"If we are the products of evolution, can we take positive initiatives, make the right choices? Or are our choices fixed since days of old, and is freedom nothing but an illusion? Libraries could be filled with books on 'free will'. Here I want to indicate briefly why I hold that a meaningful notion of freedom might perhaps be integrated with a scientific view of the reality of which we humans are a part."

"Here" is today's column, and the "I" is Willem Drees. And the subject under discussion is freedom and its role in both science and religion.

But what is freedom, really? How do we define it? Or, having it, how do we implement and exercise it? Do we see freedom as a buffet of choices, and thus the greater the range of choices, the greater the experience of freedom? Or do we see freedom as the ability to achieve a goal unencumbered by strictures, as in freedom of movement? One is a very external view of the impediments to freedom. Historically, this notion has more often than not been called liberty, whereas to be free of internal hindrances is a different type of freedom altogether. It is the kind of freedom Anwar Sadat achieved in Cell 54 of the Cairo Central Prison and that Victor Frankl wrote about in his book Man's Search for Meaning. It has to do with taking responsibility for oneself and one's actions. As Willem Drees observes:

"Freedom requires determinism, since responsibility assumes that our actions are related to their consequences. Otherwise one could not develop plans, anticipating the consequences of one's acts. Meaningful freedom is not the opposite of determination but is some form of self-determination. One might speak of freedom when my considerations, my principles, my character partly determine what happens."

Willem B. Drees is professor of philosophy of religion and ethics at Leiden University, the Netherlands. He has an advanced degree in theoretical physics (Utrecht, 1977) and doctorates in theology (Groningen, 1989) and philosophy (Amsterdam, 1994). And today's column is the fifth in a six part series of excerpts from Drees' book Creation: From Nothing Until Now (Paperback or Library Binding; ISBN: 0-4152-5653-4; Routledge; December 2001, 128pp.). Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 were posted to Metanexus:Views on (2001.12.17), (2001.12.18), (2001.12.27), and (2001.12.28) respectively.

Good reading! And--to quote a famous intergalactic sage--"Fly. Be free!"

--Stacey E. Ake

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Subject: Creation: From Nothing Until Now, Part 5 From: Willem B. Drees Email: <wb@drees.nl>

Scene 10. Responsibility

In us our heritage, matter, information, and a box full of stories. Between hope and fear our neighbors life here on Earth, between hope and fear the great project of thought and compassion on a road of freedom.

Taking stock

We carry with us, or rather, in our bodies, our language and culture, our heritage. Our heritage is material. The stuff out of which we are made is dust from stars. We inherit also biological information, useful recipes for making a human, recipes which have emerged in the course of a long history. Nature does not need a recipe to make salt out of sodium and chloride. But to create hemoglobin, the red oxygen-binding chemical in our blood, the body needs a recipe, instructions which are available in our genes, our DNA. Salt would form without any history; substances such as chlorophyll (in green plants) and hemoglobin are products of a history in which our heritage has been tested and expanded. Our bodies, our brains with their potential, our responses: everything is a product of history, materialized as biological recipes. Again and again we have to do with our biological heritage. That is not a burden, but the basis of our existence. Thanks to this biological heritage we may feel, think and act.

Our heritage is also cultural. Human languages embody knowledge about the world. Different legal and political systems and etiquette show how people may live together. Religious traditions with their rituals and stories are part of our cultural heritage too. We inherited the critical traditions, the social one of the prophets and the intellectual and political ones of modernity.

Our bodies and our cultures present well-winnowed wisdom, tested in many generations. However, that does not imply that everything that has been wisdom in the past still is. An unrestricted 'Be fruitful and multiply' is no longer wisdom when six billion humans are filling and subduing the Earth. Wisdom is bound to circumstances, and these can change. Wisdom is also related to a goal; the wisdom physics offers is quite insignificant when facing the death of a friend.

Progress?

In these scenes we considered a long development. New possibilities emerged: heavy elements, life with purposiveness, humans with consciousness, science with explicitly articulated knowledge. Has this made the world a better one? Is this a history of progress?

