Nobody’s Fault But Mine
John FarnumPeople like to blame God for things. They like to blame him for things that have gone wrong in their lives, for disasters, for injustices, for unfortunate things that happen to themselves and to others. This is not surprising considering the tendency to pass blame and shirk responsibility that is common to mankind. However, this particular scapegoat is not entirely innocent. Accusing God is an interesting angle because if he is omnipotent and omniscient, then he must shoulder at least some of the burden of blame for things that go wrong in the world. But to better understand his role and his degree of burden, you have to examine the nature of actions and consequences.
Begin with a very direct example: a man shoots and kills his next door neighbor in a fit of rage. This is a tragedy for the dead man and his family. Most people will not blame God for this tragedy because the blame so obviously goes to the man who pulled the trigger. But even in this case one could ask why God allowed this to happen. Given that God allows people to sin at all, this scenario can be explained rather easily. The angry man pointed a deadly weapon at his neighbor and fired it. The consequences of that action followed just as the consequences of a foot pressing a car’s accelerator will result in forward motion. Ignoring specific cases of intervention, it seems that God generally allows actions and their consequences rather than control a person’s every move.
Stepping back to a more indirect scenario, imagine a dictator taking control of a country and leading that country to war and/or oppression of other countries. People could ask why God has allowed all of these atrocities to happen. But the explanation is similar to the previous one. This dictator made decisions. The people of his country or at least the military supported him. The consequences of the actions of all those involved followed. The people who supported the dictator might not have been bloodthirsty or hateful, but their ignorance of the consequences of their actions does not prevent those consequences from happening. It is probably true that the scale of the sin in this scenario grieves God more than the single murder, but God allows sin and its consequences.
For the most subtle and indirect case that I can think of, imagine a child dying of cancer, and imagine that this cancer was caused by the child swimming in a river downstream from where a factory dumps toxic byproducts rather than disposing of them responsibly. Almost all parents would ask why God allowed this to happen, but even in this case it is still true that God allows sin and the consequences of sin. The factory owner might have been a man who was involved with his community and donated money to charitable organizations. He probably did not intend to destroy the lives of the families downstream, but the consequences of his irresponsibility followed.
One could ask, in all these situations, why God does allow the consequences of sins to happen. It is ultimately an unanswerable question, but one plausible reason is that people would not care to reform their actions otherwise. If God took away the consequences of sin, most people would be as unresponsive toward God’s law as the child of a parent who refuses to discipline. The consequences are painful and ugly, but they mirror the ugliness of the sins themselves. I would agree that God is somewhat responsible for the pain and injustice in the world insofar as he does not prevent it. But I put more of the blame on the sin that brings about these painful consequences. After all, you can hardly blame God if he tells you not to touch a hot stove and you burn your hand on it.
Note: I understand that this whole essay does not fit in the worldview of a Calvinist who believes that everything that happens is predestined by God. And I don’t know that I disagree. But the world seems to follow an “actions and consequences” pattern, at least from our perspective, and that is the perspective from which I approach the world in this essay.
December 22nd, 2007 at 8:42 pm
In “The Problem of Pain”, C.S. Lewis answers your question very simply, John. He points out that, if beings have free will, then they will be able to act as they see fit, even in ways that are contrary to the wishes of other beings. He also points out that, if there is a physical universe, then actions committed inside it will have consequences for beings beyond the actor(s) by the simple fact of all actors having physical mass and being subject to the laws of matter. If I throw a rock and it comes into contact with you, then the on impact you will receive the force from the rock proportional to the rock’s mass and the speed with which I threw it.
Assuming that there is a God like the God of Christian belief, can He stop these situations from happening? Of course — but only at the cost of either free will or the laws of physics. He could make it so that people didn’t throw rocks at other people, or didn’t use political power to oppress others people, or didn’t allow their companies to pollute rivers, but then the people in question wouldn’t really have free will; they would be programed. If God wants people to have free will (and it seems very likely that He does) then that means that He allows the possibilities of people doing very horrible things that He doesn’t want them to do.
Likewise, God could also make it so that when I threw a rock at you it didn’t hurt you but tickled you or was actually pleasurable, or He could even make the rock turn into a feather as it struck you. This would mean perpetually suspending the laws of physics, however, since it would happen only once — God would have to continually nullify the normal consequences of physical laws if He wanted to spare everyone the pain he spared you by making it so that you weren’t hurt by the rock I threw at you. But then it wouldn’t just be decisions to hurt but any decision that would have no meaning. No one would be able to act at all because their actions would be meaningless — they could be canceled at a moment by God’s next decision to suspend physical laws.
In other words, the very thing that makes life worth living — meaning — is only possible where people can freely make decisions and where the physical laws of the universe are such that their decisions conform to previously established rules that entail certain consequences. That is, meaning is only possible in a world where beings can hurt each other. It’s a big risk, but one which God evidently felt worth taking.
