Q&A: The Freedom of Choice of a Neanderthal
The Freedom of Choice of a Neanderthal
Question
I read your book The Science of Freedom, and it was fascinating.
I’m trying to understand: in the early stages of human development, there was a living creature comparable to an animal, so I assume that at that point it did not have freedom of choice. Then it developed into the original human form. In your view, what happened along the way that caused the change and created freedom of choice in humans? Was this an intervention of the Holy One, blessed be He, in nature?
Did the human being reach mental maturity and then receive a soul with all its implications? Or was it gradual? Was there a generational gap in which the parent was an animal and the child was a human?
I’m trying to understand what, in your view, happened, and whether it sounds reasonable.
Answer
I have no idea. I’ll just draw your attention to the fact that a newborn baby apparently has no choice. A fertilized egg almost certainly does not. So it probably enters us at some stage. And if that is so in the biography of an individual person, there is no reason it could not also be so with respect to the development of the human species.
Discussion on Answer
I also assume that if a soul entered a human being, and as a result the capacity for judgment appeared at some point in history, we would expect to see some sort of qualitative leap in human history at that point. As far as I know, there is no such leap in history.
Yitzhak,
It is possible that this stage took place in prehistory—and that the “qualitative leap” led to the formation of civilizations and the beginning of human history.
It seems to me that the linguistic revolution is the big leap.
Possibly that is also when choice appeared.
Although it may have come later, after the agricultural revolution.
Where does the leap occur in a child/fetus? In human development too, at some stage a soul with the capacity for choice entered us, and it took us time to develop it, just like a child. The results came gradually, just like with a child. I don’t see a difference.
But in the case of a child, you could say that the soul was there from the outset; it’s just that because of his developmental state, choice does not come to expression.