Freedom and God

The word freedom has several synonyms. Liberty is one of them. Freedom is the quality, especially of the will or the individual, of not being totally constrained, exemption from external control, interference, or regulation. Liberty is generally considered a concept of political philosophy that seeks to identify the conditions in which an individual has immunity from the arbitrary exercise of authority. Whenever we talk about freedom, liberty or independence, we are dealing with the notion of free will, which is a philosophical term for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives.

Once considered one of the most intractable problems of philosophy, nomological determinism is invariably tied to the slow but steady progress of natural science, substantiating the claim that everything that happens is determined by antecedent conditions together with the natural laws.

Since the concept of the free will is directly related to human mind, the latter is the object of intensive contemporary scientific research in a multidisciplinary effort to study our brain and its functions and perhaps no aspect of human mind is more puzzling than consciousness and our conscious experience of self and world. The problem of consciousness is arguably the central issue in current theorizing about the mind.

Our incessant attempts at trying to understand who we are and how we interconnect with the world around us have practical aspects and are motivated by our desire to help our physical bodies combat various illnesses, overcome and prevent diseases, and even forestall aging so that we could lead longer, healthier, and more productive lives. But even when practical aspects are not very obvious, we find pleasure in discovering scientific truths about the laws that govern our bodies and demonstrate how interconnected are all the processes that take place inside our bodies and inside our brain, how we are connected to each other and to the world around us. Intrinsically, in a subtle way, we are all wired to do discoveries, including scientific discoveries, in order to better understand our place in the universe and our relationship with the whole of existing laws of nature, both visible and invisible. As a result, it leads to our worldview’s gradual evolution and eventually to the evolution of our activities and behavior.

Metaphysical ideas on free will (Determinism, Predeterminism, Incompatibilism, Compatibilism,  Metaphysical libertarianism, etc.) have been developed over a very long time period, mostly before the advent of modern sciences of mind, especially neuroscience, cognitive science, behavioral psychology, even molecular biology, and cell biology, which all have contributed to our understanding of various mental processes. Philosophical speculations still exist and will probably exist until we have viable scientific explanation and understanding of human thought, imagination, perception, awareness, and self awareness.

Many of our contemporary philosophical ideas of human consciousness, will, and the freedom of the will are founded on our understanding of the ancient wisdom writings, especially the Scriptures of religious texts, which we consider sacred and true, because numerous generations of people believed, and many people believe today as well, that they are revelations of our Creator, the Supreme Being we call God.

The fact that we refer to God as the Supreme Being means that we are talking about the Supreme Consciousness, a Supreme Mind. Philosophical ideas of free will revolve around a narrative about a "metaphysically free will" which means the notion of the freedom of will is ascribed to “supernatural” Supreme Mind. The idea of free will is based solely on our subjective perception of our self awareness. But, since there is no comprehensive scientific explanation as to what our perception, thought, and self awareness are, the idea of freedom or free will, being a figment of our imagination, will remain scholastic until it is substantiated or disproved by sciences. Until then, the only way to prove fallacious the notion of freedom in general and of the free will in particular is to look into the Scriptures themselves and find out what particular characteristics have been ascribed to God as the Supreme Being.

At first, the very ideas of freedom and free will seem to be beneficial and particularly useful to human society. The general concept has evolved into the idea of political liberty, which is a non-metaphysical concept at all. Even incompatibilist metaphysical libertarianism, which, in the face of the nomological determinism, asserts that free will might still exist and generally represents a bulk of non-materialist constructions, have gradually devolved into Political Libertarianism that takes individual liberty to be the primary political value and may be understood as a form of liberalism, which, as a political philosophy, “seeks to define and justify the legitimate powers of government in terms of certain natural or God-given individual rights”. “These rights include the rights to life, liberty, private property, freedom of speech and association, freedom of worship, government by consent, equality under the law, and moral autonomy...”

Who would oppose such a plethora of good sounding words? Unfortunately, as good and luring as they sounded, those words have always been better at luring people toward certain political concepts, ideologies, and, ultimately, political parties and individuals, who needed popular support, rather than at accurately reflecting the reality of certain given political situations or the character of the evolving social and political relationships.

The concept of freedom has always been misleading, in political philosophy just as in metaphysical philosophy. The danger of this misleading concept makes it necessary to disavow not only the very idea of political freedoms as such along with the ideology that it gives rise to, but the very idea of free will, also stripping the latter of its falsely donned divine authority.

The selfish nature of that philosophy is in conflict both with the scientific as well as Biblical viewpoint. The core doctrine of liberal and libertarian ideas begins with the recognition that people have certain natural and/or God-given rights and that deprivation of those rights is immoral. Among those natural rights are cited the right to personal autonomy and property rights, and the right to the utilization of previously unused resources. These two basic assumptions form the foundation of all liberal as well as libertarian ideals. The emphasis put by those ideas on the individual, putting him/her in opposition to the social body as a whole, opposes the laws of nature just as well as the laws that are revealed to us in the Bible.