What did you choose to wear today, or eat for lunch? Who did/will you choose to marry, or what did/will you choose as an occupation? Did you actually choose these things, or were you simply following a pattern pre-determined by the multifaceted details about the body/brain/family/time you were born and live within? You may or may not know – some neurologists have tried to make a case against “Free Will”. As a firm believer in the healing importance of confessing our agency, I want to offer a few thoughts on the conversation.
In Deuteronomy 30:19-20, we read “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him, for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.” We are given a choice. Similarly, in Galatians 5:16-17, “Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want.” Even living as a follower of Jesus is not something we assume happens “automatically” when we believe, taking away our sense of agency. Paul writes imperatively, “live by the Spirit”, because there is the option to do otherwise.
So where does the questioning of “Free Will” come from? As highlighted well in the enjoyable book “The Unthinkable Truth“, the newest fMRI brainscan technology has pinpointed areas of our thought processes in ways we’ve never before had access to. Based on recent research, scientists can identify by a brain imaging what decision a person will make up to 10 seconds before a person is aware of their own decision being made. Which is interpreted as “The choice is made before the person consciously makes the choice.” As Bouskila writes in his fictional story around genuine research, “..the bottom line of all these studies is that between the two options – you control your brain or your brain controls you – the latter is correct.” Many believe these newest studies affirm what Benjamin Libet implied in his 1980’s experiments on the conscious free will. Our brains make decisions for us, before we are even aware of a choice being made.
Thankfully, even among those who are interpreting these things to mean we have less agency than once imagined, there is an openness to unpredictability. Recently, neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky has written, “Will we ever get to the point where our behavior is entirely predictable, given the deterministic gears grinding underneath? Never—that’s one of the points of chaoticism. But the rate at which we are accruing new insights into those gears is boggling—nearly every fact in this book was discovered in the last fifty years, probably half in the last five.”
In the midst of all these things, our world is also watching the rise of artificial intelligence, and many are questioning the difference between a computer, and the human mind. Can consciousness be fabricated? If not fabricated, can it at least be transferred? Philosopher Christof Koch writes, “Computational functionalism is a widespread article of faith in Silicon Valley and the tech industry. From this point of view, the whole-brain simulation of your brain will possess your mind, or at least a fair approximation of it, and will be conscious. The integrated information theory of consciousness takes a starkly different approach. It argues that consciousness is not a type of computation but is fully and completely specified by the unfolded causal powers of the system upon itself, whether a brain or a computer.“
Echoing Koch, neuroscientist Peter Ulric Tse reminds us our brains are not simply machines meant to do supercomputing. They are unique and non-reproducible, no matter how improved our “artificial intelligence” (which are mostly just Generative LLMs anyways) may become. As helpful as technology might be (ethics of regenerating using unique creative content aside), we have capacity as human beings that no machine will ever be capable of. This capacity is retained even with current debates of our “free will”. Tse writes, “..my journey into issues concerning the maximization of human liberty began with my efforts to escape the faulty metaphor of the brain as a computer, and place meaning rather than information at the center of what brains, minds, and consciousness are for.” Tse sees current research into calculating when a particular decision was made, and maintains that no matter when or how a decision is made, a foundation of our humanity is our creative freedom and imagination. He writes, “We can strive to become a self that we imagine, thereby choosing to become a new kind of chooser operating in a new kind of world of our own choosing.“
All of this echoes recent writing by Jim Wilder in his book “Renovated”, where he takes some familiar content by Dallas Willard and makes new contributions toward the healing transformation God desires through attachment. Many people find it difficult to “become a Christian” by simply adopting new beliefs or assenting to a particular new Truth. I believe this is why God has invited us to experience healing (often called “salvation”, in the eternal sense) in an intentional community (Church) of loving relationships, and in loving relationship with our Triune God. Wilder writes, “The ability to choose (will) is a very flimsy cortical function located on the outside of our brain…attachments (relational identity), at a brain level (beginning in the brain stem) create an identity that operates faster than conscious thought.” To put it simply, as others have written, “We are transformed more by what we love, than what we think.”
All of this is to say, as new research might emerge about when our brains decide something, or what computers might be capable of – remember that you are uniquely able to exist as you today. You are capable not only of sensing, but of discovering the meaning behind what you sense, and the mutual accountability of discovering that meaning with others. You are capable not only of deciding based on what you see, but based on the future realities you’re able to imagine prayerfully together with the Holy Spirit. You’re invited to confess the choices you had agency in making (James 5:16), repent (turning away & having a changed mind), being set free from past narratives by the authority of Jesus, so that together in a community of beloved others, we can collectively experience healing restoration and transformation toward a New Creation God has already begun in the resurrected Jesus Christ.
This is literally the super-natural becoming our new natural. I am thankful for the healing that has come already, and looking forward to how His healing continues to arrive personally, communally, and universally.
words from wick 