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Atheism and Freedom: A Response to Sartre and Baier
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Extract
A few years ago I ran across a statement by Jean-Paul Sartre which seemed to imply that if there is a God, then there can be no human freedom. That thesis struck me as questionable, but at the time I did not pause to examine it. More recently I ran across a similar, more explicit statement by Kurt Baier, and I decided the time to pause had come. My knee-jerk response to Baier – and I confess it was probably nothing more – was, ‘Why can't there be human freedom if there is a God? Indeed, can there be human freedom if there isn't a God ?’ The second of these questions has proved to be the more provocative to me, for the more I have thought about it, the more it has seemed to me that it is the atheist and not the theist who should be on the defensive about libertarianism, i.e. the position that human beings do act, that human actions are not determined, that we are the sole cause of our actions, and that all things remaining the same, we could have done otherwise. Indeed, the more I thought about that question – Can there be human freedom if there is no God? – the more convinced I became (and still am) that the atheist has no good reason for believing in libertarianism. Note: I am not saying that atheism is logically incompatible with libertarianism. Perhaps it is, but if it is, that is not yet obvious to me. Rather, I am saying that an atheist who believes in libertarianism must believe in it on the basis of faith and must hold this faith in opposition to the only type of evidence that is available to him. Hence, by denying the existence of God, Baier and Sartre do not make room for human freedom; they make belief in human freedom irrational. By contrast, I shall argue, the theist does have a good reason for believing that humans are free. Let's take separate looks at Baier and Sartre; then I shall summarize the substance of my position.
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References
page 281 note 1 Baier, Kurt, ‘The Meaning of Life’, in Twentieth Century Philosophy: The Analytic Tradition, ed. Weitz, Morris (N.Y.: The Free Press, 1966), p. 372.Google Scholar
page 282 note 1 Science and Human Behavior (New York: The Free Press, 1952), p. 17.
page 283 note 1 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Existentialism and Human Emotions (N.Y.: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1957), p. 37.Google Scholar Hereafter referred to as ‘EH’.
page 284 note 1 My discussion of God's omniscience will be limited to God's knowledge of the past and present. To deal with Sartre's claim about God's stare, we need not become entangled in the debate over God's knowledge of future actions.
page 284 note 2 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness (N.Y.: Washington Square Press, 1966), p. 724.Google Scholar Hereafter ‘BN’.
page 285 note 1 See, for example, Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Tluologiae, Ia, 2ae, 1–5.Google Scholar
page 286 note 1 Sartre does not here appear to be doing a mere description of human consciousness; he appears to be making claims about the way man really is – not just the way man experiences himself to be.
page 289 note 1 For one sophisticated account of how determinism can be compatible with the facts of ordinary consciousness see Hodges, Michael and Lachs, John, ‘Meaning and the Impotence Hypothesis’, Review of Metaphysics, XXXII, 3 (03 1979), 515–29.Google Scholar
page 290 note 1 Indeed, I believe that if we develop laws of human behaviour whereby we can predict with a high degree of accuracy both specific events of behaviour and the formation of patterns of behaviour, we should be determinists whether or not we believe in God. Hence, the confirmation of determinism is an empirical matter. In an ambiguous situation, belief in God can override evidence in favour of determinism. But if the evidence is not ambiguous, our thinking should follow the evidence.