Nobodys Fault But Mine

I was speaking on Sunday at G2 about Jesus' command of 'do not worry- seek first the kingdom of God'. I reckon I'm a much better writer than nautural public speaker- and so my speaking largely comes out of something I've written carefully and deliberately. I rarely go off piste when I'm speaking on a topic. But as I prepared in the hour before the meeting, I felt really strongly that I should fit something in that I hadn't planned to say at all. So midway through speaking, I casually slipped in:

"You do not have to be anything , you do not have to do anything- do you know that?"

You could have easily missed it. And in fact, most people probably didn't think about the significance of that question. But I could talk for hours about that alone. Tonight, as I lay in the bath reading (it is the place of most creative and spiritual revelations) I was struck again by the potency of this. The book I was reading about leadership, claims that our development, our leadership, is down primarily to what we put into it. Self leadership is one of the biggest skills a leader needs to learn. But we have the tendancy to blame everyone else for our lack of success or movement in life; circumstances, lack of input, negativity, opposition, people. But at the end of the day, the responsibility for what you get from today lies solely with yourself. 

I am reminded of a very famous scene that Sartre paints in 'Being and Nothingness' of a waiter who plays the part of a waiter perfectly. He is a little too eager, his smile perfect, he moves around the restaurant effortlessly; he has become in his own mind: 'a waiter'. Sartre accuses the waiter of living in 'bad faith'; he denies his own freedom and his own existence by reducing himself only to a 'waiter' as if it were an object; as if he were only a waiter as a rock is a rock. The truth of his existence and his consciousness cannot be reduced to this at all. The human condition lies much deeper than that of rocks and chairs. The waiter denies his fundemental freedom to exist, to be conscious.

And it's true in my own life as I stop and look back. For the past 2 months, I have become a little bitter and fustrated with certain things, I have become a little lacking in passion. And I have blamed the lack of a holiday or any time off, I have blamed a lack of time, a lack of input, too many hours at work, too much to do. I'm sure all of these factors have contributed to my situation. But the truth of the matter is that I have been living in bad faith; denying my own responsibility in my life. I have reduced my self and become an object influenced by causes and effects. It is to deny a fundemental truth about myself. It is time to face myself as responsible for the content and state of my own life.

How about you?

Do you know that we choose what we have? Always. We choose the life that we adhere to? Always. I can often be so fustrated even by my personal morality restricting what I can and can't do. But the truth of the matter is; I am free, I choose. I choose my actions, I choose to adhere to a system of ethics. I choose to get up and go to work instead of lying in and lying about it. I choose to approach my relationships the way I do, as fustrating as it can be. I choose to hardly ever have a day off. I choose be lazy, I choose my state of being. I choose my bitterness and lack of passion.

You don't have to go to work tomorrow, you don't have to stay in your marriage, you don't have to diet, you don't have to go running, you don't have to finish your degree or hand in that essay on Friday. You don't have to adhere to a system of morality. If you wanted to, you could sell all your stuff and move to Kenya tomorrow. You choose. Always.

That is not to say that those things go without consequence or influence, but ultimately you choose. And it is not to say that sometimes choices are restriced, and sometimes difficult. But the more you recognise that you always have a choice, the more you realise that only you are responsible for where you are, what you do, and what you make of life.

Tomorrow, you'll probably choose to get out of bed; what will you make of it?

Leaders Of The Free World

I quite wanted an early night on Tuesday night. Turns out I ended up talking about free will with my new housemates until pretty late. I've done quite a lot of that since I've been in York; I wrote my final essay of my degree on the subject. After wrestling with the concept of free will for three years, in the end I became satisfied that free will is only really the presence of a felt choice; it's an illusion of sorts (at least compared to what we might usually think it is).

Christians get pretty worked up and frustrated when it comes to free will. It's not surprising if they want to believe in a creator who is both powerful and knowledgeable and who also intervenes in the course of human history. Free will looks like pretty slim pickings if this is the case; if God knew and created the world exactly as it was, then he surely knew exactly the consequences of his creation, which happen to include every choice I make. A lot of Paul's writing in the New Testament talks about us being 'predestined' and 'elect' by God. That bothers people.

I have a few observations about free will that I've come to accept over the last few years.

