Evil, Free Will and the Existence of God

John Farrell has some good thoughts on God and free will, inspired by some comments made by an atheist science blogger about the incompatibility of the belief in God and the existence of great moral evils.

Among said science blogger's comments:

By any normal moral standard, however, if you can stop great evil from happening without any harm to yourself, and you consciously choose not to do so, then you are guilty of great evil in your own right. We can not evade this point by arguing that God gave us free will, which implies the freedom to choose evil as well as good. What of the free will of the victims? God could simply have caused the killer's gun to jam, after all. Then everyone would have their free will and thirty-two people wouldn't be dead today.

I don't normally think of myself as some sort of raving libertarian, but am I alone in finding profoundly unappealing the description of how this fellow would like a God that he could believe in to behave?

Think of this in terms of dealing with your kids, or your parents. If this version of God were a parent, he would be the sort of parent who would insist "I always give you your freedom" while at the same time making sure the car was broken when you tried to head out on any date he didn't approve of; that somehow only the college he wanted you to get to received your application (dang postal service...); that your resume "just happened to show up" on the desk of someone he "just happened to know"; etc. That wouldn't be a parent, it would be a puppetmaster.

Perhaps I have a run-away sense of indepence, but I can't imagine wanting to apply the human common law concept of "if you can stop great evil from happening without any harm to yourself, and you consciously choose not to do so, then you are guilty of great evil in your own right" to an all knowing and all powerful being. Indeed, I can't imagine anything worse.

For those willing to give the Christian belief in God the benefit of its own premises, God does not provide a safety net in the from of hidden puppet strings that keep us from hurting each other too much. Instead, He allows us freedom in the knowledge that each one of us has an immortal soul, unique and beloved by Him, which may find eternal rest in His love if we choose to allow ourselves to.