Tim Stratton's freethinking argument against naturalism
Last week I started reading about free will. That's right---last week! I've been studying philosophy in my spare time for the last fifteen years; why did it take me so long to finally broach what is considered one of its most fundamentally important topics?
Well first of all, it's perhaps not as important as it might seem; for instance the late Buddhist philosopher Michael Dorfman once called the free will problem "much ado about nothing." Meanwhile, none of the discussion about free will whose snippets I encountered seemed very intriguing to myself, whose chief areas of interest lie in epistemology, mind, and the nonexistence of God. Finally, the very concept of free will just seemed unnecessarily obscurist, whereas I desire clarity. So, if I could just get by without ever having to discuss free will, that would be extremely gratifying.
So, what changed? Well, to put it simply, I encountered Tim Stratton's "freethinking argument against naturalism," whose central premises deal with libertarian free will (hereafter, LFW). Stratton is an ex-pastor and current adjunct faculty teaching Christian Apologetics at Nebraska Christian College. He runs an online ministry which seems to be focused in large part if not entirely on Christian apologetics, and which he advertises as an affiliate of William Lane Craig's ministry Reasonable Faith. Although not a philosopher himself, he reports to be nearing completion of a Ph.D. in analytic theology from North-West University, a Christian school in South Africa which apparently offers such correspondence degrees.
Stratton's argument runs as follows:
(1) If naturalism is true, the immaterial human soul does not exist.
(2) If the soul does not exist, LFW does not exist.
(3) If LFW does not exist, rationality and knowledge do not exist.
(4) Rationality and knowledge exist. Therefore,
(5) LFW exists. Therefore,
(6) The soul exists. Therefore,
(7) Naturalism is false.
(8) The best explanation for the existence of the soul is God.
Personally I already affirm the existence of an immaterial mind, which doesn't seem at all at odds with naturalism. But I think by "the soul" Stratton means something more robust than just a mind---namely, something capable of existing independently of the physical world, and influencing rather than being influenced by the brain and other physical systems. Such a view, of course, has no basis in evidence, and in fact there seems to be a good deal of empirical evidence to contradict it. So, arguing against (1) seems to be a nonstarter.
Premise (4) also seems fairly certain. As long as we don't import too much baggage with our notions of knowledge and rationality, it would seem obvious that we really do have the capacity for such things.
That leaves us with denying that (2) and (3) can both be true; but which one is the most likely candidate? (They can't both be false, at least not on the material conditional interpretation.) Since we know the soul doesn't exist, and yet rationality and knowledge do exist, the only way to decide between (2) and (3) is to figure out whether LFW exists.
LFW is just the conjunction of two simply-stated positions: human beings have free will, and free will is incompatible with determinism. Not surprisingly, there doesn't seem to be anything approaching a consensus on either one of those claims. So, here I am, one week into my reading, ready to make some pronouncements on a subject whose discussion goes back at least to Plato, and yet which has not been resolved more than two millennia later? I had better be very cautious!
My first surprise was to learn that free will isn't about the will per se, at least not directly; rather, it's about our capacity for choosing and decision-making. So, the term "free will" strikes me as something of a misnomer; perhaps "freedom of choice" is a more apt label.
My second surprise was to find that free will is supposed to be something distinguishing human beings from animals, or at least the lower animals. But surely animals are capable of choices and even rational deliberation. It's almost comical when, for instance, my cat stares at the bed for a full minute or more, unable to make up her mind whether to jump up onto it, or to go do something else. Is she really not deliberating in those instances? Is she just distracted and staring blankly while daydreaming?
Some birds exhibit exceptional problem-solving abilities. For example, there's a TED talk available online which shows a video of a crow bending a wire into a hook, which she then uses to obtain food which was otherwise out of reach; her solution was spontaneous, not taught to her by the researchers. And of course it goes without saying that chimpanzees are able to solve problems too. In one infamous video clip, a chimp obtains a peanut from the bottom of a narrow glass by urinating into it so that it floats to the top---and I'm quite sure that idea was never suggested to the chimp by the researchers!
Are these cases of problem-solving in the animal kingdom not the results of creative rational processes and deliberation? Are they really just some kind of blind and unconscious responses to stimuli? Surely not. And while it may take my cat a long time to decide whether to hop on the bed due to her comparatively primitive consciousness---that's what makes it kinda funny, after all---surely she is in fact deliberating, right? I mean, I can't prove that she's deliberating, but it certainly seems that's what's going on.
