{"id":15075,"date":"2022-08-03T11:06:24","date_gmt":"2022-08-03T17:06:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/publicsquaremag.org\/?p=15075"},"modified":"2022-08-04T12:40:39","modified_gmt":"2022-08-04T18:40:39","slug":"is-life-ruthlessly-determined-or-full-of-possibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/publicsquaremag.org\/dialogue\/is-life-ruthlessly-determined-or-full-of-possibility\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Life Ruthlessly Determined or Full of Possibility?"},"content":{"rendered":"
This is the third installment in a serialization of a book by Jeffrey Thayne and Edwin Gantt, putting forth a vision of a psychology that takes seriously the restored gospel of Jesus Christ (For previous chapters, see: \u201cTowards a Latter-day Saint Perspective in Psychology<\/a>\u201d and \u201cEncouraging Disciple-Scholars in the Social Sciences<\/a>\u201d).<\/div>\n

In our\u00a0<\/span>Introduction<\/span><\/a>\u00a0to this series, we made the case that Latter-day Saint psychologists should take up Elder Neal A. Maxwell\u2019s invitation to build bridges between the Restored Gospel and the secular discipline while keeping our citizenship in the kingdom and maintaining our loyalty to core truths of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. We suggested what we believe are thirteen non-negotiables, or perhaps thirteen foundations, of a genuinely Latter-day Saint perspective. In the rest of this series, we will endeavor to expound upon each. The second foundation is thus:<\/span><\/p>\n

Human experience is full of meaning and possibility.<\/b> As Latter-day Saints, we believe that God has created, as <\/span>Father Lehi taught<\/span><\/a>, \u201c… both things to act and things to be acted upon\u201d (2 Nephi 2:14). Agency figures prominently in Latter-day Saint thought as a first principle upon which the rest of the restored Gospel of Jesus Christ rests. <\/span>God told Moses<\/span><\/a>, \u201cWherefore, because that\u00a0Satan\u00a0rebelled\u00a0against me, and sought to destroy the\u00a0agency\u00a0of man \u2026 I caused that he should be\u00a0cast down\u201d In our teachings, Satan\u2019s original agenda involved eliminating moral agency.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Joseph Smith taught<\/span><\/a>, \u201cAll persons are entitled to their agency, for God has so ordained it. He has constituted mankind as moral agents, and given them power to choose good or evil.\u201d Further emphasizing the central importance of agency to the Plan of Salvation, Elder Boyd K. Packer taught:<\/span><\/p>\n

If you put all the doctrines of the Church in boxes and laid them on a large floor and asked me to assemble them in some order, I would sort through the boxes and find one. It would be a long box and a heavy one, and it would say \u2018Agency, Freedom, Agency\u2019. I would put that down first, and everything else we believe would be stacked in proper order on top of that.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

More recently, BYU professor <\/span>Richard N. Williams has written<\/span><\/a>,<\/span> \u201cAgency is the core of all that is most human about us. It defines our eternal character.\u201d If we take this core Latter-day Saint teaching seriously, this implies that we cannot understand human action without understanding moral agency and its importance in our experience.<\/span> Williams further explains<\/span><\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n

Human agency is a genuine watershed issue for psychology and for a culture. It is not an issue to which one can be partly committed. Intellectual integrity \u2026 requires that we fall on one side of the issue or the other. \u2026 The reason human agency is so crucial to our self-understanding and our achieving our purposes is that agency is the core of all that is most human about us. It defines our eternal character. \u2026 We must either believe in the reality of human agency, seek to understand that it is and what it is or give ourselves over to an entirely different understanding of ourselves and the meaning and purpose of life itself.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If asked about our experiences, most of us answer in the language of <\/span>possibilities<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>choices<\/span><\/i>, and <\/span>meanings<\/span><\/i>. However, many psychological researchers and theorists argue that this is really just a kind of \u201cfolk<\/span> psychology,\u201d a sort of commonly accepted mythology that only the uneducated believe. As such, it is the sort of thing that can be discarded as psychologists provide us with a more scientific vocabulary for understanding ourselves. As a result, a great deal of contemporary psychological research, theory, and practice is shot through with the assumption that human experience should be understood entirely in terms of cause and effect.

We cannot understand human action without understanding moral agency and its importance in our experience.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/div><\/span>Assumptions to challenge\u2014Determinism. <\/b>Many psychological theories assume that our actions are determined by either external or internal forces, or some combination of the two. This notion is called determinism<\/i>. Determinism assumes that\u2014given the same initial conditions\u2014all events must happen as they do and cannot be otherwise than they are. The philosopher Charles Guignon explains<\/a>:\u00a0 \u201cThe physical determinism that most impresses philosophers holds that, for any event that occurs at a given time, that event is rendered inevitable by the state of the universe at some prior time together with the laws of physics.\u201d In other words, given prior conditions, subsequent conditions necessarily <\/i>follow. This is why some philosophers refer to this as necessary determinism<\/i>.<\/p>\n

In this view, human action is simply part of a complicated chain of cause and effect\u2014we are living out a complicated programming of both nurture and nature. <\/span>S. D. Gaede explains<\/span><\/a>, \u201cDeterminism is the view that humans are entirely controlled by previous conditions. Thus, the history of humanity can be viewed as the result of conditioned responses to social, psychological, and other such stimuli.\u201d Guignon further explains that, from this view, \u201cSince human actions are events, they must be caused by antecedent events, and those causal events are themselves caused by earlier events, and so on.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Simply put, <\/span>many psychological researchers do not believe they have explained human behavior <\/span>until they can render it in terms of necessary causes and effects<\/span><\/i>.<\/span> Guignon continues:<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In this formulation, explanation is taken as, by definition, a matter of identifying efficient causes that bring about specific effects in law-like ways. \u2026 We think that the kind of explanation found in classical physics is the paradigm for explanation in any area of inquiry. And, consequently, we assume that making things intelligible is a matter of showing how those things are caused to be, where the relevant causes are seen as law-governed efficient causes.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To understand this view, <\/span>you might think of the individual as a <\/span>marionette<\/span><\/i>. A marionette\u2019s behavior is entirely determined by the string-pulling of the puppeteer. In the determinist view, human action is similar\u2014except that instead of five or six strings, there are millions of them: genes, upbringing, social environment, neurochemical imbalances, brain injuries, hormones, environmental conditioning, socioeconomic status, social context, gender, race, early childhood trauma, birth order, and many other impersonal natural or social forces.<\/span><\/p>\n

Williams summarizes <\/span><\/a>the current situation concisely: \u201cThere are some \u2018marginal\u2019 perspectives that respect human agency; however, the overwhelming majority of positions either ignore it, dismiss it, or define it out of existence.\u201d To further substantiate this point, here are a handful of quotes from prominent social scientists that demonstrate the widespread nature and acceptance of the assumption of determinism in psychology:<\/span><\/p>\n