One World

36) Free Will

Posted 2nd September 2016

Recently I watched a panel debate on "Is there an afterlife?" During the discussions, one of the panel, Christopher Hitchens, asked if there were a God, then how could He have stood by why Josef Fritzl abused his family in a cellar, or while Adolf Hitler committed genocide. In response, another panel member, Rabbi David Wolpe, said that God gave man free will to do good AND evil. In response to this, Sam Harris asked how one could explain the suffering of innocents through natural disasters, which are nothing to do with man. Surely this is God's fault - whose else could it be? In this blog post, I suggest a response to Sam's question:-

People have free will to do evil, to do nothing, and to do good. If humanity collectively choose to cooperate then there need never be poverty. All houses could be earthquake proof and/or not built on fault lines. The person who might cure an awful disease might presently be foregoing her education to fetch water for her family on a daily basis, or struggling to keep him and his family alive another year by picking through a landfill dump, or simply being deprived of an education for local societal or economic reasons. That unknown person could be freed to realise their beautiful potential only if the World's population exercised its free will to choose to dispense with its bitter competitive ethos, where some thrive and many suffer, and instead adopt a globally cooperative system which efficiently provides for the needs of all and maintains a harmonious balance.

Mankind as a whole is doing little good. They generally choose to stand by while great evil is undertaken around the World, and so, the World weakens.

In the Bible it says man is given free will. It is possible that this is indeed the plan devised by a perfect wisdom, infinitely long ago, and that ultimately all men choose willingly to do the right thing and help one another. Even if the Bible were written by men, and whether or not those men believed what they themselves wrote, it is absolutely possible that they were unwittingly guided to write EXACTLY what the eternal, omnipotent, all-powerful wisdom intended. I give an argument for the existence of such a wisdom in a previous blog post, 'A bee in my ear'.

Now, evolution by natural selection is well understood - if a species is suited to its environment and outperforms its competitors, it stands a better chance of continuing, until something more suited comes along. I put it to you, that the most effective survival strategy is for a species to care for one another. When one member of the species is weak, it is helped by the others. And so, the individuals of the species are not picked off one by one until they are extinct, but instead act like a powerful super-organism, with no serious enemies. This super-organism must be very wise so as not to exhaust its food supply through over eating or over reproducing, and to care for its home continuously. Each cell of the superorganism, each member of the species, understands the benefits of being part of the group and so uses their free will to act cooperatively with the whole to care for every individual cell of the whole, and the health of the home.

I suspect that the plan, devised infinitely long ago, is for man to exorcise poor choices such as greed, cruelty and indifference, learn from the bitter long term consequences of these, and thus arrive at the best course of action to ensure their happy survival: to freely choose to help one another when it becomes apparent it is the only way to look after the self.

Free will allows you to take responsibility for your actions, and to learn properly from your mistakes, so that you can grow into a caring global citizen, making wise choices in your adulthood, following an adolescence of stupidity, bumps and bruises.

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'The Good Samaritan' image at the top of the page from https://www.thoughtco.com/the-good-samaritan-bible-story-summary-700062