I’m reading The Brother’s Karamazov so I’m thinking a lot
about the classic arguments for and against God. Nothing new here really, but I
think I cover a lot of the poor solutions to the usual questions about why God
acts like He does. I start with “free will” and cover not only the objections to
it, but the objections to the objections.
Free will, as used by a believer in God to explain why God
doesn’t simply show Himself and clear up all the confusion, does not work as a
solution to that confusion. It explains why we experience having a choice to
love God or not but only by matching up the explanation to the experience, not
by examining where that experience might have come from or what other purposes
it might serve. This makes the explanation no better than Rudyard Kipling’s
story of how the leopard got his spots. The failure of the explanation can be
found by attempting to understand God’s mercy and looking at His track record
of justice here on earth.
If God is perfectly merciful, if all sins will be forgiven,
then He can’t tell us. If He does, he has no way to mete out justice, he can no
longer threaten punishment for sin. To be perfectly just, he must at some point
decide that a sinner’s free will must be restricted, that they have lost their
right to choose for themselves. Even if only some sins under certain conditions
are forgiven, we can’t be told what those conditions are, because then we would
just meet them, knowing we could get away with the sin.
If God is only postponing the punishment until after life,
that is no more merciful than punishing us while we are here. Depending on how
long after life the punishment lasts, it could be less merciful. Acts of
justice and mercy by living people are not usurpations of God, they are
attempts to guess what he is thinking, knowing that He can’t tell us. Most
traditions say we can’t fully know the mind of God.
If we don’t have a clear statement of what is a sin and what
the punishment is there can’t be justice. People have put their full faith in
the hands of religious leaders to interpret justice and they have had that
trust broken time and again. If no exceptions are allowed to the system of
justice, there can be no mercy. God is either merciless or powerless.
Regardless of how much power he actually has, he can’t wield
it in any way that makes a difference in our lives. If he did, we would come to
know him through time as we experienced those differences. This leads us back
to those who claim they do know God and know what is just. Anyone can make a claim,
but they must demonstrate their knowledge leads to a world where sinners are
met with justice and forgiveness is given when it is warranted and that their
claims match whatever historical documentation they are claiming as their
source.
The free will answer to Euthyphro’s dilemma leaves us in the
position of making decisions for justice and mercy based on our knowledge of
the world and our ability to reason. If that knowledge and ability is given to
us by God, so be it. Our use of it ends up with the same result as a natural
world that doesn’t seem to care about justice or mercy. Free will as defined by
religion looks exactly like consciousness as defined by evolution.
