God and His creation working together

As we saw in last week’s article, in its simplest terms free will is quite easy to understand, but it can become more involved as we peel off the accretive layers, for we have been trying to reconcile two, what are to some people, seemingly divergent facts; 1) that God gave us free will and left us in control of our own destiny, and 2) that God created a purposeful universe and is in control of everything.

 

This duality of human freedom and Divine sovereignty is perhaps the most exciting thing that created beings can imagine, and as we saw last week, any cold feelings towards such a reality implies a lack of understanding of what is really happening. The part of time in which we are fixed tells us nothing about external events controlled by the timeless Creator; thus if God was quite happy for His preordained plan to unfold in a way that made the future unpredictable to all creatures within the interlocking system of time and space, we should rejoice both in the freedom and in the Divine guidance. 

 

We have seen that in a deterministic universe, chance simply means the negative to a deterministic positive, so it is not really chance at all. And yet, those who argue against determinism are arguing injudiciously, after all a spinning coin is bound to fall, so there are at least some deterministic things in creation. But notice that if we admit to living in a deterministic world, we must also admit that we live in a world in which we have to constantly make regrettable decisions. Hardly a day goes by in which we do not wish we had made a different decision or said a different thing. If chance is true then nothing, however big or substantial, can have any control over the destiny of the whole. In stating this I am not arguing that chance in its strictest form does actually exist, for if I believe in God I must believe in some actions of free thinking and some of predestination, even if both are beyond the understanding of man. It only becomes chance by the fact that we do not understand the destiny of something.  We can only agree that it seems like a world of chance sometimes - but of course, things are not always what they seem, and chance is ‘never’ what it seems. 

 

We can state that God does exist, but still concede that this world sometimes seems quite random. If it can seem like this for the foregoing example why are we surprised that it seems like this for other examples? As we have already seen in last week’s article, it is easy to see how both free will and God’s predetermined world can exist. If I spin a coin, God knows which side it will land on before the thought of spinning it came into my head, but I do not know until I see the outcome. But my anticipation of the outcome is not spoiled by the fact that God knows the outcome. 

 

There is another way in which the concept of not-knowing can be interesting to us. If I have a friend who works every other day in a bank, I might one day, after several months of not seeing him, go into the bank to see if he is there available for lunch. Having no idea if he is at work on the same that I am in the city, I could easily conclude that I have a 50-50 chance of stepping in the bank and seeing him there. But the truth is that I either have a 0% chance (if the day I step in is one of his days off) or a 100% chance (if the day I step in is one of his working days). It is not very accurate to say that my not knowing beforehand makes it a 50-50 chance. There is a difference between chance and unawareness.

 

Here is another example. Let us say that A decided to murder B. Even a man who did not believe in God should if he is thinking carefully concede that right from the beginning the laws of nature had conditioned that that act was going to occur, for if we imagine a scenario where it did not happen we are therefore imagining a different universe with a different set of laws. For some of you the objection may be that that was just one bad decision made on one bad day by one bad man, and that the laws of nature would only differ insofar as the act itself differed if A had chosen not to murder B. But surely a moment’s thought shows this to be irrational. To apply this kind of logic to one situation you would have to apply it to every situation, and then you would find that there could be billions of alternatives that would have impinged upon the overall outcome. 

 

But to admit to this, we are admitting that every decision is capable of being pre-empted or altered in advance, yet we know this is not how the universe works at all, particularly at an emotional level where we do not consciously control all of our emotions. If we feel the desire to laugh or cry, if the emotion of jealousy, guilt, or sadness comes across, it is something over which we have little or no control. No man can stop himself feeling envious, if the feeling of envy is about to come across him. And if we are to admit that A murdering B was called for by the rest of the cosmos, we are believing that no other event or outcome would have been consistent with the sense of the whole. This smacks of a reality that has a lot more worth considering than its apparent unremitting course suggests - or at least, that is the viewpoint held by most Christians, to some extent, justifiably so. 

