This entry grew as a side-issue to part 2 of my Science and Faith entry which I'm still laboring at. If nothing else my labors there have provided ideas for more entries.
If you believe in God you've probably encountered the argument, advanced by someone trying to convince you of the non-existence of God, that belief in God is incompatible with belief in free will. The argument usually goes something like "Does God know everything" to you which you reply "Yes". "So God knows what you're going to do tomorrow?" "Yes" "Therefore you don't have free will, since what you're going to do has already been determined! You either have free will and God doesn't exist, or God exists and controls everything you do!"
In Einstein's view of the universe time is a dimension, just like the three dimensions of space. You understand this in a practical sense too, when you're approaching a road intersection you don't worry about whether a car went thru the intersection ten minutes ago, or whether one will go thru ten minutes from now, you concern yourself with whether another car will be in the intersection at the same time your car is because that's what causes a traffic accident.
Let's assume that you have free will. You carry a chair into a house and, using your free will, you place it someplace in the three-dimensional space within that house. I walk in afterward and observe where you've placed the chair. Does my observation of where you placed the chair mean that you didn't exercise free will in placing it there? People are capable of moving around in three-dimensional space fairly freely, but we can only move thru the fourth dimension of time in one direction, from past to future, and we MUST move thru it, we can't make it stand still.
God, on the other hand, is an Eternal Being. That doesn't just mean He lives for a very long time, or even an infinite time. It means He exists OUTSIDE of time. He can move freely thru the dimension of time as easily as we move thru the three dimensions of space. He can look forward in time as far as He wishes to see what happens. As a matter of fact if He wants to know what I'll do tomorrow He MUST look forward in time to see what I'll do, since because I have free will the only way He can find out is thru observation.
If I may be permitted a digression, this ability of God to move thru time as He wishes has ramifications in our prayer life. Suppose someone I care for is scheduled to have surgery at 2:00 in the afternoon. I decide that at lunch time that day I'll find a quite place to pray for a successful operation, so at noon I leave my office where I'm likely to be distracted and go to my chosen place to pray. When I return I have a voice mail telling the that early that morning the surgery was rescheduled to 9:00 am and was over even before I began to pray. Was my prayer wasted? It was not, because God could move ahead to noontime to hear my prayer, then move back to 9:00 to apply my prayers to the surgery.
Free will is an essential aspect of our relationship with God. The only way we can love someone is to be free not to, that goes for each other, and it goes for us loving God too. There have been plenty of movies made about what happens when someone gives someone else a love potion, it's generally unsatisfying for the person who gave the potion precisely because the other person wasn't free not to fall in love. If you look around you'll see a great many people who have no love for God. That's the price God is willing to pay in order that some people will love Him freely.
No comments:
Post a Comment