So, whatever the kind of freedom of choice is imagined for proponents of LFW, it can't be mere deliberation between alternatives.
Nevertheless, humans seem to be reflective about their choices in a way that nonhuman animals aren't. For instance, we have what Harry Frankfurt calls second-order volitions. Alan may want to eat donuts for breakfast. Recognizing healthy eating to be better for him in the long run, Alan has a second-order desire that the first-order desire for donuts should fail to move him. He may end up eating the donut after all, but if so then it's not an exercise in free will. After all, his true desire is to resist eating the donut, but he cannot resist; so he lacks freedom of choice in this instance, according to Frankfurt. If on the other hand his second-order volition wins out, then Alan has chosen freely by resisting the temptation for donuts.
Of course, this is just one philosopher's (Frankfurt) stab at distinguishing the human capacity for choice from that of nonhumans; no doubt other philosophers would disagree. The point is, whatever freedom we have in mind for our choices, to the extent we want to distinguish it from the freedom had by nonhuman animals, it must be more than just rational deliberation, of which many species are evidently quite capable---or at least not obviously incapable.
The other prong of LFW is to deny that free will is compatible with determinism, and indeed there does seem to be something initially plausible about that suggestion. However this initial plausibility quickly erodes when considering the alternatives. In particular, it's also initially intuitive that the only alternative to determinism is an element of randomness; and yet randomness seems just as anathema to freedom as determinism.
The problem here is that the move from indeterminism to randomness isn't quite as straightforward as it first appears---perhaps there is a middle road. And that's exactly what libertarians argue.
The standard move for libertarians is to invoke "agent causation" as something distinct from "event causation." So, the mental events might be undetermined by laws of nature, but they're still caused by the agent himself for reasons had by said agent. And if an agent acts rationally on the basis of reasons, that's not randomness.
But isn't it? John Thorp, himself a libertarian, outlines the obvious concern:
"Agent causality was to save us from the embarrassment of event causality; but it is a kind of fool's gold: agents, on analysis, turn out to be just a cluster of events and states... agent causality turns out to be just a special case of event causality after all."
His answer is to claim that the causal connection between neurology and mental events is sometimes reversed:
"It is plausible to suggest that when, for example, we walk in the country and allow our thoughts free reign, it is the neurology beneath them that, according to its own laws, directs their course. On the other hand when we force our thought onto some track...the stream of mental events is directed by some mental (logical) laws, and the mental descriptive level is hegemonic: here the mental descriptions drag the neural descriptions about according to the laws of sequence which belong to the mental..."
Aside from the fact that we seem to have no good evidence for this reversal of causation (not to mention some very good empirical evidence against it), even if it were true it seems to be irrelevant to the randomness concern. One kind of determinism (whether or not it's the only kind) is that of order. That is to say, if events occur in the context of a sufficiently ordered system, then they will be deterministic. If true (and it certainly does seem to be true) then it means libertarians are committed to denying that the mental events such as our choices occur in a sufficiently ordered context. But that's just to say that the context must have a significant element of disorder. But why? How does disorder make us any more free than orderliness would allow? If agent causation is to answer this question, it can only be because it's impossible without disorder. But why think that?
I think it's appropriate to call that kind of disorder randomness, even if it's being caused by the choices of a rational agent armed with reasons. And it seems far more implausible to me that such randomness should be some essential ingredient to our human capacity for deliberation, choice, self-reflection, and so on. Then again, I've only been thinking about it for a week, so who knows? But as of the present time at least, that's what my intuitions tell me.
In light of all this, it looks to me like LFW isn't very promising. However, the compatibilist view has many proponents, including Frankfurt for example. If free will is really just about the ability for second-order desires to override first-order ones, then perhaps compatibilism is workable. But is that really the kind of freedom imagined when we throw around the term "free will"?
Presumably not. Sam Harris once sarcastically summarized Frankfurt's position: "A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings." Sarcasm aside though, his point is well taken. Regardless of whether determinism is true (Harris thinks it is, but that's not necessary to make his point), it's hard to see how we could possibly be responsible for who we are. This point is expanded by Galen Strawson in his so-called "basic argument" against moral responsibility (as summarized by Gregg Caruso):
"Nothing can be causa sui---nothing can be the cause of itself. [But] in order to be truly or ultimately morally responsible for one's actions one would have to be causa sui, at least in certain crucial mental respects."
Strawson here is technically arguing against moral responsibility, but he might as well be speaking of free will.
