will has developed slowly, though ancient philosophers did address the subject when trying to reconcile intentional action with religious concerns about human and divine freedom. It wasn’t until the end of medieval times that the modern-day understanding of freedom as a completely undetermined choice between alternatives was introduced. However, it is unclear how to reconcile contemporary science that acknowledges the in...
t is intriguing that when a person is presented with the ideas of free will or determinism, they usually jump rather quickly to the conclusion of free will. Most people appreciate the genuine freedom that accompanies choice, but do we really possess it? Complete free will would mean that our decisions would be unrelated to other factors such as the environment or genetics. In reality, our free decisions are based on factors that are beyond our own control. When exercising certain choices, we conclude that we have acted freely and distinguish our actions from situations in which we believe were not in our control. The events that are not in our control are pre-determined for us, which lead us on a path to a determined life. Even though we may be making our own unique decisions, they all connect to form a single planned outcome.