FREE WILL
DEFENCE FAILS
WHY GOD WOULD BE
EVIL IF HE EXISTED
Index – Click to Navigate
RESPECTING
FREEDOM IS NO EXCUSE
MACKEY AND FLEW ON THE DEFENCE
HOW
THE LIMIT ON UNIVERSAL POPULATION SHOWS FWD WRONG
THE FREE WILL
DEFENCE
The free will defence is an endeavour to shift the blame for evil and
suffering from God to humanity. Its
starting point is the alleged fact that there is no love unless it is freely
given and freedom means being able to choose evil. God made us free for he wants us to love him
and one another. We have misused this
free will and caused all the suffering and sinning that are
around us. They are not God's doing but
ours.
The defence runs as follows.
"A robot cannot love or hate but can only go through the
motions. To be able to love or hate one
must have free will. God wants us to
love one another and him and this is the basic reason why he lets us sin and
suffer. Our suffering and wickedness are
worth free will. God cannot stop
suffering without removing our power to love."
It is interesting that it is always said to be God who wants the love and
not us. Would we care if we only went through
the motions of love and thought we were free but were not? This shows that the defence is
not really worried about what we go through at all but what God who has all
things and who owns all things wants. To accept the defence is to be
anti-love despite its claim to be pro-love. God must be against love when
he gave us free will and thereby inferred the defence was right for the defence is not
right for love is forbidden. The defence is
incoherent. If all love
starts with self-love then the God theory forbids love for it forbids self-love
and demands that we make dirt of ourselves before this allegedly superior
being.
The free will defence implies that God comes first for when he makes it
possible for us to do terrible things and inflict astonishing pain he must be
doing it because he is not satisfied with anybody going through the motions of
love for he could make us imagine we are free and he could trick himself. When he can allow evil though he is good he
can do that. This leaves us with a
terribly selfish deity.
The free will defence would appear to justify God letting us sin, that is, giving us the freedom to sin. But this would only be if free will resulted
in more love and goodness than in sin and evil.
It would be sheer madness to say that if free will were used only to do
evil or to do mostly evil that giving it would be justified. It is held that the defence is no explanation
for natural evils like earthquakes and plagues.
But some would say that there are evil spirits who have free will and
they are responsible for them. They try
to explain every evil with the defence.
But God can make the evil spirits imagine they are harming us as they afflict
an illusionary world while we are safe in this one. Religion may propose another explanation:
that they are punishments for the abuse of freedom. Since sin implies that punishment is right
then the defence is an indirect explanation for evils that were not directly
caused by human actions for it blames them on sin that needs to be
punished. The defence leads directly and
ineluctably to the punishment theory.
Our will is conditioned and affected by our environment anyway so God
could have made sure we have one that is more conducive to goodness.
Evil and sin are a falling short of good.
It follows then that God hates using them for a purpose and hates
needing them for a purpose as well but we force him. You can’t say God exists and have little
or no evidence for him and then accuse the human race of being so depraved just for
the sake of that being or belief to be more precise. Yet those who do
this are the ones who would be angry at people who condone what their parents
do in tramping over others just on the assumption or on the grounds of weak
evidence that their parents mean well.
Free will is an evil theory for it is generally based on the false belief
that we cannot believe in right and wrong without it and if you are going to
reject a doctrine that denies free will just because you don't like the
consequences or supposed consequences then you can't say you believe in right
and wrong anyway for you are rejecting logic.
Any system of morality built on the doctrine contradicts itself and is
not really good.
The free will defence is the lynch pin of the good God doctrine. Without it, it would be more obviously
unintelligible. But even with it there
is little improvement. Some in the
Church admit that the free will defence is wrong and does not get God off the
hook because God is supposed to be closer to me than I am to myself (see 25-30,
An Intelligent Persons Guide to Catholicism). These are the ones that use the excuse that
we just have to accept that God is doing right to be so involved in our sins
though we can't understand how he could be.
They say that God is not one of us so we cannot judge him. But then what sense does it make to trust a
being like that? You can't trust just
anybody. You need adequate grounds for
trusting and this doctrine is taking away any hope of finding a reason to trust
God. It boils down to ordering people to
trust God just because the Church says so.
