This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

Thoughts on God and Free Will

The following excerpts are from comments I've posted on the atheist/antiChristian message board I've mentioned in an earlier post. They have mainly to do with God, suffering and freewill. But since they deal with omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence, they also have to do with space, time, and the nature of God (an essence or a person?). The comments are excerpted from a couple of different message threads, so there's little continuity between excerpts, and some repetition.

But I thought I'd offer them for your review and comment.

On omnipotence and free will:

There is no logical necessity, or contradiction, between omniscience, omnipotence and free will. Omnipotence, for example, does not necessitate that one always exercise omnipotence. One may, indeed, refrain from using one's power. If one MUST always use one's omnipotence, then, by definition, one is not omnipotent. In other words, precisely because one is omnipotent, one may refrain from using one's power.

Omniscience in no way precludes free will, either. To deny free will, omniscience must be combined with omnipotence (an omnipotence which must always be used). But as we've seen there is no logical necessity that omnipotence must always be used.

On what is properly basic to God, essence or personhood:

Strictly speaking, in Christian theology, it is not proper to posit a philosophical category (immutability) in place of a person. That is to say, what is "essential" as it were to God is personhood, not any sort of quality. God does not change in terms of personhood, but whether and to what degree God does engage in any other sort of change (not in terms of mutability), is debated.

On God's omniscience and on time:

First of all, you have to determine how it is that God knows the future. He clearly does not know it in the way we do, since we are temporal beings and cannot but exist in time. God, being eternal, which is to say, ex-temporal, or outside time, knows our future in a way we do not. We experience time in only a linear way. But if God is outside time, he experiences all time as present, as it were; as if it were happening now. (These are temporally-founded expressions so can only approximate what God's experiencing of time actually is.) And if the "non-temporal now" that God knows (which is our future) is the arena in which we exercise our choice, then clearly God's knowing of the future does not eliminate our free will.

On whether God must act in terms of his essence, or is a free person who acts as he will:

I would say that the Christian God is not jealous, spiteful, etc. Whether or not he can be these things, in terms of whether he can freely choose to do or be these things, is nonsensical if he is the sort of person who does not do these things. In other words, he is not precluded from doing these things simply on the basis of free will consideration. Rather it is the sort of person he is that is under consideration. The Christian claim is that all God's acts are love. That all he does is holy. That everything he says is true. But we do not say such things as God must love because it is his nature so to do, that he must act in holy ways, or that he cannot but speak truth. Though these claims are, in certain ways true, they are misleading because they presuppose that his nature is more fundamental than his personhood. But in point of fact, for Christians, the personhood of God is the basic reality of the Godhead.

On God's omnipotence and whether he acts only in special circumstances in this world, or always acts in this world:

But understand, I'm not denying that there are real "natural laws" in the universe. I'm not denying the law of gravity. But neither am I denying the miraculous, which you are required to do by your presuppositions. In other words, yours is a case of special pleading, whereas mine does not seek to make any exceptions as yours does.

That is to say, the Christian understanding of God's activity in the world is that it is always ongoing at every moment. Thus miracles, though they are in seeming contradiction to observable natural causes and effects, are not special instances of actions that God does, while the rest of the time he's off doing whatever it is that God is doing. On the contrary, the Christian understanding is that the universe always has God's special attention: he ensures the orderly processes that sustain human life and strethces out the galaxies, as well as acting in ways that are "exceptional" (from our perspective) to those processes (what we call miracles). He is not some deist watchmaker, but is, in fact, the consummate lover of all such that his care and attention is always in love directed toward that which he has made.

On whether creating humans with freewill is compassionate and loving or not:

Well, since Christians (among others) believe in free will, that God created it as a fundamental human reality and works to preserve and honor that freedom, then it would be contradictory to who God is to force people to believe in him and that what he has done is indeed his work. If you think not having free will is a better world you're free to argue it. But then if you really believed it, you wouldn't argue it. It would be pointless to do so.

