Just as you walk into a pool hall, you notice that the
player on the first table has just taken the opening break shot and sixteen
balls are careening around the table. Let’s put our story on pause and look at
the balls on the table. Each ball has an individual trajectory, spin, and
speed. If you were smart enough (I’m certainly not) and you knew all the pertinent
information about the balls, you could devise a mathematical formula which
would predict with almost 100% certainty where the balls would go, how many
cushions they would bounce off of, how many other balls each ball would bump
into, and where every ball would ultimately end up when they quit rolling. Not
only that, your formula could “retrodict” how tightly the balls were racked,
and the trajectory, spin, and speed of the cue ball when it struck them. All
that mathematical information is probably going to be useless for saying
anything certain about what was happening just before the balls collided. For
instance, I don’t think that this information could tell you could tell which
of the gentlemen standing around the table actually shot the break, nor could
it tell you if he used a cue stick or a croquet mallet.
As I understand the latest theories in astrophysics, the
Universe is a mammoth billiard table which is at least 90 billion light years
in diameter. This billiard table is filled with moving billiard balls, and I’m
not talking about stars and planets. Every atom is a separate billiard ball
which is moving along as a result of the break shot which astrophysicists call
the Big Bang. Let’s put our story on pause again. If you knew all the pertinent
information about every billiard ball careening about the Universe, you could
plug that information into a mathematical formula and predict when and how the
Universe will come to an end. You could also retrodict what has happened to
each and every atom since the Big Bang. You’ll probably need a supercomputer to
do the calculation, and even then it might take some time to finally work
everything out.
This has been interpreted to mean that everything that
happens, has happened, or ever will happen was predetermined by the way the Big
Bang banged. Upon being told this, a Calvinist might say “That’s Predestination.”
An Arminian on the other hand would probably say “That’s awful.” The Calvinist
would be wrong. The reason I say the Calvinist is wrong has nothing to do with
a belief in Free Will and everything to do with Theism. Predestination
presupposes that the break shot was taken by God. Determinism doesn’t really
know how the rack was broken, but a lot of Determinists are certain that God had nothing to do with
it. I tend to agree with the Arminian viewpoint, but once again it has nothing
to do with Theism.
I can accept Determinism, but I don’t like Predestination at
all. I don’t even like the watered down version which posits limited Free Will with
just the fact of salvation being predetermined. I understand that John Calvin believed
Predestination to be an act of kindness on God’s part, but I doubt if anyone
predestined for Hell would agree with him. So that makes me a fan of Free Will.
How can I reconcile Determinism with Free Will? All those
billiard balls careening about the pool table are completely brainless, as are
the atoms careening about the Universe. If nobody is driving the car, it’s
going to continue to roll until it hits something. Somewhere along the line,
however, some clusters of atoms acquired drivers. The Earth is teaming with such
clusters of atoms—they’re called people. We’re too few and too insignificant to
alter the course of a Universe as big as the one we inhabit, but we can alter the
course of our own and others’ lives. As the poem Invictus says “I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my
soul.” It might be wise to turn the captaincy over to someone else, but I
believe that (absent coercion) we have the ability to choose our masters.
Now where does God fit into all this? Whether you are a
Theist, a Deist, or an Atheist predetermines (notice I didn’t say predestines)
your answer to that question. I think I have said before that I believe Deism
has more prior probability than either Theism or Atheism, but prior probability
doesn’t predetermine posterior probability. Last week in college football the
prior probability was that both Alabama and Texas A&M would beat
Mississippi and Mississippi State. The posterior probabilities were somewhat
different.
You might say I’m a fan of Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover theory,
but I’ve heard that called a “tired old argument.” I didn’t know that arguments
got tired. I think that the biggest objection to the “tired old” Unmoved Mover
theory is the fact that it is believed to be an argument for the existence of God. It really
isn’t. If you’re arguing for an Unmoved Mover, you’re simply saying that
somebody or something took the break shot. Maybe the Demiurge of Gnostic
theology.
Here’s something that I agree with Calvin about. He’s one of
the few early theologians who didn’t advance arguments for the existence of
God. His reason? He felt it was a waste of time to argue for the existence of
God, you either believed or you didn’t. I think Deism can come about as an act
of logical reasoning, but belief in God comes more as an act of faith than of
logic. Logic can carry you to the threshold, but only faith is going to get you
through the door. I think the same can be said of Atheism. It takes a great
deal of faith to deny the existence of some sort of god. If Atheists were being
completely logical, they would be Deists, or at least “Demiurgists.”
