Why I don’t believe in Free Will

I want to be clear about something, as I followed Sam Harris’s work from 2007 to recently, I believe we can separate his actual realm of expertise in neuroscience and his valid critiques of Christian and Jewish theology from his anti-Muslim bigotry (that is, not criticisms of Islam which are valid, but his tacit support for the Greater Israel project which is Biblically-influenced from the Book of Ezekiel at the expense of the lives of the surrounding Arab populations around Israel), and that it is vital for anyone who loves learning to separate the author from their philosophical or scientific works. We’ll end-up finding bigotry everywhere from people and if we use whataboutism to determine who we can or cannot read or listen to on topics of expertise, then we’ll never learn or grow as people at all. We can use our rational thinking faculties to separate intellectual arguments that are in the realm of a person’s expertise from their bigoted beliefs. If not, then what is the point of trying to learn anything from historical people who had bigoted views centuries before any of us were born?  Free Speech and Free Expression are absolutely key to fixing social problems peaceably and to both learn and grow as individuals.

I first began doubting Freewill during my college years when listening to a similar video to this by Sam Harris on his lecture about Freewill. I watched all of it:

It disturbed me at the time, but I had rationalized the viewpoint of compatibilism for a lengthy amount of time after listening to this video. Slowly, after reading more neuroscientists and getting into a long-winded argument with my cousin who held the position of Hard Determinism (albeit, he reacted oddly emotionally during the argument), I slowly lost all belief in freewill. Here are my reasons why, which I wrote in Chapter 7 of my book Faith in Doubt and my comparison to it with the concept of Original Sin from the Abrahamic faith traditions on why the lack of belief in freewill might not make people more selfish or violent, after all:

Chapter 7: Free Will and Original Sin

            I’ve struggled with the topic of free will on a personal level. To clarify, it wasn’t in the Abrahamic context, but rather the current neuroscience debate over whether people have free will or not. I had been observing the online information for several years due to my morbid fascination with the subject matter and the conclusions caused me to have pause. Part of the struggle for sharing that information with this critique was trying to properly articulate the faultiness of the Abrahamic context of free will compared to the studies in neuroscience. The Abrahamic context is too simplistic and never covered the nuances that modern philosophy and neuroscience have invigorating discourses about.^[1] There was no way to broach this subject without becoming pedantic in writing the reasons why and potentially going off-topic from the discussion of Original Sin’s failings. Furthermore, throughout the process of learning and writing for this book, I genuinely struggled to have a clear view of the topic and having the confidence to pick a side on free will, determinism, or the varieties of compatibilism. I still hold a healthy amount of doubt for my current belief, but as a consequence, I was struggling with forming up the confidence to write it out. I’m no neuroscientist, I don’t want to be misrepresenting their work, and I understand that it’s a controversial topic within the neuroscience and philosophy community. This portion will just be my own layperson opinion on the matter of free will. I cannot in good conscience argue this without mentioning my crippling doubts on the matter. I don’t have any doubts about Original Sin being a horrible belief system based on the evidence, but I certainly have doubts with respect to the free will debate.

Based on the definition, the facts of cause and effect, and how our assumptions and personal contexts are formed as human beings: I am of the opinion that free will doesn’t exist. I use to move between the ideas of compatibilism and determinism, but I’ve since discarded compatibilism as incoherent when viewing the evidence. Going into full details on why would be beyond the scope of this book since the entire topic of free will is worthy of its own books and spans several different disciplines of college curriculum. As such, I can only give an overview based on brief snippets of information from various neuroscientists and psychologists for the purpose of debunking the archaic Original Sin model of free will that can no longer be substantiated with our current knowledge of human behavior. I would recommend several books that delve far more deeply into understanding the biases of the human mind and how our subjective experience forms the axioms for our beliefs. These books provide fascinating insights into the human mind and if your interest is piqued, I’ve added a further reading section for the books that much of Part 1 and Part 2 of this book uses as a reference in citations.

