Two Senses of Free Will, or What Really Happened in the Garden

 

… in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked ….

Genesis 3:5-7 

Eve took of the fruit thereof freely. She was exercising her free will. This was itself a gift of God, a sign of His goodness, that He had given human beings the power to choose. This was also the most basic sense in which we were created in His image, for God is rarely conceived of today as having arms and legs or even a body, but of course everything that God does He does freely.

            But this was also Eve’s sin: to have used this power, given to her in goodness, to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I suddenly realize, however, that free will is crucially ambiguous. It can mean simply the ability to choose between options, or alternatively in the religio-moral context, the ability to choose between options of good and evil recognized as such. The former sort of free will has no moral connotations; it just means, for example, that I have the ability to lie in bed in the morning or to get up out of bed, etc. It is only the latter type of free will that could be implicated in sinning.

            Which was Eve employing when she ate of this particular tree? It seems to me it could only have been the innocent type, the same free will with which she would pick from any tree, or do anything at all of her own volition. The reason is simple: until she had eaten of this tree, she did not know good and evil as such – that is the very knowledge the fruit of the tree imparted; therefore she could not have knowingly done anything wrong. Therefore she did nothing wrong; she did not sin.

            But she did sin. The Bible tells us so. So what was her sin? Let me think more about free will. I began with the presumption that God gave it to us. But if there are two kinds of free will, did God give us both? Apparently not, for the freedom to choose evil was what Eve (and then Adam) acquired by eating of the tree. So God did not give us this kind of free will; we took it. We used the first kind of free will to obtain the second kind. (To make a less cumbersome verbal distinction, we could humorously call the latter “tree will.”)

Was there anything wrong in that? For example, was it an act of stealing? Well, suppose it was, in the sense of taking something without permission that belongs to somebody else. Suppose even that stealing is wrong. But Eve did not know that stealing was wrong, no more than she knew that her nakedness was shameful. So she had been exercising her free will, not her tree will. Therefore what she did was not wrong. Then maybe it was not even stealing. If I pick up somebody else’s pencil, thinking it is mine, and walk away with it, have I stolen it? In any case, I have done nothing wrong (other things equal, for example, assuming no greater care was called for in my actions at that moment).

But God had expressly told Eve and Adam not to eat of that tree. They had therefore disobeyed Him. Surely that was wrong. Maybe so; but did they sin, that is, did they do wrong knowingly (= I walked away with somebody else’s pencil knowing that it was theirs and that I should not)? Ex hypothesi: no. They knew – well, Eve knew anyway – that they were disobeying God; but they did not know that disobeying God was wrong. How could they? They didn’t know what wrong was. It was like Madame Curie picking up a piece of radioactive material – and, like Eve, even suffering the consequences of having done so – prior to knowing what radioactivity is, even having the notion. But then, why would, how could a just God have kicked us out of the Garden? We did nothing wrong.

I’ll tell you why: He was pissed off! Consider: What was the knowledge that Eve, and then Adam, obtained? In other words, what had they done wrong? They disobeyed God. That’s it. That is why God got angry with them, and punished them: They had disobeyed Him. And so in one stroke, morality was discovered … and seen to be a charade. Morality turns out to be nothing other than God ruling by fiat, and what makes it morality is simply the type of emotional reactions God has to being disobeyed: anger, the desire to punish, etc.

As Euthyphro might have put it: Their behavior was not pleasing to Him. This time the definition of morality as what pleases the gods worked, because, unlike the religion of ancient Greece, with its multiple gods having disparate and conflicting desires, monotheism postulates only one God. So rightness is simply whatever pleases Yahweh, and wrongness whatever displeases Him.

We can see, in fact, why God would be doubly displeased. For not only had Adam and Eve disobeyed Him, but … they found Him out. Rather like Dorothy looking behind the curtain of the Wizard of Oz. For now they knew that God did not rule by justice, or even by the love of a father, but by power alone. His commandments were simply whim (or something equally arbitrary, like personality) and domination. God had to evict all of us forever from His Garden because … He was ashamed. No fig leaf for God. It was His Garden, in which He wanted to be able to walk around unencumbered; so it was we who had to leave.

Now what? There we were, on our own. But, as the serpent foretold, we had become “as gods,” for we knew all about good and evil (and even about God, or His goodness). Having seen through the charade and possessing this profound understanding, once evicted from Eden, humans could fall back on themselves to create human morality in the image of God’s, based simply on our desires and our power. So we hate and condemn and punish those who transgress our commands, who disobey us. But, more, like God we also have (but only to some degree, again like God) the power to dupe others (or even ourselves!) into thinking that morality has some objective basis: that what we like is right, and what we don’t like is wrong.

But because we humans are a multiplicity, unlike the one God, we were back to the situation of the Greek gods and the Euthyphro problem: different people have different desires, hence different moralities. Each person or group of persons, like God, wants its preferences to be considered the right ones. The bogy of relativism is brandished as assuring that there must be One Right Way. But none of us can prove that our way is that one right way.

And now, having once again eaten of the tree, we know why: There is no one right way; there are only competing interests and power plays. This is the Second Fall.

-- from my book Bad Faith (2013)

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