Left dangling: limits to free will revisited

In an earlier post (Freedom of choice and lined writing paper) I opened a discussion on Rabbi Akiva’s apothegm that “everything is foreseen, but free will is given” (Avot 3:19). My point was that, while this teaching is usually taken to allude to God’s foresight and supervision of the world, it can also be understood to refer to the way our freedom to exercise our choice is limited by human considerations as well as by divine ones. This line of thought would not be inappropriate, given the era in which Rabbi Akiva lived and the cause of his death.

It is often assumed that the free will versus determinism debate hinges on whether a man is a puppet who, dangling from the puppeteer’s string, has no real choice in what he does. Those who take this extreme view often press the point that God controls absolutely everything: if a person exercises choice in performing any act, it is only because the circumstances leading to that choice and the means of resolving it are both predetermined by God. Free choice is therefore an illusion. We are however bound to believe that we exercise free will, since it is this that gives any sort of personal meaning to our lives.

Others take the view that God’s control over human thoughts and actions is more nuanced in that, while setting the parameters within which we act out our daily existence, He has the freedom to choose the extent to which we exercise a genuine freedom of choice.

I can give an example, by way of analogy. Many years ago, two of my grandsons were fighting one another. Initially a play fight, the game became a little too rough and I decided to intervene. I lifted the lighter boy off the ground and held him firmly so that he could neither kick nor punch his cousin, though he made strenuous attempts to do so.

At one level my intervention curtailed the physical motion of the wriggling child. He could neither escape my grasp nor approach his foe. This was clearly a constraint upon his freedom to choose where to move. On another level, however, I contemplated the full range of options that remained available to him:

• Continue to resist my grip (in which case I would simply strengthen it as necessary);
  
  
• Stop squirming and relax (in which case I would have put him down, at a safe distance from his protagonist);
  
  
• Say he was sorry (in which case I would have put him down near his erstwhile rival, having first extracted an undertaking from the latter that hostilities would cease);
  
  
• Scream (in which case I would have ignored him till he stopped screaming);
  
  
• Call for his mother to intervene (which is what he actually did).

I like to think that this scenario reflected in human terms the sort of thing that Rabbi Akiva had in mind in this mishnah. Do you agree?