Q&A#121 Free Will

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Q&A#121 Free Will

March 30, 2019

Today's question: "In your view of human freedom do people ever truly have real multiple options that they chose from or are they always enslaved by their nature to one option and moved toward a good option by the grace of God being in a sense acted upon them? Is it valid, in your opinion, to see the unregenerate as stuck in sinful nature away from God waiting for God's move of grace but that the regenerate are growing into a greater sense of freedom where they truly have options within their nature and God is not directing every move of their life through the giving and withholding of grace? I hope my question is clear enough that you get what I'm asking."

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Transcript

Welcome back. Yesterday I answered a question on the subject of election and predestination, so I thought today I would answer a question on freedom and freedom of the will. The question is, in your view of human freedom, do people ever truly have real multiple options that they choose from? Or are they always enslaved by their nature to one option and moved toward a good option by the grace of God being, in a sense, acted upon them? Is it valid, in your opinion, to see the unregenerate as stuck in sinful nature away from God, waiting for God's move of grace, but that the regenerate are growing into a greater sense of freedom where they truly have options within their nature and God is not directing every move of their life through the giving and withholding of grace? I hope my question is clear enough that you get what I'm asking.

A number of comments first to clear away some of the thoughts that we often have on the subject of freedom that can be unhelpful. First of all, our wills are not as free as we often fancy them to be. We often have this notion of our actions being, for the most part, free, in the sense of being unconditioned or unprovoked by external factors and other things like that.

But many of the actions that would attribute to that sort of freedom are not, in fact, free. And the more that we learn about the science, from science about certain forms of human action and the way that we respond to stimuli and other things like that, and the way that we rationalize our action, we'll often discover that we are not anywhere near as free in these sorts of respects as we often presume ourselves to be. Our freedom is often illusory.

When you think about people who are gifted at manipulation, they can often lead people to make choices that they think are free, but are not, in fact, unconditioned by external stimuli and factors at all. Rather, they've been led to make something, a decision that they think is free. And there are many ways to do that, to nudge someone in a particular direction so that they will make a choice that they think is purely their own choice, but that person wanted them to make that choice all the way along.

And this is in part because much that we'd attribute to freedom is just habitual action. It's instinctual. It's conditioned by things that go beneath the radar of our perception and our conscious deliberation.

And those little factors that can push us in one direction or another are important to consider when we're thinking about freedom, that much that we consider is free is not, in fact, free. We often think about freedom, the freedom of the will, as ambivalence between choices, and that there are a number of different choices, a number of different options and routes I could take, and there's no reason why I'm weighed towards one or another by external factors particularly, but also by internal factors. I'm not bound by my nature.

I'm not bound by external forces. But yet that leads to an understanding of the will that's untethered from all these other factors. It often becomes a sort of random thing.

I mean, why would it choose this option rather than another? It just it finds freedom in randomness. But yet randomness is not freedom. Randomness doesn't necessarily lead to us being growing in a sense of freedom.

It just means that we're it's a quest for autonomy and freedom from any sort of constraints, not actual a deeper sense of freedom. What would it mean to be free in a more real sense? That's a question that we need to think about a bit more. And part of the problem here is our denaturing of the will.

Now, we can will all sorts of different things, but we cannot will what we will. We cannot will to change our wills in a great act that switches them from one way to another. We can choose many different things, but our will is something that's conditioned by our natures.

And there are ways in which we can cultivate our will and move our will towards the good over a long period of time of formation and other things like that, changing the company that we keep, these sorts of things. And we can exercise control upon our wills in that way. But the source of our will is found in our nature and our nature is either cultivated or it's something that is uncultivated and just works according to instinct and other things like that.

And in that respect, we will act, we will will according to our will. So we cannot will what we will to will. Rather, we can will things and we can shape our natures to some degree in order that they would be more apt to will things that are good.

But there's no way in which we can just will what we will. There's a danger in presuming then that our wills are disconnected from our natures. There's also a danger, as I said earlier, of thinking about the will as free when it's ambivalent towards external things, ambivalent towards all these different options that are before it.

Now, part of the problem there is that freedom is presumed to lie in a sort of ambivalence, whereas often the greatest freedom is found when we have a will that is very set towards something that's good. It's when there is this marriage between the internal will and the thing that is good for us, the thing in which we flourish. When we think about the act of this ambivalence, it's often associated with the idea of deliberation, of choice, that there are these different options and I could choose any single one of them.

