Free Will or Chao?

Let us recognize that a large fraction of our suffering and that of our fellow human beings is brought about by what we do to one another. It is humankind, not God that has invented knives, arrows, guns, bombs, and all manner of instruments of torture used through the ages. The tragedy of the young child killed by a drunk driver, or the innocent man dying on the battlefield, or of the young girl cut down by a stray bullet in a crime-ridden section of a modern city can hardly be blamed on God. After all, we have somehow been given free will, the ability to do as we please. We use this ability to frequently disobey the Moral Law. And when we do so, we shouldn’t blame God for the consequences.

 

Should God have restrained our free will in order to prevent these kinds of evil behavior? That line of thought quickly encounters a dilemma from which there is no rational escape. C.S. Lewis said: “If you choose to say ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,’ you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ‘God can.’ Nonsense remains nonsense, even when we talk it about God.”

 

Rational arguments can still be difficult to accept when an experience of terrible suffering falls on an innocent person.

 

Perhaps on rare occasions God does perform miracles. But for the most part, the existence of free will and of order in the physical universe are inexorable facts. While we might wish for such miraculous deliverance to occur more frequently, the consequence of interrupting these two sets of forces would be utter chaos.

 

What about the existence of natural disasters: earthquake, tsunamis, volcanoes, great floods and famines? On a smaller scale, what about the occurrence of disease in an innocent victim, such as cancer in a child? John Polkinghorne an Anglican Priest and a physicist has refered to this category of event as “physical evil,” as opposed to the “moral evil” committed by humankind. How can it be justified?

 

Science reveals that the universe, our own planet, and life itself are engaged in an evolutionary process. The consequences of that can include the unpredictability of weather, the slippage of a tectonic plate, or the misspelling of a cancer gene in the normal process of cell division. If at the beginning of time God chose to use these forces to create human beings, then the inevitability of these other painful consequences was also assured. Frequent miraculous interventions would be at least as chaotic in the physical realm as they would be in interfering with human acts of free will.

 

These rational explanations fall short of providing a justification for the pain of human existence. Why is our life more a vale of tears that a garden of delight. Much as been written abut this apparent paradox, and the conclusion is not an easy one: If God is loving and wishes the best for us, then perhaps his plan is not the same as our plan. This is a hard concept, especially if we have been too regularly spoon-fed a version of God’s benevolence that implies nothing more on His part than a desire for us to be perpetually happy.  Again C.S. Lewis writes: “We want, in fact, not so much a father in heaven as a grandfather in heaven---a senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘likes to see young people enjoying themselves.’ And whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of the day, ‘a good time was had by all.’

The Language of God: Francis S. Collins