If God is in sovereign control over all, how do I have freewill?

G’day everyone, Dave Deane here, and our question for the week is: If God is in sovereign control over all, how do I have free will?

The question of freedom arises in nearly every single philosophical and theological debate found in human history. Right back into the Greek Dark Ages around 1000BC, the abstract idea of “fate” was personified as the great antagonist of freedom, and somewhere in between these two oppositions was the unfolding drama of human existence. As to whether or not a person is a puppet on the strings of fate or truly free, well, that, the Greeks believe, was decided by the exercise of their power to will over tragedy to fortune.

Today, the debate is basically the same. On the far side of “fate” there are people who believe that their actions are caused or compelled by some sort of force, whether God or nature, so that there is no place for chance or genuine freedom anywhere in the universe. This position is called “absolute determinism”. Now, the problem for the absolute determinist is that it comes with the price tag of any genuine freedom. If there’s no such thing as freedom in any real sense, then there’s a whole host of theoretical and practical issues that we have to think about and somehow overcome. The theoretical issues revolve around the fact that the very act of trying to overcome the problem of determinism sort of presupposes freedom: are we free to even think about freedom? The practical issues revolve around a host of ethical questions like: if someone is compelled of necessity to do something terrible to someone else, can we really hold them responsible for their actions? I mean, we don’t judge machines for doing what they’ve being programmed to do, so does ethics even categorically make sense in such a world?

On the other side of the contemporary debate are people who believe their actions are uncaused or self-caused in the sense of absolute economic independence. They’re known as absolute libertarians. Like absolute determinists, absolute libertarians have lots of theoretical and practical issues to overcome, such as how should we decide between different libertarianly free acts? Why should one choice be made and not another?

This is all very important today, because “freedom” is a bit of a buzz word. Freedom of conscious, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to live however we want to live. Freedom is important, but it only makes sense as a concept when we ask what we are free FROM and what we are free FOR. They are the conditions that make freedom so valued.

Think about a goldfish in a fishbowl. If the fish jumps out of the fishbowl, then it is free FROM the constraints of that water environment it was in. But what is it free FOR? Not a whole lot because it’s going to suffocate and die pretty quick. You see, the whole idea of freedom assumes the truth of a condition about reality in that we are free FROM something and free FOR something.

So when it comes to this idea of human free will, what is the truth of our condition? Am I free to do whatever I want? Am I free to not die if I so choose? No, my personal freewill is constrained to the conditions of reality, and when I ignore those conditions then, like the goldfish, it can be really destructive, even deadly.

In all of this, the question of freedom turns into a question about the truth of the conditions of reality that we find ourselves in. In Australia, there are two dominate views of reality: the atheistic worldview and the Judeo-Christian worldview.

The atheistic worldview typically views reality as just nature and matter in motion, so freedom is at best just a description of unintelligent physical particles and atoms in motion, and at worst just an illusion.

By contrast, the Christian worldview makes sense of freedom within the larger truth-condition of creation. We are like the goldfish and our bowl is this creation, so to speak. And right away we can see the limit that imposes upon our freedom.

Now some would say, well it’s not really freedom at that point, but again just like that goldfish, I don’t think this is a problem. Again, I’m not free to not die if I think I can fly and step out of an airplane at 30,000ft.

Personally, I think many of our questions about God and freewill go away when we keep freedom REAL.

So it’s not an absolute freedom – there are parameters and limitations within the created order, you know I can’t just decide I want to fly all of a sudden – and at the same time it is not absolute determinism, because human beings have real power to cause and affect, which is why we are responsible for our actions.

I think the Christian worldview provides a compatibility here that doesn’t go to either extremes of absolute determinism or absolute libertarianism.

God’s freedom is not controlling or compelling but creative and constitutive of our human freedom. You see, there is only a contradiction between God’s freedom and human freedom if both are absolute. But I don’t see any reason to think they are. God’s freedom is absolute. Human freedom is qualified as “creaturely freedom” because we did not freely choose to exist.

So our freewill doesn’t compete with God’s sovereignty, because God in His sovereignty has dignified us with freewill, which is why we are ultimately responsible for our thoughts and behaviours in life.

In short, human beings are not just puppets on a string dancing to some predetermined tune, nor are we puppets without strings and therefore incapable to dance at all. All people are beings made in the image of God. We have creaturely freewill because God is the supremely free Creator! We can cause and effect because, in effect, God has caused us!