In the twentieth century humans have massacred humans at an unprecedented scale. In itself killing of others of one's own kind is nothing new. It is part of our history of the last millions of years. Similar behavior has been observed among chimps. However, even if the frequency of killings has not increased, their efficiency sadly has. A relatively recent step has been the development of nuclear weapons that can destroy whole cities.

We humans are not only a threat to our fellow humans, but also to other species. This too has been going on for ages. When humans entered a new territory they first hunted the easiest prey. For the dodo on Mauritius the end came when Dutch ships dropped their sails on its shores in 1507. Most of the big mammals of America went extinct some eleven thousand years ago, around the time ancestors of the native Americans crossed the Bering Strait. At Hawaii various birds disappeared when Polynesians discovered the island, 1500 years ago. Flightless birds were eaten to extinction by the Maori's of New Zealand. Other species then homo sapiens have shown similar behavior. European cats and foxes have eaten in Australia the larger part of the small marsupials. Their decline is no threat to the predators themselves, since they change prey easily. Humans too are very flexible.

Some animals have finished it for themselves. Reindeer flourished on St Matthew Island in the Bering Sea: 1350 reindeer in 1957, 6000 in 1963. They ate lichens faster than it could recover. After the harsh winter of 1963-1964 there were only forty-one females and one sterile male left. Early in the twentieth century rabbits were introduced on Lisianski, an island west of Hawaii. Within ten years they had eaten almost all plants on the island, thus undermining the conditions for their own existence. On the island Earth we may follow a similar course. We have no natural enemies that constrain the population size. Death toll due to contagious diseases has gone down enormously. We easily change prey, and modern technology has created the possibility of accelerated growth. We too can be caught by the ecological limitations of our own 'island', just as the reindeer of St Matthews and the rabbits of Lisianski.

An ecological crisis will not hurt all in the same way. Hence, ecological problems may generate conflicts about water, oil, heat and food. Let me give one example. Life in Europe is dependent upon the warm Gulf Stream that crosses the Atlantic from the Caribbean to north-west Europe. If due to the greenhouse effect there will be more rain in the northern Atlantic Ocean this warm Gulf Stream might fall away. In consequence the climate in Europe would become similar to that of Canada; New Foundland is south of the Netherlands. Canada houses and feeds less than thirty million inhabitants; Europe more than five-hundred million on a similar area. Would hundreds of millions set off to warmer regions? A change like this could happen fairly abrupt, in the course of a few years. It would have dramatic consequences for relations between countries. Whether the falling out of the Gulf Stream and subsequent lower temperatures in Europe is the right scenario, is not clear yet. Perhaps some other consequences of the human induced greenhouse effect may be more important. Whatever the particular events, changes in climate and ecology might create geopolitical tensions of an unprecedented scale.

Science and technology have expanded our capacity to modify our environment so that it better serves our needs. We can now intentionally modify all three aspects of our heritage described above. Setting up nuclear power plants, not to speak of nuclear weapons, reflects our ability to transform matter; chemistry and material sciences can create stuff with an incredible range of properties. Biotechnology is the ability to modify intentionally the informational heritage as coded in the genes, in humans and in plants, yeasts and animals that we eat. And our cultural heritage is changing due to the ability to store information in print and electronically, and even more to the ability to spread information across the globe. In a sense, there is progress in power, and thus in freedom. But it is progress with a prize; the risks are enormous as well as the surprises due to unanticipated consequences.

Consequences are anticipated in utopian and dystopian literature. Francis Bacon's Nova Atlantis, from 1627, is the archetype of a utopia inspired by technology and science. Thomas More's Utopia (1516) is a vision of a better world, based on a well-designed social organization. Bacon's technological optimism contrasts with the pessimistic view of Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World (1932). George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) can be seen as a counterpoint to the social utopia of a Thomas More. Social utopias, in the twentieth century represented by authoritarian regimes such as communism, seek to establish happiness by controlling human behavior. Again and again they had to limit human freedom. A technological utopia seeks to control our environment.

