Free Will: We're All Believers?

The idea of free will matters a lot to lots of people. This often leads them to try to argue for its existence.

I always end up pointing out that I don’t think you can prove it one way or another. And I’m pretty sure about this – people have been debating the subject with inconclusive results for thousands of years.

After reading a recent comment to the previous thread, I realized that it presented me not with an argument for believing in free will, but with two reasons for why it would be a bad thing if we didn’t have it:

1. If we didn’t have free will, then we would make no important life choices and decisions.

2. If we didn’t have free will, then we couldn’t give credit to disadvantaged individuals who have to struggle to overcome and succeed.

I’m realizing, however, that in a way these points actually do argue for free will’s existence. Because in fact we do congratulate people who better themselves, and we often encourage them to do so, as when we reward children for working to improve their grades. And all of us are aware of certain times in our lives when we made what felt like important life decisions.

So do these two points actually prove the existence of free will – or at least prove that all of us really do believe in it?

Spirituality and Science: the Reductionism Fallacy

Reductionism comes up quite often in discussing religion and spirituality in relation to science. From time to time I find myself discussing this subject here and on the discussion threads of other blogs and thought it worth doing another post on this topic.

One of my professors had a memorable phrase for reductionism: “nothing buttery.” Examples:

Jane Doe is a collection of subatomic particles interacting in a particular manner. Therefore, she's “nothing but” a bunch of subatomic particles. But if this were true, then back when she was a kid, her mom would have called her in for supper with, “Hey! Subatomic Particles! Time to eat!” Probably not.

Another example: We know that brain wave activity occurs when we think or have any kind of experience – say, for example, a religious or spiritual one. So any thought or experience is supposedly reduced to being nothing but patterns of brain waves. But notice how nobody ever says, “A penny for your pattern of brain waves . . .”

The fact is that qualitatively new phenomena emerge when subatomic and biological stuff is put together in certain ways. It's informative and often useful to know how our working parts work, but you and I are not nothing but collections of subatomic particles and our thoughts and experiences aren't nothing but brain waves.

Faith precedes . . .

Faith precedes all grounds for its existence. It runs ahead of independent thinking and transcends upbringing.

Faith is the silent . . .

Faith is the silent glow of your own soul suspended unknowingly but feelingly in the whole context of all-that-is.

Faith Experience

Last post I asked:

What exactly is an experience of faith? When have you experienced faith most powerfully?

Last discussion thread I distinguished faith as an experience from belief. One commenter mentioned that she wasn’t sure she could differentiate them.

Believers: So is faith primarily what you feel or experience when you think about your religious beliefs? Have you also had experiences of faith that don’t involve thinking about your beliefs?

Atheists and agnostics: Do you consider lack of faith to be part and parcel of your outlook or is there any non-doctrinal sense in which you consider yourself to have faith?

Faith: Oh, What the Heck . . .

I started out by replying to Liara, Misti, Pauline, and Vishesh on the previous post’s comments thread but it got so long – it’s a post. So here it is:

Thanks . . .

Thanks for your perceptive comments and questions. In a way my whole book is about faith and one chapter is entirely given over to this topic.

However, after doing those recent posts on love, my feeling is that if it's possible to transcribe book chapters into blog posts, I don't know how. So I think my upcoming posts will be additional short faith "sayings" - hopefully a more blogger-friendly approach than trying to excerpt/adapt sections of the book.

Meanwhile . . . here are a few things to think about concerning faith from my reply-turned-blog post:

What exactly is an experience of faith? When have you felt it most powerfully?

This might help answer Pauline's question about what it is that we have faith in.

Vishesh: I think you're probably right about that - that faith in some sense animates us, that perhaps even people who consider themselves faithless aren't so much faithless as unaware of their faith.

But as to faith in myself or any other person or even the entire species - I know for sure that's not where my faith resides. On a personal level, my body is faltering and failing in ways I never could have imagined. At the same time, one of the people I’ve been closest to is simultaneously declining in a different way – probably Alzheimer's.

When I look at us as a species, I don't feel hopeless but neither do I feel convinced we're going make a long-term go of it. We're clearly "dysfunctional" and I wouldn't want to try to predict what kind of shape we'll be in a century or two or three from now . . .

Of course, by "faith in ourselves" you may have just meant "self confidence" - but that would be a different thing to my mind than faith. Self confidence, even when it's very great, is limited in ways that faith isn't - for example, by the recognition of our own mortality and fallibility.

Faith is harder . . .

Faith is harder to understand than love. Those we love are lovely to us, but the world that we know takes everything from us that it bestows. Yet in the middle of this, faith is.

Faith and the Cross

Crossing

His head was lifting; then pain
Shot from underneath both arms
Into his contorted palms. He slumped and slipped
Some fraction of an inch, hearing himself moan.

Like an animal, he thought,
Feeling his two feet curled in upon themselves,
Tangled in the burning. With every breath
He felt a tearing through the tightening

Length of muscles in his chest, between each separate rib,
It seemed, when in another half-dream, he found himself
A child again, running to his mother’s arms
For safety; but there were soldiers and he knew

He’d taken his last step, then slept a second time.
He woke to find his breath constrained;
His chest felt flattened in the starving air,
A pressured pain, submerged and weary.

The gray sky drizzled intimately, drowning
His whole skin. Eyes on the horizon, distant white shapes –
Houses; and yet he thought of sails against
The sea and slumbered deeply into weariness again.

Once more he woke, now in near-dark: My God,
My God, he called: Why have you forsaken me?
Then still more deeply thought: how I have forsaken you,
My God, never meaning to, never thinking it could end

So soon. And Lord, I know they haven’t understood
The way that we’ve been one, and how your kingdom,
With us like a mustard seed, is sown to raise a Word
We do not hear until we learn to speak, Our Father;

And not as though the Father of my self alone, or any other lonely
Mortal self; but now I’ve failed, my God, my God –
They never understood! Denied his only purpose and desire,
Regretting everything, his eyes were lost behind themselves

To find the only Ocean’s face
Salted bright with fire.


Beatitudes

Blessed are those whose happiness is founded upon peace; peace eludes those who would found it upon happiness.

Blessed are those who identify themselves with God; great is the harm done by those who identify God with themselves.

Blessed are the oppressed who do not become their oppression; blessed are the God-forsaken who do not forsake God.

Blessed are the great-hearted. For great-heartedness is God-be-with-you not as hope or prayer, but in fact. Great-heartedness is really living what the world under the sun still dreams of.

Deeper Than

There is a will running deeper than anger, deeper than fear, pleasure, disappointment, deeper than any other kind or category of human emotion. There is a will to greater well-being that is filled with the power of our own love’s joy in being here. It owns us. We are here to own up to it. It claims us. We are here to proclaim it, and only by this Word can we claim to be ourselves.

Love is who we are in essence and intention.

See you next Sunday, most likely. I expect to have to cut back on blogging, at least for the time being.

-- Paul

Post-It

Just a quick note to thank a number of people who’ve recently emailed/back-posted me with good wishes/health ideas or favorable remarks about this blog.

On the blog, I’m at a crossroads. With diminishing productive time, I can’t “grow” it any further. At the same time, I’ve come across a couple of other ideas that might make more sense for making people aware of the book, which is described on my homepage and on other pages of this site.

I plan to continue blogging but it may be as little as one post a week. If my time constraints also make the other avenues I’m looking into unfeasible, I may return to posting more often.

-- Paul