References

THE METAPHYSICS OF FREEDOM

by David P. Hunt

Department of Philosophy

Whittier College

Whittier, CA 90608

U.S.A.

An ineliminable part of our concept of human personhood

is the idea of free and morally responsible agency. This

idea is not metaphysically neutral; some metaphysical en-

vironments will accommodate it better than others, and

some may not accommodate it at all. Among the proposed

metaphysical presuppositions of free and morally respon-

sible agency, perhaps the one that has been most often

noted andaffirmed is the requirement that there be acces-

sible alternativesto the agent’s action. Let us call this

the “Principle of Alternate Possibilities” (or PAP),

formulating the principle this way:

PAP: A person performs an action freely, in the

sense required by moral responsibility, only if he could

have done otherwise.

If we are ever free and morally responsible agents

(according to this principle), we must on at least some

occasions face an “open future” in which the direction

we actually take is not the only one possible for us.

The idea that the future is in this sense “open” has been

subjected to two important critiques in Western thought.

One comes from arguments for fatalism: the view that the

course of events is logically, conceptually, or metaphysi-

cally necessary in such a way that the future is no more

open than the past. In De interpretatione 9, for example,

Aristotle worried that the prior truth of future-tense

propositions might limit the future to a single predeter-

mined path, a worry later shared by the Stoics and others.

The problem is only exacerbated when classical theism is

added to the picture, since these propositions about the

future are then not only true but also known; thus Augustine,

in De libero arbitrio III and De civitate Dei V, is forced

to wrestle with the question how an infallible deity’s prior

beliefs about the future could be consistent with the pos-

sibility of alternative outcomes.

The other important critique of an open future comes from

determinism: the view that past states of the physical world

causally determine all future states. While a handful of

rationalists, like Spinoza, have endorsed determinism on

purely a priori grounds, it is most often maintained either

as an empirical thesis about the kind of world we live in

(making it dependent on a posteriori considerations and

subject to revision in light of further evidence) or as a

presupposition of scientific inquiry (revisable, at least

in principal, should the presupposition outlive its useful-

ness). While the deterministic threat to free choice owes

much of its credibility to the rise of scientific natural-

ism over the last 400 years, it has been with us at least

since the advent of Democritean atomism.

Arguments for fatalism and determinism, in their various

forms, can be understood as reflecting a common underlying

structure.One way to construct parallel arguments for fatal-

ism and determinism, thereby bringing out what they share in

common, is to begin by assuming what is to be disproved: that

the future will include some action A that is free in the

sense required by moral responsibility. It can then be pointed

out that the positing of A presupposes something that is al-

ready true: that it was the case that A will occur (the first

version of fatalism), that God believed that A will occur

(the second, theological version of fatalism), that physical

states and laws sufficient for A’s occurrence were in place

(causal determinism). But these facts, being about the past,

are now necessary: no one can do anything about them now.

(“This alone is lacking even to God, to make undone things

that have once been done,” Aristotle notes at Nichomachean

Ethics VI.2.) And these (now) necessary facts about the past

also entail the posited action A. Because A is entailed by

something that is necessary, it is itself necessary. If A

happens necessarily, however, the agent could not have done

otherwise, and A fails to satisfy PAP. So given the truth

of PAP, our initial assumption about A--that it is free in

the sense required by moral responsibility--must be rejected

as false.

There are a number of grounds on which arguments of this

sort can be resisted. (1) One way to defend free agency

from such arguments is to charge them with a fallacy of

inference. Some arguments for fatalism, as Boethius and

Aquinas pointed out, owe their illusion of success to a

failure to distinguish necessitas consequentiae from

necessitas consequentis; others, as William Ockham noted,

mistakenly suppose that the necessity which (now) charac-

terizes past events and states of affairs can be extended

to any fact (however artificial) that can be represented

grammatically in the past tense. (2) Another way to

challenge these arguments is to deny one of their factual

premises: to maintain, for example, that the facts about

God are such that He does not exist in time and so does

not know the future as future (the classical position,

representted again by Boethius and Aquinas); or to cite

indeterminism at the micro-level as possible grounds for

a liberum arbitrium (Epicurus’s “swerve”); or to dispute

some other factual presupposition. (3) Yet another response,

following Hume and the majority of contemporary philosophers

in the Anglo-American analytic tradition, is to develop an

analysis of the agent’s power to do otherwise such that this

power turns out to be perfectly compatible with the kinds of

necessity at work in the arguments for fatalism and determinism.