Before listing my reasons against free will, I’d like to explain what ultimately convinced me that determinism was true and how I came to that conclusion. This is an anecdote and can be dismissed as such, but for those curious as to my thought process for this may find it useful. This will be a bit lengthy so if you’re not interested then please skip to the reasons listed below. I had first become acquainted with the argument of free will versus determinism in high school when considering different regions of the world and what it would mean to be an accident of birth. As a list of examples, I thought about how in India, the vast majority of people who are born are raised Hindu; while in the United States, the vast majority were born and raised Christian; In China, the vast majority would be atheist, and in most of the Middle East, it would be Islam that they are born and raised in. Their language, religious affiliation, their ethnic background, and their nationality were all an accident of birth that wasn’t of their own choosing; this is something internet atheists who were supportive of the New Atheist movement had pointed out in various internet forums in early 2000s and it stuck with me throughout high school. I had looked-up the Christian justification for this upon seeing staunch Christians trying to defend their position that they would remain Christian regardless of where they were born; most of them just did a poor job asserting all they know is Christianity and that therefore they would only ever be Christian.^[2] In effect, Christians on the internet that I met completely ignored the argument and made an appeal to ignorance; from looking at comments and blogs from Christians, this was one of the main consistencies of the argument and showed how woefully inept they were in taking these questions seriously. I had thought that the vast majority of people had this same line of questioning when assessing the world and their place in it, but to my surprise upon growing older, I realized I was wrong and most people simply didn’t think about it. That honestly struck me as odd behavior. Over time I had grown acquainted with the free will debate through Sam Harris’s lengthy video about it and looked up several articles of research, Daniel Dennett’s review of Sam Harris’s book on Free Will, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s pro-deterministic views of it in the book Twilight of the Idols further influenced me to question assumptions about free will. After postgraduate studies, I delved further into reading various books on different aspects of human psychology that fascinated me and of which I’ve placed in the Further Reading list as references and due to my curiosity about free will, I couldn’t help but apply the knowledge written in the books to the question of free will. However, what fully convinced me was not abstractions or the psychological research, which greatly paved the way but didn’t fully change my views on compatibilism. What changed my mind was working in a temporary position as a Health Unit Coordinator for a veterans home. In particular, this veterans home was for veterans who had dementia or other similar afflictions related to memory loss.

Before I continue further, I feel it is best to mention that working at the veterans home was one of the most difficult, but satisfying, experiences and it was a pleasure to provide my own small contribution in assisting in the welfare of veterans of the United States armed forces. People may homogenize military folk as hard-nosed, gritty types whose life revolves around talking about war as per Hollywood stereotypes, but those stereotypes do a complete disservice to the array of personalities and personality quirks that make-up veterans of both World Wars, the Korean war, and the Vietnam war. For the most part, if I was forced to try to make a generalization of my experiences, they were either gentle and compassionate people or some of the wittiest jokesters with all kinds of fun humor. Of course, even that is an oversimplification for each of their personalities. Unfortunately, I can’t specify identifying information as that is against HIPAA laws and their privacy rights. Of the ones I spoke with, none had any interest in discussing war time unless prompted; this is less surprising when one considers that war was just one small component of their lives and doesn’t define who or what they are as individuals. For the most part, they preferred to talk about how their day was going, their families (especially children), what was on the scheduled menu for the day, what they thought of current events, or what they thought of any particular topic in general. I would talk to them when I wasn’t busy with paperwork or getting supplies for the unit. It had occurred to me only after meeting and speaking with several of them that they didn’t seem to hold their time during war as a major part of their lives or a sense of who they were; it was merely an experience that took up a portion of their lives and didn’t define them as human beings. A rather troubling idea formed in my mind and so I asked a few of them, all of whom were happy to be asked, if they thought the war themes or events about war perhaps brought back bad memories that they would otherwise like to forget. In the duration of my work there, I had come to realize that wars neither defined them as people nor would it have been anything that most of them wanted to relive. After all, if it was truly a horrifying time in which their life was always at risk, then why would they want to remember that? Why would any of them want to be defined by that? Mass media taught us to take it as a given, and the celebratory events for them were absolutely about appreciating all of their hard work and sacrifice for our country in times of crisis, but wouldn’t constantly being thanked every year or every military holiday for a harrowing time in one’s life get tiresome and make one relive bad memories? The ones whom I asked, one of whom said it was a good question and that they appreciated it, seemed to give the same general response. The answers seemed to be practically unanimous: the people caring for them were nice and they appreciated them, so they didn’t mind and it didn’t bother them since they liked how well they were being treated. In effect, the everyday hard work and compassion of the staff made them appreciative and they liked the people who were taking care of them. The benign treatment mattered more to them.

