Do You Really Choose, or Was It Always Going to Happen?
The Monk Who Thought You Had No Choice
Imagine you’re standing at an ice cream cart. Chocolate or vanilla? You feel like you’re freely picking one. But what if, deep down, your choice was set in stone long before you even looked at the flavors? That’s the kind of question that a German monk named Martin Luther (1483–1546) threw at the world in 1525, when he published The Bondage of the Will.
Luther was arguing against the famous scholar Desiderius Erasmus. Erasmus believed that human beings have free will — the genuine power to choose between right and wrong, good and evil. Luther disagreed fiercely. He insisted that the human will is like a horse, and either God or the devil is in the saddle. You don’t steer; you’re ridden. The choices you make, even the choice to do good, happen because God’s will has already decided them. This is determinism — the idea that everything that happens, including your decisions, has already been determined by a prior cause, and could not have happened any other way.
To be clear, Luther still believed people are responsible for their sins. He made a careful distinction. He said there is a necessity of immutability, meaning your will is fixed in a certain direction and can’t change itself. But there is no necessity of constraint, meaning no one forces you to do something against that fixed will. A thief isn’t pushed into robbing a house; he robs it because he wants to, even though his wanting to was determined by something larger than himself. This distinction was Luther’s way of saying: your will is bound, but you still act voluntarily.
Many thinkers found this baffling — and dangerous. If God determines everything, doesn’t that make God the author of evil? And if you can’t choose differently, can you really be blamed for anything? Those questions kicked off centuries of philosophical brawls.
Hobbes and the Tennis Balls of Destiny
A hundred and twenty years after Luther’s book, the English thinker Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) found himself in a similar fight. It was 1645, and Hobbes was in Paris with a bishop named John Bramhall. A nobleman asked them to debate free will, and the argument exploded. Bramhall attacked Hobbes’s determinism with fierce imagery. He said that if Hobbes was right, humans are nothing more than “tennis-balls of destiny,” and God becomes the player who swings the racket, meaning God is responsible for every evil act. That, Bramhall warned, would push honest people straight into atheism.
Hobbes didn’t back down. He accepted that he was a hard determinist and that his view made God the first cause of everything. But to answer Bramhall’s charge, Hobbes reached straight for Luther’s toolbox. He used Luther’s distinction between immutability and constraint. Just as Luther argued against Erasmus, Hobbes argued that even though human beings lack free will, they are not forced to sin against their will. A liar lies willingly, even if the liar couldn’t have willed anything else. So sin can still be imputed to the sinner.
Bramhall’s outrage, however, pointed to something uneasy. Is God being fair? Hobbes, following Luther, replied that human standards of justice can’t be slapped onto God like a sticker. It’s a mistake to think you can measure God with a human ruler.
But here’s the twist. Hobbes wedded his determinism to a materialist picture of the world — the idea that everything, including your mind, is just matter in motion, like clockwork. Luther would never have accepted that. Luther’s God wasn’t just a distant first mover winding a machine; Luther believed giving up the illusion of free choice brings deep spiritual comfort, because it means your salvation doesn’t depend on your own wobbly efforts. Hobbes’s universe had no room for that comfort. So even though Hobbes borrowed Luther’s tools, he built a very different philosophical house.
Leibniz: God Knows, but You Could Have Done Otherwise
Next on the scene was the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). Unlike Hobbes, Leibniz wanted to rescue both divine foreknowledge and human freedom. He thought Luther and Hobbes had gone further than necessary.
Leibniz grabbed hold of an old scholastic distinction and polished it till it gleamed. He separated hypothetical necessity from absolute necessity (also called logical necessity). Here’s how it works. Imagine the sun will rise tomorrow. If you know with certainty that it will, does your knowledge force the sun to rise? No — the sun rises because of natural causes, and your knowledge simply tracks what will happen. That’s hypothetical necessity: something is certain given prior causes and knowledge, but it’s not logically impossible for it to be otherwise. Absolute necessity, on the other hand, means the contrary would involve a contradiction — like a square circle.
Leibniz argued that divine foreknowledge works the same way. God knows what you will choose with total certainty, but that doesn’t mean you could not have chosen otherwise — it just means God’s knowledge perfectly matches your actual future choice. So Luther could have kept his claim that God knows all, without handing victory to hard determinists like Hobbes.