The first thing is that no one is in a particularly good position. Whether you're a theist or an atheist, free will is difficult to account for. It's not only God that makes free will difficult, the physical world poses some issues as well. The physical world is a world of causes; all physical events are caused by previous physical events. So if all there are is physical things (which I assume most atheists would want to say), then the laws of nature and the past dictate perfectly the contents of the future. It doesn't look like there's much room for free will there either; your actions are just the consequences of a physical system of causes and effects.

So if you want to maintain that there is 'free will' in the strong sense, you must deny that free agents are part of the physical system of events. And even then, you must also deny that there is a God who knows and controls the universe. As far as I know, there aren't many people whose philosophy of human beings and of the universe would allow free will in this strong sense. No one is in a particularly good position to argue for free will in this strong sense of being 'totally uncaused'. Even if we did come to the conclusion that in actual fact human actions were uncaused, it strikes me as a kind of freedom that I don't really want- actions are merely the consequences of randomness if they are uncaused.

The second thing I've noticed, is that we aren't always on the same page when it comes to talking about free will. When we talk about free will, we usually mean it in this strong sense of being 'uncaused'. But actually we aren't very clear on what we really mean by free will most of the time. I think, if pushed most people would be happy with the kind of free will I endorse. I came to the conclusion that all that we can mean by free will is the feeling of choice. And that is quite enough. It's quite enough for me to decide what I'm going to do next Tuesday, it's quite enough for me to choose what I want for my lunch. It's quite enough for me to choose to follow Jesus. It's my intention that matters rather than what caused it. I could never really know what caused my action after all.

The third thing is that at times we all have to hold in tension that our actions are both caused and free. Sometimes this doesn't make much sense when we try to reconcile it. But maybe we shouldn't try and reconcile it at all. I wonder if the problem is one of perspective. Metaphysically speaking my actions are caused; in other words- zoom out to the level of looking at the universe as a whole, on that level everything causes everything else; the future is just a part of the track that the train of the universe hasn't got onto yet. On that level we're caused. But free will is not something which we can discover on that level at all. Actually free will is something which occurs on a very everyday level; we need to zoom in a lot to get to me at 7 O'clock on a Monday morning choosing which one of my housemates' cereals to steal; I'm perfectly free to choose any of them. Free Will is an everyday thing, it is something that occurs at the level of consciousness and human existence, and not at the metaphysical level. I agree that there is still some sort of tension there, but it's one I'm happy to hold.

The fourth thing I think that is important to think about from a Christian perspective is that at times we have been guilty of constructing human theories around Scripture. When Paul speaks about the things God prepared for us in advance to do, or when he speaks about Christ preordaining our salvation, he firstly and foremost makes a pastoral point. The purpose of most of the New Testament, which is where we get a lot  of our theology on free will from, is primarily to encourage and build the Church. It is to build up leaders and fix people's eyes back onto Jesus. It is a great encouragement when we feel like we are worthless, or that we aren't good enough, to know that actually God has chosen us to be a part of his plans. Of course there are theological consequences of this. But I wonder if it's sometimes risky to take these letters of encouragement, and then take poetic lines from the Psalms, which are beautiful pieces of poetry written to glorify God, and couple them together to make complex metaphysical points about our free will. I'm not saying that these ideas are not there in the Bible, I just sometimes wonder if we're danger of skewing the purpose of some texts in order to build a nice, solid humanly understandable systematic theology which ties all the ends together.

The last thing, and perhaps the most important thing I've observed about free will is that it makes little difference. The causal state of my being makes little difference to which cereal I want tomorrow morning. You see the thing is that tomorrow morning the Calvanist, the humanist, the determinist, the libertarian, the Christian and atheist will all live their lives with perfectly free will. What I mean by that is that as soon as we put down the books, as soon as we stop discussing and debating the level of free will of the human being, we discover that free will is unavoidable. It is right there in front of us as Sartre might say- it is at the heart of our being. On a basic, everyday level, whatever you think about free will has little bearing on what you actually do and how you actually behave. I mean this as an encouragement; sometimes free will is actually not worth worrying about too much, it does not alter how you live, it does not come into play at an everyday level really. I guess we'll never really know how free we are, and it strikes me that we ought to not let it mess with us too much, we ought not to let it cripple us. I don't think anyone actually knows at the end of the day.

