God's Interaction as Invalidating the Free Will Theodicy
Two thousand years ago, before he took a very long holiday indeed, God was often meddling in his own creation, interacting with people, seemingly on a whim. Nowadays, not so much. However, I want to quickly look at this idea of God interacting with the world.
The problem of evil is the idea that if OmniGod has all of his typical attributes, then why is there still so much suffering. Theodicies are explanations of why this might be. One of the most prominent theodicies is the free will theodicy. As a syllogism, this might look like:
- Libertarian free will (LFW) is necessary for the moral dimension and judgement of humans
- Therefore, God created humans (either by desire or necessity) with LFW
- The necessary by-product of LFW is evil (badness)
- Suffering is at least in part explained by humans having LFW
Now, I deny LFW is even coherent, and that we do not have it. But most Christians assert that it exists so that God can judge us to heaven or hell. With regard to (3), it is not at all obvious that evil is a necessary by-product of free will. One can imagine a set of people who could just happen to choose positively the whole time, yet still freely. It is not logically impossible despite how improbable. But let's park that.
My short point today is that if free will is that important, if it is so necessary that humans have it, why are we consistently punished for using it in ways that we want to, and every time God interacts in the world he is mitigating it.
There are two parts to this, then.
A) Well, this meme really says it all:
God's demands and expectations on humanity are a prima facie invalidation of the concept of free will.
B) Every interaction from the obvious (Jesus proving to Doubting Thomas that he is real as a resurrected entity, Yahweh doing any number of crazy things) to the less obvious (any answering of prayer, any seemingly imperceptible interaction) is messing around with the whole process of allowing humans to freely exercise their causal power. If God knows the outcomes of these interactions, then all God is doing is creating a play and writing the script, and letting those dominos fall in exactly the way he wants. If it starts going off script (if that is even possible) then he acts like a director, moving actors about and shouting directions at the cast. This is an even more prescriptive version of the above meme. Rather than just threatening people with heaven or hell if they don't use their free will as directed, God actually meddles causally and physically in the universe so that certain eventualities come about and free will is curtailed.
In sum, I am very suspicious of the free will theodicy with the proposed reality of an interfering god who, every time they interfere, curtails free will.
It is also worth noting that the free will is not only curtailed at the point of interacting, but in some sense in every interaction further on from any given meddle.