And freedom, therefore, is considered to reside in choice, the idea that I can choose between them. And then how I arrive at that choice is through acts of deliberation. Now, there is an element of truth there, and I'll explore that in a moment.

But when we think about deliberation, is deliberation choice? Is deliberation freedom? In one respect, it could be. It's the sense that we are not absolutely determined by things purely by nature, by the brute reality of nature. But we do have a reasonable and rational deliberative power in order to order ourselves towards things in different ways.

Now, that is a sort of freedom, and it's important to speak about that. And I'll get to that in a moment. But in another respect, there can be a deeper freedom when you think of the artist, for instance, the sorts of art that involve putting your pen to the canvas and moving without ever removing your pen, your pen or your brush from the canvas and presenting this great portrait or making this picture that is just one single brushstroke.

Now, to do that sort of thing, it involves a freedom that is not primarily found in choice, a freedom that is not about pausing and deliberating at each juncture, but a recognition of the fluidity of action, of free action. There's a freedom that comes with that in the same way as with the musician who's not always thinking about what note is next. The musician has such, the virtuoso musician has such a sense of what is good and what is musical that they can play through a piece and compose a piece without actually having to pause all the time and consider what comes next.

And that is part of the discipline of freedom, that freedom can move beyond that stage of, first of all, just being determined by instinct or that stage of constantly having to deliberate at every juncture to a fluidity of action that is a sort of freedom that is more in turn comes from within and is deeply and truly related to the good. So this is not just the autonomy of being able to do whatever you want. It's not the autonomy of the kid that's put in front of the piano and said, play whatever notes you want.

They play whatever notes they want and they just make this terrible cacophony. There's no freedom to be found there. And in the same way, if the person is having to choose out each note and very carefully consider what note comes next all the time, there's a frustration to that.

There's a frustration in that your understanding of the instrument, your understanding of music is limited. And so at each point you're pausing and having to wait, you're having to deliberate in order to move forward. But then the person who's a virtuoso can just make this constant fluid movement without having to deliberate.

So when we think about freedom, I think we should be aware of thinking about it in terms of concepts of ambivalence and focusing too much upon concepts of choice. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't think in terms of the ways that determination of different factors can undermine free will. So if we think about the different factors that might impinge upon our will, for instance, just our animal nature, our animal desires, our instincts and habits and things like that, that are unconsidered, that are undeveloped or things such as other factors like external command.

There is an element in which that limits our freedom of will, but it can limit our freedom of will in a good way because it can often lead us to a sense of freedom if we follow through with it, which I'll get to in a moment. But when we think about freedom and the different sorts of possibility that come with freedom, it might be worth distinguishing between the types of things that we're talking about. So a lot of things get conflated in these discussions.

So people can talk about free will and what they're meaning about is freedom with relation to morality and with relation to the good, for instance, that we are able to will the good autonomously. And that can be a certain sort of freedom, the idea that we are not determined towards good or evil, that we can just will the good as we will. And that is something that Christian thought has challenged in various ways.

That doesn't mean that people won't do things that are good to some degree or according to a certain limited frame, but ultimately turning our hearts towards God and living lives in service of him is something that we are not free to do as sinful human beings. We have to be made free in order that we might do it in a true way. Then there's the idea of external constraint.

So I'm not free when someone is coercing me to do something. If I have, for instance, the idea of someone forcing me to sign something at gunpoint, that is not freedom. Even though my hand is moving according to commands from my brain, I'm not acting freely in that situation.

So external coercion is an example. Also, we might think about the idea of God determining everything beforehand. That is seen as a limitation of my freedom.

And there is a sense in which it genuinely could be if it were understood incorrectly. The idea that creation is a printout of God's eternal computer screen, as it were. He's got this document of what is going to happen in the history of the world up on his computer screen.

And then history is just that great printout of that event. Now, that's a very unhelpful way of thinking about these things. And it suggests that there's this external prior determination of everything that occurs.

That is something that means that my actions are not occurring according to the integrity of my own choice. And that can be an unsettling idea that challenges notions of human freedom on a more metaphysical or theological level. And I think there are ways in which that picture of God is a mistaken one.

We might think about more aptly the idea of the novelist and the relationship between the novelist and the characters in his novel. The character in the novel, if they were thinking about their place within the novel, they would not be able to say that the novelist has determined everything that I'm going to do beforehand. Because the novelist isn't within their timeline.

