Does a free society need God?

Here is an article by Dennis Prager from the Washington Times, Weekly Edition, of August 25, 2008. Give a critique, using concepts learned in the course.

Do we have freewill?

Jonathan Edwards took a walk in the woods, looking for spiders, when he tripped over a question. It’s a question many of us have encountered.

If God has ordained everything from before the foundation of the world, how can my choices make any difference? If a name is either written in the Book of Life or not written there long before that name was given to a newborn boy or girl, how can he or she be held accountable for not making it?

The conundrum has been around along time—how to reconcile the freewill of man and the sovereign will of God.

Those of us who stand in the Reformed tradition know some powerful minds that wrestled with this—Augustine and Jonathan Edwards among them.

In what follows I do not pretend to untie the Gordian knot but merely to suggest that a lot has changed in our understanding of the world since these giants engaged the subject. I believe this new understanding requires a paradigm shift that may send us in a new direction as we seek to answer this question often posed by new believers.

To do this we must back up and search for some tools that can help us talk about this. In my dissertation on freedom of the will I found that Edwards was classified as a soft determinist. Let me explain what that means before I argue that his view, though brilliant for his time, needs revision.

Return now to the woods near Northampton, Massachusetts.

Story I: The dilemma

Edwards does not see any spiders this morning. But he does see a young man approaching along the footpath.

“Good morning, Mr. Edwards! I hope you do not mind my interrupting you, but I watched you walking about here in our hills for some hours now and was afraid you might be distraught over something that burdens you regarding the church situation.”

“Oh. Good morning, Christopher. No, not at all. Ever since my jottings about the habits of the spider, done when I was but a boy of 12, I come often to meditate and to praise the Creator of these wonders here in the woods—quite forgetting the passage of time! I am quite well, actually, just caught up in the glories of our God!”

“ I am glad of it! But if you don’t mind, Sir, I have been waiting to pose a question for you.”

“Yes—speak on and I will answer as best I can.”

“If God is the cause of all things and truly knows the future actions of all men, how can he hold me accountable for my choices? Has he given us freewill or no?”

“An excellent question, my lad. I will attempt to give you insight as God helps me.”

At this juncture Edwards goes on to make several salient points.

Foundational are these: First, God is sovereign over all of creation and has pre-ordained all that comes to pass. Second, God knows everything that has occurred and ever will occur in the universe he has created. This means that a person who chooses to do X could never have done Y in its stead. This is known as determinism.

Edwards continues on to derive from these first principles the only concept of freewill that accomplishes the two things needed in a Reformed theory of human life. The first is that everything is pre-ordained, even in the minutia of each human life. The second is that God justly holds us accountable for actions that have moral elements.

By the first, Edwards comes under the category of determinism as we have said. Whatever happens is completely determined by its causes. Given the fact that Cain was angry with Abel and that opportunity presented itself in the field, his killing his brother was the only act that could have come to pass. That is determinism. Whatever happens is the only thing that could happen because the causes make it happen.

But Edwards is a soft determinist. That means he must provide a basis for moral accountability. Even though Cain’s act was determined, Cain is still morally responsible for it and can justly be punished for it.

At this point, Chris cannot keep silent. “But he couldn’t help it! How can God punish him if he couldn’t have dropped the rock or just walked away or done some alternative act? He had to do it. God foreknew it. God fore-ordained it!”

Edwards explains that as long as Cain wanted to do what he did, he is accountable and can be punished. It was his act, after all. If Satan had come along and moved Cain’s hand against Cain’s wishes so that he killed Abel, then it would not be Cain’s fault because it would not be Cain’s act. But since the act flowed out of Cain’s heart—it was something he wanted to do—he is accountable.

We sin because we want to. It flows out of our own nature. Sure, our nature is perverted. But our wills express what is in our hearts. Our actions are our actions.

“But that doesn’t seem to agree with my experience,” objects Chris. “Many times I sense that I can as easily put this pebble into my pocket as throw it down to the ground. I can do either one. It’s up to me, isn’t it?” says he, tossing it in the air.

“Yes,” replies Edwards, “it seems so. But many things are not as they seem to the casual observer. For example, the sun seems to set, but since the work of Copernicus we know that it does not. So also it seems that we can do X as easily as Y. But that does not make sense in moral situations.

“For example, if Cain could have stayed his hand, despite the rage in his heart, how do we explain that he killed Abel? If his inclinations could have gone either way, then it seems there is no reason why Cain killed him rather than not—a capricious act. But how can God, or anyone, blame someone for a capricious act that has no definable cause? We cannot say ‘because Cain chose to do it.’ We need to know why Cain chose to do it instead of doing some other act. Only then could we hold him accountable. If either X or Y could come about with the causes being exactly the same, then we have no basis for blaming Cain for what he did. We blame Cain because the causes foaming in his sinful heart necessitated his brutal murdering of his brother.”

“I suppose you are right, Sir, but it seems strange nonetheless, to my way of thinking.”

“That may be,” replies Edwards, “but God knew Cain would murder Abel long before creation began. And Cain is justly accountable for what he did, even though it was all determined ahead of time according to the way the Grand Scheme was designed to play out.”

Analysis

Let’s stop here and evaluate Edwards’ response to Chris.

Do you think Edwards gave a satisfactory answer? Unsatisfactory?

I will argue for unsatisfactory on the following grounds.

In doing so I do not fault Edwards for his answer. I think he did the best he could with what he had to work with. And I don’t mean his intellectual firepower. Edwards is arguably still the most brilliant mind America has produced. I refer to the reigning paradigm of the Newtonian era. Edwards, as all intellectuals in the European tradition, was imbued with the new conception of the world so brilliantly conceived by Isaac Newton a generation earlier.

