Free Will Is a Sham

In JL Wilson’s list of 8 Things , the item that stood out for me was the following:

“I don't understand the concept of free will. It seems to me that anything I chose to do was the only thing I was capable of choosing in that moment of decision. Most of the time I "should" have made a better decision, but that wouldn't have been me making the decision. Everything that happens - including everything I make or let happen - happens for a reason. “

It’s good to know that I’m not the only one who has problems with “free will”. I think of it as a useful fiction rather than something that we really exercise. It is helpful to act in some cases, e.g. in allocating blame, as if we had free will, but let’s not forget that it is a heuristic device.

I believe that everything I have done or ever will do is determined by a multitude of causes beyond my ken and that everything that happens was laid down in the Mind of God from the beginning of time for God’s unfathomable Purposes. That does not mean that my heart does not break. Moreover, it does not make me a practicing fatalist. I don’t know what is going to happen or what choices I may make, so it’s all a big surprise to me, and I hope that it will turn out that I one of the folks who made the right choices at least some of the time.

My freedom from the concept of free will has helped me in my spiritual life and to understand grace. I believe that I am a beneficiary of God’s infinite Grace. I am free from bondage to sin. My sins don’t count against me. God loves me just the way I am. Sunday before last, one of the back up preachers sermonized about this freedom. He did what preachers always seem to do. He announced our freedom from sin and then took it back! Good news, everybody, we’re free from sin, but you are going to have to struggle not to sin anyway. Wrong, wrong, wrong, say I. The Holy Ghost working within you will transform you into a new person who won’t even want to sin. You need not worry about rule breaking. All you need to do is let yourself act out of love.

Getting past free will also helps me with my problem with guilt. Thanks to the Baptists and other fundamentalists and my mom, I feel a lot of guilt and shame. I feel this not only for the bad stuff I do but also for the good stuff that I don’t do! I am ashamed that I am not as generous and loving as a saint, and I feel twinges of guilt about stupid things I said or did decades ago. But when I ponder that I am the person that I was meant to be, that I was made only to be so good and no better, that I didn’t really have any choice but to say or do the stupid things, I can repress my feelings of guilt and shame for a while. Mrs Vache Folle once encouraged me to be more like Homer Simpson who never regrets anything and to compare myself to an ax murderer rather than to Mother Theresa. I’m trying.

Like LJ Wilson, I find that getting past free will allows me to be less angry with others and to be more patient and understanding.