So who gets the benefit and the honour then when that is the
motive? The Church of course! Notice this: to say the defence does not get
God off the hook is to say that God consents to our sins just as much as we do
which can only mean he sins when we sin.
Talk about not being allowed to judge God cannot obscure this fact.
RESPECTING FREEDOM IS NO EXCUSE
All agree that we only choose what we think is good.
We maintain that God could have made us free but without sin and
suffering being part of the deal if the inability to choose evil for itself is
free will as the world says. In other
words, we can be free and we can love without the ability to sin. You know that all the evil you do is because
you are not having the right thoughts all the time to press the right buttons
in you. It is like when somebody
provokes you and when you respond with violence. They could do it another time and you won't
respond because someone close to you died recently and you see better that
violence is evil because of it. If you
had the thoughts the first time he provoked you would not have attacked. Memory is faulty and it prevents you from
calling up the thoughts that will stop you from doing bad. Ignorance and bad memory are the causes of
evildoing and its root, fear.
The book Religion is Reasonable by Fr Thomas Corbishley
states that the person who has the highest freedom is the person who cannot do
wrong because he or she is free from the weakness that leads to evil and evil
is imperfection (page 27). If weakness
leads to evil then it follows that to some extent we lose control of ourselves
and so it is impossible to see how anybody could commit a mortal sin, reject
good completely and thereby deserve endless torment in Hell, though Catholics
and Muslims and many Protestant cults teach that they do. Even if the rejection is partial, force has
had a part to play in the rejection so we were not totally free. We are never totally free when we sin.
When we see evil as good we choose it.
We can prove this by experience (page 64, Arguing With
God). We do anything we do for some
good end. From this it follows that evil
is insanity. It is not seeing what is
there because of a disordered perception.
Religion admits that sin or evil is insanity (Handbook of Christian
Apologetics, page 303) and says this is why people stay in Hell
forever. It is like a man falling in
love with a statue of a woman and not the woman he should fall for. But if this is true then a person thinking
about committing wrong and who then does the wrong may be the same as a person
who decides to go mad and it happens.
The choice of the person who went mad seemed to make him mad but in fact
the madness was not caused by the choice but by other disorders in the
person. It was the way the person
was. Sin could be the same. It is an error to argue that we are
responsible for the insanity of sin for we think before we do it for that is
begging the question. The insanity
exists the moment you decide to think about committing a sin for that is a sin
itself.
The past life we have must cause us to see the evil we do as good by
programming us to mistake it for good.
This proves that it is logically possible for us to have free will and do
only good and how it is done is by ensuring that we will only have the
experiences that will promote good in us.
When we do evil thinking it is good we might as well be doing real good. Technically, we
should be rewarded for evil as for good especially if the religious principle
that morality is about what is right and wrong in itself
and not about consequences is correct.
Our choices are programmed by our past.
God could program free agents to do good. It is making them freely choose good. If this is
really removing freedom then we don't have freedom anyway for we cannot change
what the past makes us to be. Even when
we change it is because the past programmed us to change one day under the
right conditions. There is no
contradiction. It is like giving a free
agent a curry knowing that she or he will eat it. It would be a contradiction
to say that God forces us to be freely good in any other sense.
The idea of free will to sin is incoherent for if you are insane your
free will has broken down. There is no
need for free will without the power to sin and it cannot exist without sin so
free will is incoherent. It is a
shameless lie.
The defence agrees with reason that the will only chooses what is thought
to bring happiness (page 2, Moral Philosophy). We know this to be true. So-called altruism and living the doctrine
that I must love my neighbour as myself is really self-indulgence and just
self-love in disguise. When my only
concern is my happiness there is no sense in a God letting me and other people
make at one another like cats hungry to bring mice to a lingering death. When all each of us can do is look for
happiness there is no point in suffering.
When a Mother Teresa helps the poor because it makes her happy or
content then there should be no poor and she would be as well soaking up the
sun on a planet of paradise. There is no
meaning in suffering then. The defence
is incoherent. It only makes more sense
if it forbids wilful pleasure and urges repentance for the pleasures that cannot
be helped.
Religion says free will is needed for love.
