Free will: the power of making free choices unconstrained by external agencies.
Choice: The act of choosing or selecting
Choose: Pick out or select from a number of alternatives
Choice consists of the mental process of thinking involved with the process of judging the merits of multiple choices and choosing one of them for action.
Introduction
I am writing this to establish my conclusions about the idea of free will as tied to the development of religion as well as the impact of this idea on humanity in general. It is my belief that free will like many other such ideas rose from the early misunderstanding of how the human mind works. All religions no doubt have a common ancestor which is something I wish to write about in future. The evidence is overwhelming that all religion sprung from the most primeval instinct of man to recognize and revere his source of life and security. To early man, the sun seemed the most eligible candidate as a force that natured all life. When the sun shone, man could see and be able to find food as well as protect himself from predators and all forms of danger. However, when the sun was swallowed by the earth, man was alone, frightened and vulnerable. It was evident that nothing would grow where the sun did not shine and to the mind without the remotest clue to concepts like photosynthesis, this must have served as enough evidence that the sun was a powerful force that governed all life. If one was deprived of the warmth of the sun, their health would falter and even fail them all together. The sun was life giver, healer, mother and protector. This great ball in the sky became the first god from whom all other gods are descended. As the curiosity of man increased, he began to study his environment; the seas, the plants, the stars, the wind. Surely all these forces, though not as powerful as the sun must be, he thought, helpers of the sun; maybe its subjects, children, lovers and so on. Through the millennia, man became more and more communal. Civilization began to grow as more and more human beings moved into clusters to survive. Every cluster was separated and secluded due to the limits of movement and communication. The earth being made up of a great variety of environments meant that all these clusters lived in unique circumstances. Their sources of food, their predators, their opportunities and their illnesses were all different. With these limitations grew many different explanations. There were wolf gods where wolves existed and lion gods where lions roamed. Gods of the seas where there were seas and gods of trees where there were no seas. But in all of human history the original god reigned supreme. From the belief in the sun god rose schools of mythology and belief furnished by the technologies, cultures and psychologies of the varied civilizations. The Gnostic belief system of the Egyptians, the mythology of the Greeks and the Romans, the monotheism of Judaism which spawned Christianity and Islam as well as the many beliefs of the Hindus, Buddhists and so on.
Most religions we have today are no doubt hybrids of some past belief system. Christianity being the dominant religion today is in itself a hybrid of Egyptian, Greek and East Asian mythology. Many aspects from these past systems remain completely unchanged in Christianity. The Egyptian Maries goddess of the sea bore Horus the sun god. The story of Jesus (Joshua the sun god later adopted to mean savior) is an exact replica of that of Horus. All aspects of this story including the bright star, the virgin conception, the three wise men and the twelve disciples are all derived from the old myths of the Egyptians and the Greeks. I will not delve further into this and will leave it for a future passage about the origin of dogma. Surely I will not be the first to write of these things but I feel that a school of thought cannot be defined until it has been subjected to the ideas of different minds. With that, I wish to add the ideas of my own mind to the debate. Though I do not wish to discuss the origin of religion here, I felt that it is important to understand the common ancestry of all dogmas of the world in odder to give you the reader a background from which to understand their common elements; one of which is the idea of free will.
THE EVOLUTION OF GOD (SHORT VERSION)
To believe in a god is to cultivate an ideology of a non-physical intelligence with influence over the physical world. I say non-physical because a god has no shape or form. The human brain collects, translates, processes and stores data by the means of physical actions and reactions captured by the five senses and sent to it through a series of interconnected ‘cables’. When the skin comes in contact with any object, the nature of the object is picked up by electrical charges present in the nerve system which is present in almost all organs of the human body. The nature of the nervous system is one of the many things used by creationists to try and prove the existence of intelligent design. In their attempt to defend their passion at the expense of research and study, they only manage to expose their lack of knowledge and understanding. Creationists in these situations push themselves into a logical trap defined by Richard Dawkins as ‘irreducible complexity’. The irreducible complexity trap is one that all superstition has suffered through out the history of humanity. I will discuss the problem of irreducible complexity further in the course of this text because I feel it is crucial to understanding the free will paradox.
Returning to the nature of god, we see that god has to exist outside the realm of the five senses in order for him to exist at all. No one seems to ever have seen god directly say for a few privileged human beings who allegedly lived thousands of years ago. Curiously, all gods of all religions stopped talking to human beings at the same time all for different reasons. No man has ever heard god as most religions define his voice as too powerful for the human ear. No man has ever touched god outside of those defined in the various scriptures that govern the various religions of the world. This is not a new argument by all means; it is a universally accepted one both by atheist and theists. In fact the only system of belief that seems to have a tangible god is the Pantheist religion of Einstein and Ancient India. If we can agree that god is not a tangible being but depends on faith to exist, then I think we can move on with this chapter. If not, I think you should question just how much you know about your religion. I find that most people defend their religion with very little information on what they believe. Many Christians will passionately defend their belief without ever actually studying its theological structure.
Christianity, Mohamedanism and Judaism share a common ancestry with the structure of their more or less common god defined by the Shamhemforash. Shamhemforash in the old scriptures is the shortened version of the acclaimed true name of Yahweh/Allah. This name is found in the book of exodus where it is hidden in code in the scriptures. The full name of God was hidden in order not to break the relevant commandment “You shall not take god’s name in vain”. The belief goes that, if a man should utter the true name of god without proper intention then he will be forever damned. For that reason the name had to be shortened to Shamhemforash in the old language which in Hebrew numeric language later became YHVH or JYVH (J & Y and V&W were phonetically interchangeable in different Hebrew dialects). These were read as Yahweh and Jehovah respectively and were later referred to by the Persians and Turks as Allah(the god: Greek- theos; Aramaic- elohim). In my entire life I have not meat one Christian, Muslim or Jew who knows this. It takes very little research and understanding to see the blindness of this kind of belief. Faith seems to be a word used to admit unconditional ignorance and shoot down all logical argument. In the conditioned mind of the believer, knowledge and understanding fall in the face of faith. This takes me back to my subject of the intangible god.
Where in man does the intangible god reside? The human brain can only understand what it can see, feel, smell, hear or taste. With those sensations the human brain can then form a nature and form and identify it with the object or element. The creators of beliefs at their time did not foresee a time when this would be common knowledge since the science of the time knew very little of how the human body works. If they had been inspired by god as it is claimed, then they would have the advantage of god’s foresight. They would know of all technological advances of man up to this day (Tuesday, April 27, 2010) and on into the unseen future and would have answers for all the questions a modern scholar would raise. Their obvious inability to see into the future meant that their description of a god could only stretch as far as the known mysteries of the time would allow. They could not imagine a future where human knowledge would shine light into the furthest corners of the universe as well as into the deep crevices of the unseen; microbiology, nuclear physics, optics, magnetism and so on. Theists are left with very few places to hide their god. The mind of man was once tormented by ignorance and darkness and thus god had a vast amount of darkness to occupy and thrive in. But with time this space has grown ever smaller. Today creationists are ready to ignore all the uncountable advances in science and knowledge and use the tiny mysteries left in science to prove their god. Richard Dawkins describes modern religion as belief in the god of the gaps. Where there is the tiniest gap in science, there god thrives. Unfortunately these gaps grow fewer and smaller with each advancement in science and research. Today religion has been left to the poor and ill educated with the more enlightened people carrying it around like a weight; too afraid to follow their intellect and defy this social tumor they have been born into.
THE IRREDUCIBLE COMPLEXITY PROBLEM
In the next post I will outline the problem of irreducible complexity both as put forward by Richard Dawkins and as I see it.
