CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: Is everyone’s destiny predetermined or do we have the freedom of choice?
How difficult it is to keep those New Year Resolutions?! By this point, many of us will have already given up on those dreams of personal change. But was there any point in even trying?
American academic Robert M Sapolsky takes the bleak view that we simply don’t have the ability to change. His book Determined, a comprehensive review of scientific findings, concludes that our decisions and choices are all determined by factors like our genes, our experiences in the womb and as young children, our hormones.
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There is no free will, he assures us, and therefore no moral responsibility for what we do. We can’t judge people for what they have done any more than we judge the sky for thundering.
It’s good to realise that there’s a degree of determinism in our lives. I can’t imagine that my choices as a young man could have been much different from what they were, simply because of who I was. It is reassuring to know it’s not true that ‘you can be anything you want to be’.
But I believe that though much may be ‘determined’, we also have free will and with it moral responsibility. Sapolsky’s book views humans in a totally mechanical way, as do philosophers who reach similar conclusions. But humans are more than living machines: science cannot explain the mystery of consciousness, and what religious people call ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’.
As Christians, we recognise the effect of our genes and our nurture, and choose to accept them, and not be crushed by them. We are free to choose the way of love, joy and peace to which we find ourselves prompted by the gentle whisper we know as God. And in the whisper comes the strength to choose.
But how free are we, really? Some of us remember things heard in the past about a determining God who predestines us to be what we are in this life and the next. I think of the sense of rejection and despair of those who have considered themselves ‘not of the elect’.
But I am convinced that just as Jesus died for all, so the gift of choosing goodness comes to all from a loving God. We may reject the divine whisper, and walk sadly away, but the choice is ours.
We fail often. Our resolutions falter. And we should never criticise others for failing in the choices they make. Only God knows the depths of their struggles, and God loves them.
As we sit with God each morning, renewing our resolutions and seeking for the day ahead the strengthening of God’s grace, new neural pathways connect in our brains, new habits form. For God’s resolutions never fail.
