It is amazing how often intelligent peoples’ thinking is self-contradictory. I have several pages of such contradictions – like this one that shows the impossibility of determinism: “If all our thoughts are determined, that must include the thoughts of neuro-scientists who hold to determinism. So determinism would mean we can never trust the conclusions of scientists as being true, including those of neuro-scientists”. Another one I like was put out in a TV advertisement for the Bank of Scotland, where a wise man said: “Some people say there are no right or wrong answers”. Then he added: “But what if they’re right? … Or wrong?”

So as we search for right answers, let us beware the dead end of self-contradicting theses.

It is normal to believe in free will – that our choices are real and that we have freedom to make our own decisions. Indeed, we consider it a “human right”, and we want the freedom of others to be acknowledged and respected. It is against this much-loved reality that determinism comes crashing.

The counterpart to freedom is responsibility: we may be held responsible for the use of our freedom. We will have to answer for any evil use of our freedom. There is unavoidable moral responsibility attached to human freedom. This instinct is written in our consciences and refers both to society’s and to God’s right to punish those who use their freedom to harm others. So freedom is not an absolute liberty to do all one may wish; it is best understood as the ability to do as one ought, despite the threat of those who would impede that liberty.

But there is a false form of freedom that is indeed illusory – and it is getting unfortunately quite invasive in society, though it will prove to be a dead end street: you don’t want to go down there, you’ll get nowhere. It is known as “expressive individualism”. 

This freedom, writes rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, “is embodied in words like authenticity, autonomy, self-expression, and self-realisation, to which we claim to have unfettered rights”. This extraordinary claim to quasi absolute freedom is a dead end street. It is at the basis of a lot of human pain in the lives of those who suppose they can define their own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life – of “who they are”, when this is in denial of what is “given”. It substitutes for the given-ness of our existence the mad dream that we can “invent ourselves”, alter the reality of who we truly are. Don’t go down that road.

If you want a different form of yourself, a better “you”, there is a preferable way, the right route to take. You can be “made over”, deeply and radically transformed into what you really ought to be. This is what Christian conversion is all about. When a person rejects his or her own reprobate inner self – those aspects of our personality that come under the description of “evil” – and when they turn to the Lord Jesus Christ, calling on him to be their Saviour and Master, a radical renovation takes place. Jesus called it being “born again”. When you invite Jesus to save you from all evil, to clean you up on the inside, it’s like being recreated – “old things are passed away and all things become new.” And all this is from God, “whose service is perfect freedom”. By such healthy transformation the Lord demonstrates that he is in the business of turning sinners into saints!

Clive Every-Clayton