All the Major Religions Imply Determinism

But then some assert “free will” to get them out of trouble

I’m not going to beat around the bush. We have religion because of determinism. Religion is the expression of our subconscious understanding of the great cause and effect of all things. That any “choice” we feel we make is actually the effect of a prior cause. That our intent is formed by what we were doing seconds and minutes ago. Hours and days ago. Years and decades ago. By our parents meeting. Our ancestors forming the culture that shape our lives. By the deep geologic time of this planet and its myriad of lifeforms. All the way back to time immemorial.

What could be more spiritual?

The irony is most religions — or at least some of the major ones, the Abrahamic ones — insert “free will,” almost like a clause. It seems a necessary component, anyway, to solve the problem arising from supernatural claims. If there is a supernatural being governing all, why do some people suffer so much on Earth? Why do some people get sent to hell for eternal torture and damnation?

“Because of free will,” goes the clause. “Because of choices.”

In this way, we can wash our hands. God allows choice, we say. People can choose to disobey/turn away from God and, oops, look what happens. Your life sucks, maybe you wind up in hell. Should have made better choices.

This gets around the problem of God lacking benevolence or omnipotence: humans have free will.

But if you take the supernatural being out of the religion, if you take away the supernatural claims, there goes your need to invent free will as a way to close that loophole!

Now we can just come back to the essence of so many religions, so much of philosophy, and today’s psychological self-help, or spiritual self-help. And that essence is letting go. Letting go of attachments. Attachments to others; to ideas; to outcomes. That essence, whether through Stoicism, Christianity, Buddhism, or AA = there is a higher power. Yield to its will and you will have greater peace. Stop trying to control everything. Stop thinking you’re in charge. Everything is interconnected, the kingdom of God is within you, and everything is one.

Pete Holmes was on the Rich Roll podcast recently, talking along these lines. He wasn’t talking about determinism, per se, but Holmes referenced a story near and dear to my heart — 5,000 years ago, God was saying to Moses: “I AM THAT I AM.” In the beginning, God was this “is-ness.” God was just being. At least, that was the report. The idea of God within us, like the breath, like centering, like the substrate consciousness alluded to by mystics and meditators. Like nirvana. All of these concepts are fully compatible, all are essentially expressing the same thing: that in the center of letting go, of giving up control, of just being, is the “kingdom,” the place where we find the solace of no-self or unified Self. Of non-dualism.

In Exodus, God goes on to say to Moses, “Thus thou shalt say to the children of Israel, ‘I AM hath sent you.’”

“I am” is just about as broad and open as we can be about naming the “is-ness” of existence. We have to use some words to communicate things, but this is pretty encompassing. Yet, we see an agenda forming — “I am” has a plan. I want Moses to go do something. We see the first cracks, then, the way storytelling and identity start to intrude on the pure being, the pure is-ness of God. This is very much a human intrusion.

At the same time, as my thesis goes, this is our way of reconciling determinism. How does this thing — this sequence of cause and effect going back to time immemorial — how does relate to being, to “is-ness,” to “I am”? Well, it’s God’s will, we say. We give it some shape, we suggest an intelligence, an agenda. But that’s all we’re doing, just dressing up determinism into a more interesting (perhaps) shape.

There is intelligence, of course. All life is intelligent. A seed somehow “knows” when you get it wet to send out a taproot and put up a shoot and start turning air and rain and minerals into greenery with vegetables and fruit. It’s astonishing. Animals know how to adapt to the seasons, how to forage and hunt, and how to mate and bear offspring. The wind and the sea know what to do, the magma beneath the Earth’s crust, the stars in the night sky — everything has this shining intelligence when you just look.

Is determinism itself a kind of intelligence? Is it evolution? Does evolution have a purpose? It’s so tempting to ascribe some sort of creator to everything, some being with an agenda. But as soon as we do that, we need free will again, lest that creator be as evil as it is good, for allowing things like starvation, torture, rape.

Some people seem okay with a wrathful god, of course. It makes sense to them that God would wage war, isolate and abandon people he’s not happy with, and even punish people for eternity for breaking his rules. But those psychopaths aside, it doesn’t make much sense at all; we’re just taking our own fears and insecurities and grotesqueries and projecting them onto this idea of a creator being. We don’t need to.

The essence of religion is determinism, this thing we know, deep in the marrow of our bones (which we have no control over; try telling your bones to make marrow), is that cause leads to effect in an endless unbroken sequence. There is no point in inserting the oxymoron of “free will.” It’s just the way we try to make sense of a creator god we invented who shares some of our best but also our worst traits. If we don’t invent the creator god, we don’t need the “free will” to fix the logic problems that the creator god comes along with.

Yet we can still have all of the good stuff. We can still have the knowledge that the more we live and let live, the more we let go of attachment, and the less we identify with the trappings of categories and ideologies and even our own life story, the more peace we will find. The Buddha said that life is suffering and that suffering comes from desire. So we work to relinquish desire, to be fully living in the present moment, not hostage to the future or the past.