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THE SUPER BOWL AS RELIGIOUS FESTIVAL

by Joseph L. Price

Joseph L. Price is associate professor of religion

Whittier College, Whittier, California.

his article appeared in the Christian Century, February 22, 1984, p.190.

Current articles and subscription information can be found at www.

christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for Religion Online by

Ted

& Winnie Brock.

When the Dallas Cowboys are at the top of their game,

winning routinely and decisively, one of the favorite

quips which circulates in north Texas concerns Arlington

Stadium, where the Cowboys play their home games.

The stadium has a partial roof which covers much of the

stands but none of the playing field. Cowboy fans say

that God wants to able to see his favorite football team

more clearly.

This is the attitude which ancient societies brought to

their games. In ancient Greece, for example, the

Olympics were only one set of athletic contests which

were performed in honor of the gods. Among the

Mayans in Central America, the stadium was attached

to an important temple, and the stands were adorned

with images of the gods and reliefs of sacred animals.

The ball game started when the high priest threw the

ball onto a circular stone in the center of the field: the

sacred rock, the omphalos, considered the sacred

center and associated with creation mythology. Thus

the game was connected to the Mayan story of the

world’s origins.

Professional football games are not quite so obviously

religious in character. Yet there is a remarkable sense

in which the Super Bowl functions as a major religious

festival for American culture, for the event signals a

convergence of sports, politics and myth. Like festivals

in ancient societies, which made no distinctions regard-

ing the religious, political and sporting character of

certain events, the Super Bowl succeeds in reuniting

these now disparate dimensions of social life.

The pageantry of the Super Bowl is not confined to the

game itself, nor to the culture heroes who attend it --

e.g., Bob Hope, John Denver, Dan Rather and other

celebrities -- for the largest audience watches the game

via television. And the political appeal of the festival is

not restricted to its endorsement by political figures such

as President Reagan, who pronounced the 1984 Super

Bowl’s benediction. The invocation is a series of political

rituals: the singing of the national anthem and the

unfurling of a 50-yard-long American flag, followed by

an Air Force flight tactics squadron air show.

The innate religious orientation of the Super Bowl was

indicated first by the ritual of remembrance of “heroes

of the faith who have gone before.” In the pregame

show, personalities from each team were portrayed as

superheroes, as demigods who possess not only the

talent necessary for perfecting the game as an art but

also the skills for succeeding in business ventures and

family life.

For instance, one of the most effective segments was

about Joe Delaney, the former running back for the

Kansas City Chiefs who died while trying to save two

children from drowning. In a functional sense, Delaney

was being honored as a saint. The pregame moment

of silence in honor of the life and contributions of

George Halas, the late owner of the Chicago Bears

and one of the creators of the National Football League,

was even more significant: I am not sure whether the

fans were silent in memory of ‘Papa Bear” or whether

they were offering a moment of silence to him.

Nevertheless, the pause was reminiscent of an act of

prayer.

Bronco Nagurski, a hall of famer (which stands for

official canonization), had the honor of tossing the coin

at the center of the playing field to signify the start of the

game. The naming of a Most Valuable Player at the end

of the game was a sign of the continuing possibility for

canonization.

But the Super Bowl and its hype could not dominate the

consciousness of many Americans without the existence

of a mythos to support the game. Myths, we know, are

stories which establish and recall a group’s identity:

its origin, its values, its world view, its raison d’être.

Two dominant myths support the festivity and are

perpetuated by it. One recalls the founding of the

nation and the other projects the fantasies or hopes

of the nation. Both myths indicate the American identity.

The first concerns the ritual action of the game itself.

The object of the game is the conquest of territory. The

football team invades foreign land, traverses it

completely, and completes the conquest by settling in the

end zone. The goal is to carry the ritual object, the

football, into the most hallowed area belonging to the

opponent, his inmost sanctuary. There, and only there,

can the ritual object touch the earth without incurring

some sort of penalty, such as the stoppage of play or

the loss of yardage.

This act of possession is itself reflective of cosmogonic

myths, for, as Mircea Eliade has noted, “to organize a

space is to repeat the paradigmatic work of the gods”

(The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion

[Harcourt, Brace, 1959], p. 32). Conquering a territory

and bringing order to it is an act equivalent to

consecration, making the space itself sacred by means

of recalling and rehearsing the primordial act of creation.

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