Not sure if I’m technically Christian anymore, but for the sake of the discussion let’s just pretend that I am. I still believe in a soul and a god in any case. I’ve been reading about determinism, and it really disturbs me. The idea that everything we do is determined solely by a chain of external factors that have happened to us, and we have no hypothetical ability to make any other choice than the one we do.
I see mostly pysicalist atheists argueing for this, but I fail to see how it changes much even if God is in the picture. This means that feeling proud of people, feeling disappointed in people, choosing to be better or to stagnate, being encouraged by people with good hearts or discouraged by people who ‘choose’ to do evil, and most importantly moral culpability…it’s all an illusion. A practically useful one in our day to day, but an illusion. Courage, justice, choice, compassion, creativity, freedom, all of these concepts that make us human are paper-thin under this framework. We are incapable of choosing our own paths, and we always have been. We were never capable of making different choices. Autonomy isn’t real.
Now I don’t want this to be true. I want there to be, ultimately, some cohesive self that is capable of making free (not uninfluenced, but free) decisions of whether or not we act in ways that are good or evil, by some complex and unknowable system. But even with the existence of God and a soul taken into account, I can’t understand how that could be. Physics or the existence of the spiritual aside, it just becomes a logic problem at a certain point. Either everything we do has a reason, which ultimately has to be external, or the things we do are entirely random.
Which feels pretty bleak. No one can claim ownership of any of their ‘decisions,’ good or evil. No one can claim they chose to rise above themselves and no one can claim anyone else could have chosen differently when they do something wrong. There is no such thing as responsibility. Who we are is entirely governed by chance. ‘Humanity’ is mechanical. Does it have to be this way, even under the Christian view? Am I thinking in too severe black and white?
I can’t even pretend to be Christian, but I also have an interest in the morality/ethics of free will in a seemingly deterministic universe. For the sake of conversation, I’ll try to articulate where my head is at.
The basic idea of determinism might be flawed. We don’t have a grand unified theory of physics at the moment, but the last Stephen Hawking book I read (The Grand Design) gave me the impression - carefully putting no words in his mouth - that every possible universe may in fact exist on some level.
In light of that, it kind of makes a sapient being something extremely privileged - to apprehend the present moment, to make choices between this or that, to see oneself within the larger context and make tenuous connections with others - we are like quasi-divine beings of chaos at the infinite centre of creation.
The universe is determinish. We can apprehend macroscopic forces, trends, material conditions and apply our understanding of natural laws to say X must follow W under prescribed conditions. The universe may be on some deep level completely deterministic on every scale, in ways that elude our ability to comprehend (or even balk at) quantum mechanics. But the question was never whether our fates are bound to good or ill, but what we chose to do with the small amount of insight we have been afforded.
One of the best things I ever heard was that “art is the study of choice”, and I think that there is certainly an art to life. To study ones own choices and make more meaningful choices in light of what we do know about ourselves and the world is the only meaningful sense in which we can have free will, whether the future is set in stone or no.