On Free Choice of the Will

On Free Choice of the Will

By Saint Augustine

Questions to be addressed: Would a good God let bad things happen? Why does man choose to do evil?

For many people, nothing drives them away from Religion like pushy, preachy people. I don't feel that I am knowledgeable enough to argue many points when it comes to religion. I'm actually not a huge fan of organized religion myself. Like most things, it has its good and bad points, but overall, anything that brings people to God is great. However, you won't find a better example of hypocrisy than the church. Throughout history, no cause has driven people to war like religion. On the other hand, if one does not agree with what people have done to the church, does that mean we have to turn away from its very foundation? When one analyzes the core of Religion, they discover that its most basic principles are, in fact, good. God IS good, right? Does God allow bad things to happen? Yes. But why? Because He has to in order to keep His promise of free will. God doesn't make bad things happen, people do. God doesn't snap his fingers and *poof*, somewhere in the world another person is murdered. That murderer chose to put himself in that situation. So does God let this happen? In the sense that He allowed the murderer to exercise free will - Yes, He did. Does this mean that we should blame God? No, I don't think so. There is nothing I am more grateful for than my free will. There would not be much of a life without it.

In Saint Augustine's On Free Choice of the Will, the idea that God allows bad things to happen is presented in a conversation between himself and Evodius. On page 5 line 19 of the text, Augustine states "Yet it perplexes the mind how God should not be indirectly responsible for these sins, if they come from those very souls that God created and if, moreover, these souls are from God." The entire concept of blaming God for bad things has always been hard for me to understand, but the book does clarify many points. I intend on presenting those points by defining several terms and applying them to the argument that Saint Augustine uses in order to obtain a sufficient answer to the question. In order to do this, we must assume that God does exist. People often say, "I know there's a God, but I want to understand: Is this God good? And if he is good, then why do bad things happen?" By asking this question, one might really be asking "Does God even exist?" which is completely different. The question of whether or not God exists has nothing to do with people's suffering, but instead, with creation, revelation, world history, etc. Therefore, for simplicity, we will not venture to answer that question and will assume that God does exist.

The question we are addressing is, in essence, requiring us to "judge God." In discussing this issue, I have chosen not to address the question of why particular things happen. Take a physicist, for example. He may be able to tell you why a leaf will fall in a certain place- it has to do with the aerodynamics of the leaf, the force of gravity, and the direction of the velocity; however, if you ask him where the leaf will fall, he cannot because it is impossible to quantify the different forces that a make a leaf fall in a particular place. Of course, he can propose several general principles, but calculating exactly where it will land is beyond the realm of his analysis. It's the same idea here. We won't be able to say why specific things are happening in a specific situation, but we will be able to speak about general principles that can lead us to understand the workings of a good God who lets bad things happen.

The Bible tells us: "God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him" (Genesis 1:27). What does it mean that man was created in God's image? It means that human beings are finite and corporal. So how are we created in God's image? Obviously, the "image of God" is dealing with the non-physical part of us - the soul. We get our drive for morality and meaning from the soul which is in the "image of God." Just as God has independent choice, so too does each human being have independent moral choice. The image of God means that we have the ability to choose.

The ability to choose is what makes us special as a race. Life only becomes meaningful because of our ability to choose. Take love for example. The difference in being programmed to love and the choice to love, is exactly what makes love special. Similarly, if I don't have the choice to do good, but am programmed to do good, then there's nothing meaningful about it. On the same accord, if I have the ability to do good or evil, then good becomes significant. For a choice to be truly genuine, there must also be consequences. If every time I get in trouble, mom comes to bail me out, that's not really a choice. Choice means consequences. Our history-personal or global- is based on decisions made by human beings including the consequences that come from that.

Now we understand that "image of God" means that God created beings who have the ability to make decisions, and those decisions will create consequences that will make this being a co-partner in the development of the world. This has many ramifications as far as why God allows bad things to happen. For free choice to operate, it's obvious that evil has to have the possibility of existing. If every time someone chooses to do evil, God is going to interfere, then there's no moral choice. If every time the gun is pointed, the turret points backwards, after a few times you get the message. It simply becomes pragmatic not to do evil. If the lives of the righteous were obviously perfect, that too would destroy the possibility of choice. Pragmatically, we'd figure it pays more to be righteous because look at all the good things that come my way! That's not choice. That's not becoming God-like. A world where a human being can create himself into a Moses, also carries the possibility of a person creating himself into a Hitler. We have to understand and appreciate that in the Holocaust, it was not God who built the crematoriums, it was the Nazis. It is not God who was massacring Muslims in Bosnia, it was the Serbs. Augustine's approach to the "free choice of the will" assumes that "there can be no denying that we have a will." Instead, Augustine defines "good will" as "a will by which we seek to live a good and upright life and to attain unto perfect wisdom" which, of course, assumes that it is free. Those who choose evil are ruled by their passion and desire for things of this