Re: Hedonism, Happiness, & the God of the Ever-Smaller Gaps
Issachar, on host 207.30.27.2
Friday, June 23, 2000, at 08:02:35
Re: Hedonism, Happiness, & the God of the Ever-Smaller Gaps posted by Dave on Thursday, June 22, 2000, at 19:09:15:
> I still can't get my head around the argument that infallible foreknowledge of an event doesn't necessarily mean that the event was pre-ordained. >
Neither can I.
I like a lot of things about Calvinist theology, but strict predestination is not one of them. I'm starting to come round to the view that God may not, in fact, have pre-ordained *most* things that happpen in the world.
That God made humans in his own image has broad significance, and a big part of it is that God wished for his human children to be active moral agents, as he himself is. God gave us free will so that we could practice righteousness (don't know if that word will be understood the right way, but I'll use it anyway) out of a voluntary decision to do so, not like robots programmed to do only the correct thing. I can't think of many Christians who dispute that much, at least.
When we talk about God's knowledge of future events, however, I'm beginning to think that we create a false tension between free will and omniscience. We generally expect God's omniscience to extend to events in the future, and in fact we have at least two good reasons for that assumption: 1) God is not time-bound, but exists "above" time as it were; and 2) God has given us prophecies in the past about events to come. If God, in his omniscience, knows the future, then your conclusion seems unavoidable to me as well: free will doesn't exist in any form understandable to our minds. To admit both free will and omniscience into our doctrine, Christians have traditionally fallen back on paradox and the unknowability of God's higher ways.
I'm not opposed to paradox. We are limited creatures, and can't understand everything that God does. But I'm not convinced that such is the case with free will and omniscience. Why is it assumed that God's power or knowledge would be compromised if he allowed many (most?) things that happen in creation to be left up to us? Is it *really* inconceivable that God would not do absolutely everything himself? Does God want free moral agents -- people who, like him, actively choose good over evil -- or doesn't he?
I've come to a point where I no longer reject the following scenario out of hand as something incompatible with the Scriptural account of God's relationship to humanity:
God desires, because he is a God whose very nature is community (a Trinity) rather than isolated existence, to create beings that are other than himself -- beings that have their own lives, their own set of relationships, their own wills. God recognizes that the practice of righteousness carries meaning only if a person has a choice in the matter; this is in fact the way that righteousness demands to be carried out: robustly, joyfully, with awareness of the act. God allows his creatures, endowed with free will, to exercise that will however they choose, to actively determine what happens in the world he gives them. They are, after all, his children, not puppets, and he wants them to be like him. So he makes "space" in his plans for them to decide things themselves, and explicitly instructs them to do just that: Be the stewards and governors over the created world.
God, for his part, does not sit back and let everything simply unfold as it will under human direction. He has a specific plan for the world, himself, and on many occasions, he visibly takes a hand in the world's affairs. (I would even say that he *constantly* takes a hand in the world's affairs, but constant work does not equate to "all" work.) God knows how he will orchestrate each step in his plan, and even how he will end this part of the story. Frequently, he reveals his plans to select persons, telling them ahead of time what he is going to cause to happen. These prophecies, however, are not "snapshots" of a future already written; they are God's proclamation of specific actions that he has decided to take, and because it is God who has decided, there is no doubt that they will happen as he says. Those parts of the future that are inevitable, are only inevitable because God, like any one of us, has decided to cause it to happen -- and unlike us, God cannot be impeded as he carries out his decisions.
More and more, that scenario appears to me to be not only a "possible" interpretation of God's motives as revealed in Scripture, but a *good* one.
That human beings determine many things that occur through the exercise of their wills, should not threaten God's knowledge or his omnipotence, especially if it was his decision to allow us the gift of that freedom in the first place. We don't consider Christ's sacrificial death on our behalf a sign of weakness in God, but instead we say that God willfully set aside his strength for a time and subjected himself to death as a gift to us. Why do we imagine that free will, which is also a gift from God, is in any way a threat to him? Free will is an invitation for us to learn wisdom, maturity, and responsibility -- to become more like God in all of these ways.
I'm looking forward to reading a book by Gregory Boyd, titled The_God_Of_The_Possible. Boyd is an evangelical theologian, and I'm very curious to see whether in this book he is able to make a Biblically sound case for the position that I've outlined above, or something similar to it. I hope that he is able to do so. The idea may be attractive, but if it isn't Biblically supportable, I'm going to have to give it up.
> ...I cannot accept a God with infallible foreknowledge *and* free will. I choose to believe in free will, because believing otherwise to me is unthinkable. I am not a determinist. I do not believe it is possible even in theory to know exactly the outcome of every event. > ...for me, this uncertainty of the universe is the explanation of free will. A knowable universe is a deterministic universe, and a deterministic universe has no room for free will. >
I hadn't even approached it from the scientific perspective, but what you've written makes me wonder whether God didn't create the universe in exactly that way -- undetermined, unknowable -- for the very purpose of making room for us to act as determinative agents in creation. I like the idea; I'll have to give it some more thought.
> So in my opinion, the only type of God I could accept would be a God that knew every *possible* outcome, and could predict with an extremely high rate of accuracy what probably would happen. But even He could not know *exactly* what would happen, because the inherent uncertainties in His own creation would prevent that. >
I prefer a description in more personal language: God isn't interested in the statistical likelihood of events, or of predicting how things will turn out. He's interested in *making things happen*, in taking a responsible role in the course of events and encouraging us to do likewise. God-as-distant-observer, the cosmic statistician you've just described, bears little resemblance to the God of Scripture, and for that I am immensely thankful. :-)
Iss "I *heart* the RinkForum" achar
|