| Dear Sir,
A simple question concerning your answer to the question: "How can we have free will if God is all-knowing? If God knows what is going to happen to us, then it is unchangeable, so we do not have free will." [my response is at FAQs - Free Will] Wouldn't you say that, for example, giving a gun to a person you know (or even suspect) is going to kill someone would be an evil or immoral act, even if commited by a mere human? If you agree with that, it would seem that you would have to agree that a comparable act by the God you describe - who knows everything that is going to happen - would be at least equally evil. This would make God evil, or at least amoral (not caring about right or wrong) which is perhaps even worse. Am I wrong? Or should we perhaps not hold supreme beings responsible for their actions? I belive that it is empirically obvious that we Humans have free will, so the question of our free will isn't very interesting, but what about God: If God is outside time and already knows all that will happen that would mean that he's the one who doesn't have free will, since he already knows everything he is going to do. So: God is an automaton? Or maybe he isn't omniscient? Or was it two questions, or three, or more? Sorry about that. Best wishes, Aron Sweden |
| My Response:
Aron, The problem with your comparison is that you're talking about a specific item given to a specific person for a specific act. What God gave us was free will, which is a very general thing given to all people leading to many, many acts - some good, some evil. Perhaps a better comparison would be this - suppose I meet a race of people who have never figured out how to make fire. I know that if I show them how to make fire, most of the time it would be used for good purposes (cooking food, heating homes, giving light on dark nights) but some of the time it would be used for evil purposes (unjustly destroying property, setting people on fire). I would have to weigh the consequences and decide whether the good use outweighs the occasional bad use. If I decide it is better, then I give it. On the rare occasion that somebody commits destruction or murder using the fire, would those given the fire be justified in blaming me, even though they know that my giving them fire was an overall benefit to their race? I'd have to say not. Their blaming me would by hypocracy unless they give up the use of fire altogether. Of course, a counter-argument to this could be - why didn't God just give free will to those who would use it for good purposes, and withhold it from those who would use it for bad purposes? A little like if I could give fire to that tribe, but somehow make it so that those who would use it for evil purposes wouldn't be able to use it at all. Of course, that's impossible for me personally, but nothing's impossible for God. In some sense, it does seem logical that God would give free will to people like M.L. King, Ghandi, Mother Theresa, etc and withold it from Hitler, Manson, bin Laden, etc. But I would argue that giving it conditionally like that would, in essence, be not giving it at all. That's because we're talking about FREE WILL here. Without an option to do evil, it's not really free will. It would be an option to do good or evil, minus the option to do evil. In other words, no option at all. As for the question of whether God has free will, that's a very interesting point that I've never pondered before. But I'd have to say that since God did choose to make the universe and the beings in it, that He has free will. Your argument was that He knew in advance what He was going to do . This isn't quite true, since God, being timeless, doesn't really experience an 'in advance'. But forgetting that for now, God could have chosen not to make the universe, in which case He would have known in advance that He would not make it. What He foresaw depended on His ultimate choice. He did make a choice no matter how you look at it, so He does have free will. Thanks for writing, and feel free to respond. God bless, David |