I said in my post last week on Joseph Luzzi’s new book In A Dark Wood that I’d be writing more posts about his ideas. Here’s the first of those.
One of the most vexing topics we face, whether coming at it from a secular or a religious viewpoint, is the question of the limits, or even the possibility, of free will. Modern scientists have postulated that there is no such thing; that the existence and location of every particle in the universe is the result of random chance and is therefore (somewhat counter-intuitively) preordained. As I sit here writing this post, my ideas arise only from the purposeless chemical interactions that are occurring down there within my brain. (There’s a great discussion of this concept in the book I wrote about back in the very first post on this blog.)
In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love by Joseph Luzzi, HarperCollins, 2015.