5
“All things by immortal power, Near or far, Hiddenly to each other linked are,
That thou canst not stir a flower
Without the troubling of star”
– Francis Thompson (1913)
Issue 5
February 15, 2015
The thought is powerful: touch a flower in your garden, and eons away and light years later, in the other side of the galaxy, a star twitches or maybe explodes. Physicists say the same thing in what is called ‘chaos’ theory, the idea that a tiny event in one place makes a big difference far away, and a very tiny difference in that event sends the chain of events off in an entirely different direction. Common sense tells us the same thing: one thing leads to another. Every cause has an effect (or many); every effect has a cause (or many); all are woven into one vast, connected reality, our material universe, and everything makes a difference.
Think of your own life, some turning point. If it had not happened—and it would not have happened if you had met a friend, or had a flat tire, or been delayed on an errand, or something— you would have had an entirely different life. You might be dead now, or living homeless in L.A., or lunching with Warren Buffet. At any point in your life the tiniest variation would have sent you swinging down another path entirely. Everything since the world began has made a difference, and it is all tied together. Such is the material universe: one great machine wherein everything is connected to everything else. There it is: “Stir a flower. . . trouble a star.” But that pre- sents things to think about.
Consider, if everything is linked together, then there is nothing that is not linked together. There are no events that do not have causes, and the causes determine the nature of the event. There can be therefore no such thing as a choice, for a choice means that you have decided to do this rather than that, but in a machine universe that does not happen. Everything is determined, not decided. What happens is not due to a choice, but was determined eons earlier. And if there is no such thing as a genuine choice, there is no such thing as free will. If an event, say, ordering a double cheeseburger was caused by a series of events that began a few hours earlier when you skipped breakfast, then, strictly speaking, you did not make a choice. Your order was an effect, not a choice. You just reacted. Your stomach, not your mind, ordered the cheeseburger. So also your apparent choice of a new car or a spouse. All was determined before you were born, and so with everything in your life and all lives, and it all began long ago. Falling dominos, that’s life, not free will and choice. In the materialist universe, there’s no way out of it.
Some will argue, however, that there is a way out, that the world of quantum action is not part of the causative system, that whether something turns out to be this or that, a particle or a wave, is not predetermined. I do not understand quantum physics at all, of course, but if something occurs without a cause then that would appear to rule out intention, and without intention there could be no will at all, free or otherwise.
In practice we ignore the matter and proceed as though we do indeed have free will and do indeed make choices. However, in our material reality, the dilemma is real. The only way out is to open up to another reality. Which some do.
