Spoiling for a Fight

I used to really enjoy getting into religious debates but mostly, these days, I have gotten over it. I shut down my religious discussion forum AARM after a few years. The forum still exists, but no one posts there any more. The discussions were supposed to move to a site called TalkBeliefs but it never seemed the same afterwards.

Since I became a Freemason I took an oath to be tolerant of the religious beliefs of others and I have tried very hard to follow through with that. My policy is that so long as a religion harms no others, I say people can believe any Tom Fool thing they want. (For the record, inquisitions, ritualized guilt, and sexual abuse I still consider 'harming others', so I haven't entirely given up the good fight.) Every now and then I get a twinge, like yesterday when I was listening to the radio and a comedy spot came on making fun of how illogical the beliefs of a particularly popular religious sect's are. I was amused, smiling ear to ear until, suddenly, the spot ended and I realized it wasn't actually a comedy act at all that I had been listening to! To my complete shock and dismay I discovered I had accidentally flipped to a 'Christian Rock' station and the commentator was completely serious. I won't go into the details of it online but, suffice it to say, it had something to do with a character who was actually a terribly nice young fellow yet was still subjected to threats of hellfire and damnation. Like I said, I thought it was a comedy act.

A part of me still wants to get into these debates for the simple reason that I am so frequently assaulted by what I consider to be irrational propaganda in the media. Just this morning I tried peacefully to watch one of my favorite TV shows, 'Ebert and Roeper' only to be proselytized by someone who knows not a damn thing about me but feels compelled to judge my person via the TV air waves. I wonder if he ever wonders that were it not for science, logic, and rational thought he wouldn't even be able to proselytize me via invisible (some might say imaginary, magical, or miraculous) electromagnetic waves in the time and space.

Yet, I know, that this desire for a debate is completely pointless. You see, this particular group of people have formed their belief system based on an entirely different set of principles than I have. It seems that while I refuse to accept their 'evidence' as evidential they, likewise, refuse to accept science, logic, facts, experience, and reason as evidential to their own models of reality.

I have to let that sleeping dog lie.

So, that's not the fight I want to pick. Just the other day I was looking for some new reading material and I saw Richard Dawkin's book 'The God Delusion' on the shelf. Personally, I don't like Richard Dawkin's because he previously has written a books titled 'The Selfish Gene' and 'The Blind Watchmaker', both of which I take offense to.

I'm kind of weird since I believe in evolution, but I don't believe evolution is either blind nor entirely selfish. I believe evolution is highly creative and expressive and I don't necessarily believe it is locked into linear sequences of time. But, hey, I'm getting ahead of myself.

While I was in the bookstore I picked up Dawkin's book on the 'God Delusion' and I opened it up. The first page that appeared to me, and the first line I read, echoed a sentiment I share so deeply that it really made me take pause. What Dawkins points out is the same idea that I have held for a long time. He makes the observation that when we, as human beings, used our minds to investigate the Universe and found out that God was so much greater, so much more profound, so much more incredible than the tiny, closed, cramped, confined, and limited vision previously promulgated by organized religions. Rather than embracing this greater, more powerful vision of God, the scientific world-view was suppressed by religious fundamentalists who treat thousands of year old documents written by, relatively speaking, primitives as carrying more weight than their own senses. (Here is a case in point; it hasn't been much over 70 years since we thought the Universe comprised, at most, the Milky Way. Today images from the Hubble space telescope and others blow us away with the massive scale and complexity of the Universe at large.)

The God revealed through science and experience is so vast, so grand, so mind boggling, that it makes that little terrorist creep in the Old Testament seem like a quaint and silly anachronism; a vestige left over from a primitive and ignorant race of men lacking such basic things as microscopes and telescopes to fully appreciate the audacity of the Universe they found themselves within.

Just reading this once sentence of Dawkins made me realize that whatever quibbles I might have with him over selfish genes and blind watchmakers, we have a lot more in common in terms of how we assimilate experience than how we may differ. (In fact, out of respect for that one sentence I went ahead and bought a copy of his book; hardback and all.)

Nevertheless, neither Dawkins or the bizarre non-satirical radio message I heard yesterday is the point of this post. The point of this post is to address those individuals who use their free will to argue with incredible vehemence that they lack free-will.

I currently subscribe to 'Discover' magazine and 'New Scientist'. I enjoy reading both but there is a trend in 'New Scientist' which is about to make my head explode. There continues to be a steady stream of articles and commentary on the topic as to whether or not free-will exists. I feel my mind will explode based on the simple observation that these (supposedly?!??) intelligent individuals choose to use their free-will to argument so vehemently that they lack free-will. Am I the only person who sees the irony in this!????

This, my friends, is where I am spoiling for a fight. I'm not certain this is even a 'scientific' discussion to begin with. It is clearly philosophical in my opinion. Moreover, science has demonstrated time and time again that God does, in fact, play dice. Albert Einstein did an incredible service in the later years of his life trying to prove that quantum mechanics was not, in fact, the true underlying order of the Universe. And, time and time again, the quantum uncertainty principle has been validated.

I am so frustrated by the exercise in bizarre theology I keep encountering in my so called 'science' magazines that I am, indeed, spoiling for a fight.

I really don't believe there is anything to even discuss!! Pick a number between 1 and 10. There you go, you just demonstrated free will. It matters not that, on average, most people pick the number 3. It's still your choice. We each make thousands of choices every day. And, on top of that, we think about thinking about thinking about the choices we might make. We hold mental constructs where we play out many scenarios weighing the pros and cons of each, often fast forwarding in our minds into an imaginary future playing out these hypothetical events. (In fact, I did so myself today when I was trying to decide if I wanted to make a post on this topic.)

From what I gather from reading these articles in my science magazines, the heart of the matter is determinism. Well, first of all, determinism a generally dead concept. The notion that we can 'predict' anything that ever could happen given a known set of pre-conditions is tenuous as best.

Nevertheless, that discussion generally relates to boulders rolling down a hill and not something as subtle as human consciousness. Maybe I'm stupid, but the mere fact that when I make a choice, any choice, that affects my reality I am exercising free will if evidence enough for me.

The only argument I have ever heard put forth from a scientific perspective that might rule free-will moot is the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (see Copenhagen). Under the Copenhagen interpretation God does not 'play dice' because anything that ever can, ever will, and ever could happen does happen in an infinite number or parallel Universes.

The thing is, even if this is the base state of reality, it is itself a moot point. Science, and the Scientific Method, deal with experience; sense data and, to each of us, our experience is that we can, will, and do, make a myriad of free-will choices on a daily basis.

So, yes, I'm spoiling for a fight. If you are one of those guys who keeps writing articles or letters to the editor to various scientific journals, arguing with great force and conviction, that you lack any free will, that your entire life, purpose, and existence is pre-determined and predictable as rain (woops, bad example, rain isn't that predictable..) then please email me. First, I will ask you to pick a number between one and one trillion, and then I will hope to smack some sense into your robotic little brain.