The novelist isn't beforehand. Rather, they are suspended upon the novelist's prior action. But the priority of that action is not so much on a sort of horizontal time frame, where this is the time of the character, and then if you stretch that out with dotted lines before and afterwards, you have the time of the novelist.

No, it's a more vertical relationship, perpendicular to the character within the novel. It's determined, it's suspended upon the fact that the novelist has brought this world out of nothing. But yet, for the novelist to bring a world out of nothing, the actions of the character have to be considered as having their cause within the character themselves.

And so they have to have integrity in that respect. And Christians have thought the same way about God's creation. That when we think about God's creation and our character as God's creation, that God has established things.

God establishes all causes within the world. And those causes operate according to his sovereignty. But yet, they operate according to his sovereignty, according to their own proper nature as secondary causes.

So when I choose, I choose of my own nature. I choose of myself. It's not just a matter of God determining beforehand, and I think I'm choosing, but I'm not really choosing.

Rather, I truly choose from within myself. But God is acting through and supporting and undergirding my choice. God is the one that makes it possible for me to choose, for me to have freedom.

It's not as if God is acting upon me, or God is this external force writing upon the blank slate of my being and determine everything that I will choose. Rather, my actions as a secondary cause, as someone who is free, arise from my own proper nature. And this is something that, even against many stereotypes, the reformed tradition has been very clear upon.

That secondary causation maintains its integrity. And so when I act, I act freely because I am a free human being. And God establishes me and undergirds me in that freedom.

And so my very being, my very freedom, is ultimately a gift of God who has created me. And that freedom and that being is always sustained by God in every moment in time. And when I act, I'm acting out of that freedom.

I'm acting out of that reality that God has created me within. And so thinking about freedom that way, we are not to think about that external constraint of God's prior choice. Of God's prior choice as an external constraint upon us.

Rather, it's the reality that is within and undergirds us. It is the basis of our existence as free beings. God's work, action, and human action are not in competition or collision with each other.

They relate to each other in a very different way. They're two planes. They're not in competition.

Other things to think about. We've talked about coercion. We've talked about prior, God's prior eternal choice, things like that.

We might also think about my nature. Many people would think that we are determined by just our nature as animals, our animal nature. And there is a sense in which many of our actions are in fact determined by our animal nature.

But that does not mean that they are entirely determined by our animal nature. And this does not mean that this is necessarily in opposition with freedom. Anyhow, when we think about the way that my animal nature is related to my will, often that is a free and appropriate relationship.

It's a relationship in which I'm not acting autonomously. It's not as if I'm acting in a way that is undetermined and unconditioned by other things. But it's something that's acting towards the good of my being.

It's acting in a way that's not coerced by other factors and other things like that. And so we might think about the way in which a certain form of reductive science can present my actions as purely determined by my animal nature. And that is something that denies our rational capacities, our social capacities, and the way that those free us from the mere determination of our animal habits and desires.

There are many ways in which we're freed from this more basic animal instinct and the idea that we're just determined by in the sort of cause effect dynamic. The very fact of rationality enables us to be determined by things that are not in fact immediate causes upon us, physical causes upon us. Our rationality enables us to exceed that sort of thing.

And our sociality also is a means by which we exceed the immediacy of the impact of that sort of thing, of causation, of physical cause. Other things to think about here is the way in which moral freedom, the idea that we are, or the idea of freedom conceived of in this detachment from any external causation. That's an overstating of the concept of freedom.

But there needs to be this sense that we are not purely determined by those factors. The idea that God determines everything in a way that violates my integrity as a secondary cause. That is a problem.

It's also a problem to say that my action arises in a way that's purely determined by my animal nature. Likewise, it's a problem to think about concepts of coercion in a way that that shapes our notion of freedom too. All of these things are problems.

So what do we think about in terms of what is true freedom? I've spoken about different ways of relation to the good. And so we can think about the indifference that we might have. There's no reason why I should choose this over another.

I'm perfectly free to choose a lot of different things. Now we should maybe step back from that and think about what is the term free doing in that statement. Is it saying that I'm not externally conditioned in my choice towards this? Or is it saying that this is in a more positive sense free? Now there are times when I can do things that aren't conditioned by external forces that are not in fact free.

