How can a
God that is all good stand by and let the innocent
suffer? The Christian answer is that he
gives us free will and though he doesn’t approve of us hurting others he gives
us the power to do it because without free will we cannot love. Love is a free thing and God wants us to
choose to love so he lets us do harm because if we can’t choose to do harm we
cannot love either. This idea is called
the free will defence for it is meant to help show that it makes sense to
believe in a loving God despite the evil in the world. Some say it helps them believe in such a God
because of the evil in the world.
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.
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. Another solution is to 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.
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). Since God is all-powerful and knows all and
when sin is defined not as a thing but as the absence of good or a good that
mistakenly falls short of real good 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.
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.
If God exists and is perfect love then he can make us sense him and see
his perfect love and glory. Christians
say that we will see God if we go to Heaven and so does the Bible (1
Corinthians 13:12; John 17:24; Revelation 22:2-5; 1 John 3:2; Matthew
18:10). They call this the Beatific
Vision. Human beings can only choose
what they think will lead to happiness.
If they see God even for a second they will never sin again or they
won't be able to bear the risk of losing him (page 119, The Life of All
Living). The Bible says man cannot
see God and live probably for man will die of love and desire for God at seeing the
infinite beauty of God (page 3, 277, Apologetics and Catholic Doctrine, Part 2).
It is said that since God is all we want we will not sin if we have him for
we only sin on earth because we don't have him and are not perfectly happy
which is why we sin. Sin costs us
God. We cannot turn away from absolute
happiness when we experience it which is why Christians believe that there is
no possibility of sinning in Heaven though God forces nobody there (page 81,84,
Why Does God?). So we sin because
we have no real idea of what we are throwing away by it. God is to blame then for he keeps us in the
dark to make sure we do wrong. God
should have given us all a peek at him before we committed our first sin which is
about six or seven. Then we would freely
choose good and never ever sin. This
would not be the removal or reduction of free will but free will being fully
fulfilled because being with God in Heaven and being happy is what you want and
though you will be able to sin in Heaven you never will for you don't want to
(page 274, Handbook of Christian Apologetics). If God really cared about our free will, we
would have been born in Heaven.
The Bible says only that we will receive the reward we deserve for the way
we lived our lives at the Last Judgment
so we could receive the Beatific Vision as soon as we die (page 1279, The
Teaching of the Catholic Church).
We don't know and experience God directly therefore there is no God. Even if there were a monistic God that is
good and evil and neither - a pile of contradictions - he could still save us
from doing evil through a universal experience. There is
no transcendent or immanent deity.
It is ridiculous to say that there is a place of perfect happiness like
Heaven and then to accept the free will defence for another reason too. What is the point of having free will to
develop good character here on earth when any virtues we have will be no good
to us in Heaven? Where there is no pain,
virtue is no good to us. What use are patience
and compassion and prudence there? Even
loving others is no good for in Heaven we are absorbed in the love of God and
it is him that gives the joy. Heaven
must be a world like earth where people sin and suffer if it exists.
When God takes baptised babies to Heaven through they never had the
chance to sin he could and should have done the same with the rest of us. The Church says that the babies see God when
they die and immediately choose to be with him forever. It adds that God is not
dishonouring their freedom but respecting it.
Babies know what pain is so nobody can say they have been tricked into
choosing God when they don't know what evil is.
Tiny unborn babies who were baptised with a syringe and were not capable
of feeling pain would still get into Heaven if they die. If we really have to experience evil and
reject it these babies wouldn't be getting into Heaven at all.
The Roman Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin
Mary claims that though she was a creature who had the power to sin she did not
use it for she had God's special protection.
When God did that for her he could have done it for the rest of us. The Immaculate Conception doctrine
contradicts the free will defence for it implies that sin is God's fault for
being careless with us and that having free will does not mean you have to sin. The apparitions in the Catholic Church that
defend the Immaculate Conception must be trying to get us to adore a God who is
really the Devil and who couldn’t really be a God.
It is no answer for Catholics to say that the whole thing is a mystery because
that is just plain absurd and totally unsatisfactory and lacks conviction. They say that Mary merited the blessings that
are hers now but that she couldn't sin.
She was free but couldn't sin. We
could have been the same. There is no
mystery. We will never learn anything if
we start calling contradictions mysteries.
Among other things, the Christian theory of original sin tells us that
the will is weakened as a result of what Adam did in the Garden of Eden making
it biased towards evil. God could have
miraculously prevented Adam's sin from affecting us for he made the law that
decreed that Adam's sin would harm us and how. To to say original sin has
anything to do with solving the problem of evil is to say that God is not
all-powerful. If original sin is true
then the free will defence is untrue for the original sin idea puts the blame
for our sins on God and the idea that our misuse of free will is to blame for
evil pretends to have exonerated him.
