Before the race begins there are three things to do, or is it four? Is it “Ready, Set, Go?” Or is it “One for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, four to go?” In any case, whether it’s the first step, or the final step before “Go!”, getting “ready” is a necessary step. We know where we’re going, so what will help our going be successful?

            We’ve reached that part of the church year, near the very end of the church year, when our thoughts start to turn toward the next church year, the year to come that begins with our Ingathering service on September 10.

            We are imaging the year, making plans, and gathering resources.

            As Whitman says, “However sheltered this port, and however calm these waters, we must not anchor here; Together! The inducements shall be greater; we will sail pathless and wild seas; we will go where winds blow, waves dash and the Yankee clipper speeds by under full sail.  Forward after the great Companions!  and to belong to them!  They too are on the road!”

            We haven’t started on the road yet, but we’re getting ready to start.

            That section of time between having an idea and acting on the idea has always fascinated me.  The time of “ready-ing.”  The pause between, “I’m thinking of what I will do.”  And then actually doing it.

            I’ve been thinking about this lately when I get out of bed in the morning.  I wake up.  I check what time it is.  I remember what I have to do that day and make a decision about whether I really need to get up now, or can I relax in bed for awhile, or even whether I could go back to sleep.  I notice that I need to pee, and try to gauge how seriously I need to pee.

            And then, sometimes, I consciously decide to get out of bed, and I get up.  And other times, I notice myself getting out of bed without ever consciously deciding.  Sometimes I decide and then I act.  But mostly, I notice, I never actual say to myself, “Rick.  Get out of bed!” but all of sudden I’m doing it anyway.  Which is a little unsettling.  Who’s in charge here?  I thought my mind controlled my body.  But most of the time, getting out of the bed in the morning, my body moves, and then my mind notices, “Oh, I guess this is what we’re doing now.”

            So what really comes first, thinking, or doing?

            What fascinates me about that gap between thinking and doing is that to decide to do something and then to do it requires converting mental activity to physical activity.  That doesn’t seem so odd at first glance.  We seem to do it all the time.  I look in my refrigerator and notice that I need groceries.  I make a plan to go to the grocery store.  And then, here is my body, grabbing my car keys and driving to the grocery store.  I think and then I do.

            But looked at a little more closely, that series of events is actually odd.

            What is mental activity?  What happens when we think?  Our thoughts are not material things, in the sense that refrigerators and groceries and car keys and cars are material things.  Our thoughts don’t have a material aspect.  It’s hard to say what thoughts are exactly:  some sort of energy, or spirit, maybe.  You might call our thoughts consciousness.  Or you might call it “will”.

            But how do you transfer the power of your immaterial will, on to the material world of groceries and car keys?

            Imagine sitting at a desk with a pencil lying on the desk top.  You can focus your thoughts on the pencil as forcefully as you like.  You can intend for the pencil to move.  You can use all of your will to make the pencil move.  But the pencil won’t move.  Our thoughts don’t have the power to affect the material world around us.

            Now of course, you can take your finger and push the pencil and the pencil will move easily.  That’s simple, your finger is a material thing and the pencil is a material thing, and we know how material things interact with each other.  The Unitarian scientist Isaac Newton described all the ways that material things interact with each other centuries ago.

            Aha!  But wait!  How does your finger move?

            Your finger is a material thing, just like the pencil.  But if your mind can’t move a pencil, how can your mind move your finger?

            Well, that seems like a dumb question, right?  It’s my finger.  My finger is connected to my brain through a series of muscles and neurons.  There’s nothing spooky happening about making my own finger move when I will my finger to move.

            But not so fast.  It’s clear that your finger is connected by muscles and neurons to your brain.  Those are entirely material connections, right up to the material stuff of your brain.  But your brain is not your mind.  So we still have the same problem.  If my mind can’t move a pencil.  How can my mind move my brain?  How can my immaterial thoughts have any effect on my material brain?  How could it ever be that by merely thinking, “Hey, lazybones, get out of bed!” that my material brain would start to send the signals necessary to make my body move?

            And indeed, as I’ve noticed, mostly it doesn’t.  Mostly, it seems my brain starts sending the signals, my body moves, and then my thoughts notice what my brain has already done.  My thought doesn’t precede my action, my thinking seems to be simply an awareness after the fact of something my brain has already done.

            This is a very curious situation.  And it’s a very troublesome situation for folks who care about things like ethics, and personal responsibility, and morals.  If our minds aren’t actually in control of our bodies, then how can we hold a person responsible for what their body does?  Why bother to teach children right from wrong if their bodies are just going to do what they do without being guided by their thoughts?  Why speak of a conscience if our thoughts are a response to the world rather than an active agent in the world?  The reason we allow an “insanity defense” in a court of law is that we recognize that it isn’t justice to punish a person for actions that they have no ability to control.  But it seems as though that’s the situation for all of us.  None of us have the ability to consciously control our actions if our actions come first and consciousness after.

