Can This One Stoic Concept Change How You Practice Your Religion?

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I’ll start by saying that this one might be a bit off-the-path. The idea came to me just a few hours before writing this as I was driving my wife and son south to the greater London area to spend a week looking at rental properties (we’re moving down from Newcastle at the end of the year). My wife asked a question about a controversial subject that often finds religious individuals on one side and seculars on the other.

The question got me thinking about a key feature of religious faiths: that individual destiny is already planned by God (“God has a plan”) and anything that happens is “God’s will”.

In Islam, for example, the entirety of a person’s life is said to already be written out on a great ruby tablet that contains all knowledge of everything past, present, and future. Here, a Muslim’s entire life is written out in detail before he or she are born.

I don’t believe Christianity has an analogue, and Judaism only has the Torah Code (which, if I’m not mistaken, is a fringe theory that is not Jewish canon), but all branches of the Abrahamic family of religions believe that “God has a plan” and that what happens isn’t up to us. We never do anything God didn’t know we were going to do well-before we think we chose to do it.

This got me thinking of another aspect of the Abrahamic faiths that is often, by seculars and atheists, leveled as a criticism of believers. It comes in two parts. I’m sure you’ll have heard both.

The first: “If God both creates humans and knows which ones are going to do evil before do it, then why does he punish them for doing the evil he (ostensively) created them to do?“

This question is meant to back the the believer in to a corner. Whether or not it is successful, the response given is often along the lines of, “God, in order to give humans free will, necessarily had to open up the ability for them to do and choose the wrong thing. God had to allow sinning in order to allow free will.”

This leads to the second part of the criticism: “Guess your God isn’t all powerful and all knowing since he couldn’t figure out how to give people free will without creating a world full of evil.”

With this the secular or atheist folds their hands together behind their head, leans back in their chair, puts their feet up on the table, and says, “Checkmate, theist!”

It is truly obnoxious — and I say this as an atheist (yes, it’s complicated, maybe I’ll tell the story one day, but not today).

It is also, I think, truly worth talking more about because when I thought of the things I’ve been discussing up to now, in the order in which they occurred to me (which is the order I just presented them to you), they lead me to consider a contradiction I hadn’t thought about in a long time. That contradiction, I then realized, was instantly resolved by the Stoic conceptualization of co-fating.

An all-knowing God would seem to contradict free will.

The all-knowing-ness that is characteristic of the shared God of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam presents the very same issue that “hard determinism” presents in Stoicism.

Saying, “If God knows everything that is going to happen because he planned it that way, it’s very hard to make a case for anyone having free will.” Is near-exactly the same as saying “If the universe is causally determined, it is very hard to make a case for anyone having free will.”

Stoicism gets around this problem via the idea of co-fating — the idea that while the Universe might bring us certain unstoppable things, we have a certain degree of power to choose our own adventure. Or, at least, to choose things like the sort of shoes we wear for that adventure.

The causal nature of the Universe had lead to a reality where rationalizing and reasoning human beings exist. This outcome, however, has, in fact, interrupted the causal chain by creating an unknown variable in it: the variable RF (for Rational Faculty and the influence its will can loop back to the causal chain).

Since a human being’s RF can rationalize and reason, it can choose. Since it can choose… well, imagine it like this:

The causal chain is the input into one end of the RF. The RF excepts this input, examines it, considers it, reasons and rationalizes through it, and then outputs it out its other end back to the causal chain, modified. The causal chain then continues on to the next nexus.

In Stoicism, the Universe’s rationality, or what we more science-minded types might like to think of as, “it’ tendency to function within the confines of the natural laws which enable it to exist (for as long as it can do so before its entropic death)”, has resulted in the RF.

The path to that point was, no doubt, entirely deterministic, but that’s no longer the case. The Universe may deliver a scenario into our lives, but we must choose how to navigate it or nothing can happen next.

If we ported this idea over to the religions I mentioned earlier, we might say something like this: God has a causal and deterministic plan, but he has intentionally created us as variables within that plan so that we become coauthors of it.

Religious individuals should consider these thoughts in earnest.

Certainly one of the most tenuous concepts of faith can be summarized with a saying I’m sure you know:

“If god wanted people to fly, he would have given them wings.”

Or, if that doesn’t make the direction I’m heading in clear enough, we might revisit a recurring theme of the Covid Pandemic in which a person of deep faith would remark something to the tune of, “If God wants me to die, then I will. If he doesn’t, I won’t. Human actions don’t change God’s plans.”

But if our actions don’t change God’s plans, then we don’t have any agency.

To believe, truly, that human beings have no agency is to risk something I’m certain none of us want to risk: complacency.

Can the Stoic’s idea of co-fating be folded into your faith (if you have one) to the benefit of yourself and others?

What if God’s plan is for you to be part of what happens next? You’re not a pawn, you’re an improvisational character placed within a causally determined environment that is intended to be modified by you. What if your God wants you to be his coauthor instead of just a character in a story he’s already written? What if God didn’t give you a part to play – what if, instead, God gave you a pencil and the knowledge of how to write and then turned you loose in the world?

This is how we Stoics are encouraged to look at the world, and why choice is so central to our pursuit of Virtue. We can’t say, “The Universe has a plan” and then put no effort into our lives just because we mistakenly believe our actions are part of the Universe’s plan and therefore cannot be chosen – for what would that sort of complacency say of our character?

Nothing virtuous, that’s for sure.

What’s this edition’s takeaway?

Only that, if you’re a religious person, you might find value in considering your role in “God’s plan” a bit differently than many leaders in your community circles might.

Religious or not, you’re attempting to live a more Stoic life, and the value of choice (whether in Stoicism or not) can only be said to matter if we truly possess the power to choose. Stoic’s believe it’s the only power we have. What do you believe?

Thanks for reading.