Scot McKnight is doing some blogging on Calvinism. He kicks off the series with this piece on Roger Olson saying this: Roger Olson is right: at the heart of the debate between Calvinism and Arminianism (or non-Calvinism) is this question: Is grace resistible or irresistible?

As I’ve mentioned before I read the book “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain” and mull some of it over as I read different things. At the heart of the contention of the book is the our decision making process lies mostly beneath the level of our consciousness. McKnight himself alludes to something like this in his history of his relationship with Calvinism.  We choose things for reasons we seldom fully fathom or appreciate.

I remember pondering this thought years ago as I took a class on justified belief at Calvin College with Nicholas Woltersdorff. We believe what we believe because we believe it. “Incognito” has some fascinating passages about how the brain develops narratives to justify beliefs even if those justifying narratives are complete fabrications by the brain.

The implication of some of this brain science it seems to me casts doubt on some of our conventional wisdom as to what a mental decision really is.

Short of a fuller treatment of the book that I’d like to write, one of the best ways of assimilating some of what is being proposed in this book, and resisting the blunt assertion of the book that “blameworthiness” is a completely obsolete concept rests in understanding that a human being is distinct but not isolated from an entire system. Beliefs are not fully our slaves, but we are subject to them.

This seems not a radical idea, obviously. We value belief based on experience outside of ourselves but what the book highlights is that the relationship between experience and belief is hardly as straightforward as we like to imagine. Accounting for what we find ourselves believing seems like something we’ll have little certainty about.

To cut to the chase here, I imagine that brain science will on the whole likely bolster the Calvinist position over the Arminian one as the ontology of decision continues to come under assault. Our decisions are far less free, perhaps, than we imagine.