The need for free will does not permit God to let the innocent
suffer. God could make each person
hallucinate their life in this world and the people in it. That way the person could be as evil as
possible and no innocent human person gets hurt. They think they live and wreak havoc in a
world that does not exist. If God exists
then your life, your friends and your enemies are unreal, all is a long dream
sequence. This arrangement means that
God is able to do all that can possibly be done to ensure that you are moulded
in holiness. If other people exist in
your life that makes it more awkward for him and he is forced to do what is
best for the majority which is often detrimental to the individual. God could and would prevent you from thinking
your earth-life is an illusion like we can be free and forget many things. He would if it is one so it is not for you
can think it. If people are real then he
unnecessarily allows us to harm them meaning he wants to punish them through us
which permits us to maim and kill as long as we intend to be instruments of the
wrath of God. Belief in God forbids
compassion and love so the free will defence is evil. It contradicts itself in claiming to be for
love and it is not.
The free will defence is a superstition.
Religious people make God attractive by convincing the naïve that he
wouldn't rape, molest children, murder and steal or anything like that. The Christian says that the apostles realised
that Jesus Christ was sinless for he did none of these things. But some people lose their alleged free will and do these things. Their minds might snap and they might be on
drugs. If I program a robot to kill the
man next door I am a murderer. If I
program it to rape I am a rapist though I didn't use my body to do it. The body parts I use to commit crimes with
are as much my machinery as my robot.
There is no difference between using my hand to kill and using a stick
to do it. God is a rapist and all those
other things. Christians might say that
he does them for a purpose. If that is
true then their absolutist ethics are fraudulent. Absolutism is the doctrine that certain
degrading actions are always evil and wrong.
It says there is never any reason for rape or murder. The absolutist has to condemn God as a sinner
and refuse to pay homage to him.
Absolutism, if true, is the only true code of proper behaviour but few
absolutists know what they are talking about.
Humanists do for they hold that anything that degrades self-esteem is
always bad. The fact that mad rapists
hurt women proves that this manifestation of evil cannot be reconciled with the
goodness of God.
If one says that Jesus Christ would have been a sinner if he raped or murdered and allows these acts for a purpose then one is being hypocritical.
That people can say they like God when they have an "explanation" namely free will for his allowing evil is disturbing. You should never condone what looks bad but take it at face value as bad. It is easy to condone free will when it is other people who are doing the suffering. What about little animals that suffer?
If the defence were true we would be free all the time and not go crazy
or anything like that for God would be incapable of sin.
If we always have a sin then we cannot do good
so what use is free will then? Christianity
says nobody is free from sin this side of Heaven. God would appear to every person and refute
this belief if it is wrong for it stops Christians having free will. He could have stopped the Christian Church
from being the largest cult in the world so he is either bad or impotent.
To choose God instead of yourself though you are certain you exist and
are less certain that he does is to sacrifice your being and not just your
pleasure and the more uncertain you are that God exists the bigger the sacrifice. God must want the being more than the
suffering though sacrificing the being entails suffering. It is better for God to have a person than to
have a person's suffering. The person is
useful to him and precious and the suffering is not unless he is
vindictive. The free will defence says
that love is sacrifice implying that God wants the suffering and not the person
for he could have the person without making the person suffer unduly as
offering yourself to God does not feel all that bad. If God put force fields round us so that we
could not harm we could still choose evil and will it would happen though it
cannot harm others or ourselves. We
could still mature for maturity is only intelligence. Religion likes to say that if we don't have
the power to harm we cannot mature (page 41, The Case Against
God, Gerald Priestland, Fount,
The Church teaches that God did not intend for us to suffer at all but we
started it (Question 19, Radio Replies 2). This tells us that we can be virtuous without
suffering because God doesn't want people to suffer. Suffering must be intended for punishing us for abusing free will.
Even if suffering is necessary to restore us to virtue, we consented to this
treatment by requiring it by sin and so deserve the suffering we get. The free will defence has sinister
implications or maybe you might introduce the view that God does want us to
suffer innocently which is just as bad or worse. The problem arises then about what God would
have to do if nobody ever abused their freedom.
Some would say they would still need to suffer for their alleged growth in virtue.
The Church counsels that we must always look on the best side whenever a
person does wrong. We must give the
benefit of the doubt whenever possible.
Then why does it accuse criminals and sinners of being immoral and not
amoral? Amoral means that you don't see
why you should be moral for you see no logic in it. The amoral person might confess to immorality
and might be amoral in motive in doing so as well so there is no way of being
sure. The Church knows that she may as
well deny the existence of free will. So
she sacrifices people and their reputations for her dogma. That is what she aims to do. The free will defence is undoubtedly an
effusion of odium.