It can be conditioned by my own nature that is a thing that is not free in itself. A lot of Christian discussion of the moral shape of free will is important here. Because often the bondage that we feel, the bondage of the will, is not this external bondage, the metaphysical bondage of cosmic determination or divine predestination or external coercion or just this sort of natural determination by my animal nature of everything that I do.

No, it's not those things. Rather it's an understanding that within ourselves we are at bondage. There are many things that I want to do, that I know that are right for me to do, that I know that if I were to do them I would be a much freer and happier person.

But yet I return day by day to my old habits, to my old ways, to things that are binding me and preventing me from rising to my full stature. Now I'm not being determined by external factors there, but yet I'm being bound within myself, partly to my animality but partly also just to the sinfulness of my mind. My mind that is set and ordered towards things that are not good for me and things that are destructive on me.

And that sense of bondage is something that is very strong within Christian thought. And so when we're talking about freedom we need to be very careful to tease out these different senses because they're often conflated and elided. That when we're talking about that sort of metaphysical freedom, that I'm not compelled by external forces, there is a sense in which that is making an important point that prevents us from seeing as freedom a mere appearance of freedom, a mere appearance of being a free cause within ourselves, that we do have a will and we do act with integrity according to that will and that that will is truly our own.

But the problem comes when we start to confuse that with a notion of moral freedom. And that moral freedom also leads to a sense, a deeper sense of freedom, in a more positive sense. So within our understanding of freedom within the West we very much think in terms of negative freedom.

Negative freedom is freedom from constraints, external factors that limit my actions. Positive freedom, however, is a realisation of my good. It's the freedom to rise to my full stature.

And in many ways what people talk about when they talk about freedom of the will in modern society, they're talking about negative freedom. It's like the freedom that comes with having two legs that we can walk, but it's the freedom to fall over and to walk and keep stumbling and tripping and falling over. Now that's not true freedom.

It's something that having legs gives you, but true freedom comes with being able to walk and run, to be able to work out, to stand to your full stature and to work out the full potential of your being. That's what freedom is. It's not something that is merely a removal of constraints.

It's not the freedom of the young kid in front of the piano who's able to play whatever he wants, but cannot actually play something. He cannot actually play anything beautiful because he does not have the mastery of the instrument. Rather it's the freedom of the person who has mastered the instrument.

And there we might think about different modes of relation to the good of my nature. So there's that sort of ambivalence or indifference. You can play whatever you want.

There's no constraint upon you. No one's telling you what to do and you can do whatever you want. There's no external limits or coercion.

And that's a sort of indifference, but it's not a true freedom. On the other hand, there's obedience where someone has an external force and authority says, you should do this and it limits your freedom. It's a limitation that comes upon you as an external force that in terms of a negative freedom is closing down of some of the freedom that you enjoyed initially, that freedom of indifference.

But yet that sort of obedience can yield a positive freedom. It's what leads to, as the next stage, wise deliberation. That the person who has learnt that sort of obedience can internalise some of those structures and can think and deliberate and can think about, OK, I have these different options before me.

Which one is best for me? And then seek to relate my nature and myself to external forces and events and realities in a way that determines what is best for me. What is the best fit? And that process of deliberation brings our rational capacities and other faculties upon the actions of our choices. And so it's no longer just a matter of choosing according to their instinct and habit and animal nature.

Rather, it's something that we can choose in a way that is more rational, in a way that works us towards something more than what we are at the moment, makes us, holds open the possibility of exceeding what we currently are and of moulding our nature towards the good. And so obedience comes first. And through obedience, we develop nature that is ordered towards things that are better.

And we can internalise to some extent the processes by which we can deliberate. And then we start to deliberate more. And at a certain point, it becomes more and more internalised.

So we can act freely and fluidly. We no longer have to deliberate at each point. And so there's a movement in freedom there.

It's maturation. We can think about this as human beings. We often think about external forces as limitations of our freedom.

But yet external forces are the things that often give us freedom. It is by submitting oneself to the law of the musical instrument and obeying that law and then mastering that law and internalising that law that leads to that musical instrument becoming, as it were, an extension of your own body. Likewise, it's through parents and the way that they raise us, the external force that they exercise upon us, that we have the freedom that we have as adults.

For instance, the freedom to think about things and to change our minds. The freedom to be people who are rational. The freedom to be people that order our lives in a rational way and in a way that exceeds mere nature is something given to us in large part by language.