The Church says that the tendency to sin is reduced by baptism. So, God can make you less likely to sin but
won't bother if you are not baptised or born of the spirit or whatever! A God who increases the chances of you
sinning is the Devil for it is a sin to cause sin. He is a sinner. Yet he says anything is better than sin for
it is an act of ingratitude for his infinite love and therefore infinitely
cruel. God can never pave the way for
sin for a purpose. This teaching is
insulting and not least because to tell people that a dip in a pool will cure
their sinfulness to a great extent is far worse than telling a person that
their cancer will improve if they drink urine at 3pm every day for both make
serious claims and have no facts and statistics to back them up. Big claims need big evidence - it's only
fair!
The issue of God allowing us to sin though he can make us freely perfect
is related to Plato's doctrine that since evil is what is irrational that
whoever is fully rational will not commit it.
God would have made us wiser if he wanted to give us a fair start in the
war against evil.
Richard Swinburne says God tries not to be too
evident to us for our own good. If God
made his existence too plain to us then we would feel under pressure to be
liked by him and obedient to him. But
when the Church says we serve God by serving people for we cannot see him this
can hardly be correct. If it is correct
then it follows that there isn’t a lot to be said for helping others for we are
pressured a fair bit to do it. People
wouldn’t like this view for it is inhuman and cold. It wouldn’t be very encouraging.
The Reality of
God and the Problem of Evil refutes this view of Swinburne’s
on page 135 in saying that we all want God for he is so good and attractive so
his being more open to us and revealing would not take away from our freedom
but respect it better for he is giving us what we want.
The Reality of
God and the Problem of Evil states that the free will defence fails
because it contradicts the Christian doctrine that God is creator (page
122). The defence says that it is not
God’s responsibility if we do wrong. It
says we create the evil and we create the evil intention. The book however recognises that God makes my
choice if he is creator. He creates the
evil I choose. He creates the bad
intention. I sin because of him not in
spite of him. However, the book says God
does not sin when I sin. God is right to
allow me to be free so that prevents him from sinning by causing my sin. I am still the one doing wrong though I am
not creating the sin but making God create it.
I am free not in spite of God but because of him (page 125).
I would argue that if God is right to causally co-operate with me when I
sin then what the book is criticising and refuting is not the free will defence
itself but only the free will defence when it thinks of God as not causing my
sin.
All are sinners according to the Christian faith. We cannot do good works for nobody is perfect
according to the Bible (Romans 3). And to do
good when you have sins is to mock good and nobody makes enough atonement for
all the harm and wrong they do.
Justice is more important than love. It is better to have unloving justice than to have unfair love if we are sinners. So we ask for the justice and therefore it does not degrade. But the unfair love degrades both giver and receiver and despises real love and morality and justice. With unloving justice the love is not deserved. Love cannot exist without justice. But justice can exist without love so justice is more important. Commonsense tells us that God would have made us to see how we would stand with justice not love when it has to be one or the other. God is reportedly fair but he does not love us or care about love or have mercy for mercy is love overriding or bluntly trampling on justice.
God would not make us solely to make choices about justice. This is because justice is only to cause suffering when other people do wrong to pay them back. Justice as in giving a person the good they deserve is not to be considered for God expects good to be done to people whether they deserve it or not. So we would have to inflict punitive justice all the time for though justice demands that we reward we cannot for there is nothing there but sin. And if God made us mainly for justice and secondarily for love it makes no difference for justice is the prime consideration. It wouldn't be love anyway to refuse to give a person the penalty they deserve.
If God wants nobody to do wrong or to cause
pain except as a punishment which would mean that we can do all the evil we
wish then he has no need to encourage temptation and make us attracted to evil.
He therefore must be like a policeman who loves people doing wrong so that he can
make them suffer. He must want us to
encourage others to do wrong. God wants
nobody to sin meaning that suffering is no use except you do sin for there is
no suffering without sin. Such a lofty
idea of God is incompatible with God allowing so much temptation and the
encouragement of sin and who wants a lot of sacrifice that makes his ways
discouraging. When suffering is useless
and God does not care if we sacrifice or not he would have made us as
robots.
You can be happy and have pain.
People perhaps should have been made able to feel pain but not to feel
unhappy which is a different thing. Unhappiness springs from fear and is the root
of all evil so a God who makes unhappiness possible is encouraging sin and
trying to defend him with the freedom defence is a total waste of energy. Why is the will so geared towards the
happiness of the person who wills then if the theory that God wants our
reaction to justice and not love is true?
