I Don't Know
Thoughts on free will, consciousness, god (and God?), and opening up to the idea that some answers lie outside of science
1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.1
I grew up outside of the Church, outside of any worship. The closest I ever got was when there was nothing happening on a Sunday morning so I’d tag along with my neighbors for the children’s program at the local non-denominational.
Instead, Mom introduced us to the wonders of enlightened talk radio. I remember fondly the many miles spent in the back of our silver Honda Odyssey daydreaming about the universe as trees passed by in an unrecognizable blur.
NPR and other shows primed me for a world viewed through the lens of rational scientific inquiry. There were no mysteries that we couldn’t unravel without a magnifying glass and calculator.
These ideas were proselytized to me from a young age: everything could be understood, in principle. I’m not sure there was ever a time when I questioned the validity and sanctity of science. This lack of humility led to me viewing religious practitioners with an air of dismissal—why bother with worship when you could understand existence through a textbook?
I imagine this made me a rather annoying child, or, at least, a particular kind of annoying child.
The kind who would endlessly erm-actually his sister in arguments just to frustrate her; the kind who was a little too proud of doing well on standardized tests; the kind who would arrogantly confront friends at lunch for wasting their Sunday mornings in dusty pews.
Yet, if I’m being honest, how am I to say it’s any less incredible and unexplainable that the primordial slop that would become all matter and energy in the universe would happen its way into sapience, absent some being of a higher kind?
If one is to take the woke physicists and astronomers (shoutout the homie Drew) as sensible and correct, then it seems like the universe as we know it began roughly 14 billion years ago. That doesn’t mean anything to us, yet I’m willing to believe it.
They say that if you look at how red some distant galaxies are and reverse calculate a bunch of esoteric observations, you can arrive at some point of infinite density and temperature. Why it was like that, they can’t say. Why it stopped being like that, they can’t say.
But it was until it wasn’t, and then the universe happened.
Lately I’ve been thinking about free will, about consciousness, about whether anything is real.
From my subjective experience, it feels like everything is real. The warm spring sun on my face, a cool breeze through my hair, the beautiful laughter of children playing outside. Nothing exists if these things don’t.
Though, we can’t actually know if what we perceive is real, or just some sufficiently convincing illusion. Reality could be hiding behind a bunch of smoke and mirrors, or existing only in the mind. But does this really matter?
I sit in a chair because I believe in the chair. There may be convincing ontological arguments for why we can’t really know the chair exists, but I’m not standing around anxious that I may phase through the chair-mirage if I try to sit on it.
Maybe I can’t truly know anything about the external world, but believing that life isn’t one massive hallucination feels better, so maybe it’s enough to believe.
It just all seems rather… odd…
How can it be the case that there was a bunch of matter and energy interacting according to a set of laws guiding the universe, and then enough random2 interactions occurred for some of that matter-conglomeration to perpetuate itself, and then this self-perpetuating thing perpetuated long and hard enough for it to become aware of the fact that it’s perpetuating and existing, and it started making choices to continue its perpetuation and existence?
Odd, but that’s what the atheistic explanation seems to be.
So I’ve been thinking that:
We are products of the dictates of the universe. As soon as the Big Bang went off, everything that would ever happen in the universe was ordained; the course could not be altered once it had begun, and the procession of all things was underway. To us, it may feel like things happen randomly or that we have some control over how we lead our lives, but every minute decision we make, from the food we eat to the words we speak, was always going to happen precisely the way it’s happening. Or,
There is some other thing, some thing that is neither matter or energy, some thing that cannot be neatly accounted for and explained in purely physical terms that has granted us the ability to have will and act it out. The Laws of Reality still constrain us, but we are not completely and totally subject to the cascading chain of events set off by the Big Bang. We are the architects of our future. We could think of this other thing as god, but not necessarily God.
I am most inclined to believe the former, that ours is merely the illusion of free will.
But I don’t know.
I want to continue investigating this question. I want to better inform myself across a range of disciplines and see if smarter people than me have a compelling reason for believing otherwise. Perhaps there’s some perfectly reasonable explanation that purely physical phenomenon can give us genuine free will.
This means I need an open mind. I can’t possibly hope to gain a better understanding if I start by writing off arguments I don’t want to entertain.
Maybe it’s already been solved and there’s an evolutionary explanation for free will as more than an illusion. Perhaps we’re simply lacking the vocabulary, but with effort we can arrive at a satisfactory answer. Or, maybe it really is the case that there’s some metaphysical explanation for us having free will, and the best answer can be found in scripture.
I’m not likely to begin attending church regularly, but I want to hear compelling arguments from someone who does. Many brilliant people believe in some metaphysical truth, even some of those who are attempting to understand the universe and beyond.
But even if this is a fundamentally unanswerable question, I’m curious what answers I can find if I start searching.
In the last year I’ve had a few “uncomfortable”3 experiences that’ve forced me to reconsider my outlook on life. I wrote about one of them—a brief moment out of my Self—here.
I want more of that! I’m uncomfortable feeling harmonious all the time. It’s impossible that I already know everything and have all the right perspectives on life—I’m too dumb for that to be true!
I want to listen to new ideas and read challenging perspectives and argue with people different than me. I’ve got some books lined up, but I’m worried that I’m limiting my search to only those perspectives that are familiar, so I invite anyone to point me in another direction.
Growing up without religion, I thought I was raised in a more enlightened way. I was free to explore the world with eyes that were untainted by dogma. But not even scientific explanations should be taken as gospel.
Once, I learned that before the Big Bang there was nothing.
But that might not be true.
I also thought that the Bible spoke of God creating everything from nothing.
But that probably isn’t true, either.
In writing this, I did a little reading into the beliefs I was sharing. Pretty much all of them were wrong or outdated, even the part of Genesis quoted at the beginning of this. It’s probably the case that the original Hebrew spoke about God creating the Land and Skies amidst chaotic seas, not out of the void.
So, I updated my beliefs and changed what I had written.
Last summer, Alex O'Connor interviewed two cosmologists who outlined several theories discussing what came before the Big Bang, all of which have some amount of evidence to support them. It’s fascinating to listen to, and I’d encourage giving it a listen here or on YouTube (for free).
All of this is to say: if you ask me what I believe currently, I’d say that I think free will is a convenient illusion that may as well be real in ordinary life. But I’d also tell you that I don’t know and I’m interested to hear what you think.
English Standard Version Bible, 2001, Genesis 1:1–2
But this is a rather stupid thing to say, for if it is the case that the chain of dominoes was set off at the Big Bang, none of the cascading dominoes was random. We might say they were arbitrary, there was no reason for the chain to be set up in the way it was, but it was always meant to happen in exactly the way it did. The chain would always topple the way it did.
By uncomfortable I mean something that challenged some fundamental belief, not that the experience itself was bad
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