Does it violate free will if the person was never given the desire to do something in the first place?

Great Debates
1

Non Christians often challenge the Biblical God punishing Adam and Eve for disobeying him or flooding the world to punish humanity for being so evil by asking why an omniscient God would make people that would just do wrong in his eyes and warrant punishment and death? Why make a species that would become so evil that you’d have to kill virtually all of them if you knew this would happen even before you created them? The usual Christian answer (from my reading) is to appeal to free will. People have free will to do what they want (good and bad) but that doesn’t mean God won’t punish them in this life or the next. The conversation typically turns into discussing the problem of evil and so on.

My question to believers and nonbelievers is couldn’t the issue of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit and humanity being flooded been easily prevented if God simply didn’t make humans with those desires in the first place?

If in the context of the Bible God made humans from scratch with no evolutionary process then why not simply make it so they didn’t have the desires to disobey him or the potential to be evil enough to warrant extermination in the first place? If free will is the ability to act according to your desires without coercion (the definition I think most people subscribe to) then it can’t be a violation if you simply don’t have certain desires to begin with. I think it would be absurd to suggest that God (or any creator) would be morally obligated to give its creation certain desires that would end in it disobeying or making evil choices as long as said creator didn’t have nefarious intentions in mind. Every person that’s ever lived has desires that they can’t fulfill because of the nature of reality and biology but I don’t think very many people would call that a free will violation. I desire to have the powers of Superman and live forever. Other people have the desire to fly, talk to animals, time travel, bench press mountains, talk to dead relatives, etc. Is my free will (and everyone else’s) being violated because I wasn’t given the ability to fulfill said desires in this life by a theoretical deity?

2

If I give rats a valid maze, with a clear and unblocked route to cheese then there’s an argument that they’ve got their shot and any failure to make it is on them. There’s also the argument that I could have just put the cheese in their feeding bowl and saved everyone’s time.

In the Christian view, questioning God’s motivation doesn’t factor into it, so you’re only left with the option that the rat’s the one in the wrong for failing the mission.

But, likewise, in (some) Christian views, part of running the maze successfully relies on never questioning God. So while we might reasonably question the whole setup, you’re automatically dooming yourself to a bad ending by doing so.

It’s like questioning the psychopath who’s got a knife out and barbecue fired up, ready to start carving pieces of meat out of you. If he’s telling you that if you make lots of babies with Marge over there, while he watches, then you’ll both go free and live long and healthy lives; or that you question him, and he’ll turn you into BBQ… Maybe, playing his game is the winning move where you escape and live happily with Marge. Maybe, questioning the game and coming up with an escape strategy is the winning move.

Ultimately, it’s less a question of morality and philosophy, so much as it’s a simple gamble over which is the better strategy for your own sake.

3

Traditional Judeo-Christian theology did a poor job of explaining Good and Evil, except that they exist in competition with each other. But that simplicity doesn’t explain why people are capable of doing both. Does God want us to do evil? Does God make us do evil? Of course, a just and loving God would never want or make us do evil.

And yet, people do evil. The explanation must be that God allows us to choose our actions and suffer the consequences of our decisions, Hence, the doctrine of free will.

In the last several decades, more theologians have begun exploring Eastern philosophies of the good/evil duality of humans. But until someone comes up with the theological equivalent of a Unified Field Theory, we’re left with the paradox of an all-powerful, all-loving God who nevertheless made humans capable of doing evil.

4

I mean, if you want to get into the history of the construction of the Bible, my take would be that the “God of Love” angle came from St Paul, and his group pushed that angle. But the Jewish cohort - Jesus’ disciples - were adherents of the traditional “thunder and lightning” view of God.

On Paul’s side, you had people like Marcion who felt that the Old Testament was completely antithetical and wrong to the new religion, and advocated to keep only Paul’s writing and other products of the gentile contingent.

On the other side, you had people like Cerinthus who fought against Paul’s Church in Turkey and advocated for a purely Jewish interpretation.

The documents that we have are (again, in my read) the product of the compromises and conflicts between different groups, with different goals.

In theory, that process might have converged on some unified, slimmed down, and coherent vision. In practice, I’d view that it really didn’t. They just globbed most of everything together, and left it to posterity to figure out what the correct answer was.

5

I don’t believe that free will is a coherent concept in the first place.