And that language always comes to us from the outside. I could not internalise, I could not articulate my inner life were the language for my inner life not first given to me by my parents and by others. This is a process of internalisation of things that are first given to us externally.

And so this idea of freedom as freedom from external constraint is a problem because freedom comes initially and it comes from external constraint. External limits that channel us towards the good and gradually enable us to internalise those processes through deliberation and then finally through deeply instilled habit and desire that is ordered towards the good. And the question then becomes not whether I will do the good or not but how will I do it? And so I think that for people who are brought into a fuller realisation of freedom as they've matured in righteousness, as they've matured in their faculties, their rational faculties, as they've matured in their human skills and their abilities to work with different objects in the world and different aspects of their social environment, these sorts of things, each aspect of that comes with an increase in freedom as you submit yourself to the law of reality and you master that law.

And so it's not external constraint that we should be thinking about as the limit of freedom. Rather it's that inability to connect ourselves with the good of our natures and with the reality of our world and to integrate those rationally into something greater. It's the inability to have, it's our moral inability through the fact that we have natures that are not ordered towards the good.

And so when God acts upon us to move us towards himself, we need to work with that and develop our natures. And that involves submitting to habit, it involves submitting to processes of formation, it involves, for instance, studying scripture, it involves prayer, it involves meeting with people who will shape us well because we're shaped by the influence of other people, by imitation of others and all these sorts of things. And these things are ultimately established upon divine gift, but they're built up through these external processes of comporting myself ever more skillfully to the world and to my own nature.

This nature then is something that freedom cannot be understood in detachment from my nature. Now when we think about, for instance, the perfection of human beings and righteousness, human beings in the Garden of Eden, they fell and they went into sin. Now, when we think about human beings in that respect, they were free, they could choose whatever they wanted.

Now, the freedom that they had at that point was very much the freedom of childhood. It's the freedom of those whose wills have not been trained to recognise good and evil. They've not been really shaped in a way that enables them to recognise from within themselves what is good.

Rather, they have to submit to external controls and constraints and law. And as they submit to that, then they can grow. When we look through the story of scripture and we look through history, there is a deepening of our skill in engagement with the world.

And in each stage, there's an extension of our freedom. As we submit to the rules of the world, as we submit to the rules of our nature, we become more free. And as we become more free, we can act in ways that we never could have acted previously.

We can take charge of reality and shape it and mould it in ways that are new. But what comes with that is deepening levels of freedom in a moral sense as well. So the person who is wise has internalised the law and can now act from within themselves in a way that discerns what is good and evil and is able to bring the light of that insight to bear upon new situations and to create things that are new in the world, that aren't just determined by their instinct, that aren't just a matter of obeying rules, but as a matter of thinking creatively and being able to bring an instinct for what is good and evil into that act of creation.

And that is an aspect of wisdom. And much of wisdom is not just a matter of choosing between good and evil, it's choosing between good and better and best. It's a matter of that wisdom of knowing how to integrate ever more fully an apprehension and a skill of working with the good into our action and our choices and into the course that we take in our activity.

And so freedom at each stage is a development and a growth. And when we think about our confirmation in righteousness in the new heavens and the new earth, what is that? Is it a matter of God externally determining by his divine decree that we will not sin? Or is it a matter of God coercing us almost, so whenever we might go off the rails, he kind of shoves us back in, it's the sort of bumpers in the bowling alley. Is that the way that God's going to act upon us? Or is it a matter of our wills being so set towards the good of our nature that we no longer need those external controls? We no longer need to be pushed in the right direction.

But rather, if we love God, we can do what we will, because that is true freedom. That when our wills are set towards that which is good, anything that we do, anything that we will to do will be good. And the more that we develop and hone that, the more skillful we'll be in our particular situation, in our particular circumstances, with our particular gifts and capacities, acting in the most skillful and freeing way, a way that is deeply expressive of ourselves as ordered towards the good.

And so what we need to think about then is the maturation in freedom. Many of these accounts of freedom are about freedom just thought about in a more static way, that freedom is either metaphysical or moral, whatever it is, that's either a sort of on or off thing. And the idea of maturing in freedom and what it means to be creatures that gain freedom from outside of ourselves, as others shape us towards the limits of the world and help us to internalise those structures and then to act skillfully into them, that is not really taken account of enough.

