Free agency? Really? – Part 1
(Okay, time for another round of amateur explorations in theology with your favorite amateur theologian, written on her trip from Illinois to Washington state for her father’s wedding. If you’re new to this blog or you haven’t paid much attention lately, you may want to read this post first.)
The diagram above is a sketch of a scar on my right ankle, a line with two dots on either side of it; I was going to photograph it, but it doesn’t photograph well. When I was a year old, I was diagnosed with bacterial meningitis, a condition that is fatal in 20-30% of babies even today, and I was hospitalized for several days while I fought the infection. The scar is from the IV that was put in my leg.
The diagram above is a sketch of a scar on my right ankle, a line with two dots on either side of it; I was going to photograph it, but it doesn’t photograph well. When I was a year old, I was diagnosed with bacterial meningitis, a condition that is fatal in 20-30% of babies even today, and I was hospitalized for several days while I fought the infection. The scar is from the IV that was put in my leg.
I’m showing it in this post because it represents a permanent mark that was put on my body that has been with me for as long as I can remember—and yet, it happened without my consent. I was too young to have any say in the matter, so my parents made a medical call on my behalf. I’m not ungrateful and I doubt I’d have chosen any differently had I been old enough to decide, but it stands as an event in my life that effected me that I had no control over.
In fact, it seems that there are a lot of factors in my life which have profoundly influenced my way of thinking which were and always have been beyond my control. Things like:
- being a woman
- being white
- having been born into a poor working class family
- having been born in America
- being born into a non-religious family
- growing up with abuse in my home
- having good Christian examples in my life as I grew up who guided me to the Gospel
- being relatively healthy for most of my life
- being white
- having been born into a poor working class family
- having been born in America
- being born into a non-religious family
- growing up with abuse in my home
- having good Christian examples in my life as I grew up who guided me to the Gospel
- being relatively healthy for most of my life
Other factors beyond my control that have been less significant, but have still effected my life in some way or another:
- having three brothers and one sister
- being 6’0″ tall
- having curly (sometimes frizzy) brown hair
- being slender by nature and not having to worry (much) about my weight
- being 6’0″ tall
- having curly (sometimes frizzy) brown hair
- being slender by nature and not having to worry (much) about my weight
The point of all this being, before we’re even born, a lot about the way we’re going to turn out is already written. We have absolutely no agency over a huge portion of who we are.
If you’re LDS and you believe in a pre-existence, then some of this lack of agency may go away. Maybe you believe we willingly selected the families that we were born into, and thus didget some say over our race, nationality, religious upbringing and starting income bracket. Then again, maybe you don’t believe that; maybe we received little forewarning on the specifics of our future lives. Whatever the case, even Mormons typically don’t believe that we chose all of it. Sex, for example, is apparently an inalienable trait that no one chooses, and I don’t think we can downplay the significance of how being male or female effects our worldview and the choices we make in life.
For a long time now, the question of God and free will has been on my mind. Being an evangelical Christian who interacts with Mormons on a regular basis, I feel like I’ve heard a wide spectrum of religious opinions on this issue. In one corner, we have double-predestination Calvinists, who believe that God alone is in control of the eternal fate of every soul in existence and that we only have free will in a “compatibilist” sense. In the other corner we have philosophically savvy Mormons, who tend to argue that creation ex nihilo + free agency don’t mix, and creation ex nihilo + free agency + exhaustive divine foreknowledgeespecially don’t mix. As a squishy Arminian, I’ve often felt caught somewhere between taking fire from both camps and having things in common with each of them, and I’ve deeply yearned to retain some of the beliefs in each group. If classical Christian theology and belief in libertarian free agency are two masters, I want to serve them both.
These days I’ve been re-thinking this issue. Here’s some questions concerning the relationship between deity and human free agency that have stuck in my mind:
(1) Given the numerous and hugely important factors effecting our lives that we verifiably have no control over, why is it so important to us that we have ultimate control over the rest of it? Why do we resist the idea that the entire thing has been decided by someone else instead of just part of it?
(2) If there is an objective truth in this universe that everyone is meant to find, to what extent are we truly able to overcome the influences of our upbringing and find it on our own?
To be continued.
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Free agency? Really? – Part 1 — 8 Comments
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The problem you are addressing I feel is in the way you have coached your agency. Agency is never a choice of your choices, there are some restraints, what Heidegger would have called throwness, and what you have mentioned as life circumstances. Just because they exist does not negate agency. Agency, philosophically termed, is simply the idea that when presented with a choice could you have done otherwise.
It also comes down to understanding the two camps of explanations for causation a little better. There is sufficient causation and necessary causation.
in sufficient causation there needs be only one factor to explain it all, i.e. biology, environment, etc. and that is “sufficient” to explain all of it.
But in necessary causation things like biology and environment are important factors but they are only parts of the greater causation picture, because in necessary causation agency could be one of those factors, and so could God; and we need to take them into account in describing a human life.
You can describe the human situation from either of those camps, but I prefer to think it is the latter.
If we didn’t have agency, accepting Christ as our Lord and Redeemer would be meaningless, because something in our environment and up-bringing made us do that, we had no choice. Therefore those who accept Jesus and those who don’t, didn’t do either by conscious volition, but because they were programed to do that. Christianity falls apart without meaning and meaning only comes by agency; we could have done otherwise but we chose to accept Christ into our lives, but we didn’t have to.