With all of this in mind, let's return to Stratton's argument. How does he defend (2) and (3)?
Well, his defense of (2) is almost self-consciously nonexistent. He even admits outright, "This premise actually does not need much defending as far as I am concerned". And he feels comfortable leaving (2) undefended because he thinks certain atheists---namely, Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Hawking---have already made the case for him. Harris and Hawking are both incompatibilists and determinists who therefore believe free will is an illusion; and maybe Dawkins believes the same. Stratton gives quotations from all three to this effect. But finding three naturalists who deny the existence of LFW doesn't constitute a defense of (2).
For example, note that Thorp's position, and indeterministic agent causation in general, are completely consistent with naturalism and the nonexistence of a supernatural soul. Instead, all it requires is that mental events can sometimes cause physical events rather than just vice versa. And while there seems to be a great deal of empirical evidence against Thorp's view, that has nothing to do with whether or not a supernatural soul exists. So, while I'm inclined to believe that (2) is true, it's not for the reasons Stratton gives. And it's only an inclination anyway, not something I'm especially committed to right now.
Stratton's defense of (3) is summed up in the following quotation:
"The process of rationality leading to warranted or justified true belief (knowledge) entails the properties of being able to think of and about competing hypotheses, deliberate between them, and the ability to infer and affirm the best explanation via the laws of logic. Therefore, a rational entity must also possess at least two other attributes: intentionality and libertarian free will."
But we have already seen from the examples of nonhuman animals that this is not the case. Cats may not be very smart, but they're still quite capable of knowledge, deliberation, and rational choice. Crows and chimpanzees are even more obviously rational, as evidenced by their strikingly creative problem-solving abilities.
So on one hand we have LFW looking very implausible, while on the other hand, knowledge and rationality apart from free will (whether libertarian or not) looks to be not only possible but actually realized in nonhuman animals. We had previously decided that, on a plain reading of Stratton's argument, either (2) or (3) must be false; and these latest considerations make (3) the most likely culprit.
Even so, we shouldn't rule out (1) and (4) as being problematic. It could be that by "soul" Stratton means nothing more than an immaterial mind; on that reading, (1) is plainly false. Additionally, Stratton might have an idiosyncratic view of rationality and knowledge, which might leave (4) in doubt too, as he intends it anyway. With Christian apologists, you just never can tell.
Well first of all, it's perhaps not as important as it might seem; for instance the late Buddhist philosopher Michael Dorfman once called the free will problem "much ado about nothing." Meanwhile, none of the discussion about free will whose snippets I encountered seemed very intriguing to myself, whose chief areas of interest lie in epistemology, mind, and the nonexistence of God. Finally, the very concept of free will just seemed unnecessarily obscurist, whereas I desire clarity. So, if I could just get by without ever having to discuss free will, that would be extremely gratifying.
So, what changed? Well, to put it simply, I encountered Tim Stratton's "freethinking argument against naturalism," whose central premises deal with libertarian free will (hereafter, LFW). Stratton is an ex-pastor and current adjunct faculty teaching Christian Apologetics at Nebraska Christian College. He runs an online ministry which seems to be focused in large part if not entirely on Christian apologetics, and which he advertises as an affiliate of William Lane Craig's ministry Reasonable Faith. Although not a philosopher himself, he reports to be nearing completion of a Ph.D. in analytic theology from North-West University, a Christian school in South Africa which apparently offers such correspondence degrees.
Stratton's argument runs as follows:
(1) If naturalism is true, the immaterial human soul does not exist.
(2) If the soul does not exist, LFW does not exist.
(3) If LFW does not exist, rationality and knowledge do not exist.
(4) Rationality and knowledge exist. Therefore,
(5) LFW exists. Therefore,
(6) The soul exists. Therefore,
(7) Naturalism is false.
(8) The best explanation for the existence of the soul is God.
Personally I already affirm the existence of an immaterial mind, which doesn't seem at all at odds with naturalism. But I think by "the soul" Stratton means something more robust than just a mind---namely, something capable of existing independently of the physical world, and influencing rather than being influenced by the brain and other physical systems. Such a view, of course, has no basis in evidence, and in fact there seems to be a good deal of empirical evidence to contradict it. So, arguing against (1) seems to be a nonstarter.
Premise (4) also seems fairly certain. As long as we don't import too much baggage with our notions of knowledge and rationality, it would seem obvious that we really do have the capacity for such things.
