GOD LOVES WITHOUT FREE WILL
SO WHAT DO WE HAVE IT FOR WITH
ALL THE TROUBLE IT HAS CAUSED?
We will learn that Christians say God has to let us do evil for if he forces us to be good we cannot really love. But then it offers a God who does not have free will himself and who supposedly loves!
Christians do not believe God can sin if he wants to. They adore this God as the
only being that matters. He can't be a role model. A creature who can sin but
who does not but who is perfect in virtue is a proper role model. If such
creatures exist then our devotion to God insults them. It also insults us for we
need a role model. It is somewhat to blame for the evil we do. So why is God
given such unfair and extreme importance? It can only be because of his infinite
and almighty power. Believers want his power and they want it on their side.
Even if they feel they have to be subject to this power, this is only because if
you can't get your own way, you have to feel you have your own way by accepting
God's will.
The Christians will answer that God matters for he is the source of all good and
all existence. But if he has no free will he may be perfect and be able to
implement perfect good but he is not good in the way a being who can be evil but
who refuses to be is. His goodness is functional. He is good in the way a cake
is good.
A God without free will is not really a person or anything you can have a true
relationship with. Believers feel a relationship but that is the same as the
relationship the pagans felt with their gods of stone and wood and metal. The
idolaters prove that our feelings of a relationship do not mean a real
relationship is happening. All the Christian God is good for is being the source
of good. If God is only important as a representation of good then it follows
that it is okay if you see your gnome statue in the garden as a representation
of goodness.
Christians who believe in an immutable God that is a God who is totally perfect
and so cannot change and who is outside time still claim that he is perfect
love. But this God cannot sin for he is good now and cannot change. This ruins
their doctrine that we cannot love unless we can sin. It is a contradiction to
say that a loving God who cannot sin gave us free will so that we could love
too. When God can love without being able to sin so can we. Peter Abelard argued
against this that our power to do evil instead of good is not a blessing but an
infirmity. But this is really a renunciation of the freedom defence which says
that God is not to blame for evil but we are. If free will is not a
gift then God is evil. Religion says free will is a gift but
the fact that it can be a gift does not mean that it is.
Abelard's view is just as good as its view.
Only an evil God could give us freedom to sin if that freedom is not good.
Compatibilism is the idea that though we don't have free will in the sense that we can go against the way we are programmed, if we do what we are programmed to do we are free and that is free will. They are just changing the meaning of the phrase free will.
Some will defend this compatibilism and say that God is
determined to be good and is good without compulsion which is enough to mean
that he has free will. But compatibilism really destroys theism for if we could
be programmed to be freely good then God should not let us sin. If we sin it is
his fault. Whatever set God to be the way he is would be greater than God.
Sin is defined as an ending of a relationship with God so God cannot sin for he
cannot end a relationship with himself (page 116, The Puzzle of God by Peter
Vardy). How strange. He can have a relationship with himself
in many ways.
Sin is defined not as a thing but as the absence of good or a
good that mistakenly falls short of real good. That is
religion teaches. Since God is all-powerful and knows all it follows
that God cannot sin for he is too powerful and intelligent to fall short. If he
had made us more powerful and smarter we would not sin or at least not as much.
He has not given us the power to make ourselves good in any great measure. For
example, we have to struggle hard to be good and don't have the miraculous power
to make it easier and yet power and intelligence are the reasons why he is good.
God does not want us to be holy or good.
The Catholic book, Why Does God? (page 30), says that God is total and absolute
perfection and he is more free than anybody on earth because the law he keeps is
his nature and he is what he wants to be. It is identical with him. So God could
have made us the same way but did not and that makes him evil. Abelard is
vindicated by this doctrine.
For this doctrine that God is free though unable to do wrong to be right, it
would be necessary for God to make himself before he comes into existence which
is an absurdity. I mean if you can’t help your nature (that what makes you the
kind of being you are) and it makes you want to live the way it makes you live
then you are hardly free are you? If your nature makes you steal then are you to
blame for stealing? No way unless you have made your nature yourself which you
cannot do! But you might object that there are people who change their nature.
But they would not be doing that unless their nature wanted them to do it so
that is us back to square one.
Does the kind of God there is matter to religion more than how he
came to be? Yes, that is to say that religion worries most
about his love and perfection. It may secretly mean that God
makes himself as he is for without that he cannot have free will in
any meaningful sense. It may be stupid but it does not mean
that it is not what religion secretly believes. All beliefs hide
stuff.
The view of St Thomas Aquinas was that all sin is caused by an error existing in
the reason and that God cannot sin for God cannot err (Summa Book 1, Chapter
95). To have free will means you have defects that enable you to err. Even if
you will never use these defects, they still need to be there so that you have
the option of sin. So if God cannot err he does not have free will. God then is
to blame for our sins for he made us a bit blind. He could have made us smarter
when we are about to make choices. That way we will see the right course and
ineluctably follow it. We that we will not err for error is necessarily
involuntary. So we will not sin. God has left things so that we would sin and
yet he says that sin is that which should not exist!
The only solution that is offered to the contradiction between a God who cannot
sin and the free will defence is that God has no choice but to do good but he
can be creative and decide between different kinds of good which one he wants to
do (page 98, Unblind Faith, SCM Press). This solution does not work at all but
shows that the contradiction is beyond solving for that kind of freedom would
have sufficed for us. And even more so when God is supposed to be perfect so
perfection is in not having free will to sin. And the "solution" denies that you
need to be able to do evil to be free which contradicts the free will defence
totally. So we are left with a God who does not love and yet his love is the
alleged justification for his giving us free will and it turns out this free
will, as in being able to do evil rather than good, is not needed at all if God
is love.
Free will depends on not knowing the future for sure. If you could see what you
would do in the future you wouldn't really be free any more. You might see what
you will do but we are talking about actually seeing what you will do so that
you are totally certain you will do it. God who knows the future cannot have
free will.
To have a nature is to have limits. Yet being all good, God cannot have any
limits to his goodness for if he had he would not be all good. But it is better
for God to be happy and make a person to be happy than for him not to make a
person at all. Believers deny this and say that God does not have to make
anything which is plainly wrong. So unless God makes an infinity of happy
persons which he has not done he is not all good. The only solution to this is
to deny either that God wants people to be happy or that happy people should be
made for the more happiness the better which amounts to saying the same thing.
He only cares for himself so how can he have free will for he can't be any
different?
Islam and Christianity hold that God made all things out of nothing and the
creation is not made from God. But to put something where there is nothing
requires infinite power. God is his power for God is an immaterial reality. He
is one entity without parts. But God must have made all things from himself for
there is no power outside his power. So God and the creation must be the same
thing. When we are God then when we sin, the free will defence cannot be true
for God sins. Also, if we are God then God is not a person for he is all
creation and must be a force. That would mean, as Spinoza argued, that there is
no free will for the will is made of a force that makes it go after what it goes
after and it cannot go any other way though it feels it can. The concept of God
requires free will and yet it contradicts it meaning that God is an incoherent
concept and should be abolished.