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Today & Tomorrow

Philip Wik

Fate and Free Will

There is no need to be ashamed by the actions of some of your ancestors. Every ancestral tree has a few limbs on the shady side (and, on those limbs, a few nuts!). Although we share a genetic heritage, we are free to make our own choices. They made their choices, and not all of their choices were wise. I didn’t choose my parents, where I was born, or how I was raised. But I can choose many other important things. And, as I decide, I form my character— and my destiny. I’ve never been able to accept fatalistic belief systems, be it kismet, astrology, or predestination, or, to put in positive terms, I come down squarely on the side of free will. My impression is that most people in the world today don’t believe in their freedom of their own will, but rather see themselves in thrall to vast impersonal historical, biological, social, or political forces that propels them like flotsam on waves, much like the Doris Day song:

When I was just a little girl,

I asked my mother, 'What will I be?

'Will I be pretty?

'Will I be rich?'

Here's what she said to me:

'Que sera, sera,

'Whatever will be, will be;

'The future's not ours to see.

'Que sera, sera,

'What will be, will be.'

As Andrew Jackson was dying, someone asked an old slave if Jackson would go to heaven. “He will if he wants to,” was the slave’s reply, which I think is a theologically accurate statement. Anything that diminishes free will diminishes our capacity to choose good over evil and also diminishes God’s sovereignty who gave us that ability in the first place. If there is no free will, there is no morality or immorality and thusly no need for Jesus. Calvary Reformed Presbyterian at Willow Grove, our church when I was at Ivyland, preached the doctrines of John Calvin, but I was never able to square our free will with the doctrine of selective salvation, and perhaps no one really can. (I may not have been paying the attention as I found an attendance record card with a note from Josie begging me to “please be quiet and considerate of people who are meditating!”) I cannot accept, to paraphrase Herman Melville’s Ahab, that all was rehearsed a thousand years before the oceans rolled, that I’m the fate’s lieutenant, that I act under orders. As Cassius reminds us in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, it’s the human condition drives our decisions, not fate: “ “Men at some times are masters of their fate: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” (I, ii, 140-141)
I also challenge the social, economic, and biological determinism of post-modernist secular thinkers and behaviorists who hold as an article of faith the illusion of free will. Freedom and the will, they would say, are imaginary or subjective constructs. Rather, the actions we take to which we ascribe good or evil are merely the result of evolution, sociobiology, culture, and history. For me, however, it was always important to have as a first principle my free agency-- that I alone can and must choose my way on life’s journey, that I must ultimately take responsibility for myself. We are masters of our fate because we are masters of our attitude. As William Ernest Henly writes in “Invictus”

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

But does free will exist? The reaction of most people is: “Why, of course free will exists! I can eat vanilla or I can eat strawberry ice cream! I can go to the park or I can go to the beach!” But, when you I ask them about what guides their life, almost all people affirm some kind of determinism. Marxists point to historical inevitability, behaviorists point to environmental conditioning, economists point to Madison Avenue, criminologists point to genetics or family dynamics, astrologers point to the stars, and Calvinists point to God.

I’m not a determinist, so I’m I hope I’m not creating a strawman by portraying what I consider to be the strongest argument for determinism.

The secular argument goes like this. The will, first of all, doesn’t exist. We only see behavior that we identify as will. The same is true with “thought” and “sorrow.” Speech and tears are merely manifestations of our biology in response to stimulus that we call thought and sorrow, not unlike my cat that comes running when I run the can opener. Ants will stream to and fro circumscribed by instinct, although a particular ant may act individualistically. Our ability to reason gives us actions and reactions that are non-instinctual. But nevertheless we are shackled by biology and culture to act as we do. The neural net that is our consciousness absorbs countless inputs and reacts accordingly, but what we think is “choice” is nothing more than the multiple and sometimes contrary firings of our mental circuits in response to external stimuli.

I once read something from BF Skinner to the effect that if you gave him a normal baby, he could turn that child into a criminal or a doctor or vagrant, or anything at all. At one time, I thought that Skinner's statement was hyperbole. But, with the perspective of time, I think it has a kernel of truth. Take for example a twenty-year old who is enlisting in the military and the succession of predicating experiences that led to that-- the toy GI Joes at Toys R Us, the violent play station games, and an uncle who served in Viet Nam. In contrast, that same twenty-year old may be filled with revulsion at the sight of a recruiter if his experiences included a parent who marched at Yale, a high school teacher who is a member of Amnesty International, and a home that is devoid of war toys and movies. Both children can have the identical make-up, but each child is drawn remorselessly and inevitably in different directions due to exposure to different experiences in concert with their own makeup. Skinner's insight has motivated me to in effect brainwash my children-- manipulate the way they think to what I believe are positive responses. For example, I'm trying to condition my kids to despise tobacco and respect teachers. However, even brainwashing doesn't have an absolute hold over their ability to choose. Our character is plastic, although not infinitely so, so the potential for making wayward choices always exists. The child of a colonel may prefer hugging trees, while the child of the radical may end up in ROTC. “Freedom is doing what you like,” goes the Chinese cookie adage. “Happiness is like what you do.” But what we think is free other see as slavery. As much as we hate the notion of being in jail, someone who has been in prison for decades and has been freed may look at the world beyond the bars as more terrifying than the routines of prison life. What peasants in China think as freedom, we may see as slavery. Freedom is a subjective construct that comes out of our history and culture. “Free will” cannot exist if both freedom and will are non-existent. What then accounts for our individual choices? These choices are an illusion. We think that we decide to drive the speed limit or shoot heroin, but this is nothing more than decades of conditioning applied to millions of years of evolution.

