Last night, I woke up feeling apprehensive…wondering if detailing my story on Facebook is a good idea. I have been, pretty much, a closet atheist since college, mainly because I felt that, in order to achieve understanding, a detailed explanation would be necessary, and who has the time or the inclination to listen, especially when the word “atheist” has so many knee-jerk negative implications in the eyes of believers? In addition to that, I knew my path was a logically defensible…if not logically imperative one, given the scientific and rational reasons for it. I was afraid of convincing others of my own position…others whose faith brings them comfort, peace, and joy. But, the Pandoras box has been opened, so why stop now? If this has been therapy for my broken wrist, its also been psychological therapy as well. : - ) So, again…a disclaimer: If you cherish your faith but feel it is not invincible, please do not read further. Having been a devout believer, I was well aware of the atheist stereotype…I had bought into it myself. Atheists, so the stereotype presumes, are arrogant, amoral subversives, bent on destroying truth, justice, and the American way. I recall when, as a teenager, I was told by my sister of an in-law who had claimed that the only “soul” in which he believed was the one on the bottom of his shoes. This person immediately dropped several notches in my respect. I concluded he must be a know-it-all whose morals were questionable at best. So, I found myself in the predicament of potentially becoming that which I had previously, for lack of a better word, despised. The most compelling question for me was not the issue of God’s existence, but the issue of free will. If our mind is a product of our brains, and if our brains follow physical laws, our minds and the decisions they make are, in no ultimate sense of the word, “free.” Free will provides the moral rationale for Catholicism and most (if not all) Christian religions. Without it, the fundamental moral principles crumble. This was an exceptionally troubling idea to me…I had to resolve the dilemma or resign myself to full blown atheism…horrors! I knew of a principle in physics known as the “Heisenberg uncertainty principle.” What it implies is that some natural phenomena are random…ie impossible to predict for one of two reasons…either there is a lack of sufficient scientific data to make an accurate prediction, or because these phenomena are inherently random, ie impossible to predict even with full knowledge of all antecedent factors I jumped at the second possibility…if there are phenomena that are inherently random, this opened the door for free will, I thought at the time. Free will could be a supernatural phenomenon that operated via the inherent randomness of certain physical phenomena! Yes, here was an out! I continued to attend Mass and go through the motions of Catholicism, even to the extent of teaching religion (CCD classes) on Saturday mornings to a class of third graders in a town near the college. But simply telling myself the Heisenberg uncertainly principle had solved my dilemma didn’t allay my doubts for long. When I gave it a little more thought, I realized that randomness was hardly a satisfying explanation for moral behavior. After all, moral decisions are presumed to be inherently deliberate…quite the opposite of randomly occurring. For example, if moral decisions were random, a person making such a decision might decide a certain action was perfectly moral at one time, and decide it was sinful at another time. This is what randomness means: a coin can land on either heads or tails, but if you toss it repeatedly under the same conditions, and if the coin is balanced, the result will approach 50% heads and 50% tails the more times you toss it. I had to face that fact that I disbelieved in free will. All of my thoughts, desires, and emotions are the ultimate product of two factors: my genes and my experiences, neither of which were freely chosen by the person I define as “me.” Now, there are those who will object thusly:: “But I can choose vanilla one day, and choose chocolate the next!” Of course they can….because an identical scenario will not repeat itself exactly at two different times. If for example, a person always chooses vanilla and I tell them they lack the free will to choose chocolate, they might choose chocolate and consider their point proven…but they’d be wrong, of course…because my challenge represented a change from the factors that determined their previous choices, perhaps fully accounting for the difference. It’s also likely that their experience of my challenge interactred with certain inherent personality traits (for example, a reluctance to easily concede an argument) to result in a different outcome.. In other words, if I issued my challenge to a different person, the outcome might have been different: They might have admitted their inability to resist chocolate and simply conceded my point. In other words, the perception of consciously and freely choosing does not necessarily equate to actual free choice. You perceive yourself choosing freely because your consciousness is not privy to all of the unconscious, biochemically and neurologically based antecedents of your choices. Consider hypnosis as treatment for a smoking addiction: Hypnosis alters your desires. If successful, hypnosis makes you want to refrain from smoking…it doesn’t give you the freedom to choose against your overpowering desire to smoke. Of course, the subjective experience of human (or animal, for that matter) consciousness remains, in many ways, a mystery to science….but neurological studies have repeatedly demonstrated that conscious choices are initiated microseconds…or even seconds… before awareness of the choice reaches the conscious centers of the brain. It seems our consciousness is merely monitoring choices which are actually made in unconscious regions of the brain. I have to point out here that my conclusions in this regard are not universally accepted by scientists….so if you are comprehending my argument, you do have a window of scientific doubt whereby you can continue to accept the reality of free will without denying the scientific evidence. Some physicists even suggest some sort of weird time reversal to explain the experimental data. I’m no physicist, and I admit to difficulty comprehending counter-intuitive ideas, but their explanations seem highly implausible to me, and so my skepticism for them remains as solid as my skepticism as to the existence of God. In fact, I’ve spent nearly a lifetime pondering free will (in the sense of ultimate moral responsibility) from a variety of angles, have spend countless hours debating the topic in internet forums, have read several pro and con scientific and philosohical opinions on the subject, and I’d put my own level of doubt at less than one percent. This is how I see it: Free will in this sense doesn’t exist, no matter how much I would like to believe it does it. While I strongly wanted to believe when I was struggling to hold onto my faith, I have to admit that I really don’t have much conscious desire to believe in free will now. The