I'm free on any sort of level that matters. I find it difficult to dispute that. It's pretty obvious to us that we are free, we're free to choose almost all the time. It's what we do with our freedom that's important, it's how we choose and what we do with our lives. 

Running on Faith

I believe because I can do no other. I wasn't argued into faith, I wasn't persuaded into faith. I became self conscious and I believed. I'm not alone in this. Others can remember the first time they had faith. My mate James for example became a Christian 5 years ago. He was at a festival with me and my friends when he got out of his seat and went to the front to respond and never looked back since. I don't think anyone persuaded or argued him into it. He just got up from his seat and walked into faith. Today he is introducing people to Jesus left right and centre, he is devoting his year to serving God and his Church. It astounds me. All because of that one moment when he leapt into faith.

 Recently I can't get away from the absurdity of faith. Understand me when I say 'absurd'. I don't mean absurd in the sense that we might often hear it. Absurd carries quite a few negative connotations, we might say "The big bang theory is an absurd theory." When we say this we usually mean it's unreasonable or that we disagree with it. When I say that faith is 'absurd that's not quite what I mean. Sartre uses the notion of absurdity to refer to all of existence. Things exist and we are confronted with their existence but there seems to be no meaning behind them. There's some pretty hilariously pretentious pieces (apologies Sartre fanatics) when Sartre talks about being confronted by the absurdity of a tree trunk as a form which confronts his senses but which has no meaning, when we strip away the names we give it, when we experience things as they actually are, we see that they're utterly absurd.

For me that's a pretty good account of faith. I've become increasingly disillusioned with apologetics, with the whole McGrath/ Dawkins spat. It once used to fascinate me, I used to want to be able to argue any atheist into the ground. Now I can't really be bothered. Partly because the arguments don't always convince me, but partly because I think that faith isn't a proposition to be proved at all. Don't get me wrong, there's a use in discussing apologetics if it helps people to see that the Christian faith isn't absolutely bonkers. But it irritates me.

Kierkegaard argued that faith is a paradox, he held that the rational mind cannot ever comprehend God fully or prove that he exists. Faith is all about risk, faith is about leaping into something absurd. I daily leap into the absurd. I choose daily to trust in God. You might have read up to here and think that I'm actually a bit of an idiot. That I've lost a grasp on rationality and am just looking for a way to cling onto some stability that has been indoctrinated in me. Surely that's a possibility, but I don't think it's the truth. You see the thing is we daily leap into the absurd. All of us. None of us can fully understand the universe, the existence of consciousness, life our own existence. When we confront things as they really are, stripped away from all the meaning we bring to them, all we have left is absurdity. Christianity isn't a proposition at all. It's a complete overhaul of my being.

I endorse Christ to you wholeheartedly. I believe that he has redeemed me. That he has set me free from my own self centered universe, I believe that he offers me life eternal. But following Christ is a total worldview. It is a lens that infects every aspect of my existence. It is not something I can be persuaded of in the same way that I can be persuaded that there used to be dinosaurs walking on planet earth. I believe that faith in Christ is the ultimate fulfillment and it brings hope and truth to everything.

But at the same time it's utterly absurd. I cannot tell you why I believe. I believe because I can do no other. I am transformed into faith. That is why I am increasingly frustrated with the limits of rationalism. At some point we all have to leap. That is why Kierkegaard claims that faith is so offensive to rationalism, it threatens the very basis of it. It is a frustrating splinter that cannot be removed, even amidst the tightest argument, there always exists the slightest doubt. I have chosen to leap fully into Christ, and into his promises. I'm not an irrational idiot. But I will constantly fustrate the humanists of this world with my faith. Because faith cannot be eradicated by debate. When we start to enter into the view that rationalism is the only option, faith might diminish, might fade into the background. But I cannot escape the absurd, I cannot shake off faith. It is the most real thing to me.

We need to show faith, we need to model it. That is why I think my friend James leapt into the unknown that day; he saw faith amongst him. I leap every day into what sometimes seems paradoxical and unknown. My hope is that other people will see the power of faith and choose the same.