MACKEY AND FLEW
ON THE DEFENCE
The philosophers, Professor Mackey and Professor Anthony Flew, assert
that free will is compatible with never sinning or wanting to sin. They say that God could have made us all
naturally good and put us in an environment in which we are preserved from
temptation and the need for doing evil.
Their critics claim that this would not be free will for God must have
done something to stop us being free to sin so he is using us as puppets. But this is untrue when we do what we think
is good for we are not free to do what we think is bad just because it is
bad. God does not need to program us but
to program our circumstances so that we program themselves to be good and perhaps
he could allow temptation but let it be so weak that the person will easily
ignore it and will ignore it. He has to
give us a nature of some kind so it is an error to say that his giving us a
nature, making us the way we are and shaping that identity by life experience,
is the same as him making puppets of us.
Another problem is that many think that a being that never resisted temptation and struggled to do good would be an innocent being but not a morally good one. This problem is accepted as an adequate refutation of the two philosophers by John Hick in Evil and the God of Love, page 306). But the being could be shown evil and tempted for a minute and the vision could cease when God sees that the will might give in so that the being starts willing good again.
The suggestion that it is good to suffer to be happy makes no sense. Why struggle virtuously for happiness and suffer a lot in the process when the happiness could be taken from you or you might die and cease to exist? Also, you cannot make yourself happy. People say you must do altruistic good works and happiness will come as a side-effect. But that is not causing their happiness for they could do these works and still end up unhappy. Happiness is a feeling and you cannot create it. It happens to you not because of you. If you carry out certain steps and happiness comes the fact remains that the happiness happened to you and not because of you. Suffering to be virtuous and to be happy is an illusion.
It would be safer to take the easy way to happiness which would be by not trying hard to be good and holy and forget the suffering - the immoral way and it would not be immoral then if it is safer.
The Humanist answer to this problem is that once you forget about loving God and realise all you do is done for your own self-esteem you will enjoy being good but religion says all has to be done for the love of God instead. Religion endangers happiness.
The theory that suffering is necessary for virtue really suggests that suffering is morally good and happiness is morally bad. It suggests that a God of love can't arrange for us to practice moral goodness even if he wants to for it is evil when it works for happiness.
God says that an innocent being that cannot sin or be tempted is morally inferior to a being that has fought temptation and suffering. Both are good. Goodness is goodness. The only difference is that the latter suffered for good so it is the suffering not the goodness that is being made important.
You might think the suffering
is what makes the latter good because he valued the good so much that he
suffered for it. This, according to
some, is the whole point in self-sacrifice.
This too implies that happiness and pleasure are evil for it is
suffering for good and not good itself that matter. But why can't the person who is never tempted
or suffers, value good as much? The
suffering would reduce the value of the good.
Good that you don't suffer for is better than good that you do suffer
for. A tenner
that you don't suffer for is worth more than one that you do suffer for unless
the suffering is the main thing, unless suffering should be an end in itself,
unless you should want to suffer for nothing.
A tenner you have to suffer for is less worth
it. If it is worth as much as it would
be if there were no suffering then the suffering and sacrifice has no
value. If it is worth more because of
the suffering then the suffering is valuable in itself and not just because of
the end. A tenner
is a good if money is good within reason so there is no difference between
suffering for it than suffering for some other good like chastity or
generosity. But it is just as moral for
it is not the tenner you want at all but the way it
will make you feel and what it will do for you.
This is still true if you plan to give it away for you would want to
feel good if you give it away. You want
love as in the glowing feeling and see getting the tenner
as loving and that is what you really want not the tenner.
Mackey and Flew have been vindicated by the fact that the kind of free will their critics want, the kind in which you have to struggle and suffer for the good, is immoral and evil. It is evil because it says that God needs good that is a mixture of evil and good with the good being the dominant component and that makes no sense. The kind of love the critics want God to require of us is sacrifice and it is incoherent to say that it is love when it is performed the way they want as an act of submission to a God who can't need it for it makes no sense. Only the Devil would confer this love on us and demand it of us.