It wasn’t difficult to ascertain why they were so appreciative and consequently what made me acknowledge that free will couldn’t possibly exist. Most people who research the free will debate know of the infamous incident of a man who had a tumor in his brain that caused him to have pedophilic tendencies until the tumor was removed and for the pedophilic tendencies to return again when the tumor had grown back.^[3] I’ve seen that story circulated in a few books and youtube channels. However, most people wrongly attempt to dismiss that story as an outlier. When working at the veterans home, I was forced to consider: what about more mundane conditions like dementia? Dementia was different depending on the individual, parts of the brain slowly degenerated over time and fully grown adults became the same as helpless children in need of care. Moreover, what about other illnesses that I hadn’t even the reference or that I didn’t have the conscious awareness to consider? It was understandable why dementia would become frustrating to live with as simple tasks like getting oneself a cup of water require help from others. Some people can’t stand the change; to go from a self-made individual to a person in a constant state of helplessness being forced to wait while others are attended to before it’s your turn. The constant state of helplessness can be difficult to adjust to; for some they become demanding, likely because their sense of significance has been reduced due to a lack of autonomy. It is possibly also because of a desire for instant gratification and possibly a comparison for when they could do it on their own time, but for others they become complacent and adapt by accepting a state of learned helplessness likely because they see the struggle as pointless since it’s a fact that they won’t get better. Needing to be pushed via wheelchair to other locations, being forced to adapt to other people’s schedules without being able to simply take actions with one’s own volition, and slowly forgetting yourself and your loved ones can all be painful and people adjust differently depending on their personalities. Sometimes, personalities themselves will radically change. Information becomes more important instead of the opposite from what I’ve observed; people always like to know what is going on and in my time there, I made sure to share as much information as possible because I knew that it was a way of helping them reclaim a sense of control from the state of helplessness. For some people, I would have to introduce myself everyday and answer the same questions, for others it was to repeat what was on their schedule if they had any planned trips outside the facility whenever they forgot, and familiarizing myself with their unique forms of sarcasm. My effort in responding to their questions was appreciated by all of them. My time there made me think of how woefully inept Hollywood was at portraying the US armed forces; it made me question if the superhuman qualities given to actors playing soldiers on screen was its own type of dehumanization. US culture constantly propagated this idea of a self-made individual with superhuman qualities who could overcome everything through sheer willpower. Often, the stereotype involved the brave people in military garments able to overcome all obstacles. They never consider old age; old actors give way to new ones, where the same hubris of god-like feats is constantly churned out for profit. Few think of what it means to become old and fewer still prepare for such a time in their life. Seeing soldiers mutilated on screen for gore porn is one aspect, but how many ever consider the care delivered in treating such grievous wounds, the painful emotions the families endure, and who knows how many other complications as a result of war?

A pernicious issue which bothered me when working there was the concept of Original Sin and what it would mean for their relationships with their loved ones. I had been told of cases where people with certain degenerative states of dementia became unable to distinguish when something was sexually inappropriate or became more likely to commit sexually inappropriate acts due to their condition through no fault of their own. How much worse would it feel for an honest victim of such tendencies to attribute it to some innate sinfulness as a result of free will when it was something they honestly had no control over? How often did people misattribute the cause of their action to something innate about their psyche, instead of something they truly couldn’t control? How many people believed that these veterans being unable to control their inhibitions would be perceived as their “real” or “inner” self instead of a horrible condition that they couldn’t control? How much more awful would they feel by misunderstanding the cause to be something they were consciously capable of? How much self-hate would they cast upon themselves believing it to be something about willpower that they could have changed, but failed to because they believed they were being sinful? How much more strained would their relationships with their loved ones be, if their loved ones thought it was some imminent truth about them that they hid because the loved one believed in Original Sin? For instance, how torturous would it feel if something similar to the infamous case of a man with pedophilic tendencies due to a brain tumor was attributed to an individual who genuinely had no control over their actions and could be proven as such by examining their brain? It was perturbing to think of how one horrid concept could possibly destroy the lives of veterans who were suffering. The suffering would maximize to further emotional grief; all because of a hateful, misanthropic concept like Original Sin. All because people had no other reference point besides the Bible teaching them to hate themselves through a misanthropic concept that did nothing but cause pain and misery. Thankfully, professionalism of the highest order was maintained and any who would believe in such a concept had never shown it. The general idea was always that it was the condition and that was simply stating the truth. It was the condition that they had no control over and not something innate as a result of free will to display of some so-called violent truth about humanity.

