Some tangential notes on "free will" that got me thinking...and I can only hope and pray that the pain of my own idiocy will not come to haunt me in the future. If I am mistaken about my thoughts or ideas I hope God will give me the humility to be so.
The topic of free will is very personal to me. (Because I've had a painful past of bad choices)
The following is from my interaction with my professor's book chapter on evil, who by the way, is someone I highly respect and appreciate as a brother in the faith (even if I don't necessarily agree with his ideas)
Professor Ganssle (my philosophy professor at theology school) writes:
"Whether we choose to do what is right or to do what is wrong must be up to us. It must be within our ability to do either." -on being free moral agents
But must omnipotence be within our ability as well to be "free" in the fact that choosing what is right from wrong will have pure rightness or wrongness all the ought the course of what follows that decision?
He writes:
"if God creates free moral agents, they must be able, by definition, to choose evil as well as good."
Just not the ultimate good (God) so they are kind of free...in a way (but not wholly free since all it takes is one restriction to corrupt the term "free"). So did God create free moral agents from the beginning or only after the fall? Or were we FMA before the fall only?
G:
"if God wants creatures with significant moral freedom, he must allow the possibility of evil."
Sounds like God throws in evil to the mix as part of what completes our freedom? If so, then that seems more problematic about God's goodness than of His not stopping or preventing what He himself threw in! Clearly that cannot be the case.
Does God want creatures with significant moral freedom?
What does God intend to do with the creation of making mankind free moral agents? For freedom's sake? Do I choose one doughnut over the other for the sake of being able to choose or do I choose one over the over for the sake of satiating my desire and adding to my delight and satisfaction?
So what is the reason behind a free will? Freedom or God?
What is the meaning or intention of the author of free will? Then we can interpret and understand how free will works.
Does He want creatures who will, in completion of their freedom rather than stemming from their freedom, choose to love Him and obey Him because it is their purpose of existence which is good?
If God wants free will to be the cause of our ability to choose Good (and freely reject evil), it must be inferred that it is also what ables us to choose God, because God is the sources of all good including morally good choices with unending goodness as a result of it being chosen)
However, if God wants free will for something else, something beyond power and choice, I would contend that free will is given to desire Good. So how then did the first pre-fallen human choose evil? Perhaps this "free will" had the capacity to choose Good, as well as the capacity to choose evil (which is anything counter to Good, such as disobedience to the source of Good). Upon choosing evil, the capacity to choose Good was broken. Why? Because God cannot commune with anything that is not good. He is goodness in Himself, and it would be a logical contradiction for goodness to relate/connect/mix with evil. You cannot have an all blue lake with green patches, otherwise it becomes a partly blue lake with some green patches.
Likewise you cannot have an all-Good God in relationship with a disobedient (evil) person without a stark separation of the two. There is good God and then there is evil person. But there is not a Good God who is with an evil person in a way that is together. You cannot become one with God the way a married couple's bodies become one (in heart, mind and body) if you are not of the same nature--if you are not wholly good.
Therefore evil exists because sin exists. Sin exists because Adam used his free will to choose evil (disobedience). Adam's free will was created by God to choose Good, which is to choose obedience to God. Free will is a vehicle with one purpose: to choose Good DESPITE the presence of evil. Free will is not the ability to just choose between good or bad. It is the ability to choose Good in spite of the presence of evil. Therefore, Adam had the ability to choose Good because before he chose evil he could be in the pure presence of God. But all it took was one wrong choice and he was banished from that communing pure presence with God. From there on out we were contaminated with enough evil to make us unable to be with God.
How then did an all knowing/powerful/present God handle this?
Why did he give us a free will? Because He gave us something good, Himself.
Evil separated us from Him, and He took it upon Himself...but wait, how did a good God take evil on himself. Sounds like a logical contradiction! He did so by being made into a man. The second Adam, able to choose Good in spite of the presence of evil, yet chose evil-our evil-not from His free will (because free will is to choose Good despite the presence of evil), but out of the Father's will.
God's will is of a freedom different than ours. Being that He is wholly good, God's will is the source of goodness. When God is willing He is not choosing good in the presence of evil, since He cannot be in the presence of evil, rather it might conclude that God chooses because God chooses. In other words, there is no question of God's goodness if God is the source of goodness, He is simply present whenever goodness is present. And therefore what He chooses to do is what He chooses to do.
God chose to give His Son to die for the evil of creatures contaminated with any sin (even if you want to argue that Adam sinned, you will soon see that your ability to choose Good in the presence of evil will have been just the same).
If all it takes is one bit of "not good" or one act of disobedience to separate us from God/Good, then our fate was set in our nature of being made with a free will. However, we could only commune with God under a willingness to do so. This willingness is desire. So then, choice, power, and desire will have the purpose of choosing God/Good, but it will not be given to us without someone taking away our evil first.
Evil exists because Goodness exists. Just like darkness exists because light exists. To say that evil should not exist in order for a good God to exist is to say evil should not exist for Goodness to exist. Clearly we know that goodness is only good because evil is only evil. They are not related in the sense being the same, but they are related in the sense of being at all. In order to know what good is you must know what is not good. I know love is good because hate is bad. I know my shirt fits until it doesn't fit. I know my class is fun because I know it isn't boring. There is evil because there is good, not because evil must be evidence of no good but precisely because it is evidence of good.
So then what about preventable evils?
That is asking something like: "you are good God but can't you be more good?"
Or conversely, "evil is evil but can it be less evil?"
The idea here is to show that an evil happens or exists within the confines of a circumstance not as proof of itself, but as a reality. We all see and know of some evil in the world, and everyone probably identifies evil in themselves (according to the definition of evil being a thing outside of perfect goodness/a communal drawing up of Good from the source of Good)
However, the notion of preventing evil must be redefined as well within our scope of our understanding of its counterpart "Goodness."
To "prevent evil" redefined as "avoid/expel evil" redefined as "cause goodness" redefined as "God's presence" would mean not that there is no evil at all but that a particular evil was vanquished by God's presence. To prevent evil might then be more accurately assigned to the notion of presenting God.
So then people ask "why did this evil happen to me?" Or "How could a good God let an innocent fawn suffer and die in the forest?"
And the only logical response would be "in order to present a Good God."
Not that the evil is God, but that it is evidence of His presence, since we would not know or call something evil unless we knew something called "good." We would not know something called pain unless we knew something called pleasure. Or more pointedly, we would not know something as good as pleasure without knowing something as evil as pain.
Therefore, although God was present with Adam and was in Himself always good, Adam was given a free will to know goodness despite the presence of evil. But when he took evil, through disobedience, as a creature he used his God-give free will to perform this act. This in turn severed his free will from the ability to choose a Good God. Sin entered man by His free will, and when God became man and by His free will chose obedience to God, the choice to not have His will but God's, this laying down of the will for God's will (which was to put all evil upon Him who knew no evil), thus gave creatures the "free will" to be in the presence of God again where it was once wholly impossible.
Free will is a grace to choose to be in the presence of God/goodness in spite of the presence of evil as a separate abiding place. So then when evil is present, God is not, but where God is present evil cannot be. Though they may both coexist as realities, they do not coexist as contradictions. One establishes the reality of the other.
Because one is present does mean the other does not exist, but that the presence of the other is to be found elsewhere, and that knowledge is what fuels our "free will" to choose God's presence.
Jmegrey
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