In this episode I explore the topic of free will. I look at the traditional Christian theistic perspective, the scientific evidence, and then view free will as an expression of nonduality. I look at what it means to ask if the human self has free will versus saying that nonduality is perfect freedom.
In this episode I explore the topic of free will. I look at the traditional Christian theistic perspective, the scientific evidence, and then view free will as an expression of nonduality. I look at what it means to ask if the human self has free will versus saying that nonduality is perfect freedom.
Do we have free will? Do I make choices or is it an illusion? Every morning for breakfast I have cereal with soy milk and fruit. I choose between three types of cereal that I keep on top of the refrigerator. I decide – or seem to decide - whether I feel like Life, Bran flakes, Shredded Wheat (the original Big Biscuit, not those little hard pellets) or maybe even hot oatmeal, if I want to take the time to make it. I weighed the possibilities this morning and decided that I felt like having Shredded Wheat. And instead of the fresh blueberries I normally have I chose a banana and dried cherries. It seemed like I was making these choices. That I had free will. Did I? Or was it all decided for me
It is an age-old question. Religions and philosophies have struggled with it. When I was an evangelical Christian I went through a phase of embracing Reformed theology. I was a Calvinist. A full TULIP for those of you who know what that means. TULIP is an acronym for five distinctive Reformed doctrines: Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and Perseverance of the Saints.
What those doctrines have in common is the belief that people are not free to choose. They believe that God is in complete control. The heart of Reformed theology is the Sovereignty of God. God determines that happens, especially who is going to heaven and who is going to hell. Double predestination, it is sometimes called. We have no choice in the matter. Also we cannot choose to do right. We can only choose wrong. We are slaves to sin.
Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Reformation, wrote a book entitled “The Bondage of the Will,” which talked about this. He said that humans have a will, but it is not free. It is in bondage to sin. We can do nothing but sin. We are natural born sinners. It all has to do with the Fall and original sin. I don’t want to get into this any more than that. I mention it to demonstrate that a large segment of Christianity believes we do not have free will.
Science seems to concur. For quite a few years neuroscientists have been conducting experiments that predict the choices participants made up to 11 seconds before the subjects are consciously aware of their decisions. It appears that choices exist unconsciously before they become conscious. Thoughts, as well as decisions, happen before they are conscious.
So it seems that if there is free will, it is not the conscious mind that is making the decisions. It is the unconscious mind. That does not eliminate the possibility of free will, but it certainly changes it. If it is the unconscious mind making the decisions, is this us or is it our body or our social conditioning and our genes?
As a Christian I like Friedrich Schleiermacher’s quote advocating limited free will. He said, “We can do what we will, but we cannot will what we will.” In other words we are free to do what we want, but we are not free to want what we want. Meaning that we do not have control over our wants, which sets the boundaries of our will.
When it comes to Christian nonduality, do we have free will? That depends who we are talking about when we ask that question? Are we talking about the individual, personal self? The self is seen through as an illusion. The self is just an idea in the mind. It is an app operating in the brain, software in the hardware of the brain, kind of like artificial intelligence in a computer. It is a very useful app. It has evolved over millions of years to give our species an edge in survival, and it has done a very good job in making the human species the dominant one on the planet. But does it have free will?
If we equate the self with the conscious self then neuroscientists say, “No.” Our conscious self is just taking orders from the unconscious brain. It is carrying out decisions but not making them. It can do what it wants but not will what it wants. It is the executive branch of our human government and not the legislative branch. We could expand that metaphor and try to figure out what the judicial branch of a human being is. Perhaps it is our conscience. But that judicial branch is only as good as the laws it is trying to adjudicate.
Nonduality is based on the awareness – the knowledge if you will - that we are not a self. That self would include the conscious and the unconscious aspects of the human personality. We are not this human being. At least we are not just this human being, even though this human being is part of the whole that is what we are. The psychological self - whether it is conscious or unconscious or both, involving both hemispheres of the brain and the nervous system that runs throughout the whole body – that self is not real. And for that reason it does not have freewill any more than a computer program or app has free will – even though it may seem like those programs do have a will of their own sometimes.
So back to the question “Do we have free will?” If we mean “Do individual human beings have free will?” then the answer appears to be no. Once again to paraphrase Schleiermacher, we can implement a plan, but we are not the one who decides the plan. Any “free will” we have is very narrow in its scope. When I analyze it I am not even sure about how much choice I have about my breakfast cereal this morning. It feels like I am just carrying out orders made at a much deeper level than my conscious thinking.
It is determined by how my stomach is feeling and the preferences of my taste buds, which have been trained by my culture and upbringing. My available choices are determined by the supply chain and whether I have made it to the supermarket this week, and the breakfast cereal manufacturers and all sorts of other things. There are a thousand factors that determine what I eat for breakfast. Any choice that the self makes – if any - is very small. So, the answer is for all practical purposes no, there is no free will.
But if we mean, “Does what we really are – our True Nature - have free will?” then the answer is yes. In the same way any Christian would say that God has free will. God would not be God without free will. And we would not be what we really are without free will! So yes, when we are understood to be the Big Self and not the little self, then there is free will. The Big Self is sometimes called No-Self, because it is not the self as we normally think of a self. It is not God in the sense of the theistic deity. But it is God in the sense of our true Self as Ultimate Reality.
The opening words of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas come to mind. Jesus said, “Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All.” I want to focus on the last words “rule over the All.” That implies free will. It means that we are astonished at who and what we really are and see that what we really are rules over the All. In other words we are in union with God.
Some other words of Jesus in the earliest canonical gospel of Mark, come to mind. Jesus said, “Truly I tell you that if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ and has no doubt in his heart but believes that it will happen, it will be done for him.” Jesus is not saying that we as individuals have superhuman powers and can go around moving the Alps or the Himalayas. He is saying that as the One who formed the mountains through eons of time we have no reason to move them around like children’s building blocks. Yet the One can and does moves mountains!
So when it comes to free will, we have to think big. Our bigger identity. Think in terms of mountain-building. Think in terms of eons of time, not in the microscopic lifespan of a human being. See through the eyes of God. See as the eyes of God. This little genetically programmed and culturally conditioned and psychologically stunted human does not have free will. But what we really are is free. It does not have free will; it is free will. So enjoy perfect freedom.