On whether suffering is pointless:

You characterize rape as pointless suffering. You are right that it is suffering. It is evil. Is it pointless? No. How could any of us ever say that such a deep and violating evil such as rape causes a suffering that is pointless? To do so is to say of the victim that she is incapable of rising above the evil that has happened to her. You reduce and minimize her humanity at the expense of proving a philosophical point of injustice. Suffering at the hands of evil and injustice should never ever--in my opinion and according to the theology of the Church--be explained by whatever effects or results it may engender, no matter how noble or positive. This sort of suffering is evil and unjust. Full stop.

But then to conclude from that that the humans who suffer these things are incapable of overcoming that suffering through their inherent worth and nobility as made in God's very image--that is also truly evil.

In other words, the Christian view is that not even evil and injustice can overcome Christ's love and the power of God. In the face of radical nothingness and insatiable evil, the Christian can know and experience the reality that suffering is not the final word.

And from that standpoint, suffering is never pointless.

On freewill and suffering:

But if you don't believe in free will, then you don't believe in evil and injustice, and therefore don't believe in suffering. If it is all cause and effect, then our moral evaluations of pain and actions are merely effects of other causes and have no intrinsic meaning. Indeed, not only can you not escape not believing in God, neither can I escape believing in him. Let's turn out all the prison inmates, let's allow more Islamic terrorist beheadings, let's let be what will be, since it's all determined cause and effect, and nothing we can really choose to do anyway.

Your position is nonsensical in the truest sense.

More on freewill and God:

I note here, then, that you have failed to address the issue of co-free will. God has free will, and in creating beings like himself (angels and humans) did so such that they, like him, had free will. You may well note that God, in his foreknowledge, could have foreseen that evil would occur as the result of misuse of the free will he'd given creatures he'd made like ourselves. But you have not proven that foreknowledge necessarily entails the negating of free will.

You also claim that since God foreknew that humans would sin, he could have saved himself the trouble and eliminated free will such that humans could never do anything but the good that God himself always willed. But this effectively eliminates any sort of sentience which eliminates any sort of actual relationship.

The picture you paint of God is a picture not even deserving of attributing to my one-year old daughter. God would not only be less than childish, in your view, he would effectively demonstrate his powerlessness. The Christian view of God keeps in perfect tension God's omnipotence, his foreknowledge and his love.

In your view, humans would be nothing better than automatons. You seem to prefer the fact that in your conception you would be incapable of sentience, incapable of anything but enslavement to your drives and needs. Granted, in the perfect world you've mentioned, you wouldn't hunger. But neither would you think. How could you, your entire being would be subsumed under the domination of forces you can neither control or understand, but could only obey. You would have no capacity to relate to God, of course, because you could not exercise love, which demands free will. But you would also have no relationship with anyone else.

In short, everything you now value you could not enjoy, because you would not have free will. All you could do is experience them. You could not enjoy them because you would have no contrary against which to judge them. Indeed, you could not judge them at all. Because your will would not be free. And if your reaction to something MUST be, you cannot truly be said to enjoy it. It would be an automatic response.

And this is a better world, you think?

No, the Christian view notes that it is precisely the gift of free will (in humans) that both causes injustice AND enables humans to fight injustice. Indeed, your free will is the very basis of your umbrage at what you take the christian position to be. Without free will, you would have no ability to either resist the umbrage you would feel, or, conversely the satisfaction you would feel, and without the ability to resist the impulse you could not judge which would be better.

On God and time:

Since God does not experience time as we do, to speak of God's knowing of his action beforehand is a bit misleading. God's knowing and willing are the very same act, at least speaking in terms of temporal events. Indeed, for God, willing and acting are the same event. Or at least there is no inhibition of his will. Everything he wills to do, he does; thus his will is both free and omnipotent. Everything he knows he knows as present to himself, and all his knowing is unfrustrated, uninhibited. If he knows it, it is. But this knowledge is simultaneous with the reality of what it is that God knows. Thus he knows, for example, whether or not I will die in the faith. For me, this is an unknown. It is hidden. But God knows it. And since his knowing of it is simultaneous with it's reality, then it is the case both that I freely exercise my will in the moment of my action and that God knows I have so willed and acted in the moment I do so. It is not as though God were ignorant of my act until I do it, because for him this knowledge is always now a reality. But by the same token, he does not know it prior to my willing and acting it in such a way as to determine it, because the reality of it happens in the moment in which I will and act. A moment that is always present to god, but is, for now, a moment hidden to me.

