| Subject: Christians are confused: man cannot sin except by God's will |
Author:
One-eyed Jack
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Date Posted: 03:08:04 08/04/04 Wed
I've argued occasionally that an omniscient, omnipotent All-Creator must logically bear complete responsibility for all that occurs in the universe: from Adam's sin to the evils worked by Satan and Bill Clinton, God is directly and personally responsible for everything. If God chose all the initial conditions of Creation with full foreknowledge of every single thing that would occur as a result of those initial conditions, then His alone is the responsibility for all that occurs.
Well, so much for free will and man's choice, eh? Christian theology is skittish on the point, and with good reason: if man could freely choose either good or evil, then God would not know for certain which choice man would make. But if God knows ahead of time what choice a man will make, it means that man's freedom is an illusion because his choice is ruled in fact by predestination--and, given God's role as all-creator, the specific mechanism of this predestination must be the conditions set up by God Himself at creation. God knew that Pol Pot would choose to be an evil barstid because He knew Pol Pot's nature from the beginning--but God also created Pol Pot's nature as an inevitable and planned consequence of His choices at creation.
It's not a problem to have an omniscient God and also let man have free will, as long as God's not the Creator: such a God knows what will happen, but he didn't stack the deck to make it happen. It's not a problem to have an omnipotent Creator who's not omniscient and also have free will, either; all that means is that God stacked the deck but isn't sure how the game will play out and whether or not His stacked deck will result in an evil barstid like Pol Pot. But if ya got an omniscient and omnipotent All-Creator, then free will is in fact meaningless.
The Church's problem is that they need an omniscient God for prophetic purposes (it just wouldn't DO to have a God that doesn't know for sure what will happen, eh?). And they want a God who's absolute perfection--the ultimate conceivable Being--if nothing else, for justifications like the ontological proof of God's existence: "Each of us has an idea of a supremely perfect being, or of a God. Perfection implies existence, for a being with the added element of existence is more perfect that one who is only an idea. Therefore such a Being must exist." (See St. Anselm, ca 1100) But the Church absolutely has to retain the idea that man is responsible for part of creation, in particular the sinful, fallen nature of the world. Hence the Christian Mindwarp: "God created everything....but man created sin....but God created everything....but man created sin..." Mutually contradictory statements, repeated ad infinitum.
(Of course, the simplest and most direct way out of the Christian Mindwarp is to say that God is inexplicable, and therefore man is not to ponder these kinds of questions and expect to arrive at any sort of answer. In fact, some Christians reckon such questioning and testing of God's nature the supreme blasphemy: "The seventh principle [of the Shema Israel] thus forbids the unbelieving testing of God: God's law is the testing of man; therefore, man cannot presume to be god and put God and his law-word on trial." (Theologian R.J. Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law, 1973) But this is a simple refusal to think. Refusal to think about something almost always means the refuser is living one kind of lie or another.)
Science has something to say about omniscience: it is impossible, in the framework of natural law, to predict the exact behavior of individual subatomic particles. This quantum uncertainty isn't just a result of the impossibility of measuring some things, it is a fundamental unpredictability inherent in the universe. A God who is bound by the natural universe cannot know exactly when a Geiger counter will detect the decay of an atom of uranium, for instance. Science therefore requires that any omniscient being be supernatural: no real surprise there, but it shoots down any idea that the Christian God can be equated to Spinoza's "God is the sum of all the universe" notion. Such a God is not omniscient, because even with knowledge of every particle of matter and every quantum of energy, the fundamental unpredictability of the universe would prevent Spinoza's God from knowing in perfect detail what would happen in the future.
The Christian God, however, gives iron-clad prophecies and therefore cannot be bound by natural law and cannot be equated to Spinoza's God. Quantum uncertainty cannot baffle the Christian God, because if it did then His ability to know the future would be degraded.
Bible analysis says a bit about God's omniscience, too: God was not omniscient in the first part of the Bible. In Genesis he decided that making mankind had been a mistake, and he repented it bitterly. Omniscient beings don't make mistakes that they later repent! For that matter, the Judaic God was not originally the only god in the world; until the latter part of the Book of Isaiah He was the only God the Jews were allowed to worship but the Bible acknowledged that there were plenty of other gods and goddesses in existence. It was only after the Jews' return from the Babylonian captivity that their prophets began insisting that the gods and goddesses worshipped by other people were merely superstitious lies. For that matter, it was the latter Isaiah who attributed to God responsiblity for everything, both good and evil: "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things." (Isaiah 45:7) This old prophet saw matters a bit more clearly than most modern Christians; he knew that if the Lord was omnipotent He would have to be responsible for the evil in the world along with everything else.
Too bad more Christians don't think carefully about Isaiah and Adam, because in such an examination they'd find that their God is inevitably responsible for all evil in the universe, including sin. Man can only be the physical manifestation of God's will at the moment of creation. Adam cannot be morally responsible for his actions; God already determined what Adam's actions would be and Adam was merely acting out God's plan.
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