Freedom is foundational in
our American culture today. We are proud
to live in a country known as the “land of the free.” People are willing to fight for freedom, even
to die for it. At the same time, many in
America have rejected the doctrine of the soul.
Christians are often mocked for their belief in the soul equating it to
some made up fairy tale. When challenged
with a materialist philosophy that
denies existence of any spiritual reality, most Christians have little to no
defense. Does materialism authentically
describe reality or distort our perceptions of it? The answer to whether or not humans have
souls carries heavy implications, particularly to the concept of free
will. In this post, I will show how
materialism implicitly denies that humans are actually free.
Materialism (Hobbes):
According to materialism, only the physical world is
real. There is nothing spiritual or
immaterial, only matter.[1] Atomist reductionism follows from this
thought in that all reality is composed of atoms in random arrangements. Therefore, the human person is just a body. Or to put it more precisely, human beings are
just bundles of atoms in meaningless compositions. One of the most prominent materialist
philosophers was Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679).
He wrote that “the universe is corporeal; all that is real is material,
and what is not material is not real.”[2]
Have you ever heard the phrase, “It’s what’s on the inside that counts”? Well, Hobbes argued that a person’s inner
“mind” is merely bio-chemical reactions to stimuli. He viewed the human being as a mechanism with
base desires. Hobbes explains in his
book Leviathan that humans are
exactly like animals except that we use words.[3] He criticized all religion claiming it was
based on fear and ignorance. Prior
philosophy taught that the goal of life was to be happy, achieved by becoming more
human and by growing in wisdom and love.
According to Hobbes, happiness is achieved only through satisfaction of
the appetite.
Okay,
so why can’t someone be a materialist and still believe in free will? If human activity is purely material, then
everything we do must be based ultimately on reactions to stimuli. For example, though it feels like I am freely
choosing to eat a slice of pizza, it is actually just the result of a complex
response to stimuli motivating me (the biological need to eat, the tasty smell,
etc.). Another example: the clothes you
put on today were decided in response to such factors as the temperature
outside or the need to attract a mate. Hobbes’
philosophy inevitability leads to determinism
which states that all our actions are determined by causes outside of our
control. If my actions are determined,
then the notion of freedom is a lie. Therefore,
we have no free will; freedom is an illusion.
Sad day L
Critique:
There are some key problems with
these conclusions though. The most
obvious one is this: do we honestly
believe that man doesn’t have free will?
Determinism doesn’t seem to adequately explain all human
experience. Of course in some way we are
atoms controlled by laws. But Hobbes’ materialism
does not account for why human beings act differently than a compost pile. It cannot explain why humans do things plants
cannot or why humans do things animals cannot.
Where does our creativity and artistic expression come from? If at the end of the day man is only a
conglomeration of cells, this paints a bleak picture of humanity. Instead of calling man higher, materialism
reduces his dignity to merely responding to stimuli for survival.[4] There is no denying that we live in a
marketing culture where the sight of cheesy pizza on the TV may immediately
prompt a phone call to Papa John’s.
However, it is not enough to say that this is all that man is and
nothing more. Man is capable of the
temperance required to say no to the cheesy pizza.
A final criticism against
materialism is that it ultimately means there is no right or wrong. If someone is really controlled by their
instincts, can they be held accountable for something their instinct motivated
them to do? According to Hobbes, the
chaste man is not any more virtuous than a serial rapist. We would have to admit that evils such as
racism, sexism, and the holocaust were not actually morally evil
at all. I do not think many who hold to
Hobbes’ materialism understand these implications. If man does not have a soul that gives him
the power of free will, then no hero such as Martin Luther King can be honored
because humans are not capable of any moral good.
Throughout this post, I have
shown that one cannot deny all spiritual reality and still believe that man has
free will. In my next post, I will
describe how the correct understanding of the soul is critical in affirming that
man is indeed capable of this freedom of the will. All
of the points discussed presume an honest assessment of reality as we know
it. If a person stubbornly clings to
materialism or atomism for its own sake, nothing will change that. However, by acknowledging of the intelligibility
of the world, one can see that the human person is different from every other type
of being. As we have stated, the
greatest evidence of this difference is that man is free.
#
Written by Joey Martineck
Beautiful Things
Bibliography:
This post was pulled from a paper in Fall 2015 Human
Nature class taught by Dr. James Jacobs at Notre Dame Seminary New Orleans, LA. Ideas discussed came primarily from class
notes and excerpts from Thomas Hobbes’ works shown below.
1.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan Part I. Supplemental
Reader for PH 103: Philosophical Anthropology, ed. by James Jacobs (New
Orleans, LA: Notre Dame Seminary, 2015).
2.
Freedom graphic: https://www.google.com/search?q=freedom&biw=1366&bih=667&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwilh7nD7u3JAhXIXh4KHTTiBjoQ_AUIBigB#imgrc=9gXPdGIU4Jy6-M%3A
[1]
Hobbes, Leviathan Part I. Supplemental Reader for PH 103: Philosophical
Anthropology, ed. by James Jacobs (New Orleans, LA: Notre Dame Seminary,
2015), 1.
[2]
Hobbes, Leviathan Part I, in Supplemental Reader for PH 103, 1.
[3]
Hobbes, Leviathan Part I, in Supplemental Reader for PH 103, 1.
[4]
Hobbes, Leviathan Part I, in Supplemental Reader for PH 103, 1.
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