Mackey and Flew are also
vindicated by the fact that free will can only be for achieving good for evil
is insanity. When you do evil you lose your free will because you are
crazy then. We cannot have free will in a bad action because we are insane.
Maybe we can still have free will in other actions that are not evil though not the kind of freedom
that would merit a reward. It is necessary to be able to do evil to be able
to do good that should be rewarded.
FWD DENIES THE
REAL MOTIVE
The Free Will Defence is a charter for self-righteous hypocrisy.
When I sacrifice I do what I want to do under the circumstances so it is
not a sacrifice for I am after gratification.
I crave the pleasure and nothing else.
The person who does things for God or mammon is really doing them for
herself or himself. The will does not
deliberately choose good or evil but only goes for gratification that happens
to be good or evil. A person's
programming can be changed by the environment we create so that he or she will
go after gratification that is wholesome for others as well which explains why
some people are good though they used to practice evil.
But it will be objected that though we are principally after
gratification that we still know if what we are doing is evil or if it is good
so I should not say that the free will defence is proven false by this
fact. But if I am principally after
gratification then that is the reason I am doing what I do and the good and
evil thing is only like a side-effect.
Also, when gratification is so powerful and is the cause of my good and
evil actions and thoughts then it follows that if it is compatible with free
will then God should make sure that it leads me only to do good. When it runs my life anyway it should run it for
the sake of good. But when all my will
really goes for is gratification it is nonsense to say I have free will. If all I do is
to please myself then there is no point in God giving me the will and power to
hurt other people for free will presupposes the power to please God or to
displease him but I am not concerned about him at all. I am concerned about how I feel and not him. The doctrine of God implies that free will is
true so what Christians are doing is assuming that God exists and bending the
evidence to fit it instead of making sure free will is possible first. This is only about God and not people. They should not be willing to hurt people
over a belief.
If you believe in God you have to deny that gratification is what free
will is all about. You have to say that
good is self-denial, doing good for others and for God and not giving a toss
about yourself and this good must hurt yourself. You have to believe that love is sacrifice so
suffering is to be sought and when it is found it is to be welcomed. God gave us free will for his own sake not
ours for would you complain if you didn't have it but thought you did and were
happy all the time? Too many Christians
because of these corrupting doctrines look at human suffering and instead of
having real compassion they fake it and just focus on how they are going to
salvage God's good name. That is callous
when he only did it for himself.
If the will is just after gratification then how can it be insane for one
to do evil for it is sane to look for gratification and evil is just another form
of it? The answer is that the
gratification sought in evil is insane for evil breeds
evil and pain for you. It is because it
is an insane way to look for pleasure that it is insane. You think evil will make you happy but it
cannot. The good commanded by religion
is really evil for real happiness comes from loving yourself and putting
yourself at the centre of your universe a view that religion bitterly
opposes.
HOW THE LIMIT ON
UNIVERSAL POPULATION SHOWS FWD WRONG
How about this?
Love is good for it is selfless.
The more love the better.
Love is only possible for free agents.
Therefore the more free agents the better.
Believers in a perfect God cannot accept the argument though it is
plainly right if love is based on free will.
They say that God does not need to create and had every right not to
make anybody (the teaching of the evil Bible at Romans 11:33-36). If more love were better than just him loving
himself or God the Son and God the Holy Spirit as a Trinitarian would say, then
God would be morally bound to make people to love him and make an infinite pile
of people to boot. When a baby is born
that proves that God does not exist for it will not be able to love him for
seven years at least. The argument
forbids any refusing to have as many babies as possible. It would have little girls being artificially
inseminated and everybody on fertility drugs in the hope that three or four
babies will be born every time. If
babies ought to be born for the sake of God then women have no right to refuse
to have them and must be forced. It
would be a sin to marry an infertile person.
Christians might say that God has made a limited number of human persons
but has created an infinity of angels so the argument
is wrong. But we have no reason to
believe that God has done that. We need
evidence not speculation that the argument is wrong. And even if God has done that the fact
remains that religion says he would be as good as ever if he made nobody which
is totally incoherent for it has to be either better or worse to create new
life. If God would be good even then
they have no business trying to fob us off with answers like, "Maybe the
universe is infinitely populated".
The idea that we not God are to blame for evil is ridiculous and callous
and dangerous.
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
Friday, 18 January 2008