Comment: Naturalism, Evangelical Christianity, & Free-Will
Naturalism views us as physical beings in a knowable physical world. As human perception supported by reasoning is seen as the best way to understand the world, Naturalists look towards the empirically-based sciences – natural sciences and much of the social sciences – as primary sources of reliable data. Unlike reductive materialists, Naturalists are willing to discuss our ‘I’ aspects of our world – consciousness, free-will, and sense of self – without necessarily reducing them to physical brain processes. Many even see emergent properties and superveniences as ways of explaining our special ‘I’ properties independently of the underlying physical processes. However Naturalists still reject magical and mysterious explanations, no matter how couched in pseudo-scientific terms.
Evangelical Christianity sees a different reality to the physical realm of naturalism. We are in a perceivable physical world controlled by another more mysterious, all-pervasive reality – eternal, undetectable physically, conscious, all-powerful and, not surprisingly, intimately interested in humans as groups and individuals. Not surprisingly, evangelicals call this consciousness ‘God’. Again not surprisingly humans are special in being both physical and non-physical beings unlike all other living things. We have a ‘soul’. Evangelical Christians seek to understand and comply with God’s demands through selected use of ancient Middle Eastern texts – their Christian biblical canon – as their foundation for living and moral judgements as well as the basis for their evangelising, their spreading the word.
Free-will, our making of unforced choices, is accepted as fundamental to our moral sense, societal control, and use of punishment. For most of us the belief in human free-will is unquestioned. Our law even reflects this attitude. However we live in a physical world best described in causal terms with events explainable by examining the effect of prior events. So is our free-will the one and only uncaused exception throughout the 4 billion year history of Earth? Philosophers have worried about this apparent contradiction for ever since they have been philosophising.
Not surprisingly philosophers respond with (1) full-blown free-will acceptance, (2) free-will scepticism, and (3) compatibilism with the latter being a scaling down of free-will enough to meet our societal needs. As there seems to be a fundamental incompatibility between an unfettered free-will and our understanding of a physical world and a naturalist is committed to all experiences coming from the physical world, he or she seems likely to advocate free-will scepticism (‘it’s an illusion’) or to a scale-downed free-will of compatibilism (‘just enough for some moral responsibility’). Uncaused free-will seems an unlikely choice with an assumed human physicality.
The Evangelical Christian has a more packaged solution to this dilemma. God gives us uncaused free-will with the total ‘soul’ package. This is a necessary in a world-view that advocates salvation from freely choosing God (through their doctrines of course). So it is not surprising that the evangelical would hold the view that transgressors can be and should be rightfully be punished. It is so simple. Fortunately most people in Australia, the 92% who do not attend a Christian church regularly, probably see morality as primarily a human affair although they may seek inspiration from beliefs about God and Jesus.
One could expect different attitudes to social justice and crime and punishment between Evangelical Christians and Naturalists. The evangelical would have a more defined sense of right and wrong and the necessary consequences of people choosing to do wrong (or evil to use their term). Punishments can be justifiably swift and harsh. Naturalists have little choice to question simple ‘he did wrong’ style of punishment. How much was he truly free to make a choice must loom large in the naturalist world-view? There are many reasons for punishment and incarceration and these must be worried about to avoid knee-jerk reactions of choosing wrong and punishment.
Upon reflection unfettered free-will in our causal world is problematic and Naturalists have no recourse to a simple religious response to the contradiction. But perhaps that is the cost for our species becoming mature enough to deal with ourselves in the world.
Alex McCullie
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