The Cartesian Race

I just presented at the Graduate Student Association forum at ACU held every spring. This year it was on pSin and pSychology and focused on how psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral genetics are affecting notions of sin and moral responsibility. Well, if you are a regular reader you know that this topic is right up my alley.

Anyway, I had 13 minutes to give my spiel on the post-Cartesion situation (i.e., the demise of body/soul dualism) and weak volitionalism (i.e., a more humble view of human agency).

In the middle of my talk I wanted to explain and illustrate how weak-volitionalism and thanatocentrism (i.e., your moral "status" is fixed/determined at the moment of death) affect free will soteriological systems. How can you illustrate all this in about five minutes in a memorable way? Well, I invented what I called The Cartesian Race.

Here is the first slide of the Cartesian Race:


Here in Slide 1 we see a classic depiction of free will soteriological systems:

1. We possess "souls" that are disconnected from the causal influences of body and environment. This is depicted in our three ghosts.

2. Given that our soul is disconnected from our body/environment, we are ALL volitionally CAPABLE to respond to the Christian message. Thus, the moral race (which ends at death) is FAIR. This is symbolized by the souls/ghosts having the same starting line.

3. Given that the race is fair, your moral status at the time of death determines your eternal destination.

Okay, if you read this blog regularly you know I don't think the race is fair. One big reason is Moral Luck. That is, our "moral status" is hugely affected by contingent circumstance. So, to represent this visually I presented Slide 2, a modified version of the Cartesian Race but now incorporating Moral Luck:


Two observations about this slide:

1. We see that Moral Luck means that we all have different "starting lines" that provide advantage or disadvantage in the Race. For example, you might be born to loving, Christian parents in America. Or, you might have been born to loving Islamic parents in Iran. If "accepting Jesus as Savior" is central to Christian soteriological systems, these two children start off in very different locations. This is symbolized as the different "starting lines" for the ghosts/souls.

2. But another way to read this slide to is to note that this is a race that ends at death. And, given that death itself is a largely contingent event (e.g., some people die in random accidents), our mortal lives can be contingently extended or truncated. That is, in thanatocentric systems, the death event ends the race no matter how long or how little you've been running. This arbitrariness is also symbolized in the varying distances of the "race" each ghost/soul will run.

But there is more. As we run the race we each carry varying volitional loads. That is, responding to Christ will vary in effort depending upon a host of contingent factors that create a volitional burden you must carry to "cross the finish line" in good moral standing. For example, one child is raised by loving Christian parents and had an amazing church experience growing up. This person's volitional load is very "light." That is, responding to Christ is very "easy," volitionally speaking, for this person. But imagine another person who had a preacher for a father and this father sexually abused him/her. Further, the church he/she experienced was hypocritical and hateful. This person has a "heavy" volitional load. That is, responding to Christ is going to be much harder (if not impossible) for this person.

If we add volitional load to the Cartesian Race we get a very unfair event depicted in Slide 3:


That is, we have the following:

1. Different starting places in life.

2. Varying volitional loads.

3. And random race lengths due to the arbitrariness of the death event.

If you compare Slide 1 and this final slide you see, in a visual way, my concerns with free will soteriological systems. I just don't think they are coherent. I think the Cartesian Race is very unfair.

This brought me to my conclusion slide:


As can be seen in this slide, based on my assessment of the Cartesian Race, I call for a post-Cartesian soteriology (a "neuro-orthodoxy," which plays off the term "neo-orthodoxy"). I claim that a post-Cartesian soteriology must incorporate the following premise:

Many (if not most) humans do not possess the volitional capacity to accept Christ during their mortal lives.

I don't know where theology will go in the future, but if it doesn't factor in this conclusion I can't, as a psychologist, find it intellectually coherent or respectable. The Cartesian Race is simply unfair.