This is going to be a long post. I can feel it already.

I've been thinking a lot about the nature of free will and how it relates to most Christian theology (I apologize if I leave you Calvinists out of the picture). I've been trying to reduce the problem to its core components and I think I have an interesting analogy that addresses my problems with the concepts. I particularly ask that those who disagree with me read what I have to say carefully; I'm interested in knowing where my argument breaks down.

Here's how the argument works: I'm going to start by describing a simplified version of the universe. I will then begin to add in more complicating factors and see how it changes the universe. When I am finished, I hope to be at an analogy that corresponds to the way our universe seems to function. This is important, because obviously the first few examples will be not be representative of our reality or of Christian theology. Bear with me here.

We begin with god. I am going to make two assumptions about god: he is all-powerful and he is all-knowing. His omnipotence (all-powerful) implies that he is capable of creating anything, destroying anything he creates, and modifying anything he creates. His omniscience means he knows *everything*, including the future. This is a difficult thing for temporal beings such as humans to conceive, so lets assume he exists in some sort of state separate from the rest of physical reality: he's really a non-linear being who creates things in a linear-reality. For him, though, everything has already happened, is happening and has yet to happen.

You'll notice that I assume nothing of god's character or motivations. We will ignore these for the whole of the analogy: I think my examples will work just as well with the omni-benevolent god of Christianity as they would with an evil god.

God decides to create a universe. This universe is in many ways similar to a computer program, or a machine. Here's how it works: god creates physical laws, similar to the instructions of a computer program, or the gears of a machine that control its function. These laws describe the way in which energy and matter will interact. For the time being, we will ignore quantum indeterminacy and assume that all of these laws are straightforward mathematical functions. This is one of the reasons why I like the computer program analogy.

God now has the groundwork for a universe -- he just needs to configure the "starting state." What I mean by this is he needs to set up the initial configuration of matter and energy in the system. God can also start with a universe of any level of complexity -- there can be just a little bit of matter and a bunch of potential energy leading to a "big bang" or he could start with galaxies pre-built. This is the beginning of the universe; time does not exist in the universe prior to this state. Consider it like a program that has not yet been run. Now, god is also going to run the program for a set amount of time. This time can be a certain number of in-universe years or it can be until the universe has reached some predefined set of conditions or whatever. All that matters is that we have both a beginning and end for our simulation.

We are also going to assume that this simulation of the universe is a closed system. Once it is started, god will not interfere with its operation, and no new matter or energy will be introduced. Because all of the physical laws are deterministic, it is possible to know exactly how the universe, with a given starting state, will look after having reached its end state. In other words, since our physical laws are fixed, the end state is controlled entirely by the beginning state. For a given starting state, there is only one possible end state.

I hope this is clear. Understanding this (the end state is a function solely of the physical laws and the starting state) is crucial to the rest of the argument. Since god is omniscient, he knows what the end state will be before he runs the simulation. This is important too: unlike a human programmer, who might need the simulation to determine the end state, god already knows how every possible beginning state will end up. If god, for whatever reason, wants a specific end state, he knows exactly how to achieve it from the beginning of the simulation.

Let's add something to our universe: quantum mechanics (I almost think these are irrelevant, but I include them to satisfy materialists who like to bring them up in discussions of free will). QM introduces a level of randomness to our physical laws. QM says that certain interactions of particles are random; the outcome of these interactions is not simply determined by their beginning state. If a human was running such a simulation, even given complete information about the beginning state, he could not determine the end state of one of these interactions. Because of this and the far-reaching effects of chaos theory (the idea that small fluctuations can greatly alter the behavior of large systems), we can say that the simulation is no longer deterministic. In other words, it is not possible to know the end state of the universe even if you have total information about the beginning state.

God, however, gets around this problem. God knows how each quantum interaction will come out. Not because he has access to information about the past, but because he knows the future. This doesn't mean these interactions aren't random or that they're predetermined, just that god knows how they will come out because he exists outside of time. He could run a universe with the same starting state five different times and get five different end states, but he'd know in advance what each end state would be.

In other words, from god's point of view, quantum indeterminacy isn't much of a problem. If he still wants to dictate the end state of the program based on the starting state, he can do so because he knows how each quantum interaction will resolve itself, and he can account for it (the level of complexity for evaluating such a system is boggling to human minds, but it's no sweat for god). Are we clear on this? If anyone can explain why QM poses any trouble for a god such as I've described, I'd like to hear it.

