"Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will." (Stein)
"Faith means not wanting to know what is true." (Neitzsche)
"Faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to." (Seaton)
If any of these things are true, then who can say they have faith? Who can say they even want it?
You might have questioned the role of faith in your daily life. Can it exist side-by-side with science? Can you question matters of religious doctrine and still consider yourself faithful? Can you be uncertain and faithful at the same time?
But what sort of person never questions what they are told? Certainly the faith of a child is unquestioning - a child has yet to learn the hard lesson that authority figures are not infallible and not always honest. In an adult, however, such unquestioning faith can only be considered an act of denial or irresponsibility. It's not only alright to question your beliefs, it's a sign of maturity in faith!
A critical examination of your beliefs can be frightening. We are talking about the foundation of our lives - the very thing upon which we base our view of the world and our response to it. One of the most difficult things I ever did was read the Canonical Gospels with a critical eye.
The good news is that by entertaining questions you can only gain: either you will find your faith well supported and gain confidence in your beliefs, or you will come around to a better understanding and new beliefs in which your confidence can grow anyway. Reading Christian scripture critically was like reading it with my eyes open for the first time. Having come through it, I have found a faith that isn't threatened by new discoveries.
Once you have reasoned through your faith, you can in fact, find equilibrium between reason and faith. Believing dogma that conflicts with scientifically established facts is foolishness. But insisting on proofs for everything you believe in is constricting. True faith doesn't conflict with reason, but it can take us where reason cannot reach.
Have you ever prayed, doubting all along whether your prayer was heard? Can you admit that nobody really knows what God is or whether God exists, or that we continue (or do not) after death, and yet live your life as if these things were known? Can you be comfortable with the uncertainty?
Then congratulations - you have faith. Faith is admitting you don't have all the answers, and being okay with that. Faith is trusting that whatever you don't know is taken care of regardless of what you believe.
Friday, August 5, 2011
Thursday, July 21, 2011
The Paradox of Limited Free Will
“Walk any path in Destiny’s garden and you will be forced to choose, not once but many times. The paths fork and divide. With each step you take through Destiny’s garden, you make a choice; and every choice determines future paths. However, at the end of a lifetime of walking, you might look back and see only one path stretching out behind you; or look ahead and see only darkness.” If you believe in Destiny, and think of Destiny as a Person, his garden might look the way Neil Gaiman described in Season of Mists.
Even though we face many decisions in life, we often feel as if we have no control over those decisions, or when we reflect later we feel as if we’ve made the only choice we could have. As when in the episode The Train Job, Firefly’s Malcolm Reynolds was confronted with the fact that his actions had deprived many honest people of the medicine that would make life bearable and told “But a man learns all the details of a situation like ours... well... then he has a choice,” and he replied “I don’t believe he does,” we have felt from time to time that we could only do as we have done.
This has caused many thinkers over the ages to question whether free will exists at all. Some will claim that our gift of free will is absolute – the basis on which we are judged by God. Others believe free will is an illusion, that God with his foreknowledge and omnipotence has seen our fate and determined all that lies ahead. Even those with no belief in God are split over the question of free will – Are we the makers of our own destiny or are we and all our decisions the mere products of the circumstances of our birth? Camps on both sides can point to examples that seem to prove their positions. Did the man that began his life in poverty and ended it as a billionaire achieve his station through hard work or incredible good luck?
What if it’s both? What if in addition to the hard work and the good decisions he made, it took that incredible luck to give him the opportunities to apply good decision making skills, or to give him the capital he required to put his plans into action? Isn’t that what we really believe: that our lives are our responsibility, but require at least a little luck to make our good decisions count? This is why I believe in Limited Free Will at best; for two things must be required for Free Will to be a reality for us – the ability to use good judgment and the power to act on our decisions, and neither of these things are endlessly abundant to any of us.
Which of us has ever had perfectly good judgment? Don’t we all remember occasions where our judgment was clouded by emotion, sleep deprivation, or chemical substances, or where we lacked sufficient information to choose wisely? And how responsible are we for the good judgment that we have? How responsible are we for our natural cognitive abilities, genetically bestowed, or for the education we received that enabled us to examine facts critically and choose from among them those most applicable to our situation?
Which one of us has ever been able to act on every impulse, selfish or altruistic, that we have ever had? Which of us has access to the resources we need to feed all the hungry, or fulfill our every sacred self-centered dream? And of those resources that we have, how much responsibility do we personally have for their acquisition, and how much do we owe to being born to the right parents, or knowing the right people, or simply being in the right place at the right time?
So who among us truly has free will? And why does it matter?
It matters, because when we know how much responsibility we have, or do not have, we can afford to be more generous, more forgiving, with both ourselves and our neighbors. Instead of punishing ourselves and others for our faults or mistakes, we can seek out the causes of those errors and seek to remedy them or prevent them from recurring. Instead of wasting time and energy on the blame game, we can heal our communities and families.
