Your assertion that we can predict human conduct is simply not supported — we cannot predict the conduct of individual humans.

Jonathan says: “But ultimately, LDS people ought to tend toward determinism because the scriptures teach that the inheritance we hope to receive is in a place that is already prepared (although future to us), and because even the specific prophecies of the future that have been fulfilled are but a small portion of all the prophecies that have been given, including several who have seen all things through the end of the world.” The fact that the righteous will receive reward for what they do doesn’t require any kind of determinism of actions, but only a conditional: “If A does X, then A will receive q; if A does B, A will receive p.” In fact, the conditional itself is inconsistent with LFW and with the kind of determinism you now advocate.

As for the prophecies that supposedly require determinism, if the world were deterministic then there wouldn’t be any conditional prophecies (which are by far and away the most common). There would not be any “if A then p, and if B then q,” but only “A will cause p.” So you claims is simply contrary to what we actually find in prophecy. However, I do agree that the greater the intelligence, the greater the options open to us and the greater the degree of LFW. I also agree that there are people, many of them, who live their lives stuck in the past forever making the same mistakes, forever chained to their addictions and sins and already dead but just not buried yet. These are they who are determined by the past. Those made free in Christ through atonement have LFW and God does not know what they will freely choose (because it logically impossible to know that), but he does know that if they keep his commandments, they will receive according to their works and what they send out will be returned to them.

Mortality opened up more options to choose; not less as Jonathan claims. However, it also entailed the risk that we could choose to give away the freedom bequeathed to us by becoming slaves to sin. The natural man is in fact causally determined; those alive in Christ are not. However, Jonathan, we disagree drastically on the view that the difference between those who accept Christ and those who don’t are determined by the degree of grace Christ chooses to give. Your view entails predestination of the kind that would make it up to God alone who is damned — and that is a damnable doctrine.

I was sitting in a class where the teacher was discussing PMA (positive mental attitude) and I thought it was the best concept anyone had ever taught me in school and always tried to have a PMA. The girl sitting next to me thought the lesson was boring and I paid attention to her and noticed that she rarely exhibited happiness. You may say that nature and nurture had prepared us differently and while that is partially true the inner cause for our opposite reactions was a choice we both made.

Simply if you took a class that taught you to wear red ties to interviews and you have a job interview, LFW is the ability to say no, I will wear a blue tie or green. Determinism is if you are only able to choose red because your experience and the situtation precludes any other rational choice.

Don’t be like Laman and Lemuel in this context, limiting God because you can’t understand how God could beat a man with 50 men. Just because you don’t see how both things can coexist doesn’t mean they don’t.

I speculate that one reason many people choose to believe that we don’t have robust free will is that it looks too dangerous to them. (Someone may have suggested this above, but I didn’t read all 172 comments.) If we look at our society as a whole, we see most people virtually screaming at our government, “Please take away my freedom and give me safety!” Why should we as Mormons be totally above this? We are still “natural men”, at least to some extent, and this is the cry of the natural man, “Give me safety!” (Saddam Hussein called himself “The Great Survivor”. And his main goal in life was to survive–even if he had to kill everyone else on the planet to do it.) Robust free will looks dangerous to us, because it means everything is up to us. It’s our responsibility if we fail, because there is nothing stopping us from suceeding–except ourselves. I think we would much rather believe that there are some problems we can’t overcome (namely the ones we have).

After years of struggling to overcome my own inadequacies and mostly failing, I find myself agreeing with Steve S’s brilliant former high school girlfriend (in #43) that “the purpose of life is to allow God to show us our selves so that we will acknowledge that his judgments are just.” With the exception of infants who die at birth, and are thus not subject to judgement, this is the one thing that we all have in common in this life–the ability to watch ourselves struggle and fail, or succeed. Most of us will not come out of this life with the gospel, but we will all come out of it having watched ourselves under stress. As Brigham Young said, “… life is designed to kick the tar out of you.” And it will. But cheer up. Whenever you get depressed by life, remind yourself that very few of us will be eaten by cannibles. (I just finished reading Michael Crighton’s book, “State of Fear”. I wouldn’t recommend it to any of you who are squeemish about cannibles.)

Of course in a deterministic universe the set of all possible states is the same as the union of all actual states, given some starting condition and tracing the state on a perfectly defined path through time. By comparison, in a conventional quantum mechanical universe, the trajectory of possible states blurs with time due to wavefunction collapse.

