HS #28 2017.11.7
Making Choices
Mae West once remarked, “When forced to choose between two
evils, I pick the one I haven’t done before.“ Yogi Berra advised, “When you come to a fork in the road, take
it.”
Humor aside, how do we choose? It’s worth thinking about. After all, our
choices determine the trajectory of our lives.
We deliberate over major decisions, but minor ones are often
more significant. When counseling high school students who are choosing a
college, I point out that it’s the choice of friends, activities, and use of
time that often make or break their college years.
Some decisions involve choosing along a continuum, e.g., how
much to spend on a house. Others are between two alternatives with no middle
ground, such as a couple deciding whether or not to have a child. The
mathematical term for situations requiring distinct alternatives is
“bifurcation.”
“Bifurcation” comes from “bi” meaning “two” and “furcate”
meaning “fork.” My Welsh corgi, Elvis, received an honorary doctorate degree
from Hope College (hood and citation included) for helping with the research on
our paper, “Do Dogs Know Bifurcations?” Elvis was paddling by my side while I
was standing in Lake Michigan. When I threw a tennis ball parallel to the shore,
Elvis wanted to retrieve it as quickly as possible. If thrown nearby, Elvis swam straight to the
ball. If farther away, he cleverly first swam to shore, ran along the beach,
and then swam back out to the ball.
Therefore Elvis had to choose between two distinctly
different strategies: Head straight to the ball, or swim all the way to the
beach. No advantage to swimming just part way to shore.
I once wrote a short story that captures the dilemma of
choosing between such alternatives. A
prisoner of war alone in his cell finds a hidden message instructing him to use
Morse code to pass information about himself and the war through the wall to an
unseen wounded comrade confined to bed in the next cell. The prisoner faces a
real dilemma since he realizes that the message might be a trick of the enemy
to gain information. If bona fide, he should do everything possible to comfort
and encourage a despondent prisoner. But if not, he should keep totally mum. To
tease a fellow prisoner with just a little information would be worse than
nothing. So it’s a bifurcation – only the two extremes make sense. The decision
is forced upon him.
In “The Will to Believe” the philosopher William James
described “Genuine Options” as situations in life where momentous bifurcated
decisions about beliefs are forced upon us. In particular, a Genuine Option is
a situation where i) either alternative is plausible, ii) the decision must be
made, and iii) the choice is about something of significance.
James continued by acknowledging that we humans operate by
more than our reason. Our emotions and yearnings are also involved in our
choices. Therefore when confronted with a genuine option about what to believe,
we have the freedom to believe what seems in our best interest – what we long
for.
How interesting. If
this is how we can choose, if this is how we DO choose, then our choices are more
about what we want to be true than what we are convinced are true. A former senior seminar student of mine
captured James’ idea with a simple and elegant observation, “The mind believes
what the heart desires.”
James’s argument is compelling, but I’m not fully convinced. Do we – can we - intentionally choose our
beliefs, or do we instead passively believe what we have been persuaded of?
When discussing this with others, I hold a table knife
between my fingers and promise to give $100 to anyone who believes the knife
will stay suspended when I release it.
Everyone WANTS to believe the knife won’t fall, but can they will themselves
to believe?
Interestingly, even the Heidelberg Catechism waffles on this
question. Giving answer to “What is true faith?” we first read, “I accept as
true . . . “ which suggests an intentional decision, but then followed by “it
is a firm confidence” which suggests that the mind has been passively convinced.
C.S. Lewis thought we could and should choose our beliefs.
He described various religions as being like rooms in a house. He proposed that
choosing one of those religions (even the wrong one) is better than living
perpetually in the hallway. In other words, make a decision.
What do you think?
Make a choice.
