Taking every thought captive for obedience to Christ (2 Corinthians 10.5)

Vision
Humanity and Free Will
Our view of the world necessarily affects our view of ourselves. If the world is only matter in one form or another, then we are only matter, and only materialistic explanations may be invoked to account for our behavior and give guidance to our lives.

For those who embrace an evolutionary and scientific worldview, that approach to understanding humankind works fine. Most of the time. But what do such people do when their worldview runs contrary to their preferred way of living?

Steven Cave suggests they lie to themselves.

In a recent article in The Atlantic, Mr. Cave reports, “There’s No Such Thing as Free Will,” but then insists, “But we’re better off believing in it anyway” (June 2016). The idea of free will – the ability to “freely choose between right and wrong” – has been central to ethical teachings of philosophers and theologians through the centuries. It is a mainstay of Western and American culture and society. As Mr. Cave explains, “Today, the assumption of free will runs through every aspect of American politics, from welfare provision to criminal law. It permeates the popular culture and underpins the American dream – the belief that anyone can make something of themselves no matter what their start in life.”

Mr. Cave ponders what might happen if our faith in free will erodes. He reports that all the relevant sciences continue pointing toward a deterministic world, a world “explained through the clockwork laws of cause and effect.”

A materialistic world only, in other words, one in which every action can be explained by material causes, and free will is only a pipe dream.

This is the result of evolutionary thinking. Recent work in neuroscience has advanced this determinism, “and has dealt a further blow to the idea of free will.” Mr. Cave continues, “The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.”

Mr. Cave does not consider what might be the cause of the build-up of electrical activity in the brain that discharges prior to our choosing; the possibility of some spiritual entity providing the motive power is not within the purview of his worldview. He merely assumes that cause to be materialistic in nature: “The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond.”

Such a view has serious ramifications, and not only in the arena of criminality and justice. The danger is that, as this determinism spreads, we will increasingly deny moral agency, and thus moral responsibility, to human actions. Various research efforts have demonstrated that “when people stop believing they are free moral agents, they stop seeing themselves as blameworthy for their actions.”

The more we deny free agency, the greater becomes the likelihood that we will act in self-interest and become more stressed, less happy, and inept at relationships. Human life in a purely deterministic world becomes meaningless, uncreative, and uninteresting.

Of course, not even the most outspoken evolutionary scientist lives as if that view of life were true.

As a result, Mr. Cave explains – citing research to support encouraging people not to believe determinism – we should simply act as if we have free will, denying the evidence of science, and lying to ourselves and one another. We should believe a myth beyond what the physical-evidence myth suggests.

That hardly seems like a very scientific approach to life. We believe a myth of our own devising, because the evidence of our materialistic worldview suggest a view of life that we find neither convenient nor agreeable. We lie to ourselves to protect ourselves against the truth of our meaningless, uncreative, uninteresting lives.

Mr. Cave insists that doing so “might be what we need to rescue the American dream – and indeed, many of our ideas about civilization, the world over – in the scientific age.”

Mr. Cave is simply admitting the incongruous nature of materialistic and evolutionary thinking: It does not explain life as we know or as we think it should be. Something embedded in us as human beings insists that the deterministic worldview isn’t so, and insists so strongly that we should simply ignore the facts and evidence and pursue our dreams according to a different “myth.”

Materialism as a worldview doesn’t work, because it provokes resistance at precisely those places where we as spiritual beings, made in the image of God, cannot escape the reality of the kind of beings we actually are.

For reflection
1.  What does it mean to be made in the image of God? How is it evident that humans are spiritual beings?

2.  “Free will” is not an idea the Bible discusses. It talks instead of individual freedom – in Christ – and responsibility – before the Law of God. Does it seem to you that Mr. Cave wants to “borrow” from the Biblical worldview in order to “prop up” his materialistic beliefs? Explain.

3.  How would you explain the idea of “freedom” to an unbelieving friend?                                                            

Next steps: Share Mr. Cave’s suggestion with an unbelieving friend. What does he or she think about this idea of lying to ourselves – believing a myth – in order to escape the consequences of our deterministic vision of life?

Next week in our ReVision column we begin a series on “The Kingdom Economy”. This is an important component of a Christian worldview. Here we’ll glimpse the mind of Christ concerning how a social order ought to work. Be sure to follow each of these studies, as they offer important Biblical insights for our lives and societies.

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