Is free will only the first part? My 1st Religious Thread

Great Debates
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I was asked by the kids, why does God let bad things happen? My answer was of course the standard response…Free will and choice. God doesn’t let bad things happen, he allows us the ability to make rational choices. Children starve in Africa, not because God doesn’t care, but because he’s given us the ability to fix the problem. If we choose not to, well that’s our problem…our choice.

Of course was asked, why should the children starve if we can’t get our act together, why should innocents have to suffer? I mumbled something about the ‘next life’ and quickly turned on the TV set, and started tossing them cookies.

Well, Spider-Man Unlimited was on, you know the one where Spider-Man leaves Earth and ends up on Counter-Earth. Counter-Earth is a duplicate of Earth, but on the opposite side of the Sun. It is ruled by the High Evolutionary, a master genetist, who creates a race of beast-men; evolved animals. I remember reading a comic, maybe 20-25 years ago, where the High Evolutionary, evolved himself like into a God in the hopes of solving of his world’s problem with a wave of his hand…but something went wrong.

He found that in this God-like state, his humanity was fading…he no longer had any passion… he no longer cared. Once he obtained ultimate power, the drive that caused him to leave earth, to create this new race…was no more. He was impotent, most of his energy being used just keep his consciousness together; forcing him to leave the world to their own devices. Despite their evolution, the beast-men were still beasts at heart and began to destroy one another. His disappeareance only accelerated the problems.

Now for my question, I wonder if the mantra of “free will” , that we constantly harp upon as God’s Gift, isn’t really just an excuse to explain God’s inability to help us…because he can’t.

Because either, he’s used up all of his energy creating the universe or he’s disconnected himeself from emotion. As absolute power corrupts, what would happen to humanity, if God decided he didn’t like what we were doing? When the slightest stray thought of anger could instantly result in destruction. How do you control such things, yeah, yeah God is all powerful…but passion is passion. So maybe he turned himself “off”.

I mean, what about those starving children…? Why not end the famine? What’s the point of having power, if you won’t use it…unless of course you can’t.

Comments?

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One of the BIG problems about talking about God is that we’re talking about absolutes.

For instance, God is said to have “absolute free will.” He can do anything he wants, any time, with no limitations. This means that God is absolutely satisfied with things exactly as they are; if not, he’d change them.

And that means that God is absolutely satisfied with starving children, etc. He looks upon our pain, and, as it says in Genesis, “Saw that it was good.”

The standard response from classical Christianity is that God is so far above us, farther than we are above mice, that we can’t perceive his purposes and intents, and his will is, to us, a mystery.

My standard response is that, if this is so, then he is no longer a moral being. Morality has as little to do with such a monster as it has to do with gravity or radiation.

Most of us, if given a mouse to take care of, would feed it, make sure it was warm, and take it to a vet if it got sick; who among us would command it, “Of the raisins, thou may eat, but of the carrots, thou may not eat,” and then, when it eats the carrots, pick it up out of its cage and throw it in the fireplace?

If God gave us Free Will…but did not deign to communicate the true consequences of following it (and the story, in Genesis, shows God really, really flubbing the business of giving instructions!) then his “morality” is as alien to us as ours must seem to the poor laboratory mouse who is made to grow a human ear along its ribcage.

Trinopus