But in an LFW universe, (while not denying the possibility of random perturbations), agents perturb the state trajectory as well, in a manner that is statistically unpredictable over long time scales.

My point here is that “possible” is a well defined concept with a long analytical history – in physics usually as a fuzzy and expanding domain in phase space, the prime focus of chaos theory.

The theory of evolution is an explanation of the observed time-asymmetry of biological complexity. In a deterministic, energy conserving universe, information is strictly conserved. One can calculate any future state from any past state, or any past state from any future state.

So lets say we flip the arrow of time and run history backwards from our present position. If evolution and determinism are jointly valid, history in reverse – a history of complex organisms evolving backward into simple organisms – has to be an acceptable sequence of events. And if that is the case, the theory of evolution is no explanation at all.

Basically, Neo-Darwinian evolution lacks a theoretical basis for why it should run forward instead of backward, and determinism, as a strictly time symmetric, information conserving metaphysic – e.g. no random perturbations allowed – makes the problem worse.

Many of the differences expressed in this blog involve what I think is a limited free will we enjoy in mortality, compared with the fuller free will (possibly LFW as Blake defines it) we enjoyed in the preexistence. There, as Alma says, we were left to choose good or evil (Alma 13:3, which I believe is the only scripture that explicitly states this); here, our choices are constrained by many factors, including the limitations of mortality summarized by the concept of “natural man,” as well as the opportunity to hear the gospel, social and family influences that preclude a fair hearing of the gospel even when presented, etc. The result is a largely, but not completely, deterministic existence. And that’s okay, because within that existence, we can have joy (just as the animals and plants do).

Stripped of the preexistence, LFW cannot explain the concept of a “chosen” people or a favored lineage. With the preexistence, LFW in mortality is an illusion. Our free will is instead limited to the highly specific conditions each of us lives under. The judgment of our responsibility for our actions is likewise highly specific, and is measured against our specific mortal condition (including heredity and environment).

Along these lines, there was an interesting article in today’s NYTimes about the discovery that “the brains of highly intelligent children develop in a different pattern from those with more average abilities.” “[P]arts of the frontal lobe of the cortex are larger in people with high I.Q.’s,” the study said. Here’s the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/30/science/30brain.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

How does one’s biological intelligence affect LFW? I think we agree that greater intelligence tends toward greater freedom to choose. We can see this clearly at the lower end of the continuum, where we assign no responsibility. If biology fundamentally determines intelligence (at least within a range), how does LFW explain the varying levels of actual freedom to choose?

When Geoff started the blog, he expressed surprise at the extent LDS people seem to accept determinism. I don’t find this surprising at all. From the mortal perspective, much of our life is determined in advance. Even statistically, we can largely predict what will happen in many categories, and the ability to predict expands constantly with better understanding of the influences of DNA, environment, and other factors.

Maybe the predictability of human nature does allow God to offer specific prophecies of the future, without that future actually existing yet (although I think it does). After all, if we’re already getting to the point where we can predict what diseases a person will get based on the person’s DNA and environment, what level of intelligence a person will have based on the physiology of the brain, and what personality traits a person will have based on DNA, God who knows all of this and more should be able to predict it even better.

But ultimately, LDS people ought to tend toward determinism because the scriptures teach that the inheritance we hope to receive is in a place that is already prepared (although future to us), and because even the specific prophecies of the future that have been fulfilled are but a small portion of all the prophecies that have been given, including several who have seen all things through the end of the world.

If I understand the LFW approach, it focuses on responsibility and, I suppose, motivation (i.e., if all things are predetermined, then what difference does it make what I do?). I think we all agree that, to some degree, people have responsibility for their choices, but we overestimate how responsible we really are when we ignore the deterministic aspects of our existence. The motivational aspect that the scripture so often teach is provided by the veil, which prevents us from knowing what the future is. So I don’t see a need for a robust LFW.

Clark: Look over at your blog where I give a fuller response. Reasons cannot be reduced to events because reasons are done to accomplish some further result that is not yet in existence. For example, I make a sandwich so that I can eat it. Mere events don’t cause something for the reason of causing something else. They merely cause what they do. So the two concepts cannot be reduced to each other and your assertion that reasons can be reduced to events fails to capture this additional meaning in rational action or reasoning. For this very simple reason, your “ontological” and “orthigonigal” arguments fail.