The good stuff is knowing that no one is where they are — whether the richest person in the world or incarcerated in the world’s scariest prison — because of free will. Our sense of agency is an illusion, we are moving through cause and effect, a cascade of intention going back to a point in time we can neither see nor fathom. The best we can say is that we have good luck or bad luck. A person born into a crime-ridden ghetto has the odds stacked against them; no amount of “free will” is going to transcend this. If a mentor steps in, if some chance of fate should happen, maybe there is a change for the better. Likewise, someone can be born with every opportunity, yet be stricken with some disease or life-changing accident. These are extreme examples, but the less extreme is happening every day, all the time, to everyone; the minutiae shaping each of our lives.

You reading this is just another link in the cause-and-effect chain. The degree to which it will or won’t have influence over you will be the effect of everything in your life that came before you read this. Maybe this is your first encounter with the concept of determinism; maybe you’ve been reading about and thinking about determinism for years. Maybe you’re a compatibilist, maybe you’re a dyed-in-the-wool free-will champion. You will interact with this article neurologically based on those prior beliefs; it is impossible for you to interact with this article any other way.

We do not spring from a vacuum every moment of our lives, ad infinitum. We are not coming from nothing at any given moment — there is no “free” space, or nothingness we are arising from in a moment that our “will” can then spontaneously form within. Like a human being at conception did not emerge from pure nothingness, but necessarily came from the sperm and the egg that formed the genome, so there are prior causes to our every moment. Nothing can be “free,” and “will” is an illusion. We can’t choose something that is not the conditioning of these prior causes. Even saying “Then I will choose something different or unexpected and prove you wrong!” is itself the effect of the cause of being challenged; you will either accept the statement that you cannot escape the conditioning of your prior causes or you will try to “prove it” wrong — and either one of these responses, or any response, could not arise without all the prior causes in your life.

The good stuff is: let go. Let go of attachment, let go of judgment. Let go of worry, about the past, about the future. Be here now and continue to seek the center. Imagine what the world would be like — not to get all hippie on you, but John Lennon was playing in this same sandbox — imagine what the world would be like if we didn’t judge other people as if they had free will. Of course, we would still have to protect the public and deal with people doing others harm, and committing crimes, but imagine if we didn’t see them as freely choosing to do these things, as if each moment in their life was an empty space for them to form some completely independent choice.

When you disabuse yourself of that nonsense, then the concepts of “good” and “evil” really fade away. Like “free will,” we need something like “evil” to explain why a person would kill another person if in fact, we believe that person had the ability to spontaneously will any action, out of all possible actions, and otherwise inexplicably chose murder. “Because they’re evil!” we declare. And then we write books and make plays and movies all about good and evil, we make it really the center of our mythology, all the way back to the first gods and anti-gods, such as Horus versus Set in ancient Egyptian mythology.

We’ve been doing this for a long time. Inventing a god or gods that mirror us, that help explain things we don’t understand, and then because the supernatural claims about these deities leave some plot holes, we conjure the ideas of “free will” and good and evil to make sense of things.

We don’t have to.

It’s true that the science isn’t perfectly settled around determinism and free will. But science rarely is “settled,” or static; it’s emergent, and that’s part of what makes it science. A great book, though, that makes the case for determinism by examining in detail each of the arguments free will proponents make against the otherwise determinism-proving neurological studies, is “Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will” by Robert M. Sapolsky. And Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, also makes an excellent case in his short book “Free Will.”

But as both of these men themselves would say, it’s not just a matter of experiments showing how the brain makes decisions three or ten seconds before we become aware of having made a “choice” — this is not some magic bullet proving determinism.

It’s everything taken together.

As Sapolsky puts it:

If you talk about the effects of neurotransmitters on behavior, you are also implicitly talking about the genes that specify the construction of those chemical messengers, and the evolution of those genes — the fields of “neurochemistry,” “genetics,” and “evolutionary biology” can’t be separated.

If you examine how events in fetal life influence adult behavior, you are also automatically considering things like lifelong changes in patterns of hormone secretion or in gene regulation. If you discuss the effects of mothering style on a kid’s eventual adult behavior, by definition you are also automatically discussing the nature of the culture that the mother passes on through her actions. There’s not a single crack of daylight to shoehorn in free will.

We don’t need it.

And, I would add (to the point of this article): if you’re talking about how determinism works as a philosophical, even a scientific tenet undergirding existence, it makes sense that we’ve formed our religions around it since we use religion to tell stories that try to make sense of the world. We just get into troubled waters when we not only take religious claims literally, but we take literally the plot fixes religions use to deal with the contradictions and illogic of certain supernatural claims.

So, we can let those claims go.

We can stick to the good stuff in religions, the same stuff that’s in many secular traditions, too. The good stuff is found in philosophy and psychology. We can stick to being open, present, and nonjudgmental.

It doesn’t mean apathy or nihilism, but the opposite: compassion.

With determinism we can see how all beings are equal, part of the same complex web of interdependence as we are, never having a choice in any matter of their lives. We can understand how important life itself is, we can let go of any sense of moral superiority and recognize the equality of all sentient beings.

We are consciousness experiencing itself, we are aware of these points of light we call our individual selves, yet we are waves emerging from the sea. Helplessly inextricable with the greater Self that we, ultimately, are.