Without a sovereign soul there is no free choice, and without free choice, there is no creation.
A sovereign soul does not answer to an external God, a personal God, who is responsible for all creation, who set the laws of good and bad to which we all aspire. If our only CHOICE is to abide by God's laws or not, or to create what pleases God or not, then we do not in fact have free choice. Our laws, our right and wrong, our creation, must be all our own, or these choices are not free. The RIGHT choice must not be predetermined or else it is not a CHOICE at all but is, rather, merely an elaborate correct answer on some great test designed by a separate, omniscient consciousness.
On the other hand, if we are only organic machines, plumbing and wiring with a computer brain to run it all, then we are not free. If we are merely evolutionary respondents to some primal tic, we are not free. If our CHOICES are merely RESPONSES to some genome, to some evolutionary desire to survive and procreate, then this is not freedom. Either our choices are sovereign, are original, come from US and not some reaction, or they are not. They cannot be both.
Therefore, the machinery of us, our brains and our loins and our skin, merely responds to the soul, which is the origin of all creation. Without a sovereign soul, without something free of the ineluctable, Newtonian response of action and reaction, or chemical compounds, or genetic code, without this eternal, sovereign force energy, we are not free. We are just responses.
I reject any idea that claims I am anything but free. I reject I as the machine. I reject I as the servant of an external God. I am I. I am sovereign. I was put here to create, and unless I am free, I am either responding or answering a test. There is no right answer to life. And life is not some cold, unavoidable response. Life is original. Every moment as original as the one that came before.
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3 comments:
Freedom of Choice is an illusion.
Your arguments boil down to the following syllogism:
1) Either humans are merely automata (responding to stimuli based on genetic coding), or there is an omniscient/omnipotent God who merely tests our illusion of free will.
2) Since in your view life is filled with creative impulses, you reject the automaton, machine view of the human body.
3) Similarly, since you demand that life offer us free choices, you reject the concept of an omnipotent and omniscient God.
4) From this, you conclude that there must be a soul.
There are so many fallacies to this logic, I don't know where to begin.
First, as a rationalist, you must admit that there is no empirical, objectively verifiable, scientific evidence of the existence of a "soul". Indeed, medical science is increasingly teaching us that "personality" is deeply intertwined with the hardware of our brains. Alzheimer's sufferers are the clearest example: as the disease progresses, the personality (and, as corollary, the essence or "soul") of the Alzheimer's patient slowly disappears. The very things you cite as evidence of a soul (the creative impulse, etc.) are shown by this horrible disease to be simply the result of a complex series of internal interactions within a healthy brain. Slow degeneration of a brain reveals that such creative impulses (along with all other higher orders of rational thought) simply cease to exist. If the soul existed separate and apart from the brain, then the horror of Alzheimer's would not be reported to be as horrible as it is.
Other scientific evidence is available when reading about the personality changes which occur when people take certain pharmaceuticals. Reports show that serotonin reuptake inhibitors change world view. And schizophrenics benefit greatly from drugs like lithium. The pharmacological evidence again shows that behavior (including "creativity") is deeply affected by brain chemistry.
Second, the fact that people engage in creative acts does not necessarily imply the existence of a soul. Elephants, monkeys, and even cats have been shown to have "desires" to make "pictures" using paint. Would you ascribe these animals' creative efforts to the existence of a soul in such animals?
Creativity need not arise from the soul. The human mind is an elaborately complex mechanism, and research has shown that humans use much less of their potential brain power than is available. People "create" art, music, literature, etc. for all sorts of reasons: fame (e.g., Warhol), mere recognition (e.g., Capote), money (e.g., Dali, towards the end of his life), competition (e.g., Lennon and McCartney), reactions to external horrors (e.g., Picasso's "Guernica"), and political/social reasons (e.g, any number of Chekhov plays). Why must such creative acts stem solely from the existence of a "soul"? There are sufficient reasons, in and of themselves, for the creators to have created such works, based simply on the exercise of their minds.
Your argument is inconsistent in its metaphysics as well. You reject the notion of a deity. But, you go to pains to prove and argue the existence of a soul. The existence of a metaphysical, non-corporeal "soul" must necessarily imply the existence of a larger, spiritual, non-corporeal world and thus must lead to acceptance of the existence of a "God" of some kind.
This is a problem philosophers and theologians have struggled with for centuries. If any kind of paranormal, "higher plane", spiritual world exists, then there must be a higher being of some kind which we would rationally identify as "God". And if a "God" truly exists, that raises the question of whether or not free will exists. Your argument flips all this on its head, by rejecting the existence of God, but then embracing the existence of the soul. I submit that these are incompatible positions.
You also argue that, if we are merely machines, then that necessarily means that we have no truly unique responses to the world. This is a false conclusion. Why must all responses to the world (including the act of creativity) be foreordained by our genetics? A random number generator is defined by a set of mathematical rules, but the result is random (and hence, unique, and hence, not pre-ordained). Taken more simply, rolling a set of dice yields random results, even though the mechanism for achieveing those results is concrete. The fact that we can count the sides of each die, and calculate the odds of certain numbers coming up, does not detract from the truly random results which occur upon each throw of the dice. More complex systems, chaos theory teach us, can yield all sorts of different results and take all sorts of different paths to reach those results - and yet, the theoretical/mathematical underpinnings of the model/theory can be well understood. So, simply because we have a genome which is fully mapped out does not mean that every action we undertake is foreordained by that genome. Our brains are much more complex and yield many more random results than the "robotic" theory you espouse.
The fundamental problem you struggle with is the tension between free will and the soul. If a soul exists, then that implies a higher realm, a spiritual plane, which we mortals cannot perceive. Who are we, then, to say that there is no omnicient/omnipotent puppet master God living in this higher plane? Indeed, as I argue above, acceptance of the very existence of the soul implies that such a God exists. And if such a God exists, then everything we do is foreordained and there is no free will.
While I applaud your attempt to grapple with this issue, I am not convinced that you have adequately proven the existence of the soul.
You have way too much time on your hands, Pete. That said, I agree in all particulars. Thanks for making my arguments for me.
I think there's a big difference between saying there is a soul and an omniscient God.
The soul can be tapped into a higher plane without there being an overlord.
And who is to say what happens to the soul when the wiring gets all fucked up?
We are creators. We are the gods of our life.
Seems simple to me.
But as we all know...lawyers are deal breakers not deal makers.
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