Large segments of our culture have acquired features of a realized technical utopia. Quite a few technological developments predicted in Bacon's Nova Atlantis and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World have been realized, without however making our society into the technocratic one they envisaged. Our technology has not been anti-moral, but to some extent become an embodiment of our morality - with speed limits enforced by sleeping policemen and automatic cameras, et cetera. The great advantage of technological over social utopianism has been that it leaves one free to think - though it limits one's practical options -, and it leaves us free to use the available means in a creative, unanticipated way. In many cases it is often morally more appropriate to develop technical means to implement certain behavior than to seek to influence the mentality of the humans involved. We may call for more restraint in the use of energy, but more energy efficient heating systems and cars may make it actually possible to move in the desirable direction. We invest our technology with morality - and that may be appreciated.

Can we bear responsibility? What kind of beings are we?

If we are the product of evolution, can we take positive initiatives, make the right choices? Or are our choices fixed since days of old, and is freedom nothing but an illusion? Libraries could be filled with books on 'free will'. Here I want to indicate briefly why I hold that a meaningful notion of freedom might perhaps be integrated with a scientific view of the reality of which we humans are a part.

Freedom requires determinism, since responsibility assumes that our actions are related to their consequences. Otherwise one could not develop plans, anticipating the consequences of one's acts. Meaningful freedom is not the opposite of determination but is some form of self-determination. One might speak of freedom when my considerations, my principles, my character partly determine what happens. When others determine my acts, I bear no responsibility. And when the juice I drink at breakfast determines my actions, freedom is impaired; we do not consider such drinks the relevant kind of determining factors. However, when my ideals determine my behavior, freedom is not impaired but affirmed. Political freedom can be described by striking out external factors: freedom is real when one's behavior is not determined by the state, nor by the church, nor by my neighbors, nor by my relatives, and so on. But personal freedom cannot be defined in such a way, as if freedom would consist in not being determined by one's character, nor by one's principles, one's life-plan, one's ideals.

Principles and ideals do not float in from nowhere; they too are products of nurture and nature. Hence, would one not be free since the past determines who you are and how you choose? This objection to freedom in the context of a scientific view of human nature confuses the relation of cause-and-effect (the influence of the past) with that of control. When a spaceship is sent to other planets, control from the Earth is unpractical. There could be a small piece of rock approaching. When it is discerned it may already be quite close. The information needs to be transmitted to the Earth. While waiting for instructions from the Earth, the probe would have been hit. Those who design a space probe need to delegate; computers in the probe will have to be programmed so that they can make their own decisions on the basis of the available information, and, if needed, change the course. Such a spaceship is granted self-control. Its programmers set up the computers in such a way that information about the environment plays a role in the control of the spaceship.

Parents do not know in what circumstances their children will find themselves. Raising them to maturity is replacing control by self-control. That this self-control is executed in a way that has been shaped by the parents, does not take away the independence of the children. This transition is not an all or nothing affair. First a child may ride her bike next to me; a few years later she may go by herself to school, and again later she may determine herself along which route to go to which destination. To some extent we can choose the environment, the friends, the schools, the books, the programs by which we want to be influenced. We are never free in an absolute sense, as if we could start all over. It is as with reconstructing a ship at see. You cannot take the ship apart, since you would have no place left to stand on. But bit by bit you can reconstruct the ship extensively.

Sometimes a human life derails. Someone becomes addicted; 'I would like to quit, but I can't'. The choices made day by day - lighting another cigarette - do not fit the plan that the person would like to choose for his life. Freedom is diminished; behavior has become compulsive. The more my acts are in line with my life plan, the more my desires for short term pleasures are kept in check by desires about the person I would like to be, the more my acts can be considered as freely chosen.

The last word about 'free will' has not been said. I see human free will not as indeterminacy but as the remarkable fact that we humans can be guided by ideals, by a life plan. We can transcend immediate needs, desires and responses, reflect upon them, consider the circle of others concerned, and correct ourselves. Therein lies freedom. This is not unassailable; we can forego the opportunity for reflection, lose ourselves in an addiction. Evolution does not guarantee a 'happy end', not for the reindeer on St. Matthew Island and the rabbits on Lisianski nor for humans on Earth. The great project of thinking and compassion on a road of freedom is a project that we have to take on, again and again. A song of praise for creation may be appropriate but there is no seventh day when the acquired treasures can be put on display in a glass case, when responsibility can be shelved.

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Published   2002.01.03