C.S. Lewis > Quotes > Quotable Quote
“God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong, but I can’t. If a thing is free to be good it’s also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata -of creatures that worked like machines- would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they’ve got to be free.
― C.S. Lewis, The Case for Christianity
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
The argument from free will (also called the paradox of free will, or theological fatalism) contends that omniscience and free will are incompatible, and that any conception of God that incorporates both properties is therefore inherently contradictory.[1][2][3] The argument may focus on the incoherence of people having free will, or else God himself having free will. These arguments are deeply concerned with the implications of predestination, and often seem to echo the dilemma of determinism.
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Omniscience and free will
If God made the game, its rules, and the players, then how can any player be free?
Some arguments against God focus on the supposed incoherence of humankind possessing free will. These arguments are deeply concerned with the implications of predestination.
Moses Maimonides formulated an argument regarding a person’s free will, in traditional terms of good and evil actions, as follows:[4]
… “Does God know or does He not know that a certain individual will be good or bad? If thou sayest ‘He knows’, then it necessarily follows that [that] man is compelled to act as God knew beforehand he would act, otherwise God’s knowledge would be imperfect.…”[5]
Various means of reconciling God’s omniscience (possession of all possible knowledge) with human free will have been proposed:
Counters reconceptualizing free will
- God can know in advance what I will do, because free will is to be understood only as freedom from coercion, and anything further is an illusion. This is the move made by compatibilistic philosophies.
- The sovereignty (autonomy) of God, existing within a free agent,[6] provides strong inner compulsions toward a course of action (calling), and the power of choice (election).[7] The actions of a human are thus determined by a human acting on relatively strong or weak urges (both from God and the environment around them) and their own relative power to choose.[8]
- Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada has stated that man does have limited free will; he can decide whether or not to surrender to the will of Krishna. All other material happenings and their implications are inconceivably predestined.
Counters reconceptualizing omniscience
- Molinism argues that God not only knows the singular outcomes of all our future free choices, but also knows what singular free choices would have eventuated in any possible circumstance. Truths of the latter sort are called “counterfactuals of freedom,” and God’s knowledge thereof is referred to as his “middle knowledge.” This view holds an Ockhamist conception of foreknowlege, in which there are singular truths about what inevitably happens in the future despite the plurality of future contingents which may and may not come to pass. Molinsts say that such foreknowlege can’t determine such outcomes, because that’s not the kind of thing foreknowledge can do.
- Compatablistic Calvinism re-defines a free act as one that is done in accordance with one’s desires. While this view avoids incoherence, it is arguable that this is the kind of freedom Theists are concerned to reconcile with divine foreknowledge.
- Open Theism holds that future free decisions are known under the category of possibility, which is their true nature. The problem of freedom and foreknowledge therefore, is due to the traditional theologies of libertarian freedom positing gratuitous knowledge on God’s part, which overextends God’s settled knowledge to the realm of unsettled possibilities.
“God is outside of time”
A proposition first offered by Boethius[9] and later by Thomas Aquinas[10] and C. S. Lewis, suggests that God’s perception of time is different, and that this is relevant to our understanding of our own free will. In his book Mere Christianity, Lewis argues that God is actually outside of time and therefore does not “foresee” events, but rather simply observes them all at once. He explains:
But suppose God is outside and above the Time-line. In that case, what we call “tomorrow” is visible to Him in just the same way as what we call today.” All the days are “Now” for Him. He does not remember you doing things yesterday, He simply sees you doing them: because, though you have lost yesterday, He has not. He does not “foresee” you doing things tomorrow, He simply sees you doing them: because, though tomorrow is not yet there for you, it is for Him. You never supposed that your actions at this moment were any less free because God knows what you are doing. Well, He knows your tomorrow’s actions in just the same way—because He is already in tomorrow and can simply watch you. In a sense, He does not know your action till you have done it: but then the moment at which you have done it is already “Now” for Him.[11]
An obvious criticism of God being outside of time is that this does not seem to grant free will. Predestination, regardless of how God perceives time, still seems to mean a person’s actions will be determined. A logical formulation of this criticism might go as follows:[2]
- God timelessly knows choice “C” that a human would claim to “make freely”.
- If C is in the timeless realm, then it is now-necessary that C.
- If it is now-necessary that C, then C cannot be otherwise (this is the definition of “necessary”). That is, there are no actual “possibilities” due to predestination.
- If you cannot do otherwise when you act, you do not act freely (Principle of Alternate Possibilities)
- Therefore, when you do an act, you will not do it freely.
God’s free will
Dan Barker suggests that this can lead to a “Freewill Argument for the Nonexistence of God” [12] on the grounds that God’s omniscience is incompatible with God having freewill and that if God does not have freewill God is not a personal being.
Theists generally agree that God is a personal being and that God is omniscient[13] but there is some disagreement about whether “omniscient” means:
- “knows everything that God chooses to know and that is logically possible to know”; Or instead the slightly stronger:
- “knows everything that is logically possible to know”[14]
If omniscient is used in the first sense then the argument’s applicability depends on what God chooses to know, and therefore it is not a complete argument against the existence of God. In both cases the argument depends on the assumption that it is logically possible for God to know every choice that he will make in advance of making that choice.
The compatibilist school of thought holds that free will is compatible with determinism and fatalism and therefore does not accept the assumptions of Barker’s argument.
Faith and the Intuitive Arts 