December 24th, 2007 at 1:17 am
While I recognize John that you intended to discuss the nature of actions and consequences and you intentionally pointed out your intention not to address the issues raised by the Calvinist view it seems that the conversation has decided instead to discuss the nature of God. Given this I cannot allow us to leave out the Calvinist perspective because to do so over-simplifies the issue in a way which is detrimental to our faith (and the intended purpose of this website). Why? In choosing one specific world view to represent in order to avoid a difficult conversation or a question that does not necessarily have a quick answer it seems that we’ve committed not to struggling with our faith but rather to defending accepted ‘Christian’ ideas whether or not scripture agrees. This is at best a worthless exercise and at worst a harmful one that leaves the Church irrelevant, impotent and often looking rather foolish.
Paul you refer to a “God like the God of Christian belief” and then go on to define him as a God that desires the free will of his subjects. Is this truly the God of Christian belief? I would argue that the God of Christian belief is not so readily encapsulated, for example I’ve listed a few verses where it does not seem that God really cares whether or not we have free will.
Exodus 10:1 (also reference 10:20,27; 11:10; 14:8)Then the LORD said to Moses, “Go in to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants, that I may show these signs of mine among them,
Deuteronomy 2:30 But Sihon the king of Heshbon would not let us pass by him, for the LORD your God hardened his spirit and made his heart obstinate, that he might give him into your hand, as he is this day.
Romans 9:20 Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use?
Genesis 50:20 20 As for you, you meant evil against me, but(A) God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people[a] should be kept alive, as they are today.
Now, we could also cite many verses that refer to or imply the free will of men and mankind but I’ve chosen not to simply because this idea has already been accepted. I will focus on Gen 5:20 because it is often misquoted or misrepresented and I think to represent it rightly forces us to sit and ponder a significant tension of the Christian faith. Often people say in response to ‘bad’ or ‘tragic’ events “God can use evil for good”. This misquote implies a passiveness on the part of God that is not present in the Gen 5 verse. In Gen 5:20 God does not use evil for good, he “meant” it or “intended” it - the evil itself was God’s plan to bring about good. In each of the verses above God either controlled men’s actions or their hearts or claims the right to do so - this stands in direct opposition to the idea that each of us has free will.
I confess to not having a solution to this anomaly but I urge the forum to at least discuss it rather than accept one position or the other. I’m personally of the opinion that a resolution is not necessary or possible from our vantage and I’m content to have this particular issue (amongst others) exist in a state of tension in my faith. However, I believe we’d all benefit from a meaningful dialog (not to mention being grateful to read a compelling solution) and we’d be remiss to accept simple one-sided arguments either way.
December 26th, 2007 at 6:13 am
There is no moral culpability without free will, Robert. That is a basic principle of morality. Hence we don’t condemn computers for crashing, because they didn’t choose to crash. They have no say in the matter. They have no will beyond what they’re programed to have.
The idea that humans have no free will is an old, and heretical, notion in Christian circles, and it’s dependent on the idea of God being above or beyond good and evil. It’s actually quite similar to the Islamic view of Allah, whose actions can’t be judged or assessed by mortals because he’s so far beyond them. But the orthodox Christian view is that God plays by the same rules by which he judges us, that what we call something “good” because it is His good. This view, like the view that God exists, is implied throughout the scriptures. It is never expressed, just like proofs for God’s existence are never expressed, because it is clearly assumed.
December 26th, 2007 at 8:04 am
I posted my previous comment while pressed for time. Allow me to elaborate a bit:
The notion of the Fall and Original Sin (or any sin, for that matter) doesn’t make sense if God’s nature is as you claim, Robert. If people have no choice but to sin, then it makes no sense for God to blame them for sinning. If I build an engine and, upon starting it, throw sand in its gears I can’t become angry at the engine when it fails. I made it fail. I am the one responsible for its failure.
The English inquisitors of Joan of Arc commanded her to come to her trial dressed in female attire, on pain of death. Then they removed all her female clothes and only left her male clothes to wear. When she came to the trial dressed in male attire they excoriated her for breaking their expressed command and condemned her to death. We consider the inquisitors to be horrible people today for what they did: they unjustly killed an innocent woman. And yet, if God’s nature is as you say, they were only emulating their heavenly Father.
It is anathema in scripture for God to not observe the rules he prescribes for others. Such moral laws only have moral force because they flow from the person of God Himself. We call people who insist that others obey laws that they themselves do not hypocrites and we condemn them. (So, by the way, does God.) But, if you’re correct, then God is the Ultimate Hypocrite. And, if you’re correct, then He is beyond good and evil.
Yet, if that’s the case, how can we know anything to be good at all? Because God said so? But what if He’s lying? He says not to lie, but he also condemns hypocrisy too and that doesn’t apparently stop him from practicing it. Why shouldn’t we just assume he’s lying? The Calvinist concept of God simply doesn’t comport with reason and scripture. The verses you quoted to me, if interpreted the way you interpret them, paint an irrational and a-moral picture of God. They make God into something like Allah — who does and commands things which Christians consider wicked.
