God and Free Will

 There are certain questions of a theological nature that I and others in my small circle of fellow bloggers disagree on. For instance, reincarnation which I believe in though I do not say that it necessarily applies to everyone. It is quite possible that different means of growth are used for different groups of souls. Speaking for myself, I am glad these disagreements exist as they make me think. They open up areas that I may not have considered sufficiently before and make me look at areas I have considered afresh. Who wants to be stuck in an echo chamber with no chance of growth or development? Not me. On the other hand, we do share basic principles such as the belief in God, in Jesus Christ as saviour, the  need to see the world as a creation which has opportunities for spiritual growth and the reality of evil which operates in a particularly devious way at the present time. That also is important. We may differ in externals but agree on fundamentals.

One of the differences which has been explored recently in posts by Bruce Charlton here and here and by William James Tychonievich here is to do with the apparent conflict between an omnipotent God and the reality of free will. If you have not already done so you will have to read their pieces to get the full extent of their thoughts on this but a crude summing up would be how can what God creates go against God? Or if God is both omnipotent and good how does evil arise? These are important questions and cannot be ignored by any spiritually concerned person. Well, perhaps they can as a simple sincere childlike faith is enough to get anyone to heaven but a thoughtful person will want to consider them.

I personally see no conflict on the spiritual level between God being the author of everything and us having complete free will. I don't see why God, that's God as God and not some kind of demiurge within an already existing reality, cannot create lots of potential little gods out of himself which then, to become actual gods, have to develop themselves which they do through their experiences in the various worlds of being and becoming, worlds of choice, of duality, of testing and of self-expression. Christians say God creates out of nothing and as he is God he can do that. That's what being God means. He is both a spiritual being and spiritual being itself, the personal Creator but also unmanifest reality. I would put this in a slightly different way and say that God creates out of himself. So, we are created out of God and in his image which means with free will. The possibility of evil arises because otherwise we would not be able voluntarily to turn to the good. That still does not answer why beings should turn to evil or why they should oppose God and creation but if free will really is free then this is always a possibility. The created want to be the creator. The fact of a free self might make some look for freedom outside God instead of within him though that just means they have become the slaves of their own egos. The doctrine of the Fall helps explain why evil arose in human terms and why both this world and human nature were corrupted to the extent that it needed the Incarnation to help put them right. However, I accept that the mystery of evil is not solved by this. It is simply pushed back into the spiritual world where first  it appeared. Consequently, we could surmise that evil is the unfortunate corollary of freedom and perhaps also of love.

As for why God does not directly create the perfect gods he wants us to become without taking the risk that we might go bad, the answer surely is that if he did that then we wouldn't be gods in our own right. We would just be clones of him. We effectively have to make ourselves gods from the raw material he gives us. You might say that if this raw material comes from him it should be him and so should not have the capacity for evil or to go wrong but that is to misunderstand the very nature of free will. If it really is free then it will have the capacity to go wrong. The idea of evil is built into the possibility of knowing the good. 

I must admit that I am constructing arguments here that support my intuitions and it is they that come first. My intuition is that God is the One without a second and that all things in heaven and earth derive from him. But free will is fundamental too. These are just basic principles for me and I am not particularly bothered if there are difficulties in reconciling them as long as there are not glaring disparities and I don't think there are.