On Free Will

I'm reading a very interesting book right now called "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature" by Steven Pinker. I never really took any psychology classes in high school or college, so many of these concepts that the author discusses are new to me. Basically, the book hinges on the argument that you don't just come into the world as a "blank slate" ready to be molded into anything. According to Pinker, you come into this world with some predetermined tendencies (based on genetics) that interact with the environment to create the person you are.

You quickly come to the problem of free will. As a side note: I like to ask the various religious persons that I meet how they rationalize all the "evil" or "bad things" in the world. The typical response that I get is that God gave us free will and since we're inherently evil, humans choose to do bad things and create the evil in the world. To which I say, what about natural disasters?? I would say that things like the recent earthquake in Haiti are pretty "evil" or "heinous" acts that have no human component. No amount of me doing any number of bad things is going to create an earthquake. Or is it?? According to Pat Robertson, Haiti made a pact with the devil and that's the reason the earthquake happened. Wonderful.

Moving on to more logical arguments, I still wonder about the concept of free will. According to Pinker, identical twins are VERY alike. In traits such as verbal, mathematical, and general intelligence, introversion, agreeableness, and openness to experience. They are similar in behavior related gambling, divorcing, committing crimes, getting into accidents, and watching TV. And among various idiosyncrasies like giggling incessantly, giving interminable answers to simple questions, and dipping buttered toast in coffee, they are SIMILAR. And these traits are apparently whether they were separated at birth or not.

The question becomes: if there are certain traits that are ingrained in you, then how much free will do we have? Pinker paints this scenario:

"Imagine that you are agonizing over a choice -- which career to pursue, whether to vote, what to wear the day, how to vote. You have finally staggered to a decision when the phone rings. It is your identical twin that you never knew you had. During the conversation you find out that he or she has just chosen a similar career, has decided to get married at the same time, plans to cast a vote for the same presidential candidate, and is wearing a shirt of the same color -- just as the behavioral geneticists who tracked you down would have bet. How much discretion did the "you" have in making the choices actually have if the outcome could have been predicted in advance, at least probabilistically, based on the events that happened in your mother's Fallopian tubes decades ago?"

How much choice do you really have?

Secondly is the story of Phineas Gage. He was a railroad worker from the 19th century who survived a terrible accident that sent a spike into his cheekbone, through his brain, and out the top of his skull. He survived with his perception, motor skills, memory, and language intact. But as one of his co-workers said, "Gage was no longer Gage." A piece of iron had turned him into a different person, from courteous responsible, and ambitious to rude and unreliable. Years later we find out that the injury damaged a part of his brain that is related to reasoning about other people.

Let's say that after Gage's incident he went and killed some people. He did some bad things because he no longer had the faculties for reasoning with other people. But if we put him into jail and "rehabilitated" him, it would have made absolutely no difference. He was forever changed and not capable of reverting to his former self. Sending him to jail to "think about his sins" would been pointless.

The thing is, there are many people today who do some no so great things. We send them all to jail and when they are released, many people revert to their previous behavior. Maybe these people can't make their own decisions because of various genetic or environmental factors. What if they don't have the free will to change? And how does this reconcile with the typical Judeo-Christian view that a person exercises free will and is responsible for their own choices?