Newton conceived nature as working according to fixed scientific laws—gravitation, thermodynamics, entropy, etc. It’s pretty much what Donald McKay said in his Inter-Varsity Press booklet, Clockwork Image. God made the clock, set the clock, and watches the clock. It’s a paradigm of celestial mechanics.

But since Einstein and Heisenberg, a new paradigm has informed our understanding of nature and hence of ourselves as created beings within nature. Being a pastor and philosopher (as Edwards was) I am no expert in science and will not pretend to make more than suggestions to be taken forward by others with more knowledge than I have.

Story II: A Way Out of the Dilemma

I was walking in my forest in Vermont not long ago and saw a man coming along the skid road. In our conversation, after I told him I was a philosophy professor, he asked if I had any knowledge of Jonathan Edwards.

“Actually I do, having written a dissertation that included some of his ideas.”

“Great!” he replied. “You see, one of my great-great-etc-grandfathers knew Edwards when he was minister in Northampton. Since then some of us have wandered north, and we now live in Vermont.”

“You’re kidding! One of your ancestors knew Edwards?” asks I. “That’s fantastic!”

“Yes, it is. And we have this story written by one Christopher about his questions concerning freewill that Edwards answered one day when they met out in the woods. But none of us have been any more satisfied with it than Christopher was in 1738.”

He recounted the episode I related to you earlier. He wondered if anything had come to light in the last several centuries that might be a more satisfactory answer to the freewill conundrum.

“Actually there is,” I replied. “If you have a some time, let’s go up to the cabin where we can sit on the glider with some iced tea and I’ll tell you what I think Edwards might say now.”

So we sat down to swing, iced tea in hand, while enjoying the dappled sunlit foliage.

“Edwards did the best one could, given the thought forms of the era,” I began. “You see, in the days of Newtonian physics, brilliant at the time, the universe was thought of in mostly mechanical terms—potential and kinetic energy, the laws of the conservation of energy, and all that sort of thing. Edwards tried to explain human action using that paradigm. But now we have had a paradigm shift, one that I find a bit baffling, to be honest with you. But since most physicists accept it, I think we can use it. And it provides new ways of thinking about freewill.

“What in particular?” asked Chris.

“For example,” I replied, “Einstein says that time is relative to the observer. If one could move fast enough, time would stand still. I have no clue what that would be like. But maybe it can explain how God, if he is faster than the speed of light, can see what we do as we do it, even though we, in the tunnel of slow time, are not even there yet to do it!”

“Oh. Wow!” said Chris XII, “that’s a cool way to think about it!”

“Yes. And Heisenberg said that the principle of indeterminacy allows some events that would seem strange to Newton. For instance, you cannot measure both the velocity and the location of a particle at the same time. Now Newton never had any idea of these particles—these gluons and bosons and morons—whatever they are. Anti-matter. String theory. The world God has created has a lot of things that don’t fit a mechanical model at all.”

“OK, but go on. How does this relate to Cain killing Abel and all that?”

“Well,” said I, “the human self may not be just another piece of the clockwork.

“A human self, like God, does not exhaust itself when doing an act. The person may be able to select among the causal influences present in a given situation and bring about any one of several outcomes. For persons, there may be a degree of indeterminacy. Maybe Cain could have walked away. He had a choice. He chose to shape the influences within him in a certain way, and so he killed his brother. He may have been able to shape those same influences in another way had he chosen to do so. That does not mean his act is capricious or unexplainable. A self is a super-causal agent, unlike a stick of dynamite where everything is predictable in Newtonian terms.

“Our moral accountability is grounded in this special capacity that we have as persons made in the image of God.”

“Would you also apply this idea to God?” asked Chris. “He is a person, too….”

“Good question!

Perhaps we can assume God also had real options; he did not have to create this world because of some inner necessity. Do you agree?”

“Seems logical,” replied Chris.

“God has super-capacities. When God touched off the Big Bang, God did not exhaust all his potential into kinetic energy as happens when dynamite explodes. So we, made in his image, have the same super-capacity on a smaller scale. When we choose to do something, we do not have to expend all our potential any more than God does. This is called super-abundant causal agency.”

“Does this mean that God is morally accountable for choosing to touch off the Big Bang and everything that would follow from it?” asked Chris.

“I don’t know about that—although it does seem reasonable, remembering that God would only be accountable to Himself,” I replied. “But it certainly applies to us.”

“Thus we are held accountable for what we choose to do because we are not necessitated by causes that are beyond our shaping. Within the parameters of our finiteness we have real open-ended choices. God sees us doing those actions that are future to us because he is outside of time and is already there to see what we will have chosen. Just as he saw what Cain would freely choose to do.

“Maybe this is an aspect where God’s thoughts are higher than our thoughts, as Edwards surely admitted. We know that Edwards revered the mysteries of God—mysteries not because they are absurd but because they are infinite. And if he had lived today, might he have answered differently than he did then? I am suggesting that there are categories beyond soft determinism and indeterminism that open to us new ways of thinking even within our Reformed tradition. Maybe the new paradigm can help us in other debates between Calvinists and Arminians.”

“Well, that is something to ponder,” he said, sucking on the last ice cube in his tumbler of tea. “I consider myself in the Reformed wing of Christian theology, as were my forebears. It’s nice to have a new window to look through. Maybe it illustrates what another of our fathers-in-the-faith said: “There is yet more light to break forth from God’s Word.”

“Keep me in your prayers, Chris,” I asked, shaking his hand. “I plan to say something along this line to our Congregational brethren at an upcoming conference. Maybe I can start a dialog that will help us as we try answer these perennial questions.”

“Sure thing,” he replied. “And thanks for the iced tea!”