Boethius, time and eternity

Medieval manuscript of
Consolation of Philosophy

1,500 years have passed since the death of Boethius, but the event has gone unnoticed. A century ago, this would not have happened, as history was still being studied. In our times, however, history is despised. And we know what happens to those who despise it, in a phrase attributed to George Santayana: those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius was a politician and philosopher of the 5th and 6th centuries, who held important positions in the Ostrogothic kingdom that emerged in Italy shortly after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. In his political activity, Boethius was successively senator, consul and advisor to the Ostrogothic king Theodoric.

The problem of Free-Will

In the current image of the world provided by physics, we have at one side, an apparent fuzzy determinism, because the universe is chaotic; at the other end we get indeterminism. What can we say about human freedom?

Free-Will, as envisioned by classical philosophers, is incompatible with determinism. But it would be a mistake to assume that it is the same as quantum indeterminism. When a radioactive atom disintegrates, it is not free; it is subject to the influx of probability. One atom may disintegrate ten times later than another, but its longevity has not been chosen individually, it is the result of the play of blind forces which, on the average, produce the effect that one half of the atoms must disintegrate in a perfectly defined time.

Physics and Free Will

In the January 2021 issue of Physics World appeared an article entitled Why free will is beyond physics. This article, written by British science writer Philip Ball, is clearly anti-reductionist and says things like these:

“Free will” is not ruled out by physics – because it doesn’t stem from physics in the first place.

If physics can disprove free will, then it must override everything else too, even evolution.

But is free will really undermined by the determinism of physical law? I think such arguments are not even wrong; they are simply misconceived. They don’t recognize how cause and effect work, and by attempting to claim too much jurisdiction for fundamental physics they are not really scientific but metaphysical.

God’s action in the light of science

Cover of the book
Divine action & modern science
by Nicholas Saunders

As I mentioned in previous posts, neither the existence nor the non-existence of God can be proved by science. God, if He exists, cannot be the object of scientific knowledge. Consequently, from the rational point of view, the problem of the existence of God is philosophical rather than scientific. Several solutions have been proposed for this problem:

• Atheism: According to this solution, followed today by many, God does not exist and the existence of the universe would be a consequence just of chance. An additional problem, suggested by this theory, is that we really don’t know what chance is (see this post). Like dark matter and dark energy, it is just a name that tries to hide our ignorance.
• Pantheism: According to this solution, proposed by such distinguished names as Spinoza and Einstein, God is the universe. In other words, there is something in the universe that we cannot discover through scientific analysis, which explains in some way its own existence and ours. The contrast of this theory with the previous one is clear in Einstein’s words against the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics: God does not play dice. With those simple words, Einstein declared his disbelief regarding the concept of chance, used by many atheistic solutions to the problem. In this theory, the action of God in the world would take place only through natural causes, without any alteration (by means of compatibilist action).
• Deism: According to this solution, God exists and created the universe, but then He left it evolve alone. Originated in the eighteenth century, many French thinkers of the time (and a few later on, until today) adopted this theory. From this point of view, the problem of the action of God in the universe does not arise, because it denies that God acts in the universe.
• Providential Theism: According to this solution, God exists and created the universe, but then He doesn’t forget about it, but interacts with it in some way, directing its evolution. The problem of divine action only arises in the framework of this theory.

Neurons and free will

In another post in this blog I have described the four theories used by philosophers to try and solve the problem of human mind: What is intelligence? What is consciousness? What is free will? Are we actually free, or are we determined, just like meat machines?

At the end of last year, Javier Pérez Castells published a book where he addresses some of these issues from a scientific and philosophical point of view. Its title (in Spanish) is the same as the title of this post. In particular, chapter 8 of the book describes some of the models with which various scientists and philosophers have tried to explain how we make decisions more complex than those studied by the experiments performed by Libet, Fried and Haynes, which don’t go much further that pressing a button or raising a hand. These models are called two-stage, because they try to explain our decisions assuming that they are made in two phases: the first, more or less random, in which the brain generates the available alternatives, followed by a second phase, when we actually make a decision, after weighing those alternatives.

The problem of human intentionality

A few weeks ago I had in another blog a debate that confronted me with three militant atheists who stood for materialist monism, which holds, among other things, that we are determined by our neurons, that consciousness is an irrelevant epiphenomenon and that free will is an illusion. In another post in this blog I have touched on that topic, mentioning the four philosophical theories that try to explain the conscience, one of which is materialist monism.

This is the argument I offered to defend dualism against materialistic monism:

Let’s tackle the problem of human intentionality. When I say: I'm going to lend money to the bank, so I’ll be paid interest, I’m saying that the reason why I’ll lend money to the bank is to get interest. This is the kind of cause that Aristotle called a final cause, because it is the goal toward which my action is directed, something that is located in the future. On the other hand, materialist monism says that the only cause of our actions is in the electric discharges of our neurons. This is what Aristotle called an efficient cause. Therefore, to explain the same phenomenon (my lending money to the bank), we are suggested two different causes: my intention and the sparks in my neurons, this second located in the present, the first in the future. Is this possible?

Inside Out

The materialist atheist philosophy has a problem: it cannot explain human free will, the existence of which has been a universal consensus among philosophers and individual human beings. So, they are bent on denying its existence. Is there an easier way to solve a problem that deny there is one? Thus they offer a number of theories to explain it away. I will cite a few:

• Free will is just an appearance. We are really the toy of our feelings (joy, sadness, fear, anger, disgust...). The Disney-Pixar film Inside Out could be an example of this philosophical stance.