Springing Forth

 

From Page 57 of my book, Notes Towards A New Age, Vol. 1, I write: “A free will springs from determinism more than indeterminism.”

 

My response: At first glance, this seems contradictory. If nomological determinism is reality, and human consciousness is nought but firing synapses and neurons in one’s biological brain the physicalists have won the argument: we are but smart robots epiphenomenally restricted t doing what nature allows us to do, sans free will, end of story.

 

The moderate in me rebels against that: God exists. Matter is real. Spirit is real, and in the human arena, both determinism or matter and freedom or spirit, somehow compatibly work together in the same mind, in the same person.

 

As the person self-realizes, her consciousness grows; her will grows; she becomes more intelligent, more-free-willing. She, to paraphrase Ayn Rand, one must obey nature in order to command nature, so she becomes increasingly self-causal, self-determining, even though the iron laws of cause-and-effect swirl around her, undeterred, every moment of her existence.

 

If the universe was purely random, lucky, or always indeterministic, then her free will would have nothing substantial to strengthen or test itself against, so contending with regularities is how the free individual learns to think, adjust, and live.