            This is what theologians call the problem of free will.  It feels as though we are free to decide what to do in the world, and then our brains and bodies follow the command of our will.  And being free, we can then be held morally responsible for our choices.  But when examined, the assumption of free will starts to fall apart.

            In the 1980s, a scientist named Benjamin Libet conducted a series of experiments that seemed to put the nail in the coffin of the idea of free will.  He had test subject come into his lab.  He fitted their brains with electrodes to measure brain activity.  And then he had the test subjects perform simple tasks, such as raising a finger.  The test subjects would also look at a timer and they would note the precise time they had the conscious thought of raising their finger.

            What Benjamin Libet’s experiment showed is that consistently, the electrodes recorded brain activity in parts of the test subject’s brains associated with the action of raising their finger, one half second before the test subject reported consciousness of raising their finger.  The brain activity came first.  Then the mind noticed the activity in the brain and had a thought about what the brain had already done.

            This is very troubling.  Who is in charge?

            From a materialist point of view the interpretation is that our brains and bodies are just material things like the rest of the universe, subject to the same laws that Newton laid out.  We’re just atoms and electric charges and chemicals interacting with other bits of material stuff according to physical laws.  The mind that we’re so proud of, in this interpretation, is simply a by-product of the material brain.  Consciousness is an emanation from the physical brain, tagging along behind the brain like a love-sick puppy.  Our supposed free will is an illusion.

            That was the situation when I went to seminary.  And still I clung to the idea of free will.  I just couldn’t accept a world in which I have no personal responsibility, and no one can be held accountable for their actions, and ethics and morals are meaningless because people act according to physical laws, not moral laws.  I built my personal theology on the belief that free will does exist.  But it always troubled me that science seemed to prove I was wrong.

            Which is why, I was very pleased to see, in the last few years, that Libet’s experiments from the 1980s have been thoroughly debunked.  They don’t show what they appear to show.  Here are some of the problems.

            Libet’s test subjects were asked to record the time they had a conscious thought of moving their finger by looking at a timer.  But that is an additional action beyond raising the finger.  And that requires shifting attention from the moving finger to the timer and then consciously registering the time.  All of that takes much longer that one half of one second.

            It’s also very difficult to pinpoint exactly when our thoughts occur.  And if the test subjects are self-conscious about their thinking, as they naturally would be participating in an experiment about consciousness, then it gets even harder.

            The electrodes measured the test subject’s brain activity associated with moving a finger, but the particular area of the brain monitored was the area associated with the body making itself ready for an action, not actually performing the action.  And that “readiness potential” activity also gets activated when a person is only imaging an action, or deciding between more than one potential action, or deciding not to do an action after all.

            But the biggest flaw in the experiment is not in the design of the experiment, but rather in the conception of what it means to make a decision.  This is the same mistake I make when I get up in the morning.

            Why do I think that I’m only in control of my actions when my action is preceded by a clear-cut, definitive, rational, directive, like “OK, lazybones, get up now.”?  That’s not the way we usually make decisions.  Decisions, are usually made in a fuzzy, intuitive, impulsive way.  There’s no particular moment when I decide to get up, but I’m still deciding.  And we certainly don’t go around with our rational minds dictating every action and our body waiting passively for clear instructions before moving like a marionette on strings.  I’m more than just my rational, conscious self.  I’m also emotional, and physical, and unconscious.  I make decisions with my guts, and my emotional responses, and for host of reasons opaque to my rational mind.  But that’s still me.  I’m still in charge.

            So I believe in free will.  I order my theology around the truth of free will, personal responsibility, and holding people accountable for their actions.  It’s our power, our choices, not predestination, or fate, or the “devil made me do it.”  I believe that ethics and moral laws are as meaningful in human behavior as are physical laws in the material world.  

            Now, you’ll notice, I still haven’t answered the question of how an immaterial mind can effect a material brain, but that’s a subject for another sermon.

            For today, it’s enough to feel our place in that particular state of “readiness potential” when our brains and bodies are ready, the brain activity is starting to buzz, but we’re waiting for our conscious minds to say “go.”

            We’re in that place in the church year like the place I am waking up in bed in the morning.  I’m checking the time.  I’m remembering what I have planned for the day, as we’re making our plans for the church year.

            Performing the action is still to come.  Now is the time to get ready.  To gather our thoughts.  And our emotional selves.  And our physical bodies.  To call down the higher wisdom that speaks through our conscience, and call up the wisdom of our intuition and unconscious.  And guided by the moral laws of our UU Seven Principles, and other sources of religious wisdom, very soon now, we will make a decision.

            And then we will act.