Determinism and Freedom

Our culture is rightly massively influenced by science, but the scientific outlook is easily a deterministic one, for every atom follows Newton’s exact laws expressed by the equation F=MA. It was argued that if you knew the exact situation at one time you could predict any subsequent situation. Obviously, since a person is made up of atoms, personal conduct, though it gives the illusion of freedom and responsibility, must also be determined by atomic masses and forces.

If you read the last chapter of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, you find the same determinism controlling human life, despite the fact that he has portrayed the heights and the depths of human life and love, with characters like Pierre and Natasha.

Obviously the idea of such determinism is fatal for the religious outlook, or for that matter, for a humanist outlook which has a concern for rights and duties. A community massively influenced by the scientific outlook needs also to be massively influenced by the religious outlook, but how is this possible? One can see a task here for philosophy.

I recall solving the problem for myself by what I called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. I noticed that Christianity could not get along without simple things like bread, wine, and water. These things I saw as things to be understood in their own right and used appropriately. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness was to see atoms as the only real things. I granted that any material thing could be broken down into the atoms which composed it but I did not grant that the atoms could tell you everything about bread or for that matter about man.

I realised that I was affirming the commonsense world as a sort of starting point and I realised that science itself depended on commonsense as well, as when a chemist picks up a pipette for example.

I was helped further by the Aristotelian and Thomism philosophy of matter and form. Prime matter is potency to form. Every material existent is formed. Form has to take account of underlying matter. So it occurred to me that every atom was formed, and so it was unlikely that each atom was identical with another, any more than snowflakes are identical. There was a Catholic philosopher, Donceel, who claimed God could not put a human soul into a cow, because the matter was not suitably formed. I suppose this idea gets rid of the Hindu idea that we might in the next life come back as a snake or a dog, but it raises questions about the degree of formation needed for the information of a human soul. Back in the 1960s, before abortion had become legal, it seemed possible to consider various stages before the infusion of a soul. I suppose one could argue on the one hand that a cow’s brain was not capable of rational thought, but that the human fertilised embryo, though not yet conscious, is capable of developing a brain capable of rational thought. What you have then is not a potential human being but a human being in potential (as we all are in deep sleep).

Lonergan is a Thomist, but he works up to the matter form position using classical science with its rules and also using statistical theory, probability theory. Indeed, he calls the position he arrives at “emergent probability” which he equates with divine providence.

He would point out that even in a laboratory there are alien influences. The measurements taken do not make an exact line. The arrival of probability theory gives one more knowledge, not less. So one knows that an asteroid follows closely Newton’s laws, but if you want to know the chance of a large asteroid hitting the earth in this decade you need to study the past and see with what frequency they have done so in previous centuries. Probability theory is not a cloak for ignorance. Rather it extends knowledge.

If you throw a dice six times and you get six sixes, you will be suspicious that it is weighted. If you throw it 100 times and get 100 sixes, you will know something unusual is going on.

If you have a chemical environment with many different complex carbon based molecules, you will occasionally get the same complex molecule again. If though you get a molecule nourishing itself, using a digestive system and then dividing itself, something different is going on. You have got a new sort of thing, more stable, always there.

If by a Canon of Parsimony you confine yourself simply to the empirical evidence, then what you have is the emergence of something unexpected, something prepared for by the previous situation, but something one would describe as biological rather than chemical. If at an earlier stage of things one had been able to observe a total set of subatomic particles assembling themselves into atoms, one would be able to observe that they formed themselves according to MendAlien subsequent table. Stage A is observable; Stage B is observable, and by insight one can explain what makes Stage B so different from Stage A. The Canon of Parsimony confines the empirical scientist to describing what he can observe and explaining what he observes. What is to be observed is the arrival of new realities on the stage; the stage thereby is changed, and further realities are enabled to emerge. Such emergence has a probability because it happens again and again and such emergencies going on again and again have led to our commonsense world with its bread, wine, and water, but without water you would not have bread or wine.

I met a scientist who was describing how an embryo grows. Suddenly an arm begins to emerge. He described the wonder of it by saying form appears to precede matter. Since it happens again and again there is a probability of it. What happens is not predictable simply from the material substrate.

What emerges are not just new species but a new environment containing many species in the interdependence that constitutes an ecology in which each finds a supporting environment. The scientist can anticipate the emergence. The theologian sees the finger of God and the introduction of new forms. There are schemes of recurrence of the pattern if A then B, if B then C, and if C then A, so if parents then children, if children then growing up, if growing up then parents.

The same probable emergence of new schemes of recurrence goes on in human life, so for example, if fish then fishing, if fishing then nets, if nets then boats, if boats then plenty of fish, if plenty of fish, population growth. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. So the materials for Newton were prepared by Galileo and others. So there is emergent probability working in philosophy as well as in science and since we must see the finger of God in emergent probability, we must anticipate emergent probability in the Church as well. Does this mean we anticipate a new saint – or perhaps something more like a new ecology, so that a richer supportive environment comes about for many?

Contrasted with my early claim of misplaced concreteness, the theory of emergent probability is at home in our modern world with its awareness of the long term evolution which has gone on in the physical environment (de Chardin’s Cosmogenesis) and the development in man’s world through historical process (anthropogenesis). While one might posit emergent probability in general communication going on between God and Man – “in many and various ways God spoke to our ancestors” - I think that with the Christian mystery we have to speak directly of Providence for we are called by Christ to faith, but we find in the Church a “scheme of recurrence”, - the Sacramental system, and we find the emergence of a new order of affairs marked by the fruits of the Spirit – “Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self control”. There is ever a rich environment for a new generation of faith.

If philosophical achievement has led through emergent probability to the possibility of a philosophy of philosophies this might allow the emergence of a theology of theologies. For God would speak with commonsense consciousness in all its varieties, but also with differentiated consciousness, whether scientific, scholarly, artistic, or philosophic. Faith is a common assent. The rich responses made need to speak to each other and support each other including, of course, the assent made by the successor of St Peter.