Free Will and Fairy Dust

* from Joss Whedon's "Serenity"

A friend told me that believing in free will was like believing in magic fairy dust. He's a big B.F. Skinner fan. Skinner was the big behavioral psychology pioneer who firmly believed that all our "choices" were illusory and that we are merely the product of rewards, reinforcement, punishment and dysfunctional relationships with our Mums and Dads. He's very popular with progressive socialists because he along with Abraham Maslow and Freud provide the basis for socialism. That is, the belief that one can make people better from the outside - through things like laws, policing, propaganda and the inevitable liberal application of the gulag.

If there is, in fact, no such thing as free will, then it would logically follow that it would be impossible for me to change my mind and believe what my friend wants me to believe. That's because, since I have no free will, I have no mental mechanism that would allow me to change my mind of my own accord.

So then, it makes absolutely no sense for him to be telling me that the idea of free will is stupid. I'm not going to change my mind. In fact, by his own reasoning, I can't change my mind and suddenly believe what he wants me to believe in the first place. - at least not without a liberal application of rewards, reinforcement and punishment. I suppose that's what all the ridicule, sarcasm and nagging are about. Perhaps he thinks that will change my mind and induce me to follow the herd that he and his ilk are trying to assemble.

If, then, outside circumstances must be brought to bear to change my mind for me, I suppose he believes that he's is acting as the environmental stimulus that will force me to come round to a belief that he believes is more rational.  Of course, then he has the problem that he has no way of knowing whether or not what he believes is rational or the product of a miserable childhood, a bad bit of beef or an old potato to paraphrase that monument to the power of free will, Ebenezer Scrooge, and therefore, my friend and others who do not believe in free will, inevitably live down a rabbit hole where they have no choice about anything and from which there is no escape (to mix my 19th metaphorical literature). In fact, without free will, how is it even possible for me to ever choose to mix my 19th century metaphorical literature in the first place?

My career in therapeutic recreation relies on an experience called "flow" which, as it turns out, is a primary mechanism which makes people happy. Flow is that all-absorbing activity that tests your skills, gives you constant positive feedback and makes you totally loose track of time. Entering flow makes you feel happy and has all sorts of positive health benefits. One of the key factors required to enter the flow experience, however, is that the activity must be chosen by the individual of his own free will.

Flow doesn't happen when you are forced to do something against your will, no matter how much fun it might be to another person. The activity must be chosen by you. And therein lies the flaw in the idea that some elite group of smart people can somehow make everyone happy and content through the application of uniform external rewards, reinforcement and punishment. Happiness and contentment come from within, not from without as generations of miserable discontented rich people, who have everything stimulating they could want, could tell you.

The idea that such a thing as the socialist utopia can even exist, that is the magic fairy dust - designed by smart people and enforced by law though it may be. It won't work. Happiness comes from within and there's only one entity in this wide universe capable of changing the human heart from within.

It's not Marx, Skinner, Maslow or Barak Obama.  There's only One who can take a heart, battered by  bad experiences, evil parents and old potatoes and scrub it up and give it back to you with your free will, not only intact, but freed from any behavioral conditioning you might have picked up along the way. 

As He described the process, "The Truth shall set you free."

Thank God for that. Otherwise all we'd have to look forward to is everybody being sad, receiving bad food, bad healthcare, bad housing and bad jobs for the rest of our short and miserable lives. Uniformity does not ensure happiness, productivity, creativity or peace. The only thing the collective can give us is universal shared misery.


And, as Captain Reynolds so eloquently put it, "I do not hold to that." And I may have to misbehave.


Tom King
(c) 2015

 

Do Churches Teach You Not to Think?



The journey that makes the snowflake makes it unique among its brethren for no two journeys are the same.


Up front let me self-identify. I'm a Sevenfth Day Adventist - member in good standing and all that. I know I should leave them alone, but when someone posts a question like this or makes the claim that churches force you to close your mind and accept a kind of forced ignorance, I just can't let the basic assumption behind that claim stand.

