Spiderman and Free Will
Brand New Day dramatizes why free will matters
Here’s a mostly spoiler-free reflection on “Spiderman: Brand New Day,” the importance of free will to a live fully lived, and God’s uncontrolling love.
“Spiderman: Brand New Day” dramatizes what it would look like to lack authentic free will.
The main villain can enter into and control other people’s minds. Viewers see dozens of people throughout the film hijacked to serve as the villain’s proxies. People speak the villain’s words with their voices. They carry out the villain’s wishes with their bodies. And afterward, they have no memory of the event.
It’s horrifying.
First, there’s inherent danger in losing control over one’s body to another person’s will. What if the villain uses mind-control, for instance, to have someone jump off a building? The film actually shows that danger, too.
Second, the lack of agency itself horrifies. It’s disorienting and sickening to see people acting contrary to their own wills. Scratch that. Actually, they have no will of their own. They’re automatons. They’re servile creatures.
The film isn’t trying to make any grand statement about free will, yet the message comes across loud and clear: to live life fully, we must have agency.
Of course, our choices are always constrained by physical limitations, the laws of nature, social conventions, ethical and moral considerations, and so forth. But we have genuine agency in our thinking, beliefs, and actions within those constraints. No one’s controlling our minds, telling us what to do.
Not even God.
When most people describe God as omnipotent, they mean that He can do anything He wants without limitation. Yet if you press a little, most people quickly qualify what they mean by omnipotence. God won’t interfere with free will, for example, but He could if He wished to do so.
And one can easily think of many scenarios where a little divine mind-control would have been a good thing. God could take temporary control over someone’s mind to prevent a mass shooting, a murder, a rape, a genocide. But of course, the world suffers these evils and more. Why?
Open and Relational Theology suggests that God cannot control others. God is love. Love is uncontrolling. Thus, God is uncontrolling.
In this view, God isn’t simply refusing to use His power to control even though He could prevent so many horrors by doing so. Rather, God’s very essence and nature as love does not allow for taking over someone’s will like the Spiderman villain does. To do so would violate God’s Godness. He can’t control us any more than He can stop loving us.
Spiderman: Brand New Day unintentionally ends up being a theological treatise on divine power and love. It shows us the horror that would be a controlling God.
Trump and his ilk are good at mind control. First you set up a "be afraid, be afraid, be afraid" scenario. And, then start demonizing a defined set of people "murderer, rapists" and keep drumming it in. These messages become codified on the cerebellum as knee-jerk responses, and he's got you. One guy, referring to government help programs said, "I would rather die, than take one dollar of welfare money." Of course, wealthy people are getting government handouts all the time. If these messages on the cerebellum are strong enough their conscious thinking ability is lost, so there is no possibility in having a conversation with them.