Free will, rocks, and Camus

Since we are all in an uproar regarding free will (see here, here, and here), I’ll toss my idea into the mix. Hypothetically, I am a compatibilist.

In this I mean that, hypothetically, I could see the material aspects of our selves and the world in which we find ourselves as sufficiently influential as to determine some or all of our actions. I am willing to see this as being the way that the God has established the world (or that this is the way it is always set up). In this, I am suggesting that the material world may be designed to bring people to a point wherein they have to make a decision regarding their interaction with God.

In my mind, Camus’s famous essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, is quite helpful. Although Sisyphus has no control over his fate, he is allowed control over his own will. The will is Sisyphus’s alone and, in the essay, he chooses to make his fate his choice, creating an existential hero.

I am saying that it is possible to be a compatibilist if you allow people this one act of free will: whether or not they will submit to the will of God. That act, in similitude of Christ’s act of submission, may be our one true use of free will.