The alternative, then, is to assume that the verses quoted don’t mean what you say they mean. In the same way, orthodox Christians insist that the verses which show God changing His mind and deciding not to wipe out Israel in response to Moses’s pleas for mercy don’t literally mean that, because the explicit teaching of scripture and Christian tradition is that God does not change. In the same way, Christians from at least the time of St. Jerome in the 6th century have insisted that the first two chapters of Genesis aren’t literal history, since most legitimate, observable facts of natural science seem to directly contradict a literal interpretation. In the same way, Christians since the days of Arius have insisted that Paul’s designation of Christ as “the firstborn of all creation” does not mean that Christ was created (although Arius insisted that such was the plain meaning of that verse — and, given a literal interpretation, he was unarguably correct), because that would contradict the (implied biblical and explicitly stated Church) doctrine that Christ is himself God and was never created.
So, Robert, it seems that if the orthodox Christian view of God is correct, then your view of God and of His nature has some serious flaws. Or, on the other had, if your view of God and His nature is correct than orthodox Christianity and all of traditional human morality seem to have serious flaws. Which do you think is more likely?
December 26th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
Robert has said that “In Gen 50:20 God does not use evil for good, he “meant” it or “intended” it - the evil itself was God’s plan to bring about good.” … But consider that lesser, not greater, guilt is conferred upon Pontius Pilate for doing what he did, precisely because God had given him the power to do so. This is evidence against the strictly-Calvinist tendency of mixing human blame and predestination into the same pot. The issue is more complicated than that…
But in his post, Robert seems to be rightly grappling with the problem of evil, and posing a solution which is a fusion between a Calvinist and a more orthodox view. He said that ‘God is responsible for injustice insofar as He does not prevent’… and reasonably so. Pure Calvinism can be irritating from a point of view of trying to rationally ground responsibility in the human person, in the unfathomable, mystical abyss of human free will. And indeed, from even a partially Calvinist perspective, it can be frustrating when fatalism and determinism start to creep into the intellectual culture. Granted, there are intellectual Calvinists, Alvin Plantinga being a wonderful example, and many of these thinkers are concerned about the problem of evil, because their theology is directly tied up in this issue. It seems Robert is trying to avoid two errors at once: which I admire, and consider the essence of orthodox thought.
But what is often unknown/forgotten on this topic of the problem of evil and predestination, is that the orthodox view is even better than the Calvinist view on metaphysically (& rationally) grounding certain aspects of God’s ability to predetermine events, without touching their human moral significance. St. Thomas says the following: that God puts actions into ‘premotion’ by their material and efficient causes, but not by their formal or final causes, which, in the case of evil events such as the crucifixion, are the causes in which he allows human-involvement. Even our own sinful causation, which is a ‘defective’ use of free-will, flows from God’s sovereign will giving us our will. The reason we have free-will is precisely because God is powerful & sovereign enough to give creatures an authentic will.
December 28th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
In adding the note at the end of the essay, I meant to acknowledge the Calvinist problem while temporarily overlooking it, but it appears to be necessary to talk about. The arguments that go back and forth about free will and predestination seem to be a waste of time. People have been arguing about it for centuries, and Scripture shows both sides. Considering the nature of God, I don’t know that free will and deterimined actions are mutually exclusive. We cannot understand God, but here is a plausible argument:
God calls himself “I AM.” This seems to imply his unchanging nature and timeless quality. It could be interpreted to mean that God transcends time, that he exists in the present at all of time, he always “is.” Assuming that this is true of God, then people can have their free will and God can completely determine their actions at the same time. If God exists simultaneously at the moment of a person’s decision and at the moments of all of its consequences and at the moments of the consequences leading up to the decision, then that decision was not determined by him and yet he is not surprised by it at all. He can influence the decisions at any point in time and be completely sovereign over the consequences while the operation of decision making is in the power of the individuals. I imagine it like history is a timeline and God can see it all at once. People are like decision making operators in that timeline. God can move things at different points in the timeline and change the ending to be whatever he wants it to be. He is not locked to a point in time. All of time just exists to him. He incarnated himself in the timeline at just the right point to interact with it and to cause salvation for all of it in the way that he wished. He could choose some of the operators for destruction and the others for salvation. He would not change, but he would react differently to the world at different points in time because the world is different.
There are probably difficulties and naiveties in this picture, but it serves to show a God for whom questions of free will and predestination are difficult to ask. There is a lot of speculation when trying to imagine how God sees the world, so I wanted to restrict the discussion to how we see and understand the world and its operation. We see a world that has actions and consequences. We see a world that a good God created which has evil in it. I wanted to discuss why this evil exists and why it might be reasonable for God to leave it in there.