 

Regarding the foregoing situation, this is what the sensible scientifically minded Christian usually has to say about it after he has considered all of the above. It goes roughly as follows: determinism denies that anything else but the murder can occur, yet here we are saying that the thing ought not to have happened. If we say that we will act as we please simply because, in universal terms, what will be will be, we will find ourselves in the midst of anarchy, therefore it seems that an a priori feature of existence is the standard by which we judge it. Is the murder simply a vicious part of a vicious whole, or is it a vicious part of a good whole, or is it a vicious part of a neutral whole? Perhaps the safest assumption for the naturalist is that it is a vicious part of a random whole, and that our moral judgements are simply the end result of a long and hostile evolutionary process in the ‘tooth and claw’ realities of natural selection, survival and altruism. But that only explains the mechanism through which our moral sense occurred.

 

Having elicited a standard the Christian then goes on to say: but if this is so, we have a problem, for the universe, being governed by immutable laws, was bound to produce these moral judgements. Should we then concede that it is just like the bank clerk situation, only ‘chance’ in our own minds, and that the laws of nature were bound to throw up some viciousness among its trajectory? But that is not at all satisfactory either; it implies a universe very unlike the one we observe before us. The commonality of man is not at all consistent with such arbitrariness. If we cannot regret the murder alone (because we are forced to regret the whole cosmological laws) then we have to abandon regret altogether. Having said all that, the Christian will then usually say that if we abandon regret altogether, we are then forced to admit that feeding the hungry is no better than murder, and helping an old lady who has fallen over is no better than stealing from a shopkeeper. But of course, we can never think this way and that is because we cannot imagine what it would be like to abandon all thoughts of right and wrong. 

 

And this brings the Christian to the next question; why have we got such an indignant attitude towards wrongdoing if we come from a universe that was bound to permit it? Although I can concur with most of the standard Christian arguments in the above section, I would not endorse them in this type of discussion, nor would I confer approbation by assenting to this line of argument myself - and in the next section I will explain why. 

Having established how God-kindled free will and determinism are harmonious (at least theoretically), the question about where we got our morals from is a contentious one, particularly if it is put forward using the standard Christian argument above. The naturalist argues that our moral awareness is something that came about over a long evolutionary process and needed no Absolute moral law to bootstrap it, and the sensible scientifically-minded Christian says that our moral awareness is something that came about over a long evolutionary process but that there is an Absolute moral law which comes from God. Naturally, being a Christian, I think the second contention is right - there is an Absolute moral law, and our evolution has slowly brought us closer to greater awareness of that Absolute moral law - or perhaps more accurately, awareness of how that knowledge can be applied to human living. Obviously we as humans are progressing towards greater moral rectitude – this is very obvious when one looks at the past few thousand years.   That was never in dispute; but one must admit that if God is the ultimate embodiment of ‘good’ then the moral law has always been a fixed thing. 

 

Given the foregoing, the debate about morality is only a secondary debate under the primary question of whether God exists or not. The reason I say that morality is a secondary question behind the question of whether God exists or not is because, having brought to your attention one particular caveat regarding the standard Christian view of morality, I want to bring to your attention one particular caveat regarding discussions with naturalists about morality. One must always see the wider framework when it comes to discussing things about nature and God’s existence. This is why the fullness of the cosmic blueprint is so important, for it contains all the subsystems and informational nexus for everything that we see in nature; therefore one must not zoom in on things within nature and expect that an absence of palpable intentionality is a good reason for supporting a naturalistic viewpoint. 

 

The issue of morality is a particularly pertinent one here as morality is for me much like probability, bound up in knowledge, and it is obvious that things we can never know for sure often produce a stalemate. As probability is about knowledge, then our limitations of knowledge on this one means that ‘origin of morality’ remains a ‘subjective’ phenomenon. I will show you why I think there is a compulsory limitation on human endeavour regarding origin of morality.

 

If we apply the same argument to Absolute morality as we do to randomness and probability, we can see that Absolute morality is not a fact or law or regulation or event or circumstance on which we can zoom in or frame in a wider empirical context with the hope of demonstrating where its origin rests - the origin of morality is something that we will never have enough knowledge to be certain about. There is a good prima facie case to be made that the moral law is indelibly stamped on the hearts of every single person that has ever lived - that is, selfhood has with it an a priori awareness of what is right and wrong, but we are on dangerous ground if we use that as an argument in favour of an Absolute moral law (I think the argument is a sound one, just not very effective in the normative empirical conditions under which morality is usually discussed). 

