William James Tychonievich has written a blog post about a fictional book that (as part of its story) attempts (albeit from a Jewish rather than Christian perspective - it was written by a Rabbi) to provide an intellectual model that combines the attributed omniscience and omnipotence of God, with human Agency, or Free Will.
But, as William argues (endorsed by comments from myself and Francis Berger) the model actually, by its assumptions and implications, sacrifices human agency in order to sustain the Omni-God assumption.
In this respect, and in common with nearly-all Christian theology (including mainstream Roman and Eastern Catholic and Protestant theology); it is evident that the omni-nature of God is primary - and an understanding of human agency and freedom is something that is, in practice, sacrificed to the need to ascribe omni attributes to God.
This is confirmed when the Rabbi author (Shaul Behr) responds to the post with a couple of comments; finishing with:
Like those who came before me, I am content, as you say, to leave it as an unresolved "mystery of God".
The Rabbi's response is therefore essentially identical with that of most Christian theologians over the past couple of millennia; and I translate it as follows:
We are sure and certain that God is omnipotent and omniscient. We also recognize that Men must be free agents in order that each Man's choices have meaning. But, although we can provide confusing, complex abstract pseudo-explanations of how this might be possible - none of these explanations really make sense. And we cannot provide a clear, simple, coherent account of how free agency is possible with an Omni-God. So we call the situation of Man's freedom in the context of Omni-God "a mystery".
The question I ask is: is this good enough?
And I answer: No it is not good enough.
It is, in practice, treating the matter of coherently understanding human agency as trivial - and not something that needs to be understood.
It is commonly asserted that all Christians (and, apparently, all Jews) must believe in the Omni-God, or else they are not Christians (or Jews) - because Omni-God Just Is God - because supposedly nothing else makes any sense...
Man's freedom, in stark contrast, becomes something that must be taken on faith, as a form of words; by the asserted necessity for each of us to trust in the validity of theological authority.
Apparently; Omni-God is mandatory; while by contrast free agency is something that needs to be asserted but does not need to be understood - and, because of Omni-God, freedom cannot be understood.
Unsurprisingly, in practice, traditional Christian theology has always tended to assert God's omni-nature as interpreted by "the church" (whichever church prevailed); while human agency was considered to be a problem.
Indeed, human agency is blamed for the evils of this world.
It seems that the only proper role of human freedom - in traditional theology - is to make the right choices from among those presented by God.
Unsurprisingly, since there is only one right answer among choices, and all possible answers are God-given; it has seemed to many Christians that it might be better if humans had simply been pre-programmed to make these right choices.
It has thus seemed that the only significant role of human agency is negative: freedom is seen as the freedom to do wrong.
Which fits with the pointlessness of human life when God is Omni... Since such a God is everything, then human beings can add nothing to creation; which implies that creation of humans was futile - because (from this perspective, at the bottom line) the best a human can do in life, is to follow a pre-determined path of correct choices.
Apparently; freedom has no positive role.
Thus, by such accounts; the problem of Omni-God and human freedom has been "solved" by reducing human freedom to an expression of negative resistance to God's reality.
Freedom becomes regarded like a disease; something wrong with Men... Hence the centrality of "original sin".
However, if the logic is followed - we get the bizarre assertion that this supposedly Omni God, for some "mysterious" reason, created flawed human beings who can only mess-up.
The things is: our freedom, our agency as human beings, is experiential; something we know innately and directly.
Whereas the Omni-nature of God is something inferred as a consequence of non-intuitive abstract assumptions; and via logical procedures that many or most people cannot follow, or regard as flawed.
And that is a problem!
It is a problem that will not go away: Christians know we are free, and yet we are told that this knowledge of agency is subordinate to the assertion of Omni-God.
Officially - we are told that the ultimate answer is that common sense cannot comprehend this situation - tha tthe situation is necessary and unavoidable - therefore "it is a Mystery".
And yet this mystery is made to be foundational to being-a-Christian (and also perhaps a Jew)!
Well, in the end, the only responsible way to address this situation is for each of us to plumb the depths of our primary assumptions concerning the ultimate nature of reality - to establish what we really suppose to be known, and sure, and foundational.
Is it what we have been told, or what we experience?
Upon this hinges a great deal.
8 comments:
What bothers me most about the concept/doctrine of free is its rather obvious but largely denied/ignored/unacknowledged restrictiveness -- a restrictiveness that ultimately ends in determinism.
Free will implies a choice between predetermined options (all predetermined by God), and as far as I can tell, that's the sort of freedom the Rabbi, in this case, has posited. The problem with "free will" freedom is its really just a kind of masked slavery to externalities, laws, and necessities (and slavery to God). This is as far as you can go with a caused sort of freedom or, as you note, a negative kind of freedom.