A church is, after all, a place where people study and share ideas. Very few congregations have such a rigid structure that there is no exchange of ideas. The sermon alone is a flow of ideas from the speaker to those who hear him. Ministers constantly challenge the comfortable assumptions of their parishioners and invite them to contemplate that which is infinitely beyond themselves. What could be more mind-expanding than that?  What the recipient receives and how it gets interpreted, is entirely up to the listener, but as the Germans say, "Sie gedanken sind frei."  You're thoughts are free.

Holocaust survivor, famed author and psychoanalyst Victor Frankl realized this in a very powerful way when, his family murdered and himself stripped naked and tortured, he discovered that no guard, no SS torturer could reach inside to control who he was in his inner soul.  He discovered that if one has a reason why he should live, if one truly holds love in his heart, he can survive any horror, any trial intact.

Some basic truths I have found:


1. Before a man can clearly look at any set of data, think about it and decide for himself (or herself) what the data means, he must have a mental construct or frame from which to analyze the data and come to a decision as to what to do about it. For some, formal religion or a specific philosophy serves this purpose. Even if you think you don't have a religion or philosophy, you will pick an underlying belief system up from friends or from TV or family -- somewhere, whether you like it or not.  Everyone has a mental framework or belief system. The construction of this framework is the entire work of childhood. Were we not to create a coherent belief system, all the data we absorb would be meaningless. You would be trapped in a kind of perpetual befuddled infancy, unable to decide what was important and meaningful and what was not. There would literally be thoughts you could not think.
2. When that belief system or paradigm is challenged, it causes some level of anxiety.  You experience much greater anxiety if your belief system is fragile or not working very well for you.  You experience far less anxiety or maybe none at all, if you are secure in your intellectual paradigm and can assign meaning to what is happening to you be it good or bad.

3. Shakespeare said, "Methinks thou doth protest too much." When our beliefs are challenged and we are not truly secure in them it disturbs us.  When a challenge to your beliefs is clearly articulated, and you have no ready answer to the challenge it presents, you may experience a fight or flight reaction. Panic may ensue and you resort to fighting, accusation, intimidation or threats against the person who disrupts your comfortable belief system. You do this in order to protect your core beliefs. On the other hand, you may simply flee from it and refuse to look at anything which challenges your beliefs.

4. In truth we all are conservative in our thinking in that we naturally resist changes that threaten the mental structures we rely on to process information. That's why a sudden conversion to a new paradigm can be mentally disorienting and frightening, even if it's a conversion to a better, more stable belief system. 

5.  Ultimately, the strength of our belief system depends heavily upon how much thoughtful work you put into constructing that belief system. If you never examine what you believe; if you never purposefully consider what you believe; if you do not consciously accept ideas that make sense to you and reject ideas that you find through study and research are without value, then you never really develop the ability to resist the instincts of the herd. It's how the Germans both knew about the holocaust, but could claim, honestly that they didn't. Their unconscious belief system accepted the idea that something should be done about the Jews - everyone believed it, didn't they?  At the same time they simply avoided thinking about what that meant in terms of actually doing something about the Jewish problem.

Conclusion: We each begin our search for God or for some kind of enlightenment from exactly where we stand. There is no other way. If God is up there (and I believe firmly that He is), then He is quite capable of locating us where we are and bringing us to Himself along a straight and narrow path. Remember, though that the world is a three dimensional place. We all, if searching sincerely for God, will find Him and meet at His feet. But because we all start in different places, it is conceivable that our paths might never cross except at the end. It's pretty certain, in fact, that no two of us will ever experience the journey in quite the same way. That is why, like snowflakes, no two of us are ever exactly alike.

And that, my friends, is, I believe exactly how God intended for things to work. Our work is to search for truth, to examine our beliefs and to choose whether we wish to love outward or to do the opposite which according to Elie Weisel is indifference. Indifference is what happens when you turn love completely inward and no longer care about anything or anyone outside yourself.
 
