If Not for the Grace of Nature, There Go I
By Mark Gregory Karris
An amipotent God and deterministic processes shape human behavior, challenging the idea of free will by highlighting the role of causality and constraints, inviting us into empathy and adventure.
If Not for the Grace of Nature, There Go I
Brian, a young man already weighed down by the heavy chains of incarceration for a hate crime, found himself being transferred to another man’s cell late one evening. The fluorescent lights flickered as the guards shut the door, unknowingly sealing a grim fate. As the hours passed, an unthinkable horror unfolded behind those cold, steel bars.
The next morning, the man sharing the cell was found brutally beaten, gasping for breath on the grimy floor. The security footage captured Brian standing over him, eyes cold and detached, as the life ebbed out of the man’s battered body. The lifeless silence that followed seemed to echo the finality of death. Brian, now condemned for murder, was sentenced to life in prison.
The media had a field day. “Evil monster!” they screamed. “Psychopath!” The headlines blazed with outrage and condemnation. And really, who could blame them?
However, as his brother, I knew there was a different story to tell. There was the story of a beloved young man who lived in a world that an amipotent God co-created, where determinative factors outside of Brian’s control led him to the very moment of ending another precious person’s life. His story’s existential and divine reality can be found within our own.
Relational Processes Run Amok … for Good and Not So Good
An amipotent God co-creates the world. When I say “create,” I don’t mean God said, “Poof!” and there it was. Rather, since an amipotent God does not forcefully control events as a solitary coercive actor, God collaborates with what has already been created to shape ever-evolving events in time. God works with the substance of previously created existence, continually luring something new into being with each moment.
Because God cannot forcefully change the outcome of events all by God’s self, the whole of reality is fluid, like an unstoppable snowball rolling down a steep hill. Infused with Spirit, each moment explodes into new moments of novelty and, over time, splits off into ever-evolving solar systems, perhaps even multiverses, along with their inhabitants. God can’t stop it. God can’t forcefully control and unilaterally change the unfolding processes of nature all by God’s self. Neither can we.
Humans Have No Control Over Most Life Events
God has created a world where each event is causally linked to preceding events. And, since God can’t stop it, forcefully change it, or control it, all God can do is flow with it and hope that each particle, organism, and creature follows God’s loving lure toward optimal flourishing. However, the cascade of events will unfold whether God wants them to or not and whether we want them to or not. This unfolding benefits some more than others.
When we zoom out from Brian’s life, right before he murdered his cellmate, we can see that Brian was not a monster. Sure, what he did was monstrous. However, it makes perfect sense how Brian became the sort of person who committed that tragic act. If we look at the seconds before, we will see his cellmate laughing and refusing to give Brian the mattress to his bed. Minutes before that, we would have seen guards place Brian in that cell with a man he didn’t know and who was mentally ill. If we looked at the morning , we would have seen Brian not taking his medication for paranoid schizophrenia.
If we pan back to a year ago, we’d see correctional officers victimizing Brian. A year before that, we would have witnessed the years he spent in solitary confinement. Going back further, he was off his meds, in the throes of a psychotic episode, heading to jail for beating up a random guy on a park bench because he was paranoid and felt endangered. Even earlier, we would have seen the terrible abuse he suffered as a helpless child. Brian was predisposed to mental illness: our great-grandmother died in a mental hospital, and our father was mentally ill. The hundreds of thousands of choices Brian made in his lifetime were made within an embedded web of interrelations.
You’ve heard the phrase, “God Can’t.” Well, “Humans Can’t” either. Humans cannot make choices free from the sum of all previous events and moments in time. Even if we miraculously change, that change is based on all preceding moments. We can’t escape the reality that every choice we make is affected by and embedded within the context of previous moments. Dare I suggest that we are also causally determined by preceding events?
My brother Brian was not born a monster; he was shaped into one. Every choice he made, and every action he took, including throwing his first punch, was influenced by a cascade of prior events, circumstances, and influences far beyond his control. Brian’s tragic story illustrates the complex web of determinism that shapes all our lives, a concept that can be difficult for many to grasp. Just as God, who is more powerful than all that exists, is restricted by nature, and nature is so powerful that it can defy the will of God, humans are also restricted by the natural deterministic processes that shape their existence.
Are Our Choices Determined or Truly Free?
I am not a fan of using words like determined or free choice. Saying that we are determined sounds like there is a grand determiner. It reminds me of my old Calvinism days of a God who’s the grand Puppeteer, causing everything to happen according to His will. Yuck. However, because of God’s amipotence, and the fact that God is not dictating every action and reaction or can stop them from occurring by coercive force, nature is happening to us and determining our choices. Every choice we make is shaped by what came seconds, minutes, years, decades, and even centuries before we made that choice. That’s why I’m not a fan of using the qualifier “free” before the word “choice.”
If we grew up in China, we would speak Chinese. If our family were Buddhist, we would most likely have been Buddhist. If we were born into a racist family in the 1800s and were told that Black people were subhuman, then most likely, we would have been racist. If we had been brainwashed to think that blowing people up for the right causes and becoming a martyr was God’s will, then if put in the right situation, we would. All of our past experiences shape us into the people we are today. Show me an 18-year-old in prison for a gang-related murder, and the causal effects are probably a no-brainer. The reason we didn’t come up with “Amipotence” and Thomas Jay Oord did is precisely because we didn’t have the myriad experiences Oord had, along with his upbringing, genetics, prefrontal cortex health, neurobiology, and other influencing factors.
