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Re: Radio Satan

On Mon, 20 May 2002, ryan richards wrote:
> You know, the great thing about free will is that the Christian knows
> it's out there and can truly choose it and live it whereas the atheist,
> because of his/her deterministic world view, has to try and conjure it
> up.

How does the Christian know it's out there?  I have had doubts about my
own free will since I was 14, at least.  It all started when I sat on a
bus at a bus loop and thought about getting out and buying a chocolate bar
at the nearby 7-Eleven before the bus had to leave.  I knew my parents
didn't want me to waste money on chocolate bars, so I thought maybe I
shouldn't get out and buy the chocolate bar.  Wanting to be obedient, I
told myself I had to practice self-discipline and not follow my impulses
... and then it dawned on me, if I chose self-discipline, wouldn't I be
doing it because I had felt an impulse to pursue self-discipline?  Rather
than placing free will above impulse, wasn't I simply following one
impulse instead of another one?  And didn't this mean, not that I had
*chosen* an impulse, but that one impulse had been stronger than the
other?  Was I not still a slave to my impulses, in some sense?

The question so perplexed me, that I never did get off the bus -- not
until it dropped me off at my home, at any rate.

This was around the time I read Isaac Asimov's _The Robots of Dawn_, in
which there is some discussion of the idea that the human mind works
according to set, predictable patterns, just like the robot mind.  That
may or may not have influenced my thoughts on the bus that day.

FWIW, years later, the Christopher Walken character expressed similar
thoughts in Abel Ferrara's 1996 film _The Funeral_:

   http://mypages.smig.net/users/jcorey/the.funeral.html

   You wanna get deep on this shit? All them Catholic scholars say
   everything we do depends on free choice, but at the same time they say
   we need the grace of God to do what's right. Now if I do something
   wrong, it's because God didn't give me the grace to do what's right.
   Nothing in the world happens without his permission. So if this world
   stinks, it's his fault. I'm only working with the tools I've been
   given.

For my part, I choose (ha!) to believe in free will, and I see no way that
it can exist without a God of some sort, but I don't *assume* that I have
free will, and I certainly don't "know" that I have free will.  To
paraphrase _Lawrence of Arabia_, a man can be whatever he wants, but he
cannot *want* what he wants -- we may choose the things that we want, but
we do not choose to want those things in the first place.  That said, I
believe in free will because, as Puddleglum might say, it seems a good
deal more "important" to me than the idea that my mind is nothing more
than a symptom of my brain cells, all of them doing whatever it is they do
without much concern or thought (uh, so to speak) for each other.  But
then, I may just be following another impulse, in that regard.  :)

Feeling dizzy yet?  :)

--- Peter T. Chattaway --------------------------- peter at chattaway_com ---
 "I detected one misprint, but to torture you I will not tell you where."
      Winston Churchill to T.E. Lawrence, re Seven Pillars of Wisdom

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