LAUSR

The 2018 CTNS publication, God’s Providence and Randomness in Nature, provides scholars with a critical if not indispensable treatment of autopoiesis [creaturely creativity] within God’s evolutionary creation. In my contribution, “Contingency and Freedom in Brains and Selves,” I advance this thesis: human free will exists, and what we mean by free will is self-determination. The human self exercises free will in the form of deliberation, decision, and action. Such self-determination, along with nature and nurture, make up a three-part determinism. This thesis is important in the face of free-will-deniers, especially by those today who conscript neuroscience in support of their materialistic, deterministic, and reductionist doctrines. What I did not do in that book chapter, however, was connect the scientific and philosophical treatment of free will with the distinctively Christian understanding of freedom. Here is the paradox: what looks like free will philosophically looks like a bound will theologically. According to the Augustinian tradition, the natural self is incurvatus in se, curved in upon itself. The self cannot but express itself on behalf of its own self-interest. What in the wider culture is celebrated as free will is nothing more than subjective arbitrariness, the unavoidable choosing of what would be in a person’s own self-interest. In sum, subjective arbitrariness can be satisfactorily accounted for when drawing upon neuroscience and quantum physics; while Christian freedom remains unaddressed and unexamined in the wider current discussions. This editorial adds what is missing.