What If You're Not Really Free? Hasdai Crescas and the Puzzle of Choice

Imagine you’re standing in front of two plates of cookies. One is chocolate chip, your favorite. The other is oatmeal raisin, which you hate. You reach for the chocolate chip. Did you freely choose it? Of course you did. But now imagine that someone had secretly hypnotized you to always choose chocolate chip when given the choice. Would you still be free? What if instead of hypnosis, it was your own brain chemistry, your childhood, your genes, and everything that’s ever happened to you that made you reach for the chocolate chip? Would that make a difference?

This is the kind of question that haunted a 14th-century Jewish philosopher named Hasdai Crescas. He lived through one of the worst disasters to hit the Jewish community of medieval Spain. In 1391, violent mobs attacked Jewish neighborhoods across the country. Thousands were killed. More than a hundred thousand people were forced to convert to Christianity. Crescas himself lost a son. His community in Barcelona was destroyed. He spent the rest of his life trying to help Jews survive, to figure out what it meant to be Jewish when you were forced to act like a Christian.

And in the middle of all this, he wrote a book that asked: Do humans actually have free will? His answer was surprising, and it still matters today.

The Problem: God Knows Everything, So Are You Just Following a Script?

Here’s the basic tension that Crescas saw. Most Jews in his time believed three things:

God knows everything that will ever happen.
God commands humans to do certain things and forbids them from doing others.
Humans have free will and can genuinely choose between right and wrong.

But if God already knows what you’re going to do tomorrow—if it’s already written in His mind—then how can you really choose? It’s like reading a book where every character thinks they’re making decisions, but the author already wrote the ending. Are you just a character in God’s story, following a script you can’t see?

Most philosophers before Crescas tried to wriggle out of this. They said things like “God knows what you’ll choose, but He knows it because you choose it” or “God’s knowledge doesn’t cause your actions any more than your watching a movie causes the characters to move.” But Crescas thought these answers were dishonest. He decided to follow the logic wherever it led, even if the answer was uncomfortable.

The Hard Answer: You’re Not Free (But It’s Weirder Than You Think)

Crescas came to a bold conclusion: human beings don’t have free will in the way most people think. Every choice you make is determined by causes—your personality, your upbringing, the situation you’re in, the way your brain works. If you isolated a person who seemed to be hesitating between two options, and if you knew all the causes influencing them, you would see that they could only ever choose one.

He compared humans to a piece of bronze. Bronze can be made into a sword, a statue, or a cooking pot. But it doesn’t decide which one it becomes. Someone else—a metalworker—shapes it. Humans are the same way, Crescas thought. We feel like we’re choosing, but our choices are shaped by forces we don’t control.

This is a form of what philosophers call determinism—the idea that everything that happens, including your decisions, is caused by what came before it. Nothing is genuinely random or free.

But Wait: If You’re Not Free, Why Does God Command You to Do Anything?

This is where things get interesting. If Crescas is right, then God is commanding people who literally cannot disobey. That seems pointless, even cruel. Why would God say “Don’t steal” if He knows you have to steal? Why would He punish someone for doing what they were always going to do?

Crescas had two answers, and they’re both pretty wild.

First: Punishment isn’t something God does to you. It’s just the natural consequence of bad actions. If you do something harmful, it damages your soul the same way eating poison damages your body. The “punishment” is just what happens when you go against how things are supposed to work. So God isn’t spitefully punishing people for things they couldn’t help—He’s just letting the universe work the way it works. It’s like touching a hot stove: you get burned not because the stove hates you, but because that’s what stoves do.

Second: The Torah (or any set of moral rules) is itself a cause that influences people. Even if you’re not ultimately free, being told “do this, don’t do that” still changes the causes that shape your behavior. The commandments aren’t commands to free agents; they’re tools that help shape people into better versions of themselves. This is like how your parents tell you to practice piano even though your fingers will do what they do—the instruction itself becomes part of what shapes your choices.

The Really Tricky Part: Does Anything Change Inside You?

Here’s where Crescas got even more subtle. He thought there was a difference between two kinds of situations:

You do something bad and you’re happy about it. You want to steal, you steal, and you feel good.
You do something bad but you hate yourself for it. Someone forces you to steal, or you’re in a situation where you have no good options, and you feel terrible about it.

Even though both actions are caused and neither is “free,” the second person is different from the first. Why? Because their inner self—the part that feels joy or sorrow about what’s happening—is aligned with good. The person who feels bad about sinning is, in some important way, not really a sinner. They didn’t truly want to do wrong.

This might sound like a small point, but it was huge for Crescas’s time. After the attacks of 1391, thousands of Spanish Jews had been forced to convert to Christianity. Many of them continued to practice Judaism in secret, but some genuinely became Christians. Crescas was trying to figure out how to think about these people. Were the forced converts still Jews? Were they going to be punished?

His answer (which he never stated directly, but which his arguments support) was: the inner feeling matters. Someone who was forced to convert but kept their love for God in their heart was not really lost. Their situation was terrible, but their soul could still be connected to God through that inner love. This was a radical and compassionate idea for its time.

What About God? Does God Have Free Will?

Crescas didn’t stop with humans. He asked the same question about God. And his answer was even stranger.

Most philosophers before him (especially the hugely influential Jewish thinker Maimonides, who lived about 200 years earlier) thought that God’s main quality was intellect. God is pure knowledge, pure thinking. To love God, you should try to know God—to study philosophy and understand the universe.

Crescas disagreed. He thought the main quality of God was not intellect but love. And love is not the same as knowledge. You can know something without loving it. Love comes from a different part of you—what Crescas called the will. And the will, for Crescas, was not a free-floating power. It was shaped by causes, just like everything else.

