Froyd’s Rants
God and free will and sin
Now that I’ve got your attention, let’s get down to what I believe. This post is going to probably be long. A bit more of the fair warning offered you earlier.
Let’s start with God. I believe He exists.
Easy enough, yes? Ok. let’s move on with Free Will.
Does Free Will Exist? Yes. Is it possible with an all-knowing and all-powerful God? Yes.
Wait. stop the boat. Huh?
Now we’re going to go into some Boethian philosophy here, because that is what most closely resembles my thoughts on the matter. Think of God as observer: He can see the chariot, but did He necessarily cause it to move? No. This is, of course, setting aside the understanding that God’s responsible for everything because He created it. Duh. But that argument is ultimately worthless, even when applied to a human such as Adam and original sin(getting ahead of myself here, sorry). That argument generalizes too much, for starters. Moving on.
So, if God observes, and knows what WILL happen, isn’t He responsible for making it not happen? Problems of evil and all that sort? Here again I’ll revert to Boethian politics. God views everything, past present and future, as one thing. There is no cause and effect, and using words like “Happening” and “Happened” to describe how the world happens shows a very homosapienesque world view. It is impossible to explain God’s view and power in those terms.
This is, of course, where Faith is involved…my specific definition of Faith is to accept something as beyond explainable. Some things deserve Faith(God), some things most certainly do not(the belief of an undersea city where mermaids live). That’s what faith is. Anyway, back to my argument.
So, free will that we choose…does it exist with God’s observation in a dimension we can’t conceive of? Yes. So how about destiny? Does that contradict Free Will? No.
Huh, whazzat? Now here’s where we get to Boethian ideas of how we perceive things. Destiny, to human minds, involves a notable chain of cause and effect leading up to a inescapable conclusion. How do we tell if something was destiny(ie love)? We look back at the happenings of chance and tie the knots into destiny ourselves. Our perceptions of the past creates the idea of destiny for the future. Our perception of Destiny is based COMPLETELY on our understanding of the cause and effect of past events. So what about free will?
Since we can only perceive the past, and the present to an extremely limited degree(our immediate world), we cannot know the future. Free Will involves the choices that make the future the present. There are times when people can make an assumption of what will happen with a choice, but that isn’t destiny. That’s attaching a probable outcome to what the person has perceived the cause and effect chain of the path. Free Will deals with the future, an outcome that is completely unknown to human kind outside of judging it based on past outcomes.
Free will exists for our perceptions. So too does Destiny in that we understand our worldview and make a hypothesis of past events. If we could see the future THEN free will would be dead to us. So what about God? Doesn’t His all-knowing self allow Him to change our actions? Again, look above at the example of the chariot. He knows everything. Does that mean He has to exercise His omnipotence? No.
So what about evil? Is it sent by God? Shouldn’t God stop it? Here we get to our perceptions and the limitations based on them. We human individuals cannot notice the massive amount of variables affecting our everyday life. Even the largest computer could not keep track of a dust molecule as it affects everything in one day. How much more complicated when you have numerous dust molecules, hamburgers, pop cans and automobiles affecting things? These variables are exerting an influence on actions. So why doesn’t God, in his ultimate ability to see and understand all of this do something to stop evil? I don’t know. I just HOPE that it has a purpose, and I’ve got faith that it will work for the better.
So this brings us back to sin. God knows everything, what has happened what is happening and what will happen, all at once in an idea that we can’t wrap our minds about. Why doesn’t He step in and stop sin? Because of free will. God wants us to choose Him through our own choices.
Look at the faculties He gave us. We can’t perceive the future, so we can’t base our decisions on some known future. Free Will still decides that for us. We CAN perceive the past, so that we can learn from both our mistakes and the mistakes of others. He has given us the limited perception of the present so that we can judge from past actions how our current actions may affect others. Sin, in my opinion, may be, and always may have been, the refusal to take responsibility for our actions.
Let’s look at responsibility, it isn’t just “Hey, I did this”, it’s “Hey, I did this, I’m sorry, it won’t happen again” if it was bad. And HONEST committment to change if it was a harmful sin.
Look at when sin entered the world. Was it the eating of the fruit, thus disobeying God? If that was the case, then God the Omnipotent would probably have known that it happened IMMEDIATELY, and kicked them out of Eden…if that was the sin. Instead, God tests Adam and Eve. Here’s where Sin enters the world. It should never be said that Eve was the first to sin, rather she was the second. It was Adam who was the first in his scapegoating. He did not say “Yes, I ate the apple, I am sorry”…Adam blamed eve, who blamed the serpent. THAT’S where sin entered the world. The refusal to take responsibilitiy and ASK for forgiveness.
If you disagree, look at what we need to do to be forgiven in modern times. We need to take responsibility, be honestly repentent, and our sin is absolved as if it never happened.
Now, tie that in with Free Will. We perceive our freedom of choice, that is all we can perceive. We can’t perceive all the variables, we can’t perceive what will happen for sure, but we do have the capability of making the CHOICE, the exercise of the free will, to say “Yes, I did wrong. Help me be better.” If that is done honestly, absolution is guaranteed.
So could God step in and stop us from making mistakes? yes. so why doesn’t He? Because He sees EVERYTHING, knows EVERYTHING, and He works according to His will, which you need faith to believe in. Is there evil? yes, from the human perceptions. How much of this evil exists because there lacks a certain amount of repentence and taking of responsibility? But the point of this wasn’t necessarily to discuss the existence of evil, though it is there. What of the devil? Does he exist? I’d say so, yes. The reason that he is evil is that he attempts to sway our free will, in usually a harmful way. Is the devil as powerful as most things make him out to be? I don’t think so. Satan has as much power as people will give over to him of their own free will.
So. What about original sin? does it exist? No. babies do not go to Hell, children go there neither. To be culpable, I believe, one has to understand the responsibility issue. Psychology has shown that the cause and effect reasoning are not fully developed yet. Since God knows everything, is it likely that He would punish children made in His image who are not mentally capable of exercising their gifts of understanding the past and deciding the future? I would hardly think so.
But God knows that free will does not automatically equal the correct choice. Why would He act as He did if He didn’t know they ate the apple? To test humans, who in their limited ability to perceive reality, wouldn’t quite understand God’s place in it. If we were given Free Will, EVENTUALLY the apple would have been eaten. God had to know this, as He knows everything. What would have happened if they each, or just one of them, had taken responsibility and said “Yes, I did it”. Their choice obviously would have been wrong, but God has always been merciful(Cain, anyone?), and perhaps we’d have a different past to judge from.
So, God gives us the ability to be wrong. He’d have to realize that we’d choose wrong at one point in time. It was the test, however, and continues to be the test, to take responsibility for our choices. To see how the choice will affect us and others around us, based on the past that we can perceive. Sure God knows what will happen, but I think He’s pleased to notice when someone admits their mistake. that’s why forgiveness is so easy for Him. He likes to see when His creation does the right thing.
This probably still has errors/issues, but it is the closest thing to what I believe in my mind and heart for the time being. And Lord knows I ain’t perfect.