That leaves us with denying that (2) and (3) can both be true; but which one is the most likely candidate? (They can't both be false, at least not on the material conditional interpretation.) Since we know the soul doesn't exist, and yet rationality and knowledge do exist, the only way to decide between (2) and (3) is to figure out whether LFW exists.
LFW is just the conjunction of two simply-stated positions: human beings have free will, and free will is incompatible with determinism. Not surprisingly, there doesn't seem to be anything approaching a consensus on either one of those claims. So, here I am, one week into my reading, ready to make some pronouncements on a subject whose discussion goes back at least to Plato, and yet which has not been resolved more than two millennia later? I had better be very cautious!
My first surprise was to learn that free will isn't about the will per se, at least not directly; rather, it's about our capacity for choosing and decision-making. So, the term "free will" strikes me as something of a misnomer; perhaps "freedom of choice" is a more apt label.
My second surprise was to find that free will is supposed to be something distinguishing human beings from animals, or at least the lower animals. But surely animals are capable of choices and even rational deliberation. It's almost comical when, for instance, my cat stares at the bed for a full minute or more, unable to make up her mind whether to jump up onto it, or to go do something else. Is she really not deliberating in those instances? Is she just distracted and staring blankly while daydreaming?
Some birds exhibit exceptional problem-solving abilities. For example, there's a TED talk available online which shows a video of a crow bending a wire into a hook, which she then uses to obtain food which was otherwise out of reach; her solution was spontaneous, not taught to her by the researchers. And of course it goes without saying that chimpanzees are able to solve problems too. In one infamous video clip, a chimp obtains a peanut from the bottom of a narrow glass by urinating into it so that it floats to the top---and I'm quite sure that idea was never suggested to the chimp by the researchers!
Are these cases of problem-solving in the animal kingdom not the results of creative rational processes and deliberation? Are they really just some kind of blind and unconscious responses to stimuli? Surely not. And while it may take my cat a long time to decide whether to hop on the bed due to her comparatively primitive consciousness---that's what makes it kinda funny, after all---surely she is in fact deliberating, right? I mean, I can't prove that she's deliberating, but it certainly seems that's what's going on.
So, whatever the kind of freedom of choice is imagined for proponents of LFW, it can't be mere deliberation between alternatives.
Nevertheless, humans seem to be reflective about their choices in a way that nonhuman animals aren't. For instance, we have what Harry Frankfurt calls second-order volitions. Alan may want to eat donuts for breakfast. Recognizing healthy eating to be better for him in the long run, Alan has a second-order desire that the first-order desire for donuts should fail to move him. He may end up eating the donut after all, but if so then it's not an exercise in free will. After all, his true desire is to resist eating the donut, but he cannot resist; so he lacks freedom of choice in this instance, according to Frankfurt. If on the other hand his second-order volition wins out, then Alan has chosen freely by resisting the temptation for donuts.
Of course, this is just one philosopher's (Frankfurt) stab at distinguishing the human capacity for choice from that of nonhumans; no doubt other philosophers would disagree. The point is, whatever freedom we have in mind for our choices, to the extent we want to distinguish it from the freedom had by nonhuman animals, it must be more than just rational deliberation, of which many species are evidently quite capable---or at least not obviously incapable.
The other prong of LFW is to deny that free will is compatible with determinism, and indeed there does seem to be something initially plausible about that suggestion. However this initial plausibility quickly erodes when considering the alternatives. In particular, it's also initially intuitive that the only alternative to determinism is an element of randomness; and yet randomness seems just as anathema to freedom as determinism.
The problem here is that the move from indeterminism to randomness isn't quite as straightforward as it first appears---perhaps there is a middle road. And that's exactly what libertarians argue.
The standard move for libertarians is to invoke "agent causation" as something distinct from "event causation." So, the mental events might be undetermined by laws of nature, but they're still caused by the agent himself for reasons had by said agent. And if an agent acts rationally on the basis of reasons, that's not randomness.
But isn't it? John Thorp, himself a libertarian, outlines the obvious concern:
"Agent causality was to save us from the embarrassment of event causality; but it is a kind of fool's gold: agents, on analysis, turn out to be just a cluster of events and states... agent causality turns out to be just a special case of event causality after all."
His answer is to claim that the causal connection between neurology and mental events is sometimes reversed:
"It is plausible to suggest that when, for example, we walk in the country and allow our thoughts free reign, it is the neurology beneath them that, according to its own laws, directs their course. On the other hand when we force our thought onto some track...the stream of mental events is directed by some mental (logical) laws, and the mental descriptive level is hegemonic: here the mental descriptions drag the neural descriptions about according to the laws of sequence which belong to the mental..."