The staff of the veterans home were from diverse backgrounds of all kinds in different staff departments. The Nurse Managers, Doctors, Nurses, Certified Nursing Assistants, and Health Unit Coordinators were an assortment of varied ethnic backgrounds and religious beliefs. Avidly pious Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Sikhs worked in tandem with coworkers who were Agnostic, Atheist, scientifically-minded but not altogether irreligious people, and even a gentleman who professed his own unique multi-spiritual beliefs during a lengthy conversation I had with him in the parking lot. To my knowledge, everyone was open to liberal values such as respect and equality for homosexuals and treating their fellow coworkers with the utmost dignity and respect. As mentioned, the ethnic make-up of the workforce was just as diverse; within both the Nurse Managers, Nurses, and Doctors; there were White, Black, Hispanic, Indian, and potentially other ethnic Asian workers. All of whom diligently followed the rules and held everyone accountable to the demanding standards for the sake of care for the veterans and keeping all veteran’s rights protected in compliance with the law. Many Haitian and Hispanic CNAs and housekeepers were fluently bilingual. It made me think that while the American Dream may be something one must fall asleep to believe in, the American ideal was most certainly expressed well in that care facility.

For my part, I felt honored to have made my own small contribution to helping veterans and I recommend working or volunteering at your local veteran’s homes as the staff assistance is likely to be sorely needed and every little bit of assistance really does add-up; both the veterans and staff are appreciative of all such efforts. Unfortunately, due to the demanding nature of the work environment, very few have the patience and perseverance to handle working at a veteran’s home. As a result, due to the sensitive nature of meeting the needs of veterans, a culture of hard work and correcting mistakes was built around selfless in-group cohesion.^[4] The demanding nature of the various jobs; whether Nurse Manager, Certified Nursing Assistant, Doctor, Med Nurse, Charge Nurse, or Health Unit Coordinator called for such a work ethic and it was most certainly built around selflessness for the sake of making veteran’s lives as comfortable and safe as possible. For those who are unaware, groupthink is actually beneficial for the cohesion of an organization, but only so long as groupthink is focused primarily on the goal of an organization and not misused to place higher value on the personal feelings of certain individuals or the entire group because that both distracts from the goal and thereby undercuts the chief aim of the group in attaining the goal.^[5] In other words, groupthink works well when people are held accountable for not meeting the expectations of the group. Equally as important is showing proper appreciation when a person conducts proper effort in fulfilling their assigned duties or going beyond those assigned duties when qualified and asked to do such for the organization. In effect, everyone enjoys being appreciated for the effort that they give to an organization that they care about. Within the veteran’s home; the hard work, dedication, and in-group trust that was always patient and willing to give a helping hand for any difficulties formed a culture of high-competence because everyone was both held accountable for their failures and taught how to correct those failures through careful guidance, explanations on what actions to do and not to do, and the reasons why. Questions were valued and answers readily given; early on, I failed to fulfill key monthly goals, but learned from my mistakes and worked to better my modus operandi within the scope of the tasks assigned to me and took lessons from those who were far beyond my skill level. I felt I learned a lot from the people there; in particular, the importance of saying no to others when you were expected to follow guidelines. This came from observing hyper-competent people like the doctor of the unit I worked in, learning the Charge Nurse was the one who was really in charge of the unit, and helping out the CNAs (Certified Nursing Assistants) who did their utmost to provide care for the veterans of the unit. I decided to utilize several psychology and work productivity books to put my best effort in fulfilling the needs of the demanding work environment; it was actually surprising to realize most people didn’t prepare for demanding workloads by utilizing such resources beforehand and I had come to the conclusion I had overestimated competence and effort in most other environments I had worked within based on the hyperbolic beliefs of the high school I attended and my own parents. By the time the contract for my work ended, I was given a hefty amount of praise and well wishes; many said I had done a great job and that I had indeed been able to keep up with one of the more demanding units to the satisfaction of organization goals. I was able to keep-up with the Doctor, Charge Nurse, CNAs, and many of the veterans wished me well saying they enjoyed meeting me and thanked me for my work and dedication. As you may imagine, at this current moment in my life, the veterans home stands as the best job I’ve ever had the pleasure of being a part of.

