Thursday, March 17, 2005
The Boulder That's Too Big to Lift
We’ve had an interesting colloquy going on in the comments section since my post on Monday about the church shootings in Brookfield, Wisconsin. So let's talk some more about free will, the idea that God created human beings with the ability to do good or evil as they choose. "Why did God allow this person [like, say, Terry Ratzmann] to do this terrible thing?" "Well, it's because God gave us free will, and sometimes people use their free will to do terrible things."
As I noted in one of my own comments to the original post, the free-will argument has no explanation for whose free will takes precedence in a situation where multiple wills clash. If Terry Ratzmann had the free will to choose to shoot up his church, what about the free-will choice of his victims not to be shot up that day--a choice they surely would have made if they had known? How is it that Ratzmann's free-will decision prevailed? The question has been asked before, most notably about Mohammed Atta, leader of the 9/11 hijackers, but I've never seen anyone try to explain it without resorting to the mysterious-ways default--which is, as I said Monday, a copout that avoids the issue.
(However, even if we accept the mysterious-ways default--that for some reason we are utterly incapable of understanding, the actions of a Ratzmann or an Atta must occur, even in a universe ruled by God--it's hard to square the benevolent God we heard about in Sunday school with a God who permits innocents to be painfully slaughtered and to spend their last moments on Earth in unspeakable horror. As Jonathan Wallace wrote in an anguished essay published after 9/11, "How do you reconcile this view of God with the parable of the shepherd, who leaves the 99 healthy sheep to go rescue the one in trouble?")
We've all heard the paradox, "Could God make a boulder so big that he couldn't lift it?" Each generation of Sunday-school fifth-graders hits on this question sooner or later, and while we smile at it, we never think too hard about it, either. But in that paradox lies another problem with the concept of free will--one that puts God's existence into serious jeopardy.
God is supposed to be omniscient. But, we're told, he also created us with the free will to decide our course of action in life. So right now, if I wanted, I could walk over to my office window, drop trou, and moon the condos across the parking lot. It's entirely up to me, or so I'm told. But if God is omniscient--if he knows everything, including that which will happen in the future--certainly he must know whether I will actually, at some point in the next few minutes, moon the condos across the parking lot. And if he knows that, along with everything else about my future, how free is my will, really? It might seem free to me, but if God already knows what my allegedly free choices will be, then isn't the course of the future fixed already?
And if the future is fixed, then God could not have looked down on Terry Ratzmann sticking a gun in his jacket last Saturday morning and said, "Hmm, I wonder what he's going to do with that?" He had to know what Ratzmann was planning--and in his omniscience, he also had to know what it feels like to die of a gunshot wound, or to watch someone you love die of a gunshot wound. And he let those things happen, even though his omnipotence gave him both the ability and the right to have stopped them.
And if he couldn't stop them--if God's future, like ours, is also fixed--then what's his purpose? He can't actually answer prayer, because it's already been determined whether Aunt Martha's boil will be cured, and if she's not destined to be cured, God can't do anything about it. He can't protect your kids while they're in school all day, because what will happen to them is already set. He can't intervene in history, because he has no power to alter the future he already knows.
So what good is he, exactly?
And so you've had a taste of the problem involved with the concept of free will. Dan Barker, an former pastor now with the Freedom From Religion Foundation in Madison, goes a step further--if there's such a thing as free will, he says, God cannot logically exist. And that's ultimately the point I was attempting to make in my original post--it seems obvious to me that a world where Ratzmanns (or Attas) can exist is not a world where a benevolent God also can exist. Jonathan Wallace puts it another way:
And thanks for your comments. They make this bloviating seem a lot more worthwhile.
We’ve had an interesting colloquy going on in the comments section since my post on Monday about the church shootings in Brookfield, Wisconsin. So let's talk some more about free will, the idea that God created human beings with the ability to do good or evil as they choose. "Why did God allow this person [like, say, Terry Ratzmann] to do this terrible thing?" "Well, it's because God gave us free will, and sometimes people use their free will to do terrible things."
As I noted in one of my own comments to the original post, the free-will argument has no explanation for whose free will takes precedence in a situation where multiple wills clash. If Terry Ratzmann had the free will to choose to shoot up his church, what about the free-will choice of his victims not to be shot up that day--a choice they surely would have made if they had known? How is it that Ratzmann's free-will decision prevailed? The question has been asked before, most notably about Mohammed Atta, leader of the 9/11 hijackers, but I've never seen anyone try to explain it without resorting to the mysterious-ways default--which is, as I said Monday, a copout that avoids the issue.
(However, even if we accept the mysterious-ways default--that for some reason we are utterly incapable of understanding, the actions of a Ratzmann or an Atta must occur, even in a universe ruled by God--it's hard to square the benevolent God we heard about in Sunday school with a God who permits innocents to be painfully slaughtered and to spend their last moments on Earth in unspeakable horror. As Jonathan Wallace wrote in an anguished essay published after 9/11, "How do you reconcile this view of God with the parable of the shepherd, who leaves the 99 healthy sheep to go rescue the one in trouble?")
We've all heard the paradox, "Could God make a boulder so big that he couldn't lift it?" Each generation of Sunday-school fifth-graders hits on this question sooner or later, and while we smile at it, we never think too hard about it, either. But in that paradox lies another problem with the concept of free will--one that puts God's existence into serious jeopardy.
God is supposed to be omniscient. But, we're told, he also created us with the free will to decide our course of action in life. So right now, if I wanted, I could walk over to my office window, drop trou, and moon the condos across the parking lot. It's entirely up to me, or so I'm told. But if God is omniscient--if he knows everything, including that which will happen in the future--certainly he must know whether I will actually, at some point in the next few minutes, moon the condos across the parking lot. And if he knows that, along with everything else about my future, how free is my will, really? It might seem free to me, but if God already knows what my allegedly free choices will be, then isn't the course of the future fixed already?
And if the future is fixed, then God could not have looked down on Terry Ratzmann sticking a gun in his jacket last Saturday morning and said, "Hmm, I wonder what he's going to do with that?" He had to know what Ratzmann was planning--and in his omniscience, he also had to know what it feels like to die of a gunshot wound, or to watch someone you love die of a gunshot wound. And he let those things happen, even though his omnipotence gave him both the ability and the right to have stopped them.
And if he couldn't stop them--if God's future, like ours, is also fixed--then what's his purpose? He can't actually answer prayer, because it's already been determined whether Aunt Martha's boil will be cured, and if she's not destined to be cured, God can't do anything about it. He can't protect your kids while they're in school all day, because what will happen to them is already set. He can't intervene in history, because he has no power to alter the future he already knows.
So what good is he, exactly?
And so you've had a taste of the problem involved with the concept of free will. Dan Barker, an former pastor now with the Freedom From Religion Foundation in Madison, goes a step further--if there's such a thing as free will, he says, God cannot logically exist. And that's ultimately the point I was attempting to make in my original post--it seems obvious to me that a world where Ratzmanns (or Attas) can exist is not a world where a benevolent God also can exist. Jonathan Wallace puts it another way:
In fact, regardless of whether or not He exists, our world functions exactly as if there was no God. In a Godless world it is easy to understand how men invoking an imaginary God could fly fuel-laden 767's into towers full of people. In a Godful world, such events are impossible to comprehend.If you're up for it, there's hours of brain-rattling, paradigm-shifting reading on this topic over at the Secular Web. You can choose your flavor: arguments for God or against.
And thanks for your comments. They make this bloviating seem a lot more worthwhile.
