Volume-2: God and Free Will

More than the question of whether God exists, I am more piqued by the implications of the acceptance of God’s existence, the most interesting one being “Can the concept of God and free-will co-exist?” In this volume, I choose to explore this line of thought.

For this exploration to be meaningful, I shall first assume that God exists and that the standard definition of that God applies—omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and all-moral. I will not get all caught up in the proper definitions and their implications as in the last volume.

Before we go any further, let’s first describe what we mean by free-will. Basically, it’s one’s ability to define one’s own destiny. In other words, was it pre-destined that I will be here sitting in a plane at 10:59 AM on December 20, 2006 in seat 49C and start composing this document? Or does the credit go to my spur-of-the-moment thinking when I decided to open up laptop and start typing?

In my opinion, the concept of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent God cannot co-exist with the concept of free-will. Here’s my reasoning.

Let’s make sure we understand something here: we all know that God, by definition, knows that I shall be doing this activity at such a time. The question is does fore-knowledge imply pre-destiny? I think not. God may have chosen to grant us self-determination and the capacity to make such decisions (namely large brain, rational thinking, etc.) and could still have known about what exactly we’d do, think and feel at each moment of our lives.

Some might argue that if God knows I would do ‘A’, did I really have a choice to do ‘B’ instead? And the answer is that it’s an incorrect question. God knows that I’d do A because he knows that of all the choices available to me (A, B, …), I would select A. So, in that sense He didn’t pre-destine this for me; he merely knew me and knew the choice I’d make. This dichotomy is logical and these two concepts can certainly co-exist. My line of argument for believing that God and free-will cannot co-exist is different.

So, what does free-will mean again? It means that I, and only I, have made the decision to do so-and-so thing a such-and-such time. There will certainly have been psychological, sociological, brain-capacity, mood, and a host of other factors that influenced that decision—no doubt about that; but the important point to note is that God should not have made that decision for me before I was born. That’s the key here—was this decision to compose this document at this time made before I was born? If it was, then there’s no free-will; otherwise, there is.

To answer that question, we need to dive only a little deeper into the concept of omniscience. We all know it to mean that God knows everything including what we’d do; but remember it also means that not only did God know we’d do something, but why we’d do that. Again, that’s the key phrase—“why we would do something?”

By definition of omniscience, God not only knows what would happen, but also why it would happen.

In exploring this line of thought, let’s conceive of an imaginary being called God-Minor (“G-Minor”). Assume G-Minor has all the intelligence of God, but has none of the 3-Os (omnipotent/ omniscient/omnipresent). Here’s a snippet of a conversation between those two:

G-Minor: “what would Siva be doing at so-and-so time?”

God: “Siva would be typing his thoughts on my existence.”

G-Minor: “But doc, why would he be doing that?”

God: “Because his neuron #365 would be firing along synapses #78, which would cause a chain reaction in his left-hemisphere in …” [too complicated for me to write]

G-Minor: “OK, but why?”

God: “Because…”

G-Minor: “OK, but why?”

By now, you get the drift. G-Minor can keep asking the question “why” a zillion times. God can, in answering those questions patiently, talk about how something was caused by Siva’s Dad in his childhood, which was in turn caused by something that happened to Dad while he was in his mom’s womb…and so on and so forth.

But, let’s now turn to the end-game of this line of questioning:

God: “…”

G-Minor: “OK, but why?”

God: “Because this imaginatron and that hypothitron are in these places and their interaction makes the above possible.” [I am making up these two terms to signify that our current building blocks of matter (electron, neutron, proton, string theory and others that are being discovered) may not be the real building blocks. There may be others that I am denoting as imaginary and hypothetical particles called those terms above.]

G-Minor: “OK, but why?”

God: “That’s because I am placing those two in these places at the time of ‘big-bang’.”

G-Minor: “OK, but why?”

God: “That’s because I choose to.”

That’s what it comes down to, doesn’t it? At the end of the day, the reason I am writing this memo at this time is that God had placed the imaginatron and hypothitron particles in those specific locations 14 billion years ago when the big-bang happened (or whatever time God considers as the start of this Universe of ours). If He had placed them a trillionth of a nanometer apart than He had, I might not be writing this essay, or for that matter this Universe may not even exist. Who knows? But the point is that the decision for me to write this piece now was taken not by me, but by God before I was born, which, by definition, is the absence of free-will.

And hence, I submit that the concepts of God and free-will cannot co-exist.

A coupe of interesting observations may be derived from above comments: First, the above series of dialogues between God and G-Minor may seem to imply that I support the view that our universe is based on a causal-effect model in a linear-time basis. I don’t…or more precisely, I don’t know. For all I know, during the series of answers God provides G-Minor, God could quote a cause in the future and relate it back to an effect in the past. I simply don’t know. All I know is that He somehow, at the end, has to relate it to that instant (not necessarily back) in time when He decided to create. In any case, it doesn’t really change the crux of my argument.

Secondly, and this is more interesting, it seems to imply that God is a rational God. [I define Rationality as the belief that there exists a logical explanation (except for the prime cause) for everything.] He cannot be irrational. He knows the “why” for everything and can explain it to anyone with the capacity to understand him, which is the very definition of rationality. Of course, it doesn’t mean that He has to be linear…he may make non-linear explanations for certain phenomena, but there exists an explanation nevertheless.