So even God’s love, in some sense, follows a pattern. But that’s okay, because love, not freedom, is what matters. The goal of human life isn’t to be free. It’s to love God. And the best way to do that is to follow the Torah, not because you’re choosing freely, but because the actions themselves shape your soul toward love.

Why This Still Matters

You might be thinking: “Okay, this is interesting, but it’s about medieval arguments over God and free will. Why should I care?”

Here’s why. The question Crescas was asking—Do we have free will?—is still very much alive. Modern neuroscience has shown that your brain makes decisions before you’re consciously aware of choosing. Studies have found that you can predict what someone will choose several seconds before they “decide.” Some scientists think free will is an illusion.

And philosophers today are still arguing about what this means. If you’re not free, can you be held responsible for your actions? Should we punish criminals if they couldn’t help what they did? Should we change how we think about praise and blame, reward and punishment?

Crescas’s answers—that punishment is natural consequence, that the inner feeling matters more than the outer action, that love is more important than freedom—are still live positions in these debates.

The Part That Gets Technical: What Crescas Did to Physics

Crescas also did something that seems unrelated but turned out to be hugely important. He attacked the science of his day. The dominant scientific system came from Aristotle, who said things like:

There is no such thing as empty space (a void).
There can’t be an infinite amount of anything.
Things move because they’re trying to reach their “natural place.”

Crescas argued that Aristotle was wrong on all three counts. He said:

Empty space (a void) can exist. In fact, the universe might be an infinite void containing many separate worlds.
You can have actual infinities. And some infinities can be bigger than others. (This was a genuinely original mathematical idea—centuries before modern mathematicians worked it out.)
Things don’t move because of a “natural place.” They move because of forces like weight.

These might sound like dry scientific debates, but they mattered enormously. By breaking Aristotle’s system, Crescas helped clear the way for new science. His ideas about infinite space and the void influenced later thinkers, including the great philosopher Spinoza (who was also Jewish and was kicked out of his community for his radical ideas). Spinoza built a whole philosophy around the idea that God and the universe are the same thing—and Crescas’s physics helped make that possible.

The Unresolved Question

Crescas’s system is strangely beautiful. It’s compassionate (sinners who feel bad aren’t really sinners). It’s consistent (if everything is caused, then everything is caused—no cheating). And it’s honest (most people feel like they’re free, but that feeling might just be ignorance of the causes shaping us).

But here’s the question it leaves dangling, and it’s a question philosophers still fight about: If determinism is true, why does it matter what anyone does? If Crescas is right that punishment is just natural consequence, and that the Torah is just another cause shaping behavior, then what’s the point of trying to be good? You’re either going to be good or not, depending on the causes. The whole project of striving—of making an effort—seems to lose its meaning.

Crescas had an answer (the Torah itself is a cause that helps shape you), but many philosophers think this answer doesn’t work. If you’re not really choosing, then even your “effort” is just one more caused event. The whole system feels like a machine with no room for you to be you.

Unless, of course, being you just means being a certain kind of machine. And maybe that’s okay.

Appendices

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Determinism	The idea that every event, including human choices, is caused by what came before it—nothing is genuinely random or free
Free will	The ability to genuinely choose between options without being forced by prior causes
Will	For Crescas, the part of you that desires and chooses—but he thought it was caused, not free
Natural consequence	Crescas’s idea that punishment isn’t something God adds on top of sin, but is just what naturally happens when you do something bad
Inner self	The part of you that feels happy or sad about what you do—for Crescas, this is what matters for whether you’re truly good or bad
Infinite	Having no end or limit; Crescas argued that actual infinities exist and that some infinities can be bigger than others

Key People

Hasdai Crescas (c. 1340–1410/11): A rabbi and philosopher who led the Spanish Jewish community after the violent attacks of 1391; he argued that humans don’t have free will but that inner feelings matter more than outer actions.
Maimonides (1138–1204): Perhaps the most influential Jewish philosopher of all time; he thought God’s main quality was intellect and that philosophy could prove religious truths. Crescas disagreed with him on many points.
Aristotle (384–322 BCE): The ancient Greek philosopher whose science dominated medieval thinking; Crescas argued that Aristotle was wrong about space, infinity, and motion.
Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677): A Jewish philosopher who was excommunicated for his radical ideas; he was influenced by Crescas and developed his own version of determinism and pantheism (the idea that God equals nature).

Things to Think About

If you discovered tomorrow that free will doesn’t exist—that every choice you’ve ever made was determined by causes you couldn’t control—would anything change about how you live? Would you still try to do the right thing? Why or why not?
Crescas thought that someone who does something bad but feels terrible about it is different from someone who does something bad and enjoys it. Do you agree? Should a court treat them differently? Should God? What if the person who feels terrible still did real harm?
If God (or the universe) knows everything that will happen, does that mean the future is already “fixed”? Or could God know what will happen without causing it? Try to explain the difference.
Crescas said that loving God is more important than knowing about God. Do you think love is more important than knowledge in general? Is it better to love something (a sport, a person, an idea) than to understand it? Or does understanding make love better?

Where This Shows Up

Neuroscience and psychology: Scientists today study whether our brains make decisions before we’re aware of them. The debate about “free will” is happening in labs, not just philosophy books.
Criminal justice: If people don’t have free will, should we punish criminals? Many philosophers and legal thinkers argue that we should focus on rehabilitation and preventing future harm, not on punishing people for choices they couldn’t help.
Artificial intelligence: If we build AI systems that make decisions, will they have free will? Or will they be determined by their programming? Crescas’s arguments about causation and choice apply directly to thinking machines.
Everyday life: When you blame yourself for making a bad choice, or when you praise someone for doing something good, you’re assuming they had free will. But what if they didn’t? Would you still feel the same emotions?