Today, we’re going to place the idea of agency, the ability to choose good or evil, also known as free will, in Mormonism within the discussion of free will in philosophy.
This post gets into the philosophy and theology of free will/agency, so if you haven’t read part one of this series, I’d suggest you do so if you haven’t already deconstructed free will. This process can get a bit trippy, and I don’t want anyone to go into it without as much informed consent as possible. In part one, I detail what I see as the pros and cons of no longer believing in free will.
I am not a philosopher, so for general philosophy, check out my Ethics and Moral Philosophy page, which include links to perspectives on determinism and free will. You can also read books like Free Will, by Sam Harris, which I will quote from in this post. Fair warning, the linked resources and the book do discuss some horrific crimes, including abuse and murder.
My goal here is to contextualize agency in Mormonism within the discussion of free will and determinism. We’re matching up terms here and taking stock of our Mormonism-based philosophical beliefs as well as examining other perspectives.
Spoiler alert: you’ll probably find you’ve never fully believed in free will.
Tom Hiddleston as Loki in Loki says “This is absurd.”
I hope this post will be a helpful entry point to the discussion of free will.
Christian Belief
First, let’s look at agency in Christianity in general.
One of the biggest philosophical questions that Christian theists, or believers in God, have to answer is the problem of evil. If there is an all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful God, then why doesn’t he stop the suffering and evil in the world?
Free will (what Mormons call agency) is Christianity’s main answer to the problem of evil. God created us with the ability to choose, and humans don’t always choose to be good.
Traditional Christianity considers man to be fallen and naturally evil due to original sin. The goal is thus for humans to use their free will to choose to become good through the grace of God, traditionally through accepting Jesus as their Savior and being baptized. Those who choose good will be rewarded with an afterlife in heaven while the wicked will be condemned to hell.
Problems with Free Will in Christianity
However, Christianity ran into some problems with this doctrine.
In his book Free Will, Sam Harris says:
“The popular conception of free will seems to rest on two assumptions: (1) that each of us could have behaved differently than we did in the past, and (2) that we are the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions in the present” (pg. 6).
Believing that everyone can choose to believe in Jesus might fly when you live in a society where everyone has to at least pretend to believe from cradle to grave. But if you interact with other cultures and areas of the world, you realize that people cannot just spontaneously learn about and believe in Jesus. The ability to accept Jesus as your Savior is to some degree dependent on external factors—at the very least, hearing the gospel preached to you.
So you have people who have never had a chance to believe in Jesus being condemned to hell, and you’ve got babies who died without being baptized labeled as evil and condemned to burn in hell for all eternity.
This unfairness undermines all of Christianity, so it has to adapt. Different Christian denominations have modified their ideas of free will in different ways, such as with universal salvation or baptism of desire.
Mormon Belief
Let’s briefly review how the LDS Church gets around these problems with free will, or agency.
In the Mormon doctrine you were probably taught growing up, agency is also the answer to the problem of evil. In fact, agency is so important that when Lucifer presented an alternative Plan of Salvation in which agency didn’t exist but everyone would be saved, God rejected that plan, and we fought the War in Heaven over the issue.
Joseph Smith rejected infant baptism as evil and unnecessary, declaring baptism to be necessary only for people old and developed enough to understand right from wrong, which Joseph Smith identifies as people at least eight years old. “And their children shall be baptized for the remission of sins when eight years old, and receive the laying on of hands” (Doctrine and Covenants 68:27).
Thus people are born innocent and then choose good or evil. As Joseph Smith wrote in the second article of faith, “[Mormons] believe that men will be punished for their own sins and not for Adam’s transgression.”
(At least, Mormons don’t believe in original sin if you don’t take verses like Mosiah 3:19, which says “the natural man is an enemy to God and has been from the fall of Adam” and certainly seems to be describing original sin, at face value. But that’s a different discussion.)
Doctrine and Covenants 137, which dates to 1836 in Kirtland, Ohio, also declares that people who die before receiving the gospel but who would have received the gospel if given the chance, will be saved.
Later, Joseph Smith solves the issue caused by the technical requirement of baptism by introducing baptisms for the dead (plus there are other proxy ordinances).
Mormonism also has degrees of glory, which allow for more nuance in the afterlife than the “heaven versus hell” binary does.
Compatibilism
These ways of modifying free will to acknowledge that external factors have some impact are types of compatibilism. Compatibilism is the idea that free will and determinism are compatible.
Determinism is the idea that everything is determined by causes external to human will. (Philosophers like Sam Harris do acknowledge that “willpower” as in the power to do things does exist but that it’s determined by factors that you can’t control, such as your brain structure and functioning.) So when we talk about human choices, determinists generally say that your choices are all made as a result of environmental and genetic factors.
A compatibilist would say that external factors can be super important to our choices without that negating the existence of free will.
Most Christians today, including Mormons, are compatibilists, though they likely don’t think about it in those terms.
Before learning about determinism, I believed in a very liberal compatibilism that was nearly determinism, though I didn’t know either of those terms. That may be where you are now. A lot of people get to that point just through empathy or observation.
For example, let’s pretend you’re a believer talking about people accepting the gospel. The more you believe in free will, the more likely you are to say that people should let the missionaries in when they knock at the door and say they have a message about Jesus Christ. If you’re more to the determinist side of compatibilist spectrum, then you’ll be more likely to acknowledge that factors like fear for personal safety and a normal urge to not let random people into your house would keep a rational person from hearing the gospel despite coming into some contact with missionaries.
Actors from The Book of Mormon musical dressed up as missionaries and posing.
If you were a progressive member, you might even say that things the church has done, such as banning Black people from exaltation, would understandably keep good people from recognizing the church as Jesus Christ’s.
