DOES GOD HAVE FREE WILL?

Does God have free will?  What?!  For most Christians, the question may seem almost absurd, the answer obvious:  Of course, God has free will.  After all, he’s, well, God.  And the question may seem even sillier coming from someone who believes neither in God nor in free will.  But for those who believe in a personal, theistic God to whom they ascribe certain qualities and a certain character, I don’t believe the answer to the question is obvious.  So, in all seriousness, for those who believe in a personal God as well as for those who don’t, I offer the question as a way of reviewing the character of God and exploring the meaning of free will.

I would ask the reader to consider the following questions:

First, how would you describe God’s character?  Is he omnipotent?  Omniscient?  Omni-benevolent?  All three?  To say that God is omnipotent and omniscient is to assert that he can do all things and moreover that he knows the consequences of whatever he does.  

And what does it mean to say that God is omni-benevolent?  Does it mean that he always makes decisions and acts in the long-term best interests of humankind?  Would God ever act in a manner detrimental to our ultimate well-being and happiness?  Would God ever, say, abuse a human simply for his own amusement, like a preadolescent boy might torch ants with a magnifying glass?  If so, he would be very different from the standard model of the Christian God. 

But this notion of God as omni-benevolent does bring to mind a couple of challenging biblical accounts.  The first is Job, certainly a problematic story for those Christians who take the Bible as literally true.  Would an omni-benevolent God torment someone simply on the basis of a wager with another supernatural being, as one reading of Job would suggest?  Was the cruelty that God authorized in the story of Job really necessary to teach a lesson?  Of course, as the story goes, all was well that ended well and Job wound up better off than he had been before God conducted his “experiment.”  Unfortunately, along the way God authorized, among other atrocities, the killing of all ten of Job’s children.  Were they just props without lives of their own?  Was it ultimately benevolent to sacrifice them for some sort of greater good?  It’s probably better to assume that the whole story is just an allegory intended to highlight God’s inscrutability and supremacy over humans.  And I think most Christians who want to maintain belief in God’s omni-benevolence are willing to assume that metaphorical interpretation.

Then there’s the story of the Flood.  As the tale goes, God became so disappointed with the behavior of the human race—that he himself crafted—that he basically performed a “do-over,” killing all but a handful of humans in a worldwide flood.  Had God just goofed up?  Was he not thinking things through when he designed the nature of humankind?  What about all of those innocent humans, including infants and children, that were drowned in the process?  Most modern Christians would say that the story of the Flood, too, is metaphorical, that it is a mythical tale intended to provide a lesson about the importance of obedience to God and about the relationship between God and humanity.  Better that interpretation than one in which God loses his temper and goes on a murderous rampage.

In other words, the stories of Job and Noah notwithstanding, the basic position of most Christians is that God simply never makes mistakes or acts in a manner detrimental to the ultimate well-being of humankind. 

Then there’s the question of free will.  What does it mean to say that an individual has free will?  We humans are possessed of a powerful sense that we can make choices to act in a given way but that we could just as well have chosen to act in a different way.  Unless we are compelled by circumstances beyond our control, we can make choices, for better or for worse, as an exercise of free will.

  

This is a matter that I have discussed a number of times previously [see, e.g., https://skepticreflections.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-matter-of-choice.html] and for which there are arguments on both sides.  I do believe the better arguments are on the side of the denial of the existence of free will.  See, e.g., Sean Carroll’s The Big Picture and a YouTube lecture by Jerry Coyne [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca7i-D4ddaw]. They both point out that we humans, including our nervous systems, are built of the same stuff as everything else, namely, elementary particles that are governed by the same forces and laws of nature as the rest of the world.  To argue for free will is to assume that there is something in the human brain (free will) that is not governed by those same rules but that can somehow override the laws of chemistry and physics to modify the brain’s electrochemical processes.  There is no objective evidence to support such an exception, which seems to apply only in the confines of the nervous system.  Indeed, there is evidence to the contrary in the form of experiments showing that physical changes in the nervous system result in changes in conscious perception (whatever that is) and voluntary behavior. 

Ah, but I can hear the Christian ontological argument that, whatever may be the case for humans, God is outside of space and time.  He is incorporeal and therefore not subject to the same laws of nature as we humans.  As a physicalist, I’m not sure what it means to be outside of space and time or to be incorporeal, but granting the argument for the sake of discussion, I believe there are still problems with awarding free will to God.

Here is my question:  Assuming God has free will, does he ever make poor choices in the exercise of that free will?  If God confronts a choice between two actions, does he ever make a suboptimal choice, a decision other than the very best one possible?  Can you imagine God saying, “This isn’t the best possible choice, but what the heck.”  Of course not.  So does God actually have a choice if he always knows the best option and always chooses it?  

Bottom line:  If Christians have conceived of God as always knowing the perfect option and always acting in accordance with that knowledge, then has Christianity created a deity that is essentially an automaton? 

Corollary: How is a world created and run by a deity who always does the right thing distinguishable from a mechanical one governed by a simple set of rules, that is, by natural laws?

© 2019 John M. Phillips