Free will is a common theodicy, or explanation, for why there is evil and unnecessary suffering in the world. But, as The Tale of the Twelve Officers should make manifestly obvious, there is more under the surface. Free will is not a complete explanation of why an all-powerful and perfectly loving god would stand by and watch pain go by unhelped.
After reading Vuletic’s essay, one must ask: If free will is such an important feature of being human, than what exactly do we find personally wrong with the police officers’ decisions to not uphold their duty to justice? My response to this question is that free will is a red herring. If one of the police officers would have stepped up and defended the woman from rape and murder, that officer would not have changed the will of the perpetrator. Free will was not interfered with, or directly influenced. Rather, the police officer took away the free exercise of the perpetrators’ will. The will of the perpetrator to rape and murder the woman could, in all probability, have remained the same or even intensified after the police officer stopped him from carrying out his plans.
I think most would agree with me that this would be just. If it is unjust to prevent such acts as killing and raping, then one must wonder why it is just to take any sort of moral action at all.
So then, why doesn’t God intervene to prevent evil and unnecessary suffering? Wouldn’t he have a moral duty to do so?
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August 29, 2008 at 9:43 pm
grinningthorn
Your point contains a bit of specious reasoning. You confuse free will -the thing- with the exercise of free will. It is the exercise of free will God will not contravene. What is the effect of a will that can never be actualized? If God were to contravene every willful evil act by preventing it from occuring or reversing it somehow, then in what sense would the exercise of free will for the evil person exist? That is the point. A will to evil which is constantly blocked is not free to be exercised. Freedom exists only when the potential of actualized choice is real. A man who is told to choose life or death and is given only a cup of poison to drink, is not being given a choice. He is not free. Likewise a will to evil that can never be allowed to actualize is not free. It is merely an exercise of the imagination in the mind of the evil person.
August 29, 2008 at 11:43 pm
poppies
False analogy. The police officers are merely human; exposing their presence and power by intervening would have minimal bearing on the general populace’s ability to feel free of coercion in their choices and especially thoughts. God doesn’t have that freedom, since His presence would have profound implications for these issues.
A more apt analogy would be an almost omnipotent surveillance network that even reached into people’s minds. The violence against volition which wide-ranging justice systems represent has been darkly touched upon by 1984, Minority Report and The Dark Knight, among many others. I’ve never seen such an idea represented positively, and there’s a clear reason why.
August 31, 2008 at 3:54 am
poppies
Grinningthorn, very well said.
August 31, 2008 at 4:44 am
Brad
grinninghorn:
I wish I could fly, but I can’t. Is my free will being infringed upon? I don’t think so. My will is free, but I do not have the physical liberty to act on it.
And, if we say that free will is more important than people’s suffering, then we say that we all have the right to murder and rape each other. In fact, God seems to have given us this right. Why don’t we follow God’s example and become apathetic and passive towards all evil in the world? If we were to overcome evil, we’d be making people think good is the only option!
poppies:
What you seem to be arguing is that with greater power comes less responsibility, because otherwise it would make us bullies who don’t let everyone act however they want (a.k.a. free will). I don’t buy that. I want him to stop my arm from striking others, to shut my lips before hurting others. I want him to teach me without anybody else getting hurt in the process! Would it be “coercion” to disallow me the capacity to harm others? Would it be “violence” to my volition to not let me violate other people?
In 1984, there were negative consequences for thinking good thoughts and doing good deeds. This is not what I want. In Minority Report, people are punished for crimes that could have merely been prevented instead of punished. This is not what I want. And in The Dark Knight, Batman’s actions do in fact do good in Gotham city. (He saves the entire city, after all.) I do want that, but times one billion.
And isn’t “an almost omnipotent surveillance network that even [reaches] into people’s mind” already a reality under belief in God? And is it not coercive that he rests our salvation on whether or not we accept him?
September 2, 2008 at 3:24 pm
grinningthorn
The analogy of flying is not good. You have no ability to fly by nature of you anatomy and physiology which is human, not avian. By definition you have no free will in this area. Once again you miss the point. Your will is not free to choose flying, specifically because you can not by nature fly. There never was a choice. Your will remains free as to any number of things: You are free to walk or stand up, you are free to meet a fellow human’s greeting with another greeting or to strike them, shoot them, or pass them by without saying anything. You are free to believe in God or not. Thus your will does remain free with regards to things in which you have a choice. Choosing something no human can do and saying your will is still free in this regard, again reveals your confusion of the word “free” with the act of simply staging something, even though it has no reference. A will free to choose flying has no reference. It is a string of meaningless words, an example of which is impossible to find. A square circle is another such object. Words, strung together, but the meaning of each logically precudes the other. A meaningless phrase. Speaking words and having those words actually refer to something are two separate things.
I never said free will is more important than suffering. The two do not exist on a continuum of comparison. Free will simply is and suffering is. In many regards, the suffering of mankind is the result of evil people exercising their free will to choose evil. This causes others to suffer. Suffering and free will are causally linked. One is not more important in any meaningful sense than another. Free will either is or is not. There is no degree to its being. Its one element in the human experience as is suffering. Willing is something we do. Suffering is something we experience. Some sufferings are more important than others, murder vs. an insult, forced starvation vs. profit taking on food. You can no more compare suffering to willing than you could compare becoming tan to willing or stumbling and willing.
God is not apathetic. The basis for this statement is you think he does not intervene for man’s good. Many Christians and Jews would argue otherwise. The entire lesson of the Old Testament is just that God cares for his people and does intervene to help them. Obviously, the NT is the fulfillment of all divine intervention on man’s behalf. You can choose to see that or not. That is an exercise of free will on your part.
September 4, 2008 at 9:44 pm
Brad
More like an exercise of reason. Belief shouldn’t be based on mere whim and will, in my opinion.
I didn’t find the Old Testament a very good way of getting good lessons across. I found it to be more like a record of the Israelites’ evolving spiritual ignorance: their gloriously-bloody, nationalistic, xenophobic, hateful and intolerant foreign wars, their fixation with obediance, punishment and reward, law, law, and more arbitrary law, their egoistic pride of being God’s chosen people (Why does God have a chosen people anyway?), their dumb hypotheses about what their God wants for them, and so on and so on.
That isn’t to say there isn’t anything good in the Old Testament. There are some stories and some prose that I like. But all in all, the OT is a very telling document that shows the primitiveness of its main nation.