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 have my faith for my own reasons, and I’m very much interested in science. They address different aspects of my same self and I’m okay with that. I do feel that religion falls under the philosophy heading, for me personally, and I’m fine with that too. I’m aware others may or not agree, and I’m ok with that too. It’s been a long time since I read Erich Fromm, but from what I remember, I still agree with him having said there’s no reason religious and non-religious can’t get along.
@[email protected] I didn’t know I was engaging with copy/paste, and I don’t like it either. Are our replies being pasted back to Reddit?
No, the answers aren’t fed back to Reddit. Here is the matching post and it doesn’t have them underneath. And if OP posted something back, they’d have to do it using their own username.
I fail to have science and religion side to side. I mean we long have a better understanding of how we came to be and that replaces pretty much the entire origin story of mankind as laid out in the Old Testament. Philosophy teaches me to use reason to arrive at some morals and ethics and not just adopt them from some old book. So I’m mainly left with the teachings of Jesus. I just have to strip the claims about supernatural events, or it’d make the science part meaningless. And that’s my perspective. I’m definitely inspired by things including religion, but the faith part is just missing for me and I read it like other stories. I know however it’s not like that for many other people. What you write is also what some friends tell me, and yeah multiple clever people wrote books about it.
I’m of the opinion everyone, religious or not, has their own path. It’s not for me to convince anyone, other than living a life with kindness and integrity. I largely stick to Jesus words, and definitely fall short. Evolution is slow, messy, and sometimes painful. In life’s journey, we start where we are, not where we’re going.