We're now going to ratchet up the complexity a little more and get to the heart of the argument. Into this universe, god is going to introduce free agents. These are creatures (we'll go ahead and call them souls) that, for the moment, are capable of acting independently of the physical laws. They aren't physical beings, and right now we are going to assume that physical laws have no effect on them. They can make decisions and alter things in the physical universe, but they aren't subject to its laws. In other words, they have what we would usually call "free will."

These souls then add another level of indeterminacy to the universe. Since their actions are guided by their free will, not merely dictated by the interactions of physical forces, it would be impossible for a human to know the end state of a universe simulation in which they were present. Like QM, though, god can still know the end state without reducing the souls to simply being deterministic cogs in a machine.

In reality, though, these souls do not appear to be free from physical influences. Their interaction with the universe is two-way: while they can make decisions that influence the universe, physical factors seem to be able to influence their decision making. So we're going to bind these souls to physical bodies. Soul + body = human in this analogy. The soul is still the primary factor in the decision making process of the human, but two things seem to affect its ability to make decisions:

1) The experiences of the human.
2) The current physical state of the human.

In other words, the life a human has had plays a factor in the way the human decides things, but physical factors can be a problem. If a human is on drugs, for instance, or had too little sleep or has a chemical imbalance in his brain (which is where the majority of soul-body interactions seem to take place).

How does this change our simulation? Not a whole lot, really: it just says that now there will be some factors at work in the decisions of souls that would lend some kind of predictive aspects to their actions. In other words, a person running this simulation might be able to guess with some certainty how a human would respond to a given situation, if the person running the simulation had enough knowledge of the human's physical makeup and past experiences. Unlike QM, the interactions of humans with the universe is not random.

Again, god, with perfect knowledge of the starting state and the outcome of all non-deterministic interactions can control the ending state with the starting state. No significant changes from his point of view.

I have committed a bit of faulty reasoning, though. I have assumed something without being direct about it, and I'll bet many of you didn't notice: I have assumed that the souls have some means of evaluating decisions apart from their experiences with the physical universe.

This is important. Is there some intrinsic nature of these souls that guides their interactions? Hrm. I don't know, and this where I have to ask a question of those who believe in souls and free will: if souls have the ability to make decisions that aren't influenced only by physical factors, what is the nature of this ability? Where does it come from? How is it used?

I'm now going to have to fork my simulation to account for two different possibilities:

The first is the materialistic view of the universe. In this simulation, humans don't have any supernatural properties, and as such are nothing more than a series of physical laws and interactions. Aside from QM, their actions are entirely deterministic. They are capable of evaluating actions, but their evaluations are solely limited to their experiences and their physical makeup. This means that humans are just a function of physical laws. Free will, then, is largely an illusion. The humans may believe they are evaluating reality independent of it, but they are not. Their brain chemistry is controlled entirely by physical laws. Again, QM means their actions aren't necessarily deterministic, but they're still bound to physical principles.

The second view is a hypothetical view that I created only because I was unable to come up with any other explanation for the Christian viewpoint. In this simulation, souls have some sort of intrinsic nature that they can rely on to aid them in their decisions. This intrinsic nature is set by god. Again, though, this removes "true" free will from the souls, since they have no control over the only tools they have for making decisions.

I don't much care for this example, though, because I think Christian theology is more complex than "god sets the intrinsic nature of souls." I'd like to hear a better explanation for how free will works.

One final thing: let's assume god has a plan for the universe. In other words, he wants a specific end state. Given that everything in the universe is controlled by laws he created (after all, if he didn't want quantum mechanics he didn't need to implement them) and that he gets to define the starting state AND that he knows the outcome of every possible interaction before it happens, how is it reasonable to assume that *anything* ever happens that is not god's will?

This is essentially the problem of evil (why does a benevolent god allow bad things to happen?) compounded by the fact that he's not just allowing these things to happen, but actually causing them to by defining the starting states that will force them into happening.

The only way I see to get out of this paradox is to define free will differently than I have or to add a new dimension to the nature of free will (but unless that nature is not intrinsically set by god I don't know how it will solve the problem). I look forward to comments.

Stephen