QUESTIONS

The Freedom Question

DO YOU HAVE THE POWER TO MAKE FREE CHOICES?

Chips or salad? Diet Coke or Dr Pepper? Dine-in or take-out?

It's a basic fact of human life that we make choices. We make them all the time — sometimes so effortlessly and so subtly that we don't even notice it. For example, you chose to start reading this book. By continuing to read it, you're implicitly choosing not to do something else right now. Before this day is over, you'll make hundreds more choices.

But are those choices free? That's one of the most enduring questions in the history of human thought. Some philosophers have said that we do make free choices, while others have denied it. Still others have said that our choices are free in some senses but not free in others.

There's a sense in which even a computer makes choices. For instance, it chooses the best time to run maintenance services (usually when the computer is idle). Nevertheless, we don't usually think of a computer as making free choices, the kind of choices that are made by a thoughtful, self-conscious, morally responsible agent. It's just a machine following its programming.

But what about you? Are your choices just the stimulus-response outputs of a neurological computer (also known as your brain)? Or are they the free choices of a morally responsible agent?

Do you have the power to make free choices?

If you answered yes to the Freedom Question, go here.

If you answered no to the Freedom Question, go here.

A Joke with a Serious Point

Forgive me! I couldn't resist beginning with a little philosophical humor. As you probably realized, you were directed to this page no matter how you answered the Freedom Question.

But there's a serious point here, too. One of our most basic human intuitions is that we, unlike computers and robots, have the ability to make free choices in life: to deliberate about our options and to select between different courses of action. What's more, we're often held morally responsible for our choices (and rightly so). You may be reading this book simply for entertainment, but how you decide to answer the questions, and how you respond to what you subsequently read, is, in a very important sense, up to you. And how you choose to respond may well have important implications for your life and the lives of others.

So press on! Consider carefully how you would answer the questions and take responsibility for the choices you make and their implications for your worldview.

Of course, some readers of this book may still want to insist that in reality none of us make any free choices and none of us are morally responsible for our choices, despite our strong intuitions to the contrary. If that's what you really think, it's going to be difficult to change your mind at this point.

But on one level, that doesn't matter for the purposes of this book. After all, you've already made the choices to pick up the book and to read this far, even if those weren't free choices. In the same way, you can choose to continue to read: to answer the questions and to reflect further on your worldview.

For the time being, I'm happy to settle for that.

Now continue here.

IS THERE ANY OBJECTIVE TRUTH?

"It's all relative, isn't it?"

Some people believe — or at least claim to believe — that all truth is relative. They say that what's true for one person need not be true for another person, or that what's true for people in one culture (e.g., a Jewish community in New York) needn't be true for people in another culture (e.g., a Buddhist community in Tibet). Such folk often insist that truth isn't something "out there" to be discovered; rather, truth is something we choose or create for ourselves. Truth is always "inside" us rather than "outside" us.

So, for example, while the statement "There is a God" may be true for some people, it doesn't have to be true for everyone. What's true is always relative to a person's particular viewpoint, context, or culture. So we shouldn't speak about the truth, as though truth is the same for everyone. Rather, we should speak about my truth, your truth, their truth, and so on.

In contrast, other people insist that many truths — including the most important truths — are objectively true. There are some things that are just true period, regardless of what anyone happens to think, hope, or feel about those matters. (As they sometimes say, "The truth hurts!") These objective truths are true for everyone, everywhere, because they're based on objective facts about reality that are independent of human ideas, desires, and feelings. According to this view, it makes no sense to say that the statement "There is a God" could be true for me but not true foryou. Either it's true or it isn't: end of story.

But which position do you take? Is there any objective truth?

If you answered yes to the Truth Question, go here.

If you answered no to the Truth Question, go here.

IS IT POSSIBLE TO KNOW THE TRUTH?

It's little use having millions of dollars in the bank if you can't access that money. In the same way, objective truth is little use to us if we can't access it — if we can't know, with some degree of confidence, just what that truth is. If the truth is unknowable, if it's always beyond our grasp, there might as well be no truth at all. We'd be wasting our time by trying to pursue it.

Most people would agree that we have intellectual faculties, such as reason and perception, that allow us to investigate matters of interest to us and to...