On freewill, time and atemporality:

Free-will exists in a temporal space: I'm not sure that it is the case that free will must be limited to temporal conditions. If free-will is the choice between two or more options, then why must time be a necessary condition for such a choice? That it inescapably is for humans, sure. But unless you can tie a logical necessity between choosing and time, you are merely asserting a proposition which is debatable.

Furthermore, if it is the case that freewill must demand a temporal locus, then in an atemporal locus, it is not the case that a divine and eternal being would not have freewill, only that it wouldn't make sense to speak of freewill as attributed to a divine being. In other words, while it would be true that one could not ascribe freewill to such a being, it would also be true that one could not deny freewill to such a being. Neither assertion would make sense since an atemporal divine being would necessarily not be subject to any assertions about a temporally-located freewill.

But what one could determine about a divine being is if there were any constraints on such a being such that in a given scenario an atemporal being could not but think/act in a specific way. Some conceptions of God do in fact posit such a thing: that God must necessarily be utterly good and act in good ways, that such a being must necessarily be all-powerful and act in omnipotent ways, and so on. But the Christian conception of God rejects such descriptions since for the Christian God is not a sum of attributes or traits but is fundamentally a person. If God is determined in anyway it is that he is a person, but as a person he can think and act in whatever way as a person he chooses so to do. What we say about God's attributes and traits--that he is good, all-powerful, and so on--are a result of a personal experience (note: I do NOT mean an individual experience) of who God is and how he acts and the thoughts he articulates to us. That is to say, we do not come to know these traits by rational cognition primarily but rather by personal (not individual) experience.

More on God and time:

If one posits that there is a reality which is throughly located in time (as you do), it is not necessary to conclude that all reality is so located. If God is the sort of person Christians claim him to be, then his is a reality that is outside time. But if that is the case, this does not eliminate the temporal experience, but rather that God is not limited by that experience. For God, then, all things are seen, as it were, as simultaneously present (though to speak of God's reality in temporal terms is admittedly to speak only by analogy).

On God, acting and thinking, and atemporality:

For humans, we can only know decision making and action in temporal terms. But Christians understand their God to both think and act simultaneously. From a human perspective, God's acts unfold in time. We do not know how God's acts unfold for him.

But it is not necessary to assume sequence as limited to time. Though in an atemporal sequence there is no time between one thing and another in the sequence, but just because this happens atemporally it does not mean it cannot happen sequentially. It's just that the sequential events happen as though it were simultaneously. by way of analogy, one may point to conception: at the moment of conception other things that will unfold in time have already become fact: hair and eye color, sex, and so forth. From a temporal perspective, these attributes only develop sequentially in time. But from the standpoint of the makeup of the person, it has already happened simultaneous with the coming into being of the person. (I grant you this is an imperfect illustration, but it gets at what I'm trying to communicate.)

On God's extratemporality:

On the contrary, if God created all that is, as the Christian view asserts, then God created time and can do with it as he will. But as the creator of time his person is not bound by time. He can cross into time at will. In fact, the Christian view is that he has done and is doing so, most quintessentially in the Incarnation.

On God, time and place:

It doesn't seem to me to be logically necessary to posit a place that exists outside time. Indeed, if place involves extension and magnitude, even in nonmaterial ways, thus extrauniversal, it would seem to follow that space and time are also necessary, even if space and time as applied to these nonmaterial, extrauniversal "places" were of a fundamentally different character than is the space and time we experience.

Rather, it seems that all one needs to say is that the Christian God is a person who is extrauniversal and who is extra-temporal. God, in his essence, has no extension or magnitude, and therefore space and time, even the extrauniversal nonmaterial sort I posit above, do not properly apply to God. It thus becomes nonsensical to ask "Where" God is, since God, having no extension or magnitude, is nowhere, in terms of place. But if God is nowhere, then place does not properly apply, and therefore all wheres, just as all times, are present to him. Only in this way can he be omnipresent. And being thus omnipresent he can observe all things (past, present and future to us) as eternally now.

Posted by Clifton at October 15, 2004 01:32 PM | TrackBack