Making Choices

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.