The last time Ben Goren wrote a post on this site, it really twisted the knickers of the ID-ers (particularly Vincent Torley) who frequent the creationist Uncommon Descent site. I thought it was time to twist them a little more, so we’re following up “Why doesn’t Jesus call 9-1-1?” with a new post on the topic, “Is there free will in heaven?” That may sound like a funny question, but do remember that, to many Christians, heaven is populated by souls, and the soul is supposed to be what runs our mind on Earth. Herewith, Ben Goren, who is apparently afflicted with Alliteration Syndrome.
The Flip Side of Free Will
by Ben Goren
Regular readers are by now fairly familiar with Jerry’s assurance of the importance of recognizing the reality that we lack free will — as well as where the regular commentators specifically situate.
But all our debate occurs within a secular assemblage. We all agree: no gods grace our globe. Alas, we are almost alone; most support supernaturalism: Christians, chiefly. For them, free will fits a different function, superbly summarized by Terry Gilliam in his timeless classic, Time Bandits:
Should you absent our sane sanctuary and encounter an evangelizing ecclesiast who proffers profundities on allegorical autonomy, consider countering with a couple of queries:
Is there evil in Heaven? And also free will?
If nay and yea, free will engenders no evil. If yea and nay, what need we needless will? And if even Heaven has evil, why wish it?
Of course, sophisticated sophists supply replies. Frequently, free will itself is slaughtered on the hereafter’s altar…after which it wends its way to the world and wearies us once again with weapons-grade divine indifference.
“Is there evil in Heaven? And also free will?
If yea and yea, free will engenders no evil. ”
Well, no. The argument would be “Free will makes evil possible, not inevitable.”
I would presume that those who make it to heaven have the sort of free will that didn’t choose evil.
The third series of Lexx had a guy who got bored with Heaven and defected to Hell. I imagine the concern runs along those lines.
Those souls that didn’t choose evil, but are not necessarily prevented from choosing it at some point in eternity, as Lucifer allegedly did.
Yes. The act of evil itself removes you from Heaven. So while there’s no evil in Heaven the potential is always there as in the example of Satan.
Why waste time on this kind of argument? Better to inquire why we should think heaven exists at all?
I believe that theologians have decided that angels do not have free well. I’m not sure how that affects what Lucifer did or did not choose.
Since most of us here agree that free will doesn’t exist anyway, the question is really designed to flummox a Christian, which makes this question less sincere than the 911 question.
Hence, being saved for all eternity has some fine print in the contract that the religionists never mention.
‘Twould seem to follow, then, that damnation to hell for all eternity would have its loopholes, too. “Oops, they were right, I was wrong; ok, I will (heh) accept JC…”
So what’s the point of it all in the first place?
Oh, right. Money, power, political clout, judicial immunity, gaudy costumes, access to prey…
If free will simply makes evil possible but doesn’t actually cause it, then free will can’t be the reason why there’s evil — whatever it is that actually causes evil is what causes evil. So why shouldn’t your favorite god leave us our free will but remove the cause of evil?
b&
As you know, the whole concept of free will is full of contradictions.
I’m just pointing out the escape route a Christian would likely take; I think there’s small chance you’d be able to make them see the logical consequences of their various claims.
I agree that free will is incoherent. I’m just pointing out that you can take it as a given, as a black box, and use grade-school Christian theology to realize that, whatever it is, it can’t even hypothetically be a valid excuse for evil…despite the fact that it’s basically the only excuse ever offered. Whatever it is.
b&
I don’t think you need to go to heaven for that. If free will exists on earth, and some choose good and some choose evil, then there must be some other contributing factor that causes one to choose evil.
No; that won’t work. It’s actually the standard Christian response: blaming the victim. If you use your free will for evil, it’s all your fault. Somehow. Even though Jesus was the one who infested you with whatever desires you have that cause you to do evil, and then planted the temptations to fulfill the desires…very, very sick, that bullshit.
b&
“So why shouldn’t your favorite god leave us our free will but remove the cause of evil?”
This possibility brings to mind a world in which we are free to decide to do evil only to find our every attempt thwarted, as famously imagined in A Clockwork Orange, the fine novel by Anthony Burgess.
Ironically, in that story it was the prison chaplain who protested that by doing so the government was stripping Alex (the protagonist) of his free will!
What you describe is exactly how the Sophisticated Theologian™ is likely to describe Heaven: we retain Free Will, but only those who have proven themselves worthy make it there in the first place; all temptation to do evil is removed; and Jesus is just such a fabulously entertaining guy that it never would occur to anybody to want to do anything other than blow him all day anyway.
b&
The “all temptation to do evil is removed” bit bugs me. So much of who we are is our successes and failures at giving in to do evil. Without that, we are not who we are; we’re someone else. So then we don’t go to heaven, just some puriefied version of us.
Ugh, this whole thing is such a frustrating waste of brain space. We would totally have flying cars and ponies for everyone by now if it weren’t for religion.
It gets worse. The evils we’re most often tempted by are the proverbial sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll — or, to use an earlier era’s formulation, wine, women, and song. Calling those evil in the first place is itself an horribly perverted evil thing to do…and how on Earth can Heaven be a good place if it lacks such simple pleasures? Er — scusi, “temptations”?
b&
Yeah, but then the question is… why doesn’t everyone have that kind of free will? Why didn’t god make everyone with the sort of freewill that leads to heaven? Why didn’t he make everyone perfectly perfect like Jesus or whomever else he thinks is heaven worthy? Why would he punish people for being exactly as he knew they’d be before he made them?
