Ecclesiastical Orphans

Preaching guru Fred Craddock, retired from Emory’s Candler School of Theology, often quips: “Anyone who can’t remember any farther back than his or her own birth is an orphan.” He was speaking about the postmodern penchant for individuality and concomitant lack of interest in history and context that tends to disconnect and detach us from any corporate, collective, or contextual sense of the self. We’re like orphans isolated and independent, experiencing the world without family, without memory, without history, without perspective. His point is that humans require context, historical perspective, to know who they are. We are not sui generis creatures, isolated, insular, independent. We are contextual creatures, connected in a nexus of relationships that includes both the living and the dead. Lose the context, forget those connections, and we forget who we are, what we’re about, why we’re here, and where we’re going.

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

The new year always brings a deluge of decisions, doesn’t it. Is this the year I finally quit my job? Is this the year I lose that ten pounds? Is this the year I ask her to marry me? It’s amazing, isn’t it, how a simple act such as turning a page on the calendar can precipitate so many choices.

Or does it? According to Jerry Coyne, a professor at the University of Chicago, there are no choices to be made, really. What we euphemistically, and somewhat quaintly, refer to as our “decisions” and “choices” are really nothing more than brain chemistry (see his op ed piece in USA Today titled “Why You Don’t Really Have Free Will”). Working from the latest neurobiology, he argues that we are really just “meat computers” in which our brains are “...programmed by our genes and experiences to convert an array of inputs into a predetermined output.” What we incorrectly call our “decisions” or “choices” are really just the way our brains happen to work, nothing more. There is no supra or extra biological or chemical consciousness warranted...or needed. Our will itself, Coyne argues, may be little more than an evolutionary trick played on us by our brain chemistry to help us to “connect the dots” of our actions which, in reality, are nothing more than unconscious biological and chemical processes. “The ineluctable scientific conclusion,” he writes, “is that although we feel that we're characters in the play of our lives, rewriting our parts as we go along, in reality we're puppets performing scripted parts written by the laws of physics.”