Leibniz also cared deeply about keeping faith and reason on friendly terms. He was no enemy of philosophy. He suggested that Luther’s harsh words against reason were really aimed at a narrow understanding of nature, not at reason itself. Faith might be above reason (beyond full comprehension) but never contrary to reason (flat-out contradictory). A doctrine that contradicts reason, he said, would be not mysterious but simply absurd. And absurdity won’t help anyone believe.
Kant: You Ought, So You Can
Then came Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant was raised in a Pietist household — a Lutheran reform movement that stressed the limits of reason and the depth of human sinfulness. He took some of Luther’s darkness seriously. Kant believed that human beings have a “propensity to radical evil”: we naturally tend to put our own selfish concerns ahead of the moral law. He also thought theoretical reason hits a wall and can’t prove or disprove God’s existence. So far, so Lutheran.
But when it came to free will, Kant slammed the brakes. He argued on moral grounds. His famous principle was “ought implies can.” If you genuinely ought to do something — resist a temptation, help a stranger, tell the truth — then you must really be able to do it. If you couldn’t, the “ought” would be a cruel joke. So freedom of choice has to be real, even if we can’t explain how it fits with a determined natural world.
Kant also rejected Luther’s idea of grace, the completely unearned divine help to be good. Kant feared that if you believe you’re incapable of improving yourself and must wait for God to do it, you’ll stop trying altogether. He insisted we must believe we can, at least to some degree, make ourselves worthy of assistance — not because it’s a proven fact, but because living a moral life demands it. In Kant’s hands, Luther’s deep pessimism about human power was turned partly on its head, even while the shadow of evil remained.
Hegel: Freedom Is Not About Endless Options
The final figure in this chain is G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831). Hegel proudly called himself a Lutheran, and he heaped praise on Luther for starting a new era of “Christian freedom.” But Hegel’s idea of freedom was radically different from the “pick chocolate or vanilla” picture most of us carry around.
Hegel thought the common idea of free choice (what he called Willkür — the power to pick arbitrarily between options) is actually a low, unfree state. You only face a choice because you’re pulled in two directions, not yet fully committed to the good. A truly free will, Hegel argued, sees only one path as possible: the path that the good demands. Think of a skilled musician improvising. She isn’t paralyzed by a hundred possible notes; she’s so absorbed in the music that the right notes flow without hesitation. That’s what Hegel meant by freedom — not being blown around by whatever desire pops up, but being so aligned with reason and goodness that you are fully yourself, without internal conflict.
In this way, Hegel borrowed Luther’s critique of free choice and pushed it further. He even linked freedom and necessity in a dialectical twist: genuine freedom is not the opposite of necessity; it’s necessity understood correctly, as acting in accordance with your truest nature. Many philosophers find that idea either profound or perplexing. Either way, it was a direct descendant of Luther’s question: if you’re truly good, is “choosing” even a thing you do?
Why It Still Matters
The argument Luther started hasn’t disappeared. It still hums underneath big questions you live with every day. When you feel proud of a kind decision, was that really you, or just your brain chemistry and your upbringing doing their thing? If a neuroscientist could predict your every move by scanning your brain a second before you’re aware of deciding, would that mean you were never free? Courts of law assume people can choose to obey or break the law — but if determinism is true, is punishment ever fair?
Luther, Hobbes, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel each offered a different piece of the puzzle. No one answer has settled the matter. The feeling of freedom is so strong that even hard determinists live their lives as if they’re choosing. Yet the chain of causes behind every action can feel endless. The next time you stand in front of an ice cream cart — or face a genuinely hard moral decision — you might hear the ghost of that monk asking: Did you really pick that, or was it always going to happen?
Think about it
- If a scientist built a machine that could predict every choice you’ll make with perfect accuracy, would your choices still be free? Why or why not?
- Imagine a friend tells you, “I can’t help being mean — it’s just how I was raised.” Would you accept that as a fair excuse? Where do you draw the line between influence and responsibility?
- Do you feel more free when you have lots of options, or when you’re completely focused on one thing you love? Which experience seems closer to “real” freedom?