That being said, as for being designed without a desire affecting your ability to make a choice it’s questionable either way. On the one hand, having a desire also affects your ability to make a choice; controlling dangerous or immoral desires is an issue for everyone. On the other hand, if you create a slave without the wish for freedom, it’s rather to absurd to argue that their ability to choose hasn’t been taken away.

I don’t think there’s really a good answer, the concept of making a free choice kind of implicitly assumes that your psychology wasn’t desired by someone else to fulfill their purposes. Throwing a omniscient/omnipotent creator god into the mix makes it doubtful that concepts like freedom have any meaning in the first place.

6

True. This is why I added the nefarious intentions part. Most people would recognize it would be wrong to create something that had no issue with or enjoyed any number of horrible things you did to it. I don’t think the same applies to making a being that would never desire to murder or rape someone because we recognize those as wrong and things the world would clearly be better off without. Even more so if you know your creation is going to become so depraved and evil that you kill virtually all of them as punishment (Noah’s flood). Why make something with desires you allowed it to have just to punish it for acting on said desires it couldn’t help but have when you could simply not give them those desires? People would clearly recognize it as wrong if I gave a sentient robot the desire to kill and rape (or the capability to have said desires) but not when it’s an omnipotent being creating flesh and blood people.

7

Because he made man in his (our?) image. There were holy angels and fallen angels, so the choice of good and evil was part of the plan. It set man as separate from the animals.

8

“Free Will” is what separates us from, essentially, “wind up toys” that are programmed to do certain things but not others things. In other words, we can decide whether or not we want to love, nurture, and educate children or whether or not we want to walk into a school and slaughter them with an assault rifle. I believe that comes with being intelligent enough to be self-aware, thinking creatures. It is what gives us the ability to create the wonders of the world or to destroy our civilization. It is what makes us great and what also makes us horrific. It is what produced Isaac Newton and Einstein, and what also produced Adolph Hitler and Stalin.

9

Sometimes I feel like humanity is a runaway science fair experiment created by a teenage god……

10

He should have learned His lesson the first time.

(As Larson later wrote, “I felt like I was tempting Him to turn me into something resembling that kid.”)

11

Most people could not walk into school to slaughter kids. To use those who argue for objective morality’s favorite example, neither could we torture babies for fun. They always include “for fun” since God tortures babies all the time, but since it is not for fun it must be okay.

Yet those of us who cannot do such heinous things have free will to the extent that the idea is coherent. There is plenty of choices we can and do make. Would God decrease free will by not making anyone with the ability to commit horrendous acts? The could get their evil jollies from jaywalking or not returning library books.

So my answer to the OP’s question is no. And for god, either he is evil or he isn’t good at doing the real. I’ll take the second option. Our genetic diversity and cultural diversity explains evil quite well.

12

This is a worthwhile distinction. Growing up Jewish, the emphasis was much more on the “obey” the commandments rather that a more general definition of good. Plus, of course, inclusion. We’re the chosen people after all, though not frequently to our benefit. To me, the most perfect approximation of the Jewish population with God is Moses wheedling and bargaining with God after the Golden Calf’s creation.

God was pretty pissed, insulting, and petty, and yet was willing to be talked around with an appeal to the promises made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob/Israel. For me, when I was religious at all (I’ve been Reform/Secular all my life), God wasn’t all-loving, but very much a stern parent who brooked no fuss. It’s not about the afterlife, if you break the rules, he was going to punish you immediately.

Or, quoting CKDextHavn from an old staff column:

Belief is almost irrelevant to Judaism. Abraham is not told to BELIEVE in God, but to walk with God. What is important to Judaism is action, not belief. Doing the right things for the wrong reasons is viewed as sinful (or at best, ambiguous) in Christianity; but in Judaism, doing the right things for the wrong reasons still means you’ve done the right things. Thus, being Jewish is not about believing in God, but about doing the right things. (I decline to get into the discussion of what the “right” things are, since different sects of Judaism have different thoughts on this issue.)

Thus you may have free will (though a thousand Talmudic scholar’s may fight over definitions), it is important insofar as you choose to follow the rules/obey. You can choose NOT to follow the rules (back to the Golden Calf) and you will face the consequences. We existed as humans for quite a while before the commandments we bestowed upon us - and exercised our own wills to that point, though even then, if God felt you were pissing him off, well, punishments abounded.

