Am I Free?

 I never particularly enjoyed studying math or science.  I think it was because they have answers.  When tested, answers were either right or wrong.  I was more intrigued by questions without answers.  It was not a question of right or wrong, but how well could I back up my answer.  I used that approach when teaching the Hebrew Bible.  Unlike some who think they know what the Bible means, I took the approach that there were multiple points of view, and all of them were correct.  A typical question was "Did Abraham lie to Pharaoh?".  If someone just answered yes, they may be right, but they still failed because they did not explain why he lied.  Their goal was to convince me that they were right.

I think that might be why questions about God may intrigue me so much.  There is no right answer.  All the proofs and arguments we looked at did not prove God.  Each argument tried to convince us that through the logic of the argument, they were right.  Atheists take the same approach.  They cannot prove that God does not exist.  Philosophers tell us that the most logical answer is correct.  But faith and belief do not necessarily depend on logic.  It relies on the ability to suspend disbelief.  Logically, miracles cannot happen.  Water cannot be changed into wine.  The dead cannot be brought back to life.  The sun cannot stand still.  Reactions to these miracles range from believing that an omnipotent God can do anything, even break the laws of physics; the stories are a fiction; or, they are allegories and metaphors, based on real events, but interpreted through the lens of theology.

Why do some people believe and some people do not?  I do not think it is just indoctrination.  Many people who were raised in religious households have abandoned their beliefs.  It has to be something inside each person.  And so, as I usually do, I start with the Hebrew Bible.  Thinking in the Bible takes place in the heart, intestines, and kidneys.  It is a thought process based on emotion.  I think the ancient Israelites did not intellectually know God, but emotionally felt the presence of God.  In the 4th Century BCE, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle changed the way people think about thinking.  It was the head, not the heart that did the thinking.  

It was the birth of psychology.  How do we account for logic and rational (the head) on one hand, and emotions (the heart) on the other?  The Bible, understood by Jewish philosophers, looks at the creation of humanity in the first two chapters of Genesis and concludes that our emotions, our basic animal instincts, come from the Earth, and our intellect, our soul, was breathed into humanity by God.  Our intellect is divine and since God is viewed as an intellect by Aristotle, that is the image of God that we possess.  We struggle between our basic animal, emotional instincts and our intellect.

Do we have freedom in this struggle?  Basic animal instincts are imbedded in our DNA.  All living things want to stay alive.  Instincts are not governed by morality.  If I am hungry and you have food, if I am stronger, I will take it.  It comes down to survival of the fittest.  If these instincts are part of me, am I a prisoner of them?  Somehow, humanity, in its evolutionary process, developed morals and ethics.  For believers, it is our divine soul that is in conflict with our base instincts.  Without a divine imperative, we will never be moral.  For Freud, it is our superego.  If our drive for morals is part of our DNA as well, we cannot be free of that either.

So, do we have free will?  For the rabbis, it is essential.  The commands of God in the Hebrew Bible would be meaningless without it.  My dog did not have free will.  My commands were meaningless.  Yet, if we truly have free will, there is a dilemma.   We go back to Anselm and his definition of God.  God must have the attribute of omniscience to be God.  If God knows everything, then God knows my future.  That means that my future is determined.  If I come to a fork in the road, and God knows I am going to the left, can I go to the right?  The rabbis understood the paradox.  Their response was that even though God knows that I am going to the left, God's knowledge did not compel me to go to the left.  I went to the left out of my own free will.

I have a different interpretation.  As I said, I am a prisoner to my instincts.  They are inbred.  I did not cause them.  I am also a prisoner to the way I was brought up.  I cannot escape that either.  Confined to myself, I have the freedom to choose, but it is not based on free will.  It is based on my instincts and my intellect.  I compare it to a video game.  The game as been programmed, but I can choose the movements within the game.   The outcome of my choices has been determined by the programmer.  It would be easy for me to understand God as the universal programmer, but that does not solve my dilemma.

So here is my solution.  We exist in linear time.  We go in a straight line from our birth to our death.  If God knows what will happen to me in the time I have left and when I will die, that everything is pre-determined.  I am not particularly happy with this, because that just makes me a puppet in a play, without even the freedom to choose.  If I turn the line of my life 90 degrees, so my line looks like this--"." rather then like this--"__________________________", then God knows my entire life in an instant.  We exist in time, God does not.  If Aristotle is correct, and God is an intellect, than God does not know, God is knowledge.  The past, present and future are a moment in time to God.  As Augustine said, God exists in the eternal present.  For Aristotle, time is the measure of change, and since God does not change, God exists outside of time.  I have the freedom to make choices throughout the time-line of my life.

I do not think I have totally solved my dilemma.  My definition might work in a deistic system, in which God is the cause of existence, but has no role in it, but not in a theistic system, in which God has an impact on the universe.  As I said, I like to deal with questions that have no answers.  Another attempt at humor.  A man asks God if it is true in the Book of Psalms, that a thousand years are like one day to God.  God says yes.  The man says then all the fortunes in the world would be like one dollar.  God says that is probably true.  The man asks if God could loan him a penny.  God tells him to wait a second.