Free Will: A secular approach to why it doesn't exist.


I have heard many times from Christians that free will was given to us by god. We can choose to do things, but there are consequences. Apparently double consequences. And if there was a god he would be guilty of double Jeopardy, people being punished twice for the same crime. This isn't that debate, mostly because it is bogus, but because there is more challenges here to free will than those who subscribe to it can answer.

When it comes to free will, what this assigns any one person, is that they have complete charge and control over their lives, and nothing is predetermined. It means every day is a new start, you can make choices and though they may have consequences either direction, you can somehow make them in a way different from what you know. This is wrong.

You were not aware of the moment that one egg and one sperm combined to make you, but it did. Nine months later you were born to circumstances you had no control over. Before you could define yourself, your parents, society and humanity began to do it for you. No one sat back and watched you grow giving you every chance to determine your self, but they subscribed their ideologies onto you. This trend continued until you became like who your parents were trying to achieve for you to be.

Most people will not leave their social standing, make more money than their parents or live lives very far removed from that, but there are exceptions. How do we explain those. Well the dynamic gets deeper. Because every choice you have ever made leading backwards is involved in this equation. And it is an equation, with outside variables interacting in your small bubble of a life.

hose outside variables are the 6.5 billion other lives on this planet. They all had prior decisions before they ever interacted with you, and while I am not saying random events won't or can't happen in your life, those are random chance events based upon this equation. Because at any given time you are interacting in the mesh, and interacting with the one of two decisions that person had to make.

Now this is where it gets highly complex, so try and follow. In the morning from the opening of your eyes you make decisions, so do the 6.5 billion other people on the planet, any of those given decisions can lead them to interacting with you, giving you another 2 decisions to make, then they interact with you and others adding to the decision complex, but there are only ever two decisions...yes, or no. When you pick one of these you move from one path to the other, and interact with people who made a similar or opposite decision of yes or no, and on it goes...ad infinitum.

All of the good things and bad that happened to us today and will happen come from those paths at any given time, and you won't ever escape it because of prior training, known consequence, care and desire to have or avoid those consequences and social standing. In other words, everything you do is based on everything you did, and everything you will do is based on everything you did or know.

When people say you have free will, they say you can somehow escape the chain of events you have faced since your birth, leaving you free to escape from them, but thinking back, did you ever do something that changed every dynamic in your life, or did you follow one of the two decisions given to you and the subsequent path that followed. No that doesn't mean random chance does not exist, it does, only because if this were a math equation, the numbers would be astronomical, and the more people you add into your life, the more chances a yes or no will present, but it will always come back to what s your prior experience, what are the yes and no options, and how will you respond based on those.

When it comes to free will, all that we are is a mesh of prior existence to this moment, it is not all predetermined, it is just set in motion from birth on a continuum that will end in death and it will play out the same way over and over for billions of lives.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Be Inspired: Hitchens Last Message.

Image
It has not yet been a year since the passing of Christopher Hitchens. Every time I hear his words I am inspired. His contribution to humanity will sustain mankind for thousands of years to come. His whit and candor brought fear to his foes. His splendid knowledge was like a well versed and worn book. Every page was some sparkling overlooked detail of history. He shined a light on the hypocrisy of religion, and shouted it from every podium or arena he could find. In his final message, in Texas, to the freethinkers gathered there, he said "Be inspired." He looked to the future that he would never see. A future where we solve the mysteries that lie awaiting our discovery. Discoveries he could have never dreamed of, for his lifetime. On the eve of his own departure from humanity, he knew that our choices will effect the certainty of our existence. We as a species, and a group, and societies, countries, families. He had come to terms with his own human frailty as an organic
Read more

Why I am thinking of leaving activism.

I must say, the last year or so has been a wild ride. Meeting so many wonderful people, getting so many hugs, showing and being shown so much love. It warms the heart, it makes me proud and feel like this is what life should be. Lately though, those feelings have turned to a kind of sadness that I just can't explain. One that haunts and disturbs me. When I first came into activism, it was just a passion. One girl with a blog, a vocabulary that was utterly passionate, and a dream. I was charged, and madly, deeply driven by passion I had gotten from the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens. I could see the way I wanted life to be, and how oppressive religion was, how it tore men down and broke their spirits, and destroyed the very natural fabric of man. Now almost two years later, I sit at my kitchen table thinking, how do I go on? How can I do this, when the fire is dying inside. I don't feel inspired, worst of al I don't even feel like writing, or doing a podcast or standing
Read more

Mohammad was just a man and the Quran is Not Science.

Image
Mohammad Was Just A Man, and The Quran is not Science. 1400 Years ago in Medina was a man named Mohammad. He was born to an average mother, and father. He grew up illiterate, and claimed to have talked to god. No one can refute this since he was alone during this time. Perhaps he had listened to the tales from men traveling through, certainly only he knows, but no one speaks from the grave. He had many wives, his youngest and last being the Aisha. This has caused an uproar in the West, though honestly it is not the first time a man would marry a child too young, or the last. That brings me to my point. Mohammad was just a man.  I know that those who follow the Quran and the Hadith never want to be caught speaking bad of their prophet, but face it he was not perfect. In fact some of the things he did, like have a woman's family killed so he could marry her, were kind of horrible. http://www.answering-islam.org/Responses/Osama/zawadi_safiyyah.htm His wanting a young bride
Read more