Likewise, when people made mistakes, if you were trying to see things from their point of view and be Christlike, you might have looked at where they were coming from and said, “You know, I don’t agree with their choice, but I can see how, based on where they were at and the information they had, they made that choice.”
Our question now is, what separates this compatibilism, sometimes called soft determinism, from hard determinism?
Determinism
The difference is that hard determinists don’t believe in free will at all. So a determinist believes that your choice to have oatmeal or eggs for breakfast is determined by factors such as your genetic preferences for certain tastes, your schedule, your budget, and so forth.
More seriously, with issues such as child abuse and murder, a compatibilist might say that the perpetrator was in an unfortunate situation but ultimately had a choice and chose evil (and therefore is evil), and a determinist would say that the conditions of that person’s brain and environment made it so the perpetrator effectively did not have any other choice than the one they made. Like anyone else, they made the choice that seemed the best to them at the time, but they had a lot of messed up factors involved and so made a messed-up choice. With this explanation, people can do good in one context but do evil in another because external factors matter.
Determinists also point to neuroscience for support. Quoting from Free Will by Sam Harris, pages 8–9:
“The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously used EEG to show that activity in the brain’s motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move. Another lab extended this work using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): Subjects were asked to press one of two buttons while watching a “clock” composed of a random sequence of letters appearing on a screen. They reported which letter was visible at the moment they decided to press one button or the other. The experimenters found two brain regions that contained information about which button subjects would press a full 7 to 10 seconds before the decision was consciously made. More recently, direct recordings from the cortex showed that the activity of merely 256 neurons was sufficient to predict with 80 percent accuracy a person’s decision to move 700 milliseconds before he became aware of it.”
Donald Glover as Troy Barnes in Community.
In other words, a determinist would say that while we feel that we consciously make choices, data suggests that our brain makes choices without the input of our conscious selves. While you feel like you’ve made a choice in the moment, in reality, your brain uses the resources it already had available via genetics and past conditioning (environmental factors) to reach a decision—and then you become consciously aware of that decision.
Compatibilist Rebuttal
The compatibilist rebuttal to this point, per Harris’s characterization of Daniel Dennett’s argument in Harris’s book Free Will, is that “even if our thoughts and actions are the product of unconscious causes, they are still our thoughts and actions. Anything that our brains do or decide, whether consciously or not, is something that we have done or decided. The fact that we cannot always be subjectively aware of the causes of our actions does not negate free will—because our unconscious neurophysiology is just as much “us” as our conscious thoughts are.” (Page 20)
In other words, compatibilists like Dennett don’t see this neuroscience research as a problem because regardless of whether decisions are conscious, we are the ones making them.
Determinist Rebuttal
Harris responds by saying that compatibilists are changing the subject. We are arguing about whether actions are a result of the will, not caused by the self. If your body stopped producing the red blood cells you need to survive, your body would have done that, yes, but that would not have been an act of your will (pg. 21). If you don’t make decisions consciously in the moment, then you don’t have free will.
I find Sam Harris’s argument here most compelling, but you’ll note that this argument hinges on the definition of free will. Daniel Dennett’s point suggests that whatever the technical definition of free will, which people rarely consciously believe in because it’s unrealistic and outdated, our choices still come from us rather than someone with a remote control operating us. That feeling of control is what we care about.
And if I can take things back to the practical effects of determinism for a second, we’ll note that this is how deconstructing free will can empower us. If we know that our decisions are made largely by our unconscious brain based on past experience, then the way to make choices more aligned with our values in the future is to use our conscious brain to give ourselves experiences and attitudes more aligned with the choices we want to make in the future.
Quantum Mechanics
Back to the theory. Some people also argue that at the level of quantum mechanics, events don’t transpire according to the same rules, so we can’t say that everything happens according to causal law.
Determinists reply that even if some things do happen randomly, that is an argument for chaos rather than free will. I think that chaos probably plays a role in how things happen too, but I don’t really understand quantum mechanics, so I’m not going to discuss it in any detail.
New Beliefs
So according to philosophy and neuroscience, apparently we’ve been living Satan’s plan all along. There’s no free will! Maybe Satan wasn’t trying to defy God and start the War in Heaven. Maybe he was just trying to tell us that Heavenly Father’s plan was unworkable because the entire concept of free will makes no sense.
Wreck-It Ralph from Wreck-It Ralph says, “Thanks, Satan.”
After learning about compatibilism and determinism, what do you believe?
I’ve personally deconstructed free will and don’t believe in it—but to be fair, I never was fully on team free will in the first place. Am I a determinist? I don’t emotionally identify with the term, but yes, my views are determinist.
However, while my labeling of my views has evolved, my personal philosophy now is just an extended version of my approach when I was a progressive Mormon: People do things for reasons—though sometimes those reasons are extremely stupid.
The idea of deconstructing free will is scary if you’re an adherent of a religion that depends on the concept, but if you’re already an atheist, then a lot of this discussion becomes semantics.
Future Posts
At this point, you are probably wondering, “If it’s all basically semantics, then why bring it up at all? What a waste of time!”
Oh, but just you wait. Society’s redefining free will as it’s become more compatibilist over time hasn’t stopped the original ideas of free will from continuing to shape our world in ways that are counterproductive.
Our ideas about mental health, moral responsibility, and criminal justice are often still based in an unconscious belief in the unrealistic definition of free will that Sam Harris argues against.
But first we have to talk about fatalism and the cosmic view of determinism, because that is where a lot of the emotional spiraling comes from. If you’re spiraling a bit, then check out part three, which is about fatalism in a world without magic.
In the meantime, what do you think? Are you a determinist? Still a compatibilist? Do you have a different definition of free will? Let me know in the comments or on social media.
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