 

But perhaps it is better if I put it like this. If Absolute morality is from God it will still appear to us in its contextual form. That is to say, in the epistemological sense, given that it was developed and crystallised by our physical organisms though a long evolutionary process we can only get a cognitive purchase on it at a low-resolution level. But this tells us merely the institution, not the provenance - and however much we try to assess morality within the context of our gradual evolution we are never going to demonstrate empirically that it came from God or that there is an Absolute moral standard. If God exists then it is perfectly logical and sensible to believe that He is the originator of morality, and I believe that when one knows God he or she begins to see the moral imperative much more clearly, it is henceforward seen as an immutable given, just like love and reason and, of course, God Himself. 

 

Moreover, if you trawl though the annals of time and study history, geography, anthropology, and the various civilisations from the multitude of countries around the world, you will not find very much difference in views about a moral standard - you will find the same acknowledgements of the good of love and kindness and charity, and the same repudiations of murder, violence and dispossession. Of course there may have been variances in action and behaviour - but there is no question that since God put Himself into man (Genesis 2:7) we have always known about right and wrong, and sensed the immutable moral standard wherever we have been. But as we have seen from the above arguments, it is unwise to argue that our sense of an Absolute moral standard provides evidence that Christianity is true. It does not; it usually produces an insuperable stalemate.

God gave us freedom to make choices (both good and bad) because He did not yet wish for us to be in the Heavenly realm until we had learned how to receive the grace that will bring us there. He has given us the gift of independent living, not in a state of complete separation, but in a state where we can experience the joy of knowing Him more and more each day by assenting to His will. The gift of life that God has fashioned for us in this material universe gives us a wonderful blessing, while all the time hinting of something better to come. He made the universe both predictable and unpredictable; He gave us enough so that we could understand it, but kept enough concealed so that we could not know it all. 

 

You can see the brilliance of God in the whole plan of creation. He created the laws which He could sustain (a bit like designing the cosmic blueprint for a grand novel and turning its pages). Matter allows both for the free will of mankind and for the sustenance of God; thus we have a future ahead of us in which we can make free choices, we can shape our own destiny which will all the time be in accordance with His plan for us. It is a beautiful and quite awesome method of creation. 

 

One they had been started by God, the laws of physics were clearly sufficient to set in motion a chain of events that would eventuate in life. That is why we should not be worried by the fact that humans, animals and plants all seem to originate from one common ancestor (or a few ancestors), the first example of mutation and self-replication. This is the next brilliant part of creation - the perfect continuity between predictability and unpredictability leaves plenty of room for all life to have originated from one source, and that one source to have originated from another source - the laws themselves. I do not mean that the initial singularity which gave rise to the universe had within it every part of what would be the whole creation. I mean that the very law of creation contained enough predictability (established material) and enough unpredictability (unestablished material) to give rise to the whole interlocking system, in which God could cover every eventuality He wanted to cover in the original cosmic blueprint.

 

When it comes to the bigger picture of salvation, perhaps for some of us, salvation will only come when we have tried everything else. But when it does come it will explain in one miraculous illumination all other phenomena; it will explain our need for Him in the first place and then, as we grow in Christ, it will show us all that we will be blessed by having the Holy Spirit inside of us. All this contemplation started with our own freedom - our freedom to make both good choices and bad. The question as to whether we have free will might only be answered in part, for we cannot know about unknowables, and there are plenty of them in the creation. But there is one thing we know for sure. Our freedom permits us to begin our journey of discovery, and it will, along the way, show us that each and every decision was purposeful, it hinted at purpose in a seemingly purposeless nature. But if we look beyond nature, if we look for a purpose, both in nature herself and in our own hearts and minds, we shall find Christ is ready to saturate our hearts and minds with Divine love and Divine grace. We shall find that the spirit of Christ, upon entering us, is able to transform us into a new creation, one that will grow in Godly wisdom and eventually in Heavenly glory. That is what the story has been about all along. We were created to know God and to be with Him in Heaven. Nature is the scenery, it is the medium by which God reveals to us His biggest glory - His Son Jesus Christ through whom we ourselves can be part of the miraculous.