And so that gift of freedom also helps us to think about creation more generally, that creation is something that is ultimately the establishment of our capacity for action. And God, as he speaks to us in command, is helping us to internalise the world so that through the feedback loop of our action within creation and reflection upon objects in the world, we can become ever more skillful in the art of living well. And this is how freedom is found.

I mean, you know that yourself. You know that when you have lived in a way that is not just bound by your animal habits, not just bound by the moral sinfulness within you, not just bound by coercion of others or anything like that, you feel at liberty. You feel that you've really achieved something.

And it's an experience of freedom that helps us to understand more deeply what freedom is. It helps us to move away from the idea of freedom idealised as ambivalence, of being able to do whatever you want and that any choice is as good as any other, or this idea that my choice is something that it doesn't really have any factors impinging upon it. Rather, when my nature impinges upon my action, it's a good thing.

My action should be something that takes into account the fullness of my nature, so that when I act, it will be in terms of the goodness of my nature. So we do not have to worry too much about research that suggests that we generally act in a way that is fairly undeliberative and that just comports with our natures. That's not an inappropriate thing to do.

Rather, we need to internalise and act according to our natures. But we need to do it as rational animals, as animals who are not just working according to an animal nature and not just working according to a rational capacity that is imprisoned to that animal nature or imprisoned to our sinful desires, which is not quite the same thing as our animal nature. We need to think about nature that is ordered towards the good, the good of ourselves and a good of the world and ordering ourselves towards God as well.

And in each stage as we become more and more oriented towards those things, we will become more free. And that confirmation in righteousness, that deepening in righteousness, the more that we act in that way, we'll become single-minded and wholehearted people. The person who's constantly having to choose between things, who's wavering between options, isn't really free.

The person who's more free is the person who may decide, be considering how is best to live out the good, but the person who has a deeper apprehension of what is good, who's not always second-guessing themselves, who's able to make strong decisions because those decisions are known to be good. Now, if you're constantly making choices and you cannot decide, there's a problem there. Decision is not just making a choice.

Decision is being able to follow through with that choice wholeheartedly in a way that knows that that choice is for your good. And we struggle to do that, but yet the deepening of our apprehension of our natures and what is good in the world and the sharpening of our wills in the skill of living well will enable us to take those actions in a way that is more decisive, more free, less determined by external factors that we must take account of and we feel that we're always wavering between things, not knowing what to do. This is something that makes us more free.

And so the Christian message is very much about a movement and a deepening in freedom as our wills are comported ever more fully towards God and the world that he has created. It's a recognition the will is not autonomous. It's related to our natures.

It's related to the creation and it's related to God. And as it's related to those things properly, we will find that we no longer feel constrained in the same way. We'll feel at liberty.

And the bondage that we often feel most deeply is the bondage of ourselves, the bondage of sin, the bondage of our own habitual wickedness, those things that are playing out in us that we can't uproot. And the Christian message is a message of liberation. It's a message that calls us to receive God's gift of freedom, to submit to his word, to take the actions that he calls us to.

And as we take those actions, we'll find that he gives us the freedom that when Christ, for instance, says to the man, take up your bed and walk, that Christ commands and he makes possible for us to obey the command. And God's word, God's commands are freedom. They lead us towards that fuller realisation of the good of our natures.

And the more that we root ourselves within those, the more that we meditate upon his word, the more that we become people who love that. And again, it's worth thinking about the way that the law is spoken of in scripture. The law, this first stage of obedience, it's not just something that you're supposed to hear and obey.

You're supposed to hear and obey. But there's a lot of emphasis placed upon the fact that we should meditate upon the law day and night. That we should be those who love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.

That this is something that occupies our desires. And the more that we meditate and internalise that, that becomes something that orders our wills, not just something that is an external constraint upon our wills that we reluctantly submit to, but something that we're seeking to shape our wills towards. We will find that there is a freedom there.

A freedom that's the freedom that comes like the musician that has learned the instrument, that has submitted to their scales and found the freedom that's found in the love of that instrument, in the attention to that instrument and the mastery that comes with all of that. There's so much more that could be said on this subject and many things that I've said that would need further elaboration, qualification, clarification, but I hope this has been helpful. Lord willing, I'll be back again tomorrow.

And if you have any questions or anything else like that, please leave them in my Curious Cat account. And if you'd like to support this and other videos like it, please do so using my Patreon or PayPal accounts. The links for all of those are below.

God bless and thank you for listening.