I think if we take the OP’s discussion of free will in Adam and Eve as “accurate” for the purpose of discussion, then there’s no problem or contradiction as long as you DON’T assume omnibenevolence. Because if God is omniscient and omnipotent, but NOT omnibenevolent, then it’s easy to reason that God knew we could, and would break the rules, and had the power to remove the temptation or desire, but CHOSE not too.

That (IMHO) tends to make God childish, cruel, and vindictive. So, yeah, that’s why I’m a Secular Jew. There are plenty of powerful humans with a great deal of knowledge and wealth at their fingertips that actively make things worse for other people because they want to. And we are made in his image after all.

13

I want to add that if it’s okay for a person’s worst desires to be removed when they’re in Heaven then why would it be wrong if God created Adam and Eve without seriously immoral desires? Why is it okay to remove something from an already existent person but not okay to do the same to a person you’re actively creating?

14

I think your assumption is faulty. As the story goes, Lucifer was cast out of heaven because of his “worst desires”. In fact, the phrase “fallen angel” is often used in reference to him.

15

The free will defence doesn’t remove god’s culpability because eating the fruit was how Adam and Eve supposedly realized that it was wrong to disobey god: it was the tree of knowledge of good and evil. So really it is exactly like leaving a baby in a room of razor blades and boiling-over fondue pots, and then just saying “free will” when it hurts itself for reasons it could not have understood.

And in answer to the OP, the Christian has to believe that a safe world with limited desires is possible because that’s what’s claimed about heaven. We supposedly have free will there, and yet no great harm comes to us there, so such a world has to be possible. God could have just set us up in heaven from day 1.

NB: I don’t think the concept of “free will” even makes coherent sense, but I’ve espoused this at length in many threads, so I will just mention it here as an FYI and leave it there.

16

Yeah, what’s the point of a lifetime that’s essentially infinitesimal compared to an eternity in Heaven or Hell? Just put us where He knows we’ll end up, or just start us all in Heaven.

Adam & Eve had no knowledge of good and evil, so how could they know it was bad to disobey God’s orders anyway, since they didn’t know what “bad” was?

17

You’re right but angels are fundamentally different beings than humans and as far as I know in the Bible no human in Heaven has rebelled or tried to sin so this makes me think they’re genuinely unable to by virtue of being in Heaven as a soul. I don’t think this is a free will violation though.

18

Yeah, it would be so totally rad to have wings! :upside_down_face:

19

Yes, all this exactly. You can’t have free will if you’re denied the knowledge of good and evil. God was essentially setting Adam and Eve up for failure. It’s like a con man depending on his marks to give in to temptation. God shrugs his shoulders and says “hey, I gave them a choice-- it’s not my fault they failed and sinned”. There’s a book of short stories I read as a kid called Because it is Absurd which was written by Pierre Boulle, the author who also wrote the 1963 novel La Planète des singes, which the series of ‘Planet of the Apes’ movies were originally based on.

One of the BiiA stories was a deconstruction of the ‘Adam and Eve’ story. It’s been a long time, but the gist is that God repeated the ‘Adam and Eve’ experiment on billions of Earths, and every time A&E succumbed to temptation-- except for something like the 9 billionth time, where Adam and Eve defied the serpent and did not partake of the forbidden fruit. The serpent (who was working a tag-team con job with God) said to God “we got a problem-- Eve turned me down, and you promised A&E and their progeny eternal life if they obeyed, and you also told them to be fruitful and multiply. Earth #9 billion is going to be overrun with immortals in a short span of generations if we don’t get them to eat that fruit”. So God essentially had to trick them into eating the fruit somehow (I don’t remember the exact ending).

And I agree that the concept of 'free will" is essentially an illusion. Our decisions are wholly or at least largely shaped by our genetics and how we’re raised-- the basic ‘nature and nurture’. Brain scans have shown that our unconscious mind has already made decisions before our conscious mind even is aware of making them. Even very basic, simple choices, like “will I have eggs or pancakes for breakfast?” might just be a matter of what our bodies need more in the moment, protein or carbs.

20

That argument presumes that it is OK for somebody to have their mind forcibly modified like that. The idea that everyone essentially gets turned into a God-zombie is one reason I lost interest in the Christian idea of Heaven.