The Father.1

"What do you think of Jesus Christ? Whose Son is he?"

--Jesus

I recently did what every modern American is relentlessly badgered to do: find out whether 15 minutes could save me 15% on car insurance!

Lo and behold I actually saved over 50%! And my new auto insurance provider said I could save EVEN MORE!!! All I need to do is put a little "tracking device" in my car so they can "monitor" my driving habits for 90 days! They assured me they would only be watching four items: braking, acceleration, miles driven and night time driving. Not where I stop for lunch, who I flip off in the lane next to me, or how I react when I spill coffee on myself!  


The device is now discretely attached inside my car.  The smiley faces on my phone app tell me I'm doing a good job and proudly shows me trip by trip the wonderful savings I'm going to enjoy when this exercise is over. (Don't tell my wife but I'm already thinking about the fun things I'm going to do with all this extra money!)

It occurred to me after listening to a recent podcast featuring host Ben Shapiro and his guest Scott Adams, author of the comic strip Dilbert, that even though, presumably, a human being set up the computer algorithm to track my driving habits, no human will ever see this data unless requested. The reality is that a machine is going to assess my driver skills and bequeath the savings I've "earned".

The reason I referenced the Shapiro podcast is that the day's conversation centered on modern politics and specifically the communication skills of the current president.  Adams made a rather chilling prediction: (paraphrased) whenever Donald Trump's presidential term comes to an end, it will be the last of free elections.  Just as computer algorithms dramatically influence the public's buying decisions (like saving more money on car insurance by allowing yourself to be monitored by a machine), so they will dramatically influence political candidate choices."

The question philosophers are aggressively grappling with in today's internet connected world is: do people really have "free will?"  It is an age old question but the information age has added a whole new layer of complexity to the debate.

Why? Because our perception of what we think we do is usually woefully skewed from the reality of what we actually do. That is not new, but how we spend our life's resources -time, talent and treasures- has a brand new way of being measured! For example, in the past if you really wanted an accurate understanding of how you spend your money you could tally your purchases from your checkbook/bank/credit card statement over the past six months!  (NO WAY I spent that much money on Starbucks!)

But in today's world all that activity is being recorded on The Web! When called into question on some or other activity, such as browsing Facebook while on the timeclock at work, we would vehemently dispute how much time we actually take vs what we perceive (especially if we were being docked pay!)  But Facebook knows and Google knows.  And people who engineer our growing addiction to all things technological know.  

Now we are discovering that they are not only engineering our buying habits but our social values. Organizations like Dennis Prager's PragerU are suing YouTube for pulling conservative commentary. Twitter has admitted to "shadow banning" certain speech. Facebook is working overtime to make censoring "hate speech" a moral imperative.

Something else that is not new: man's desire to be the savior of other people!

I think a better question regarding free will, then, is this: "Do individuals really know themselves?" For as the prophet Jeremiah laments: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" True freedom is acknowledging that we really don't know ourselves and truly need a Savior.  Just not the man-made kind!

So the question Jesus posed to his disciples millennia ago is ever more relevant today: 
"What do you think of Jesus Christ?"
By walking with Him, trusting in Him and obeying His word we can truly know and save ourselves from engineered manipulation of both the well intentioned and nefarious.