How I Became A Humanist: Determinism and Hell

 What religion would you most likely believe if you'd been born in Saudi Arabia? What about if you'd been born in India? Do you believe in the same god your parents do? Have you read the religious texts of other religions? Have you been to centers of worship? Have you spent as much time in them as you have your own? Enough to adequately compare their truth claims to your own?

Like most Americans, I grew up believing in a rather robust and what I now consider to be a Disney-esque view of Free Will. I believed that we freely chose our actions, our beliefs, who we are and where we were going. 

My studies in history, theology and the rest began to challenge these views. Now, obviously, if I had been born on the American continent in the 1300s, I couldn't have been a Christian. This goes without saying, but what we often ignore is that almost all of us believe about God more or less whatever our parents believed, maybe with some slight variations. Are we so sure that we choose our religion? Are we so sure that the Virgin Birth makes sense but Golden Tablets don't? 

Never mind that. Instead, consider this. Did you choose your primary language? Did you choose your parents? Your genetic make-up? Did you choose your innate intellectual or emotional intelligence? Did you choose your first grade teacher? Your first grade classmates? 

Okay. Maybe not. But you still chose WHO YOU ARE, didn't you? You've had free will since... since when? Did you have free will when you were in the womb? What about day one out of the womb? I think most of us would say that we did not have free will in the womb or the first day out of it, but those of us who are parents will acknowledge that babies have personalities on their first day out of the womb. Mothers will say that babies have personalities when they're in the womb. And if this is true, then we have personalities before we have free will. That is to say that we are making choices that cause the interactions that lead to learning that cause us to grow into who we will be at the point of our next decisions... and we're doing this before we have what we might call free will. 

And this leads us to a problem that we don't generally consider when we think about free will. We don't choose the chooser. I didn't choose to be Jon Noble Day 1. But Jon Noble Day 1 lived a life of interactions that led to Jon Noble Day 2. Jon Noble Day one neither chose to be Jon Noble Day 1 nor chose the participants who were present for Day 1, nor the scenes of Day 1, nor even what Jon Noble Day 1 was and wasn't aware of...

And this creates a problem. Because not only do we not choose the religious perspective of our parents, we don't choose whether or not we're likely to be the sort of people who are willing to investigate outside of that perspective should that perspective be the incorrect one. 

But let me come at this from another angle. All of our choices are decisions made at particular points in time. Those decisions derive from who we were in those particular moments and what we were aware of at the specific decision point. That is to say that faced with a similar situation tomorrow as today, I might not be inclined to make the same decision because I might not be the same person in a way that might affect my decision. Change one variable about me, about my awareness, about whatever and the outcome potentially changes in a way that looks more like a billiards table than it does 'freedom.'

And when we look it it like this, the objections people usually raise about our decision not being predictable or us not making the same decisions today as yesterday vanish. Of course, we don't make the same decisions today as yesterday. The situations aren't identical and even if they are, we aren't. And of course, it's not predictable. Neither is the weather, really. I don't suspect anyone is attributing the weather's unpredictability to free will. 

To put it plainly, being determines doing and everything is. It's not that I couldn't choose otherwise, it's that me being me means that I wouldn't. For me to choose something different would mean that something about me or the situation or my awareness of it would have to be different from what it is. Why else would I be inclined to choose other than what I am choosing. And this is as true of frogs as it is of humans. Might it not also be true of Gods? Are Gods not whatever Gods are with whatever goals, awareness, etc. that those Gods have? Who is to say, really? 

And it was these thoughts that led me to Determinism and to question the justice of an idea like hell.