God has an interesting way of going about things, but I guess that’s why he’s God and I’m me.
They say that if you, or your consciousness . . . your spirit, were transposed into the shoes of a Nazi soldier, you very likely, almost certainly—considering genes, experiences, and everything in between—would have done exactly what he did.
We’d all love to think we’d be one of the few to denounce Nazism, work against all odds to help set the Jews free and, while we’re at it, form an underground coalition to assassinate Hitler! But the reality is, or so says this notion, that we’d all probably have been no different in the slightest.
Such an assertion forces me to wonder, would I ever, under any circumstances, commit such evil acts? Am I really as good as I think I am? Am I really as in control as I think I am?
Moreover, is everyone else, contrary to my judgmental intuition, acting reasonably? Would I act like them if I had lived their life? Is it right for me, then, in any instance, to take issue with the way things are? Is the world the way it is because it makes sense and could be no other way?
But before I get ahead of myself, I must wonder, is this notion true in the first place?
By odds, it’s more likely to be true than false; it seems, admittedly, that the majority of people are relatively predictable. But is it absolute? Could any one of us have overcome the influence of the Third Reich?
There’s no way to know how the world would be if certain things didn’t (or did) happen. Some talk of parallel universes . . . Of an infinitely expanding set of circumstances transpiring each and every second. Whatever the hell that means.
But, in plain terms—in the circumstances our biology permits us to perceive (for argument’s sake, dear mystics, set aside déjà vu for a second)—we get one life, and we experience one world.
It is the world of life and death.
It is the world in which the push of a button could have and still may change the lives of billions.
What if that one guy they talk about, that guy on the Russian submarine—the third of three needed to approve a missile launch—said yes instead of no? How different would the world be? Was he destined to say no? Were the other two destined to say yes?
How different would my life be if I hadn’t met that one person? If my family hadn’t moved across my neighborhood when I was three? If I hadn’t kissed that one girl in high school that one time? If I hadn’t told the other girl what I had done! You idiot!
Were there Nazi soldiers who denounced Nazism? And if there were, were they secretly Jews? Were they mercenaries tasked by the Allies to undermine the Axis from within? Or were they true Germans, born and raised, who simply felt deep within that what they were doing was wrong?
It seems impossible to get around the fact that everything is little more than a mathematically determined series of events following one great big explosion.
But I think we’re going about this discussion the wrong way. Are things really either completely destined or completely not destined to happen? To know or not to know, is that the question?
Western thought is linear. We’re trained, much more deeply than we think, to see the world in a this or that way, which often encourages our eyes right past the intense complexity and incomprehensibility of the universe.
To us, it’s all cause and effect. But this is a vast oversimplification.
You see, we can’t know, as knowledge is in the way of science, whether things could, and therefore may be different. Posing such a question in this instance is like trying to study Jupiter from the Earth’s surface with a magnifying glass.
Could things have been different? Of course, they could have been different! But they weren’t. Is it because someone elected to do something that changed or directed the course of things? Or is it because the momentum was already set long ago?
Without science, we cannot answer this question.
Why?
Because it is a scientific question! Only the Western mind would approach this matter from such an angle in the first place.
I am near certain when I say, if there truly exists this thing we’ve put in the box labeled “free will,” it exists outside of the material universe . . . The universe in which science operates—the universe that our supposed five senses permit us to perceive.
While science struggles to put a finger on free will, it might, however, be able to notice it, just as we sometimes do the “immaterial” world.
Have you ever received a call from that person who just crossed your mind? Have you ever felt someone looking at you, even though they were behind you?
In my new favorite book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Pulitzer Prize-winning Annie Dillard says,
“. . . in 1927 Werner Heisenberg pulled out the rug, and our whole understanding of the universe toppled and collapsed. For some reason it has not yet trickled down to the man on the street that some physicists are now a bunch of wild-eyed, raving mystics . . . The Principle of Indeterminacy, which saw the light in the summer of 1927, says in effect that you cannot both know a particle’s velocity and position. You can guess statistically what any batch of electrons might do, but you cannot predict the career of any one particle . . . It is not that we lack sufficient information to know both a particle’s velocity and its position . . . Rather, we know now for sure that there is no knowing . . . [Sir James] Jeans says that science can no longer remain opposed to the notion of free will. Heisenberg says, ‘there is a higher power, not influenced by our wishes, which finally decides and judges.’ Eddington says that our dropping causality as a result of the Principle of Indeterminacy ‘leaves us with no clear distinction between the Natural and the Supernatural.’”
In all honesty, I haven’t the slightest clue whether the Principle of Indeterminacy proves anything about free will.
But it is interesting: the scientific method found a century ago (in relative terms, a century is not long at all) that it itself is limited—that there are some things, or at least one thing, one boundary, it cannot surpass.
We all say that things are meant to be, that life transpires near exactly as it’s supposed to. I myself concur.
You’d think such a stance would imply a negation of free will . . . Of our influence on the way things happen.
But I don’t think it does.
While I acknowledge that my environment, my life’s circumstances, the “knowledge” I have accumulated, the wounds I’ve sustained, all by far, for the most part, set my course for me, I also believe we have these choices—laced seamlessly into existence by God—that seem at first glance to the untrained eye (or, actually, to the adult, trained eye) insignificant.
I do not wield the holy eye capable of distinguishing these choices; I merely know they are, like the wind, somewhere out there.
Part of me wants to think that it is in our power to, over time, subtly shift the trajectory of our lives with these choices. And, of course, at least on the surface, such may be the case. But it is also the case that God has a plan.
It seems most probable that our free will lies in our choice to submit to or resist his plan—to marvel in it or to thrash around violently, tiring ourselves, rendering the ride unenjoyable, scary even.
We could wonder, then, might our commotion or lack thereof change something about our trajectory?
I recall a month or two ago noting a spontaneous thought in my memos: “My writing is an effort to understand the way all this (meaning God) works . . . That everything I’m doing is ever more an effort to build a relationship with the divine.”
In other words, this whole writing endeavor has led me, not unlike how all rivers drain into the ocean, to God. No matter what I did, no matter which tributary I chose, the flow always led to bigger, faster, & more momentous rivers, all of which led me to the same place, regardless of my efforts.
The more I wrote, in an attempt to resolve my struggles, the more clear it became: everything is one.
It is true—God works in mysterious ways, just as they say. But I believe the only mysterious things about his ways are those you cannot sense.
I wonder, is faith not a sense? In what’s become so quantitative, appearance-oriented a world, we’ve been led to believe, by these unholy experts who claim, in the name of science, to be themselves the judge, jury, and executioner, that only these things perceivable en masse via one of these five senses are real. “Oh! but we also have instruments! Things that can detect things we cannot!”
Apparently these instruments so too return blank scans.
Still, no matter how irreligious one is, they’d have more difficult a time getting through life without faith than without their own eyes.
I lost my faith for a while.
I guess I didn’t lose it altogether—I can’t recall, though I’m pretty sure Vivian, my guardian angel, kept it awake in me—but there was a time, starting in middle school, when a distance grew between God and I.
I wonder why he might let such a thing happen to a child. You know?
Perhaps it is here that free will has its place—for God must have known that, having been born into faith, the faith was not mine.
As is the case with any relationship, you don’t want them—friends, lovers, or family—to be with you because they have no choice but because they love you.
Was God once lonely? Was the big bang his great big effort—his creation—to make friends? And, to be certain his friends loved him, did he grant them free will so they could choose?
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great post! really grounds us in the reality that our ethics are culturally determined and circumstantial