I don’t deny that the case for determinism and against free will is appealing. However, I think the case for freedom of our will is nevertheless stronger. So here are secular and Christian arguments why I believe that free will exists.

I’m opposed to determinism because I’m opposed to the consequences of determinism. If everything is determined, how can we assign legal culpability for any act? If I kill someone, am I not guiltless if my action is merely the consequence of my genetics, environment, and conditioning? Our judiciary and capitalism both assume free will—that we will be penalized or rewarded because of the acts that we freely undertake. Determinism more over violates common sense. We lives in realms of choicelessness, but nevertheless, we still retain the most significant choices—whether we should immigrate or who we should marry, for example. We live in a contingent risk-filled universe, and are surrounded with opportunities for countless decisions. In the broad sense, many decisions have already been made for us—by our biology, the government, our parents, and the culture in which we live. But, nevertheless, we still have countless opportunities to make other decisions. I’m not sure this is something I can prove, but it is a presupposition from which I can act responsibility and morally.

My chief objection to Christian determinism is that it is morally evasive. If the Devil made me do it or God made me do it, why should I be blamed or rewarded accordingly? If God is sovereign over all, what is the point of the tree in the Garden of Eden—or indeed the tree from which Our Lord was crucified? If He is the potter and we are the clay, if He is the chess master and we are the pawns, then where is our responsibility for anything including even our existence? If God predetermines everyone for either hell or heaven, why waste time, money, and effort on churches and missions? How does God’s creation of a single human being who will inevitably go to Hell glorify God? From the Garden or Eden on, man has been presented with choices, and it is entirely up to us as to whether we make the right or the wrong choice. If those choices are removed, sin cannot exist, and there is no need for a redeemer as God has made the choice already. Calvinism also insists that nothing passes on this earth, indeed in all of creation, without His ‘permission’. In my discussion on the problem of pain, I consider this to be a fatal mistake, as it must make God minimally a co-conspirator in every evil that befalls man, from last week’s ingrown toenail to the holocaust. I think we can affirm that God is absolutely sovereign, so long as we insist that God's sovereignty must never curtail human responsibility in any way, including repentance in sin and faith in Jesus.

Some people claim that God is so transcendent, that we cannot understand that what seems like evil to us is merely the working our of God’s plan. "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts." (Is 55:9) But this makes no sense. Time and again, the Bible makes it clear that God is good, not just good as a quality that we cannot perceive, but a quality that we can perceive. That we perceive God to be good but when He is actually evil or that we perceive God to be evil when he is actually good is incomprehensible, and, I believe, false. It would negate even our ability to perceive and interpret any kind of good, much less God’s goodness, including the death and resurrection of His Son.

I give a measure of credence to some deterministic theories. We can accurately study and predict human and animal psychology through behaviorism and sociobiology. The oriental concept of the Tao seems to make sense to me—that if I violate the rules, the rules will violate me, if I break the laws of common sense the laws of nature will kick in. I think also that character is destiny. We are wired in ways that produce predictable results. An impatient, choleric person, for example, will have more traffic accidents than a placid, sanguine person. Kismet, I think, also makes sense in that life deals us certain cards, and these we must then play as best as we can. I don’t believe everything is merely cause and effect. There is also uncertainty due to the way our mind absorbs and tries to process information, and this gives rise to an emergent property of choice.

It is theologically inaccurate to claim that the Puritan dogma of predestination warranted complacency about our life and destiny. To the contrary, they claimed a mutuality between God and man in a covenant relationship. Perhaps predestination and free-will are sides to the same coin or two parallel tracks along which chugs the train of destiny. It could be that freedom and determinism, circumstance and coincidence, chemistry and character, life and death, despair and joy are sides of the same reality like the gestalt drawing of the witch’s face who is at the same time a pretty woman. “I have always loved butterflies,” Winston Churchill writes. “In Uganda, I saw glorious butterflies the color of whose wings changed from the deepest russet brown to the most brilliant blue, according to the angle from which you saw them. In Brazil as everyone know there are butterflies of this kind even larger and more vivid. The contrast is extreme. You could not conceive color effects more violently opposed; but it is the same butterfly. The butterfly is Fact—gleaming, fluttering, settling for an instant with wings fully spread to the sun, then vanishing in the shades of the forest. Whether you believe in Free Will or Predestination, all depends ion the slanting glimpse you had of the color of the winds—which are in fact two colors at the same time.”