For those who don’t live in the US and have kept an interest in this personal account, I’d like to thank you for your interest and appreciation for the lives of people outside of your own country as I imagine it gets stifling to hear only about the most influential Western countries if you live outside of them. If the aforementioned has made you interested in helping veterans in your own country, I would suggest thinking over ways in which any suffering they endure can be alleviated or working to help correct any potential injustice done to people who’ve served your government; of course, that is assuming the military and potentially specific military personnel in question within your country serves the public good of your nation-state and people.

With all that being stated, here is my explanation for why I don’t believe in free will:

In his book Deviate, neuroscientist Beau Lotto mentions that assumptions are inculcated as a person grows up in their environment. We tend to attribute this to our preferences in taste, but the assumptions run far more deeply than that. The assumptions we inculcate from intuitive life experience determine our religion, our nationality, and our language.^[6] It even determines our social perception of “race” since race is merely a social construct according to scientists.^[7] Similarly, where and how we grow up determines our self-theories of who and what we are in relation to the world around us.^[8] There are all prior causes that most of us may not even be consciously aware of assessing as assumptions that we’ve grown up with.^[9] Our assumptions about the world and preferences therein are a statistical distribution; which means we would first generally have to learn why a particular belief is wrong before we accept another one to be right, especially if it is a strong belief of ours.^[10] In other words, we can’t jump from a set of beliefs like creationism to a new set of beliefs that are diametrically opposed like evolution without first understanding the basics of evolution, which would require slowly disentangling our assumptions about creationism.^[11] Within the scope of evolution itself, organisms are adapting to their environment through a lengthy process of ridding a species of useless traits and attaining more useful traits to keep alive in their habitat. Oftentimes, it’s a mix of positive and negative qualities in a mostly positive set of traits. Beau Lotto tries to argue in his book that free will could still exist because we form new meanings from our past.^[12] However, the past is something we can’t change and our shifting interpretation still wouldn’t change the fact a past event remains an axiom that we base meaning itself on and crucially, still forms a starting point for the acceptance of new beliefs.^[13]

In the book, Stumble on Happiness, Harvard professor and Social Psychologist, Daniel Gilbert explains how we humans mistakenly feel our personal perspectives and what we imagine about how the world operates are always objective.^[14] However, all we really do is fill in what we think living in a particular situation is like with our own imagination and we believe what we imagine about that situation to be representative of the objective reality.^[15] This is a natural human tendency and oftentimes occurs unconsciously without us fully recognizing our belief about something is just our personal interpretation and not objective reality itself.^[16] As such, our belief that we intuitively see reality for what it is only functions as a detriment to both our understanding of the world and of our own experiences. To better understand why this is, consider the fact that atoms, microbes, single-celled organisms, radio waves, and microwaves are all just as real as you or I, but they can’t be seen by the human eye. Furthermore, consider the fact that so much of our personal feelings and subsequent actions oftentimes depend on how good or bad the weather is, how much we’ve eaten, what we’ve eaten, what microbes are in our bodies, and so forth. What we see, as many of these psychologists assert, is just our subjective experience in the world. We don’t see reality for what it is, but we have the illusion of objectivity.^[17][18] The only way for us to become closer to being objective about the world is through scientific experimentation of testing hypotheses through the scientific method utilizing our scientific instruments to understand the world around us. Yet, even then, some interpretation might be necessary once we understand what the facts are. Finally, near the end of Stumble on Happiness, Gilbert explains that we as humans implicitly overemphasize our uniqueness and the uniqueness of other humans because our everyday experience is trying to find qualities that differentiate people to find the people that we want to spend our lives with; we try to find people who will be the most valuable of friends or whom we should marry or the best people to work with at a job.^[19] This biases us towards focusing only on differences and we tend to skim over or simply don’t register the normalcy of our experiences.^[20] We also try to rate ourselves as having more qualities that make us unique from the average person in surveys . . . even when we are the representative average.^[21] Gilbert provides a compelling argument in his book where he explains you can predict your future happiness before undergoing a particular experience (going to a specific amusement park, a holiday in a particular foreign country, or choosing between two high-quality jobs as a lifelong career path) by looking up the personal testimonies of any random person or set of people who has undergone that experience.^[22] Of course, the testimony would have to be an honest account and not simply one manufactured by an organization on its website that makes one push a narrative. Nevertheless, honest accounts of particular sets of experiences will suffice as an accurate account of information you neglected to consider and will be a useful measure for your feelings about materials you hadn’t considered regarding the experience that you wanted to know more about.

