Free Will

There was a point in my life when I stopped believing in the particular sort of God and the particular sort of religion that went with that God. And I became agnostic toward the idea of a “God” in general. It was a completely transformative experience in my life, simply because up until that point everything for me had revolved around those beliefs and the outlooks that emerged from them.

It took a while (a few years, and in one sense it is still happening) to regain a sense of equilibrium and to build a new way of looking at life and my experience of it. Because pretty much everything had changed for me.

The key thing about my new world view is that it is fluid. It changes with the emergence of new information and evidence and experience. And that has been liberating to be honest.

But although fluid, that new world view had some core foundations. Possibly the main one being the notion of free will. The fact that we are free to respond, and actively do, in how we think and act. It is, in fact, a belief that is hotly debated in the world of philosophy. But most people believe we have it, one way or another, and that it is fundamental to our morality and ethics as human beings.

I’m not going to discuss any of that in detail. Suffice to say that I have had another transformative world view experience.

I no longer believe in the notion of Free Will.

And that change has come about through the simple realisation, after close observation, that I have not the slightest clue, not the merest inkling, what thought I am going to think next. There is no Me controlling it. It just happens. I suspect if you examine your own thought processes, you may well discover the same thing.

I’m definitely not trying to persuade or prove anything here though. However, whether true or not, there are clearly lots of potential implications for this bombshell of a change in my thinking.

In the meantime, although in one sense all at sea in my mental ship without that former anchor, just I was when God went and died in my heid, I am convinced that those implications do not need to be nihilistic, nor fatalistic, nor inconsistent with a motivation to live a better life and work towards a better world.

Quite the opposite in fact. I was told that without God there was no reason to do good. To bother with anything. And that is patently not true. I’m quite certain it’s not true in this case either.

But for now, there is a whole new way of looking at the world which I am needing to work out. I’m finding it quite fascinating and exciting actually.

Sorry to batter you with this personal revelation on a Tuesday morning, though.