non-existence of free will is perfectly understandable in my current worldview, in which evolution binds these ideas into a cohesive and rational whole. In fact, the human illusion of free will fits this worldview perfectly as well. People resist radical alterations in their belief systems with tenacity….as was the case for me so many years ago. I don’t deny a similar reluctance to change the worldview I currently hold….but I have to say that I have encountered nothing which would seriously challenge that worldview, as my theist worldview was challenged 47 years ago. Of course, younger people are probably more open to change than are older people”) sset in their ways”) and I am certainly no longer young. : - ) I’ve had my ideological applecart upended once, and to be honest, I’m not really looking for another upheaval. However, I do try, as best I can, to remain open to conflicting data. I’d be a fool, however, to claim I’m immune to confirmation bias. Many atheists agree with me on free will, but not all. I must say I was stunned when I joined my first atheist internet forum and discovered that there actually are atheists who believe in free will. To me, this seemed like denying a supernatural god, while accepting a supernatural explanation for human choice. Most atheists I’ve encountered who defend free will deny that they are clinging to a supernatural explanation for their belief…but after endless debates with many such atheists, I have come to the conclusion that nearly all believe because they strongly want to believe. They cling to doubt in the face of strong evidence which would easily convince them if the question didn’t involve a cherished ego-enhancing concept. This, of course, is only my opinion of the free-will believing atheists I’ve encountered in internet forums.. They’d strongly disagree, and write off my opinion of them as due to narcissism or condescending arrogance on my part. Been there, done that, many times. : - ) It certainly is a blow to the ego to realize that we are not, in any ultimate sense of the word, self-made men and women…but this is the only way I can reconcile science and reason with the dilemma of human choice. Now, one problem with free will is that people mean different things by the phrase. I am using free will in its religious sense…ie as referring to a phenomenon which rationally justifies delivering punishment to a sinner for his bad moral choices after he dies.. I do not use “free will”, for purposes of this discussion, in its colloquial sense…That is, meaning “acting in accordance with one’s own desires.” When you feel coercion from outside (eg, someone is forcing you at gunpoint to choose against your will, or someone uses threats or psychological manipulation to cause you to choose differently than you otherwise would), you might say that you were not operating under your own free will. I sometimes use “free will” in this sense in certain contexts, meaning the absence of perceived coercion. However, this is not free will in its philosophical sense, ie as “free from physical determinants, whether conscious or unconscious.” (My own definition.) I love Sam Harris’s comment in this regard:““A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.” Mental patients sometimes experience internal compulsions….They feel compelled from within, as was case with the mental patient in a neighboring town, who stabbed a seven year old girl to death on an outing at a street fair, and who calmly explained that God had ordered him to do this, wondering why everyone was so upset about his fulfilling God’s will. Internal compulsion is also experienced by addicts who desire both to free themselves from their addictions, and to experience the pleasure that their substance of choice might bring. Their choice depends upon which desire is stronger, but they can’t simply choose not to desire to indulge in their addiction. . When our desires are not consciously conflicting, however, we experience no internal compulsion…Of course, this doesn’t mean it’s not there, acting subconsciously. This is how I view the situation…We are free to act according to our conscious needs and desires. but we cannot choose our needs and desires. They are programmed into our brains by our genes interacting with our experiences. I can certainly choose to eat a pizza, but I can’t choose to not like pizza. Here’s another quote from Sam Harris to illustrate my point: “Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didnt choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime - by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this? Yes, you are free to do what you want even now. But where did your desires come from?” Please don’t misinterpret my argument as rendering punishment meaningless, or as absolving people of all proximate responsibility for their actions. By punishing and holding people accountable for their socially unacceptable actions, we become part of the program that, hopefully, will encourage them to choose more appropriately the next time they experience temptation to commit a similar act. Thus, I see crime and punishment as deterrents to future criminal acts on the part of the perpetrator…or, in the case of life imprisonment, as protecting society from dangerously programmed individuals. But, because I don’t believe in free will, I don’t believe in the death penalty. Where is the rationale for killing a person as punishment for perfectly following the program written in his brain by his genes interacting with his experiences? Death certainly can serve no purpose in reprogramming the perpetrator…though arguments are made that capital punishment serves as a deterrent to other potential wrongdoers. (I think the evidence shows that criminals don’t expect to be caught, so the prospect of dire punishment is largely ineffective.) I have explained this intellectual problem in great detail, not because I want to convince anyone of its validity, but to demonstrate the rational considerations that compelled my solution. I did not freely choose to disbelieve in free will, and I couldn’t freely choose to believe in it, any more than I could freely choose to believe in Santa. The reader will reach his own conclusions for his own reasons. I believe they may differ from mine only for two reasons: My genes and experiences differ from those who conclude differently than I. Where does a personal God fit into all of this? Believing in God, for me, would be a piece of cake if I could convince myself of the validity of free will. I have been taught that God is just, and He rewards or punishes according to our freely chosen actions. But if our choices are determined by the God who created us, where would be the justice in punishing us for perfectly carrying out the program he himself created for us? I had to admit that the God I had always accepted and loved, most probably doesn’t exist. After I accepted this conclusion.. the rest of my religious beliefs, based on the God of Christianity, fell like a house of cards. To be continued….
Posted on: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 21:45:34 +0000
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