Now, to digress a bit, for those who wish to immediately argue that these two books could apply to the existence of a deity because humans aren’t good at seeing reality in any objective sense, please keep advised of the following: first, there is no central definition of what such a deity even is or what it would comprise itself of, or where it would originate from. It’s been 2000 years and the Abrahamic faiths have found nothing to prove the existence of the Abrahamic God. Second, there is no basis for beliefs in spiritual worlds and afterlives as none of that can be corroborated by any physical evidence and none has ever come forth to lend credence to the existence of any afterlives resembling anything the Abrahamic faiths have argued in support of. Finally, and most tellingly, you’re just trying to use your own ignorance as a basis for making an open-ended assumption that has no evidence; in short, it’s baseless and we have hard evidence that is demonstrable of what we can prove so we have to judge based on the evidence and not our personal feelings with matters of scientific inquiry. Insinuating from the basis of human ignorance would lower the level of credibility to the point where you could make-up anything such as the assertion that an invisible, translucent, spiritual pink polka dotted elephant flies across the universe faster than the speed of light. If you wish to say that there is evidence for the Abrahamic God, then please first try to show that your belief in your God can be separated from the scenario of the imaginary elephant that I made up just now. If your arguments can support both the Abrahamic God existing and the imaginary elephant that I just made-up existing then you’ve failed. This is not an attempt at an insult; I’m pointing out that you have to demonstrate this belief in a deity is founded on more than just anything you can make-believe like my ridiculous and fictitious idea of the elephant.

In the book, Thinking Fast and Slow, by legendary psychologist and Princeton professor Daniel Kahneman, details how we form coherent structures of how the world works through associations we make in our minds.^[23] This often makes us find causes for different subject matter that are entirely unrelated to each other. As such, we may form patterns to make up a coherent cause for why an event happened.^[24] When, in actuality, the cause could be something entirely unrelated or we could even be confusing cause for the effect or a correlation that isn’t specifically the cause. For instance, in the United States, many of the Right-leaning public blamed the violent protests in Baltimore to Black youth listening to rap music; trouble is, rap music is beloved by various ethnic groups across the United States and isn’t solely exclusive to what Black youth listen to and most youth (including Black youth) who listen to such music don’t go out of their way to commit violence. By contrast, the Baltimore police were known to give large payouts in court trials that they lost on a yearly basis with the demand that families and victims couldn’t go to the national media to speak on the violence conducted upon them by the Baltimore police in order to receive the payouts.^[25] Thereby, violating their first amendment rights and treating them as second-class citizens. If any family members or the victim of police brutality spoke out to the national media, then the local government could stop paying for the treatment of physical damages their officers caused.^[26] That would most certainly be a direct causal link, especially since four years of peaceful protests were ignored.^[27] To continue about free will. We also have hindsight bias; that is, we remember placing more confidence that an event was going to happen after it has already occurred despite the actual evidence showing we report very low confidence that a particular event was going to happen before it actually happened.^[28] We substitute what we thought of the past based on outcomes of the present that change our perception of what we believed.^[29] Many surveys regarding major political events show this; such as the percentage of US citizens who report they had lower confidence in the Iraq War of 2003 than what they actually reported back in 2003 or in the example given in Daniel Kahneman’s book, the confidence that people in the US had of Nixon’s trip to China.^[30][31]