Me, I choose love; the powerful reaching out beyond yourself toward infinite love that transforms the soul and leads you home. I choose love every day of my life. In the meantime, may you find for yourself that path that leaves you strong, self-aware, and truly possessed of free will as God intended.
 
Till then, I'll see you at the journey's end.
 
Tom
(c) 2011

Why Christians Should Stop Arguing with Atheist Progressives

I let myself be lured into arguing with an atheist friend of mine today.  First he said I must believe that Satan was behind the tectonic plate movements in Haiti, since, of course, Pat Robertson said so (which he didn't) and therefore I "must" believe it.  Then he claimed that I was "..trying to use reasoning and evidence, yet when asked for any evidence and reasoning behind the very existence of the devil you are using the defense “it’s a matter of belief.”


Except I never said "It's a matter of belief." He said that on my behalf without any help from me. Then he made some garbled comment about believing in "...talking snakes and drinking blood of dead God on Sundays."  Then, he went right on to "I would like an evidence which would not be riddled by gross logical fallacies" and offered to recommend some books for me to read that would fix me right up with my whole distorted belief system.

Oh, and then he suggested that if I were "intellectually curious" (oh, like George Bush wasn't you mean) then I might actually read some of the great books on how stupid Christians are.

I love it when progressives who are also atheists start tossing around book titles and asking you to prove God mathematically. Oh, and he made sure he pointed out that he has more education than 95% of ordinary mortals so "elitist" was an okay label with him.


The thing is, when you attack someone's belief system, they tend to get defensive. My friend's reaction was to defend his faith. I can't fault him for that. Atheism is no less passionate a belief system than any other religion.  My friend made it clear that I must prove that Satan exists if I am to believe in him.

The problem with that is he is under no similar compunction to prove that Satan does not exist. The fact is, you cannot prove a thing does not exist, only that you have never seen it yourself. I, for instance, have never seen a black hole and neither has anyone else. They can only infer the existence of a black hole by it's effect on objects around it.

I infer the existence of Satan in much the same way.  Progressivism actually began with a fine intent and had some very positive effects on society.  Crusty old capitalists were convinced to voluntarily treat their workers better. Christians began to perform organized acts of charity to improve the lot of those less fortunate than themselves.  But something happened to the movement early on and turned it a nightmare ideology based on beliefs that are totally at odds with Christian principles.  Eugenics, mass murder, persecution and tyranny sprang up from progressive roots with a speed and ferocity that was breath-taking.

The regularity with which this happens in history, points with certainty to the existence of a cool and evil intellect behind this transformation. At least it points with sufficient clarity to convince me that this evil entity exists.  Can I prove he exists? No, for I have never met him, although a person whose veracity I trust tells me she has met one of his agents in the flesh.  I have no reason to doubt her.


I am curious as to why folks like my friend even bother to argue with me.  It makes no sense. Atheists assume there is no God. Researchers like B.F. Skinner, proceed from that assumption and are led, logically, to the conclusion that men's ideas and attitudes and behaviors are entirely the product of operant conditioning. By that logic we basically have no free will.  Free will is, then, an illusion produced by our evolutionary proclivities.  The book he recommended that I read claims that people see meaning in randomness because of our evolutionary makeup and not because there is any inherent truth or meaning in life at all. 


If this is so, my friend's argument is the product of a lifetime of experiences and events that have conditioned him to believe as he believes and act as he acts - nothing more.  If that is so, then he believes what he believes quite by accident.  I, on the other hand, believe what I believe entirely by choice. Logically, he cannot help but pick an argument with me. He is conditioned to do so.  Since I am also conditioned to believe what I believe, according to his belief system, then neither of us are arguing because we want to, but because we are conditioned to.

Logically, only a person with free will could choose to stop the argument.  The responsibility, then, for ending the argument is entirely mine.  Since my belief system says that I am able to choose, I, therefore, choose not to argue.

Don't worry about my friend. He'll ramble on a while, score what he thinks are a couple of devastating points and then move on, congratulating himself on how he showed me up!

I love making atheists happy.  They have so little to be truly happy about.

I'm just sayin'

Tom King - Flint, TX