It is an ancient and persistent question, perhaps never more adroitly framed than in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, in the fifth century B.C. The play's harrowing prophecy, delivered by the oracle at Delphi, is that the hero will someday slay his father and marry his mother. Oedipus, hearing of this destiny, determines to escape by fleeing his home in Corinth. At a crossroads, he quarrels with a traveler over the right-of-way and ends up killing the man. Soon afterward, he arrives in Thebes, where, after saving the city from a murderous monster, the Sphinx, he is crowned king and marries the widowed queen Jocasta.
Two decades later, Oedipus learns the truth: his real parents are not the couple who raised him but the man he killed at the crossroads (who was King Laius of Thebes in disguise) and Queen Jocasta. For all his willful striving, Oedipus realizes that the gods, not he, have determined his lot. In horror, he gouges out his eyes.
The question posed by Sophocles' drama goes to the heart of what it is to be human: Are we autonomous individuals who have some say in what we do, or are our thoughts and behaviors determined by outside forces? Like Sophocles, the earliest philosophers leaned toward the view that the gods control man's actions, a belief that reached its culmination during the seventeenth century, in the writings of the Dutch philosopher Benedict de Spinoza. Spinoza believed that if man seemed capable of making up his mind, it was only an illusion, for all matter and thought are attributes of God and thus are determined by Him.
The opposing view was advanced in the second century B.C., by the Hebrew authors of the Old Testament. Each individual, they said, freely chooses to follow either the evil impulse (yetzer hara) or the good (yetzer ha-tov). In the early fifth century A.D., Saint Augustine elaborated upon this belief, asserting that God had given man free will - but that He had also instilled in him the desire to be holy. Indeed, if man did not have the capacity to choose God of his own accord, many later Christian theologians observed, any punishment for sin would be cruel and pointless - and instance of God's penalizing man for wrongdoing that He himself had preordained.
Another view of free will has been espoused by such atheistic philosophers as Democritus, who, in the late fifth century B.C., suggested that the interactions of invisible particles, akin to atoms and molecules, determined all activity on Earth, including the acts of man. But it was mainly during the past hundred years that nonreligious discussions of free will came to predominate. Today, some determinists, in the tradition of Democritus, hold that all our thoughts and behaviors reflect molecular activity in the brain governed not by individual volition but by the natural laws of physics and chemistry. On the other hand are those who maintain, simply, that evolutionary adaptation has given man the ability to decide his own thoughts and actions.
The debate continues, but science has introduced an important new piece of evidence. Researchers looking for the physical foundation of free choice have discerned electrical changes in the brain that precede the reported time when we are first conscious of our decisions to act. In philosophical terms, the most striking discovery suggests that what most of us think of as free will may be physiologically impossible. The medical evidence could thus force philosophers to reconsider one of
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