From all I’ve learned through these and other psychology books, it has become clear to me that a lot of our memory and our actions are derived from situational contexts that we’re often unaware of. Original Sin thereby confuses cause and effect by deliberately misattributing everything to an unalterable, intrinsic biological state that is scientifically unfounded. This is a powerful form of fundamental attribution error. That is, people overweigh the influence of personality and don’t give reasonable weight to the situation that a person is in. Context matters, but the concept of Original Sin would posit without any credible evidence that everything horrific and violent is inevitable because humans have free will. Original Sin ignores everything relevant in uncovering why certain events happened and by doing so, provides a convenient moral shield for the worst offenders of war crimes like torturing children into becoming child soldiers, war rape, and genocide. How does the concept of Original Sin do that? It treats those egregious acts of violence as inevitable and thereby ignores any call to form corrective measures to hold perpetrators responsible as juvenile and idealistic. The reason for that is because of the pervasive belief that any human is capable of such behavior as a result of feeling too much freedom which allows them to be selfish and hateful. As mentioned prior, Original Sin promotes the idea that such devastating atrocities are never going to be able to be corrected, that there is absolutely nothing we can do to help others suffering in those situations, and that we can’t stymie or decrease these acts of egregious violence through any social changes. Just because events of human violence in the past went unchecked shouldn’t mean that we ignore events happening now from continuing that route. Yet, the Original Sin version of free will would have us believe that there is nothing we can do because humans will spontaneously behave in cruel and horrific ways. Abrahamic religious groups use free will as the objection in an almost synonymous notion with Original Sin; attributing every free act as an act closer to committing human violence or activities a religious group finds socially unacceptable. Social censure towards transgenders or homosexuals are widely scrutinized, but not the underlying belief that freedom of actions and freedom of thought will cause people to be selfish, cruel, and commit violence. It’s fundamentally an undemocratic belief.

Human violence is not inevitable, it is not unalterable, and much of the statistical evidence proves that humans have gradually become less prone to violence.^[32] Consequently, technology has become more thorough in uncovering wanton acts of human violence and state-sponsored violence that goes unchecked. That’s a valuable first step, because it means we’re treating the lives of every innocent that we see perish as significant, but our reaction can’t be this meaningless ascetic notion that human free will makes it unavoidable to change circumstances for the better. Even if we can’t stop a massive war or help everyone who is harmed; we should consider what small contribution can we make to alleviate the suffering, misery, and pain of people currently being harmed. The statistical information on human violence worldwide and the charities which hold themselves accountable show that contributions do help others and that every little bit helps to make a better life for people who are suffering.^[33][34]

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1. [1] Green, Hank. “Determinism vs Free Will: Crash Course Philosophy #24.” YouTube, Crash Course / PBS Digital Studios, 15 Aug. 2016, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCGtkDzELAI.

 

2. [2] Kahneman, Daniel. Chapter 9: Answering an Easier Question (97-107). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
3. [3] Green, Hank. “Compatibilism: Crash Course Philosophy #25.” YouTube, Crash Course / PBS Digital Studios, 22 Aug. 2016, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KETTtiprINU.
4. [4] Ispas, Alexa. Psychology and politics: a social identity perspective. Psychology Press, 2014.

 

5. [5] Ispas, Alexa. Psychology and politics: a social identity perspective. Psychology Press, 2014.
6. [6] Lotto, Beau. Chapter 6: The Physiology of Assumptions (1671 – 2121). Deviate: the Science of Seeing Differently. Hachette Books, 2017.

 

7. [7] Gannon, Megan. “Race Is a Social Construct, Scientists Argue.” Scientific American, 5 Feb. 2016, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-construct-scientists-argue/.

 

8. [8] Dweck, Carol S. Mindset: How You Can Fulfill Your Potential. Random House, 2012.

 

9. [9] Lotto, Beau. Deviate: the Science of Seeing Differently. Hachette Books, 2017.

 

10. [10] Lotto, Beau. Chapter 5: The Frog Who Dreamed of Being a Prince (1356 – 1670). Deviate: the Science of Seeing Differently. Hachette Books, 2017.

 

11. [11] Lotto, Beau. Deviate: the Science of Seeing Differently. Hachette Books, 2017.

 

12. [12] Lotto, Beau. Chapter 7: Changing the Future Past (2122 – 2429). Deviate: the Science of Seeing Differently. Hachette Books, 2017.

 

13. [13] Lotto, Beau. Chapter 6: The Physiology of Assumptions (1671 – 2121). Deviate: the Science of Seeing Differently. Hachette Books, 2017.

 

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