My Christianity: Free Will

[Mempho]

I decided to try and put some of my concepts of Christianity in words for the forum to debate. It is not my contention to make this a thread of evidence for or evidence against but rather one of concepts that are often on the minds of people.

The concepts presented build upon each other successively so it is best not to engage in a game of “Whack-A-Mole” apologetics. The reason that I decided to bring this up was that many of the questions were questions that I had.

These concepts are, to the best of my knowledge, congruent with the Bible. If you happen to stump me, I’ll do my best to research the correct answer and get back to you. If I don’t know an answer, I may have to tell you that. What I would ask is that you don’t go off-topic immediately and start bombarding me with questions that aren’t relevant to the topic at hand. If we’re talking about free will-determinism, then don’t go asking me questions like:

-What about the Muslims?

-What about the Egypt?

-Why didn’t the Egyptians believe?

-Don’t you consider it to be an oxymoron that good and loving God would send someone to hell for eternal punishment?

All of these are valid questions and I will do my best to cover them. The problem that I run into is that these debates often get dragged off topic so quickly that the main point, which is critical to understanding the successive questions, gets buried before the truth of it can be fleshed out.

Further, I expect some people to say something along these lines:

“Well, that’s not what Pat Robertson teaches.”

---OR---

“That’s not the Christianity that any church teaches.”

That’s all fair and good, but I am not Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, or any other guy with a television ministry or even so much as a Sunday school class to lead (maybe for a good reason).

I don’t go along completely with any denomination or leader per se. I just took what I could read from the Bible. Alright, on to the first topic:

Free Will and the Origins of Good and Evil

God Gave Man Free Will

This is extremely important and it is not rocket science. People make it out to be rocket science and I don’t know why.

God gave humans free will. If humans did not have free will, they would be incapable of love, since they would be essentially be biological robots. God desires a voluntary loving relationship with each of us. If our plan is determined, then choice does not exist.

That freedom of choice means the freedom to choose God’s way, which is the way of absolute truth, or any multitude of other ways. One must choose light or dark. Any other choice besides light is automatically dark.

There is one way for truth and multiple ways of darkness. If Bill asks you, “What is favorite food?” and your favorite food is pizza, you have a myriad of choices, but only one of them (pizza) is the truth.

Since God gave man free will, he has to allow for the possibility that the choice made by man will be something other than the choice to follow the truth and the light. This affects everything around us for both good and bad.


God Can See the Future

Now, the determinism people will point out very quickly (and quite correctly) that God can see the future. They think this presents a conundrum for the concept of free will. It does not.

Suppose that God is on his throne, peers through time into the future, and one day and sees Susie being born. Susie is a wonderful child and grows into a beautiful, young woman. She is beautiful, smart, giving, and caring. She donates time to feed the poor and is an avid churchgoer. She gets engaged to a young man who loves her very much named David. Her life is a blessing to all around her. One night she comes home from feeding the poor and finds Tom in her house. Tom has made a dark choice and proceeds to rape and kill her.

Would God not think of this as a terrible tragedy? Of course he would. After all, it was not Susie’s fault and she was a blessing to all around her. It was Tom’s fault because he made the wrong choice. God could’ve intervened but he did not. If God intervened every time that something bad happened, he would eventually end up removing Susie’s capacity to love all of those around her because all of the opportunities for everyone who ever lived to make a wrong choice would be extinguished. Love is a choice. Without that choice, humans are nothing more than biological material. With that choice, however, the door for evil is always open.

There is a prominent theory about the origin of Satan, but it is not easy to extract from the Bible. The more common story is extracted from Ezekiel 28 and it refers to an angel with free will who, due to pride, started thinking of himself as God, and ultimately revolted against God’s sovereignty in an attempt to become God.