Aside from the fact that we seem to have no good evidence for this reversal of causation (not to mention some very good empirical evidence against it), even if it were true it seems to be irrelevant to the randomness concern. One kind of determinism (whether or not it's the only kind) is that of order. That is to say, if events occur in the context of a sufficiently ordered system, then they will be deterministic. If true (and it certainly does seem to be true) then it means libertarians are committed to denying that the mental events such as our choices occur in a sufficiently ordered context. But that's just to say that the context must have a significant element of disorder. But why? How does disorder make us any more free than orderliness would allow? If agent causation is to answer this question, it can only be because it's impossible without disorder. But why think that?
I think it's appropriate to call that kind of disorder randomness, even if it's being caused by the choices of a rational agent armed with reasons. And it seems far more implausible to me that such randomness should be some essential ingredient to our human capacity for deliberation, choice, self-reflection, and so on. Then again, I've only been thinking about it for a week, so who knows? But as of the present time at least, that's what my intuitions tell me.
In light of all this, it looks to me like LFW isn't very promising. However, the compatibilist view has many proponents, including Frankfurt for example. If free will is really just about the ability for second-order desires to override first-order ones, then perhaps compatibilism is workable. But is that really the kind of freedom imagined when we throw around the term "free will"?
Presumably not. Sam Harris once sarcastically summarized Frankfurt's position: "A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings." Sarcasm aside though, his point is well taken. Regardless of whether determinism is true (Harris thinks it is, but that's not necessary to make his point), it's hard to see how we could possibly be responsible for who we are. This point is expanded by Galen Strawson in his so-called "basic argument" against moral responsibility (as summarized by Gregg Caruso):
"Nothing can be causa sui---nothing can be the cause of itself. [But] in order to be truly or ultimately morally responsible for one's actions one would have to be causa sui, at least in certain crucial mental respects."
Strawson here is technically arguing against moral responsibility, but he might as well be speaking of free will.
With all of this in mind, let's return to Stratton's argument. How does he defend (2) and (3)?
Well, his defense of (2) is almost self-consciously nonexistent. He even admits outright, "This premise actually does not need much defending as far as I am concerned". And he feels comfortable leaving (2) undefended because he thinks certain atheists---namely, Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Hawking---have already made the case for him. Harris and Hawking are both incompatibilists and determinists who therefore believe free will is an illusion; and maybe Dawkins believes the same. Stratton gives quotations from all three to this effect. But finding three naturalists who deny the existence of LFW doesn't constitute a defense of (2).
For example, note that Thorp's position, and indeterministic agent causation in general, are completely consistent with naturalism and the nonexistence of a supernatural soul. Instead, all it requires is that mental events can sometimes cause physical events rather than just vice versa. And while there seems to be a great deal of empirical evidence against Thorp's view, that has nothing to do with whether or not a supernatural soul exists. So, while I'm inclined to believe that (2) is true, it's not for the reasons Stratton gives. And it's only an inclination anyway, not something I'm especially committed to right now.
Stratton's defense of (3) is summed up in the following quotation:
"The process of rationality leading to warranted or justified true belief (knowledge) entails the properties of being able to think of and about competing hypotheses, deliberate between them, and the ability to infer and affirm the best explanation via the laws of logic. Therefore, a rational entity must also possess at least two other attributes: intentionality and libertarian free will."
But we have already seen from the examples of nonhuman animals that this is not the case. Cats may not be very smart, but they're still quite capable of knowledge, deliberation, and rational choice. Crows and chimpanzees are even more obviously rational, as evidenced by their strikingly creative problem-solving abilities.
So on one hand we have LFW looking very implausible, while on the other hand, knowledge and rationality apart from free will (whether libertarian or not) looks to be not only possible but actually realized in nonhuman animals. We had previously decided that, on a plain reading of Stratton's argument, either (2) or (3) must be false; and these latest considerations make (3) the most likely culprit.
Even so, we shouldn't rule out (1) and (4) as being problematic. It could be that by "soul" Stratton means nothing more than an immaterial mind; on that reading, (1) is plainly false. Additionally, Stratton might have an idiosyncratic view of rationality and knowledge, which might leave (4) in doubt too, as he intends it anyway. With Christian apologists, you just never can tell.
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