Thoughts on free will

Thank you, Rev. Klockers, for inviting us to think about free will and determinism in your column “Revisiting predestined ‘Days of Future Past’” from Friday, June 8. Our metaphysics informs our worldview which influences our beliefs on many important issues such as responsibility, punishment, salvation, and so on. To ignore metaphysics is simply to have a bad metaphysics and so it behooves us to engage with metaphysics if only to clarify our confusions.

I take as my inspiration a line from Kierkegaard who while riffing on Hegel wrote in 1844 that “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” Our past looks scripted because we understand events when they form a narrative but we are unable to find the future script because the events have yet to happen. Consider the Moody Blues in 1967 deciding what songs to include, what lyrics to write, what chords to play, and so on. They don’t know that their album will still be enjoyed 50 years later. In 1967 they just know that they have a lot of decisions to make regarding their latest album. It is not until after it is released and we play the record that it seems scripted because the album seems perfect as if it could not have been otherwise. But it could have. They made millions of decisions to create that album and if they had chosen otherwise then it could have been “Nights in Blue Satin” or something else. We create a scripted narrative out of unchanging past events because that is understandable to us, but a few different decisions would have resulted in a different script that would also have looked just as inevitable. The future is unscripted but once it is past we create a scripted narrative for our own understanding.

Dennis Knepp

Moses Lake