God the Father by Cima da Conegliano, via wiki
（編按：博客 Evan Fowler 對張國棟博士的自由意志文章深感興趣。但因 Evan 不諳中文，只通過編輯口頭轉述略知張博士文章要旨，此文並非直接回應 。）
In the summer of 2009, I was in South Africa. Just outside of Kurland village, a coloured settlement besot with the usual drink, drug and violence that has sadly come to mark the lives of many coloured (mix-race) people, I met an unordained pastor who had for the past 10 years devoted his life to the community. No longer affiliated with any church, organized religion he told me was corrupted, he went amongst those people he believed God had told him to help save. These people were without a doubt poor and in need of support, though the poverty that I saw and lived among may not have been the same poverty that he saw.
Sitting on the porch of his small home, this simple, humble man told me the story of his life: of how he had been a rebellious youth who lived for music and alcohol, until God appeared to him and granted him the power to heal the sick; of how God asked him to go forth and empower his people, and to spread the message that He resides not in any temple but in our hearts.
The pastor told me how in doing God’s work in the field, by writing His Laws upon people's hearts, he had seen and himself suffered tremendous pain. Too many people had, he said, chosen the wrong path. “God gave us choice not to punish those that choose wrong, but to reward those that choose His Love”, he said. Our suffering did not mean God was not loving, or that he had neglected us. Choice is a manifestation of God’s Love. He allowed us the opportunity to choose his Love, and this to know the pleasure of we having made this choice ourselves.
The question of Free Will provokes many of us as other philosophical questions do not. To borrow an observation from Daniel Dennett, it is an issue that people fear to seek to understand because the (mis)application of any understanding, whether we are free of not, is beyond what our senses have evolved to handle. We do not want to know because to be too free or to be too determined is the cause of great anxiety. Whilst we can today choose the sex of our offspring, or alter ourselves genetically, to design ourselves, we are uncomfortable doing so. Freedom can be taken too far. So rather than understand free will, in Dennett’s words, we instead “campaign”.
When we campaign we do so with a predetermined objective, and on the issue of free will, no organisation is campaigning more strongly against an understanding than Christianity. This makes perfect sense, given that free will is central to not only Christian belief, but also the application of Christian (and to a degree all religious) doctrine. Indeed the issue of free will challenges the very core reasons for their being a belief system at all, by questioning not only whether we are free to make those choices that a belief may judge moral or immoral, but more fundamentally the need for a purpose to these choices at all.
To many Christians, the issue of free will is motivated less about understanding what we can do than the next question of what we ought to do, which is the question that religion seeks to address.
In a recent piece for these pages, local philosopher Dr. Cheung writes that as a Christian he has come to question his previous belief that free will is necessary for compassion and goodness, and to be happy. C.S. Lewis’ quote that “Free Will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having” is easily countered by adding the perception of free will alone will suffice. But perception is different to question of whether we do have free will and whether or not the choice it implies is a reality of the universe within which we exist.
The “lowly freedom” of his pet dog that Dr. Cheung refers to in his article begs the question how one defines this lower form of freedom. Freedom is not static, for sure - it evolves as the being that defines his own freedom evolves to both sense, reason and understand it - but this is not to say that there are various levels of free will as implied by various perceived levels of freedom. He would be on more solid ground to write that there may be various perceived levels of freedom due to our understanding of free will.
Purpose out of complexity
However, if we lose the need to clasp firmly to a need for their to be free will, and are prepared to accept that determinism does not mean that everything is inevitable, such gradation is more easily understood. If we are willing to accept the more scientific line, though not necessarily as far as Sam Harris takes it, and start from an understanding that the laws that define our universe also define and determine our choice, does not reduce free will to an illusion. What it does is to provide a deterministic framework through which various levels of choice, whether real or imagined, may exist through complexity. Complexity creates purpose, which in turn creates the need for a perception of choice.To understand this is to understand evolution, not just of living organisms, but in a more basic form of complexity that arises from a set of determined laws.
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