Even our decision-maker, or inner decider—what we might call our “will”—has been shaped and determined by factors beyond our control. Our will is the cumulative effect of everything that has come before it. Our will is both determined and the determiner. My will desires something different than your will precisely because we have different pasts that shaped it. So, when we talk about “Free,” I think, “Free from what?” And “In what sense?”
Consider this scenario: hoping to debunk my claims, someone says, “Mark, look, I’m about to eat ice cream. See, I can freely choose whether I want vanilla, chocolate, or pistachio. And I just freely chose pistachio.”
Then, I would ask (as someone who would have chosen vanilla), “How is it that you have become the kind of person who likes pistachio?”
Consider another scenario: someone says, “Mark, I grew up in an abusive home. I was an addict, and now I’m a minister preaching amipotence and God’s uncontrolling love.”
Then, I’d ask, “What factors, actors, and variables came into play for you to become an addiction-free minister preaching the love of God, especially given that, according to the World Health Organization, there are about 600,000 worldwide deaths attributed to drug overdoses, many of them being Christian?”
Unless someone can convince me that an individual’s choice in a given moment can be entirely independent of the preceding seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, and decades—encompassing experiences from the womb, family background, biology, genetics, cultural and religious influences, the unconscious, and more—it becomes nearly impossible to conceive that choices are made “freely.” I know we can experience it as a free choice. However, throughout history, our intuitions have not always aligned with objective reality. Our intuitions once told us that schizophrenia was caused by demons and, later, by cold and distant mothers. Thankfully, now we know neither is true. Our intuitions can be wrong.
Every decision we make is intricately woven into the vast tapestry of our past. The taste for pistachio didn’t appear out of nowhere. It was shaped by a lifetime of experiences, memories, preferences, and influences, both seen and unseen. The very notion of “free will” connotes that we operate in a vacuum, detached from the threads of causality that have been spinning since before we were born. But the reality is our choices are profoundly tethered to the myriad factors that have sculpted our identities.
So, do we have a “free” will? Hardly. Can we and do we make choices? Of course. The illusion is not that we make choices but that we believe we are completely free when we do so.
It is a sobering thought that if we had all of Brian’s experiences, along with his parents, genetics, neurobiology, and every other variable that made him who he was, it would have been us in prison for murder. Remember, I grew up in the same home as my brother. However, nature provided different contextual variables that made me who I am. Now, I am living a life of substantial privilege and luxury; my brother Brian is not.
Surfing within an Open But Constrained Future
While God does not control the outcome and is constrained by the river of nature, we can trust that the Spirit of love is continuously relating, luring, wooing, and loving to the extent that God is able while valuing autonomy all the way down to quarks and beyond. The future is open, but it is also constrained. For example, no matter how hard we try, most of us can’t become a basketball star or an astronaut at this stage of life. However, even though every moment is determined by the moment before it and the billions of moments preceding that moment, no one knows the outcome of what the next moment will bring. That is the beauty of this grand adventure of life.
We are part of nature, just like God. Just like the trees, tornadoes, fungi, and bacteria, we are all in perpetual becoming. The future is open and exciting, full of deterministic possibilities. Since we don’t know what the future holds, we are called to surf with nature and the amipotent Spirit into the vast unknown, aiming for the stars. Yet, how many we will reach depends on variables too mysterious to know in totality.
Invitation into Empathy
Even if you hold to a belief in “free” will, and you are not as deterministically minded as I am, I hope this essay invites you to see how an amipotent God co-creates a world where, at the very least, you can acknowledge that our freedom is highly constrained. Recognizing how unfree we actually are—how significantly luck, history, genetics, and other factors impact us, shape who we are today, and determine who we can become in the future—could lead to a more just, empathic, and humane society. The notion that, given a different set of variables, we all could have been a Brian, a Hitler, an abuser, a serial killer, or a staunch racist is sobering and invites us to meditate on a profound truth: If not for the grace of nature, co-created by an amipotent God, there go I.
Bio: Dr. Mark Gregory Karris is a licensed marriage and family therapist in full-time private practice in San Diego, California. He specializes in religious trauma and couples therapy. Dr. Karris is also the best-selling author of Beyond Fairy Tales: A Couple’s Guide to Finding Clarity, Doing the Work, and Building a Lasting Relationship. For more info, check out: MarkGregoryKarris.com
OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE
Mark Gregory Karris examines the circumstantial factors that influence human choices toward good or evil. He illustrates this through the contrast between his brother’s life and his own. While God creates the world, God does not control every life event, meaning his brother’s harmful actions were shaped by difficult environments and a cascade of prior influences. I agree with Mark that our choices are profoundly shaped by circumstances, but I part ways with him when he claims they are entirely determined. I think we have genuine but limited freedom. And I believe we can both affirm free will and empathize with those shaped by their environments.
For more on Oord’s view of free will, see this article.
* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.