1 of 1- natmain
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Aquinas' First Way and Free Will
I have a question reguarding Aquinas' First Way and free will. I understand the First Way from a biological level with the scenerio:
My finger causes the pencil on the desk to move
the muscles in my hand cause my finger to move
my brain causes the muscles to move
the firing of neurons in my brain cause my brain to "move"
ect.
This scenerio makes sense to me. However, and issue of free will arrises in my head with this scenerio. If we look not just at the biological aspects in this scenerio we can see that:
My finger causes the pencil on the desk to move
the muscles in my hand cause my finger to move
my brain causes the muscles to move
my will causes my brain to "move"
ect.
If then the souce of the motion is an unmoved mover, would I then have no free will, since my will is being moved by another source?
- Scott
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Re: Aquinas' First Way and Free Will
Alexander wrote:
Basically the answer would be that your free will is "moved" by God, but only in the sense that God is causing you to be free. We have to remember that causality isn't the same as determinism - God's causal activity is necessary for you to will anything, but His activity does not determine what you will.
As far as I can see, that's the basic answer for Thomists as well -- or at least it's the answer I would have given had you not given it first. (The most I might do is say instead that "God is causing you to have the power of volition," and even that much isn't necessary.) So I don't think this specific question requires us to differentiate between Aquinas's and Suárez's accounts of free will, although such differentiation is important for other reasons.
Last edited by Scott (7/15/2015 9:08 am)
- Scott
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Re: Aquinas' First Way and Free Will
Incidentally . . .
We have to remember that causality isn't the same as determinism - God's causal activity is necessary for you to will anything, but His activity does not determine what you will.
. . . I'm forever harping on this very point, so I may as well mention (since Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange came up in another thread) that Fr. G-R is emphatic about it too (in particular here*). So this is another point on which (at least some) Thomists would agree with you.
----
* I see that that hardcover 2-volume set is "currently unavailable" on Amazon. That's probably because I bought the one available copy of it a couple of years ago. Sorry. 
(Paperback reprints are still available, though.)
Last edited by Scott (7/15/2015 2:18 pm)
- Scott
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Re: Aquinas' First Way and Free Will
I think I get the impression that Thomism is against me on this because Brian Davies, who I take to be a pretty archetypal Thomist, seems to (at least implicitly) decide that God determines our free choices, in his rejection of the free-will defence.
That's probably a fair reading of Davies, and even Garrigou-Lagrange makes a great deal of hay out of the argument that God can effectuate His will through contingent causal processes as easily as through deterministic ones (suggesting that God may, in a primary-causal sense, "determine" the outcomes even of processes that are contingent in a secondary-causal sense).
That may be a point on which Thomists and Scotists do genuinely differ: namely, to put it one way, whether God's doing that sort of thing should count as "determinism" or whether only deterministic secondary causation should count. But if so, I think that's still a distinct issue. Each side in that argument would agree that God doesn't determine what we will; the argument would be mainly over whether Thomists were consistent in holding that view.