Take Rodney as an example. Last week he stole a car from a nearby neighborhood. His due punishment is a jail sentence. But suppose he stole the car so he could sell it for his next house payment, and suppose he couldn’t make that payment because he’s been laid off and his mother is in the hospital? Or maybe he’s a long time offender, paying for a drug habit, which he formed as a teenager when he ran away from home, to avoid being beaten by his step father? Or suppose he simply lacks the skills and judgment that get most of us through life by legitimate means? How much good could we do by eliminating blame and punishment from Rodney’s case and focusing on what caused it in the first place? What if instead of punishing him, we rehabilitated him through therapy, education, job placement assistance, or disability services?
Let’s bring it down to a smaller example: that lady who cut you off in traffic yesterday. What if you knew that she was late to work and sleep deprived because she’s caring for her father with Stage 5 Alzheimer’s and can’t afford to lose her full-time job at WalMart? How would that knowledge affect your reaction to her rudeness and risky behavior?
And how do you know that she isn’t?
And herein lies the paradox: knowing that there are limits on our free will, we can choose to be kinder, more reasonable, more helpful. We can understand that everyone else is doing the best they can with what they have, like we are, and we can work with them to maximize every opportunity to improve life. We can be grateful for the natural abilities we’ve been granted, giving thanks to God, if we believe in God, being humble before nature if we do not, accepting that neither our genetic predispositions nor our early environment were our own doing. And we can make the most of what freedom we have.
Even though we face many decisions in life, we often feel as if we have no control over those decisions, or when we reflect later we feel as if we’ve made the only choice we could have. As when in the episode The Train Job, Firefly’s Malcolm Reynolds was confronted with the fact that his actions had deprived many honest people of the medicine that would make life bearable and told “But a man learns all the details of a situation like ours... well... then he has a choice,” and he replied “I don’t believe he does,” we have felt from time to time that we could only do as we have done.
This has caused many thinkers over the ages to question whether free will exists at all. Some will claim that our gift of free will is absolute – the basis on which we are judged by God. Others believe free will is an illusion, that God with his foreknowledge and omnipotence has seen our fate and determined all that lies ahead. Even those with no belief in God are split over the question of free will – Are we the makers of our own destiny or are we and all our decisions the mere products of the circumstances of our birth? Camps on both sides can point to examples that seem to prove their positions. Did the man that began his life in poverty and ended it as a billionaire achieve his station through hard work or incredible good luck?
What if it’s both? What if in addition to the hard work and the good decisions he made, it took that incredible luck to give him the opportunities to apply good decision making skills, or to give him the capital he required to put his plans into action? Isn’t that what we really believe: that our lives are our responsibility, but require at least a little luck to make our good decisions count? This is why I believe in Limited Free Will at best; for two things must be required for Free Will to be a reality for us – the ability to use good judgment and the power to act on our decisions, and neither of these things are endlessly abundant to any of us.
Which of us has ever had perfectly good judgment? Don’t we all remember occasions where our judgment was clouded by emotion, sleep deprivation, or chemical substances, or where we lacked sufficient information to choose wisely? And how responsible are we for the good judgment that we have? How responsible are we for our natural cognitive abilities, genetically bestowed, or for the education we received that enabled us to examine facts critically and choose from among them those most applicable to our situation?
Which one of us has ever been able to act on every impulse, selfish or altruistic, that we have ever had? Which of us has access to the resources we need to feed all the hungry, or fulfill our every sacred self-centered dream? And of those resources that we have, how much responsibility do we personally have for their acquisition, and how much do we owe to being born to the right parents, or knowing the right people, or simply being in the right place at the right time?
So who among us truly has free will? And why does it matter?
It matters, because when we know how much responsibility we have, or do not have, we can afford to be more generous, more forgiving, with both ourselves and our neighbors. Instead of punishing ourselves and others for our faults or mistakes, we can seek out the causes of those errors and seek to remedy them or prevent them from recurring. Instead of wasting time and energy on the blame game, we can heal our communities and families.
Take Rodney as an example. Last week he stole a car from a nearby neighborhood. His due punishment is a jail sentence. But suppose he stole the car so he could sell it for his next house payment, and suppose he couldn’t make that payment because he’s been laid off and his mother is in the hospital? Or maybe he’s a long time offender, paying for a drug habit, which he formed as a teenager when he ran away from home, to avoid being beaten by his step father? Or suppose he simply lacks the skills and judgment that get most of us through life by legitimate means? How much good could we do by eliminating blame and punishment from Rodney’s case and focusing on what caused it in the first place? What if instead of punishing him, we rehabilitated him through therapy, education, job placement assistance, or disability services?
Let’s bring it down to a smaller example: that lady who cut you off in traffic yesterday. What if you knew that she was late to work and sleep deprived because she’s caring for her father with Stage 5 Alzheimer’s and can’t afford to lose her full-time job at WalMart? How would that knowledge affect your reaction to her rudeness and risky behavior?
And how do you know that she isn’t?
And herein lies the paradox: knowing that there are limits on our free will, we can choose to be kinder, more reasonable, more helpful. We can understand that everyone else is doing the best they can with what they have, like we are, and we can work with them to maximize every opportunity to improve life. We can be grateful for the natural abilities we’ve been granted, giving thanks to God, if we believe in God, being humble before nature if we do not, accepting that neither our genetic predispositions nor our early environment were our own doing. And we can make the most of what freedom we have.
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