This great God of the Christians is supposed to be love according to the
saccharine epistles of John. But if he
were really perfectly good he would be justice.
Jesus stressed that we should embrace the cross God asks of us, in the
gospels. The free will defence tells me a God of love wants me to accept the crosses he sends to me.
So the defence is telling me that though it is my
fault that I am a sinner and have not fully overcome the weakness Adam's sin
put in me, I should accept the cruel way to overcome my sins and sinful tendencies
though they are my own fault for not doing enough to overcome them without
suffering. In other words, God wants me
to suffer to get rid of self-inflicted faults I won't give up. To do what
he wants would be to commit the sin of accepting suffering as a means to overcoming sin and
purifying my will of evil when the fact that the evil in my will is sinful and
therefore my own fault should show that I can do it without suffering. It is a sin to ask for to be tortured to
death when you could die painlessly when you have to die and this is the same
principle here. To say that evil has a
purpose implies that God is evil. When
to say that is evil it is evil to say God is good or to use the free will
defence to defend his reputation. The defence is useless when all
it is good for is encouraging evil. We
prefer most things in this world to God though God being goodness itself should
come first. The God concept then
encourages cynicism because nearly everything we do is anti-God and therefore
not as good as it looks if there is a God or if we believe in God so to suffer
to do good for other people in order that they may live holier lives is
madness. It would be wiser to put your
own enjoyment first when the odds of having much success are so slim. Religion sees reducing sin or stopping it as
the supreme good work which is cruelty.
To be good to a person who is bad when you believe that person is very
unlikely to change is really rewarding that person's sins. Don't hide behind any pretence about trying
to change that person for if you really tried to change a person you would have
reasonable hope that that person would change.
Is a person who looks for a needle in a haystack and says they hope to
find it in an hour telling the truth? No
for they can't expect to find it. And
besides they would be demeaning themselves by trying and wasting their
time. It is the same with what the God
belief and free will defence suggest we should do.
You are supposed to love the sinner and hate the sin. But to say you hate the sin that a person has
created freely is to say you hate the person for the person creates the sin. With all the sin that goes on there is no
point in free will being given so that we might love for how can we?
Elsewhere, for example, in The Gospel According to Atheism, I show that
Christian forgiveness is a sanctimonious and that the alternative offered by
Humanism rises above forgiveness like the
Con
It is horrible how Christians use the free will defence to show you that God is not to blame for evil while they do not believe it themselves. They then worship a being that is to blame after all!
BOOKS CONSULTED
AN INTELLIGENT PERSONS GUIDE TO CATHOLICISM, Alban McCoy, Continuum,
AN INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS, John Hospers, Routledge,
APOLOGETICS AND CATHOLIC DOCTRINE, Most Rev M Sheehan DD, MH Gill & Co,
ARGUING WITH GOD, Hugh Sylvester IVP,
CONTROVERSY: THE HUMANIST CHRISTIAN ENCOUNTER Hector Hawton,
Pemberton Books,
EVIL AND THE GOD OF LOVE, John Hicks,
FREE INQUIRY, Do We have Free Will?
Article by Lewis Vaughn and Theodore Schick JR, Spring 1998. Vol 18 No 2, Council for Secular Humanism,
GOD AND EVIL, Brian Davies OP, Catholic Truth Society,
HANDBOOK OF CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS, Peter Kreeft
and Ronald Tacelli, Monarch,
MORAL PHILOSOPHY, Joseph Rickaby SJ, Stonyhurst Philosophy Series, Longmans, Green and Co,
PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY, Voltaire, Translated by Theodore Besterman, Penguin,
RELIGION IS REASONABLE, Thomas Corbishley SJ, Burns & Oates,
THE CASE AGAINST GOD, Gerald Priestland, Collins,
Fount Paperbacks,
THE LIFE OF ALL LIVING,
THE PUZZLE OF GOD, Peter Vardy, Collins,
THE REALITY OF GOD
AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL, Brian Davies, Continuum,
THE TEACHING OF THE
THE TRUTH OF CHRISTIANITY, WH Turton, Wells Gardner, Darton
& Co Ltd,
UNBLIND FAITH, Michael
J Langford, SCM,
WHY DOES GOD? Domenico Grasso
SJ, St Paul's, Bucks, 1970
BIBLE QUOTATIONS FROM:
The Amplified Bible
THE WWW
www.ffrf.org/fttoday/august97/barker.html
The Free Will Argument for the Non-Existence of God by Dan Barker
13/06/2008