The only real solution to genuine freedom is to recognize it as uncaused, as something that has its origins from a source that lies beyond external determination or, to put it more bluntly, in a source that lies beyond God.
Most omni-God believers appear unable or unwilling to do that. Best to let it all be a mystery.
@Frank. The picture I get from William's description of the book is one of each person's life being a map of choices, of forking paths; which are predetermined - and the better and worse choices also pre-decided.
The individual "freedom" is in picking-out one pathway among this vastly complex branching web - he cannot contribute anything at all to this reality (which is wholly pre-determined) - his job is merely to navigate it.
(Meanwhile, the individual is dividing into two every time he makes one of these choices - leading to an exponential multiplication of "selves".)
Yet, even such a grossly reduced kind of choosing freedom since to have no reality; because the criteria by which people choose are decided by external circumstances and personal character - both of which must be determined by an Omni-God.
In a world where, by definition, everything that is, is God-given, God-made, God-decided - nothing can possibly be a free agent!
I cannot see any possible basis from which even such a horribly-restricted definition of freedom could operate in the (ex nihilo) creation of an Omni-God.
When I sin & repent, God forgives me. I remember it, but He has, "cast it into the sea of His forgetfulness." He can't remember it-or won't - which may be the same thing for God.
@Phil - I don't understand your point.
I don't think it's appreciated what an obstacle it is to faith, either. As a mid-life convert, who was very assured of his atheism, I feel myself very in-touch with the modern world and what modern man is like -- the modern man that most Christians claim they are unlike, or that they believe they can escape.
I'm no subscriber to post-modern philosophy, but I liked Rick Roderick's lectures on the subject, because he beats home the inescapable nature of modernity, that we cannot *but* think in a post-modern way. And, if you're gonna do modern philosophy, you can deny the output of the post-moderns, but you can't deny that the problems they're grappling with are real, unique and new... they would be incomprehensible to Plato, Aquinas or even Descartes.
Free will is similar. For those who grew up Christian, with all the dogma, all the Omni- stuff is just obvious, and they can do the mental fudging and accept it, and disregard free will. But for someone coming in from the outside, it's utterly bizarre, and one of the things that makes Christianity look ridiculous and unsuited to the modern world. I was lucky in that I read Vox Day, who might have been cribbing from you, who has his theory of Pan-science and Pan-potence or whatever he calls it, where God is the *most* powerful, and the Lord of *everything*, but he can't do "anything". Reading his stuff made the idea of God actually make more sense to me. It felt like a grown-up actually treating the problem seriously. It made me respect Christians and want to know more.
But if you reject it as a silly notion, as something that has to be kind of... explained away... then you turn off a larger number of potential converts who rightly see themselves as sensible adults, and feel patronized towards by people who wanna believe in silly fantasies. If you're losing people at the basic empirical fact that they're most intimately familiar with, you're gonna have a hard time convincing them of more elaborate things like the Resurrection!
The Omni-God feels like a holdover from Platonic thinking, from this obsession that for something to be the most Pure, it must be the most removed from our messy, contingent world of material stuff... which, y'know... God coming in human form and promising us physical, perfected bodies seems to contradict!
I find Dr. Charlton's concept of God's nature very compelling. Since I first became a believer I have always connected far more deeply with God as Parent rather than as a collection of abstract properties.
A naive question: how do we respond to the objection that if God is not fully omnipotent/omniscient, then is it not the case that a "greater" entity could in theory exist, or do we instead believe that the "omni-God" is not possible, even in principle? I.e., an omni-God is simply incoherent / logical contradiction.
@Rory - I too am a late convert (aged about 50) and was a scientist - what's more I was not just an atheist, but involved somewhat in transhumanism. So, your experience resonates with mine.
@Stephen - Your question is significant; because the Omni-God comes from the desire "logically" to prove (albeit by fiat, by chosen definition) that no greater entity could exist, or arise, than the God "I" have chosen.
I regard this as a version of the "My Dad could beat-up your Dad in a fight" argument among young children. The fear that - even if "my Dad" was the toughest in the village, maybe there is another Dad somewhere else who could beat him...
But I think you would agree that to say that My God is the one and only creator of everything *by definition* is not really an answer, so much as defining the threat out of existence!
Like saying, my Dad is the Only Dad - therefore by definition the toughest possible.
Well, it might convince somebody who already believes it, but why *should* anybody believe it!
My answer to the question is to restate it as a matter of assumed fact: God is the greatest as a matter of history: because God *just was* the primary creator - who started it all, within whose creation every being lives.
It might have been otherwise - but it wasn't.
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