What sort of things would the believer be doing if he didn’t have the heaven/hell threat hanging over his head? Are those sorts of inclinations going to go away in heaven? If so, then its not free will, is it? But what if fulfilling ones fantasies are contrary to whatever is required in heaven? If god makes it so you can only choose the heaven worthy stuff, then it isn’t “free”… and he could have made everyone like that in the first place– heck he could have made all heaven all the time for all beings. He never needed to create urges that displease him… nor did he need to create any suffering at all (much less a devil and a place of ETERNAL torment for those who don’t follow the right nebulous rubric!)
Nothing about theology makes any sense to anyone who takes any time to think about the subject– believers can’t help but create their gods in a human image, and hence he has all the flaws that come with such no matter how they assure us that he’s perfect and omnibenevolent and omniscient and omnipotent. A god who blames his creations for being as he made them can’t really be any of those things. The only way to believe in such a god is to be indoctrinated and made to fear the loss of faith.
Thanks for the bit of Time Bandits. A fine way to start the morning!
I’ve never come across Time Bandits before. I’ve clearly been missing out. It’s genius! 🙂
It is a very fun movie. Pythonesque, Sean Connery, Ralph Richardson, music by George Harrison… what’s not to love?
Sounds great! I’ll definitely be checking it out. Thanks!
The whole quasi-trilogy is worthwhile: Time Bandits from the perspective of a boy; Brazil from the perspective of a man in his prime; and Baron Munchausen from the perspective of an old man.
b&
Cheers! 🙂
So where does 13 Monkeys fit in? 🙂
Related, I think. Calvinists like to use determinist arguments. But does that mean God doesn’t have free will either (if Calvinism were true)?
Presumably He was still free to set the initial conditions of the Universe.
That of course presupposes there *were* initial conditions, which is another problem. Alternatively, that of the local hubble volume. But that doesn’t work either – the local big bang “wipes out” any settings, or so it seems. (See V. Stenger’s work.)
Heaven is a thoroughly incoherent concept. You can’t shake a stick without hitting a contradiction. Can you imagine a heaven without your precious Fido/Felix? What about people who dislike dogs or cats? Will your beloved grandma be there, blue of hair and dispensing those gingerbread cookies you loved so much? But what about grandma’s desire to spend eternity as a 20-year-old who would essentially be a stranger to you? Or do we each get our own solipsistic heaven, filled only with illusions of what we think should be there? Heaven is a hallucinogenic drug. That seems nice.
That’s kind of like the incoherent Mormon notion of families staying together through eternity, even though there’s a brutal segregation of those who fail to meet the earthly standards, and those who succeed are supposed to go off and run their own planets. The doctrine makes contradictory promises. I guess the polygamous wives get to stay together since they’ll be used as full time breeding stock in some celestial barn.
Indeed. The ability to discern the consequences of a view or a claim is not a theistic forte. Or perhaps I should say the ability to ignore logical consequences is a theistic forte.
Yes. The number of theists who *see* the logical consequences is large, but a key part of religious indoctrination is training you that making such inferences is taboo, that one should refrain from even thinking about such things. When everyone around adheres to this taboo, it becomes second nature to ignore what you very clearly can see.
“Such fine silks, your majesty, such painstaking stitching…”
I also find the materialism of heaven ironic. Pearl gates, jasper walls, gold streets. And yes, John describes the “wall” of heaven. Why would infinite heaven have walls? And isn’t it obvious that man’s aesthetic is the driving force of heaven’s imaginary composition. And why would formless spirits need streets? For their ’67 Mustangs? Drag races in heaven? Oh, I got it…NASCAR!
How about the multi-heaven hypothesis. After all, if there can be an infinite number of universes, why not an infinite number of heavens? That would also help with the nearly infinite number of gods… (In case anyone wonders, my personal opinion is that the number of gods = 0)
So everyone gets their own personalized heaven? Wait, I’ve heard that before:
Almost as good as having your own planet.
The answer is 42.
The question is: How many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
As usual, the answer to the title question is no. Decomposing bodies have no free will and couldn’t care less about evil.
Among the other videos that come up after the Time Bandits clip is an interesting conversation involving Michael Palin and John Cleese, talking about Life of Brian with two Christian conservatives — at least one of them a priest, not sure who either of them were.
Yes, that’s a classic. All must watch. Obey! Obey! (as if you had a choice)
The priest was Mervyn Stockwood, Bishop of Southwark, and the other guy is Malcolm Muggeridge. Oddly enough, they were both supposed to be liberal rather than conservative — at least they had been in their younger days. Muggeridge at least did get pretty conservative, and I think it’s obvious they were both very devoted to their mythical savior.
Free will is a feeling or preference not unlike love, morality or happiness. It is a construct of the human (mammal?) mind and it requires no validation. I don’t think it should bear the onus of proving its reality anymore than declarations of love do.
I do find it interesting that the religious and some philosophers focus on these feelings for their arguments for the supernatural. Is it simply that these preferences seem to emerge with not discernible mechanism? In a way it’s comforting because it is inevitable we will find out their naturalistic mechanism.
“I do find it interesting that the religious and some philosophers focus on these feelings for their arguments for the supernatural.”
Just as many non-religious & atheistic philosophers do for their arguments against FW.
Though after a few decades of hearing these arguments, “interesting” would not be my first characterization of them.
I like Ray Bradbury’s idea of coming back for a year every hundred years just to check in and see what’s been going on.
Through a bit of searching, seems the program was Dangerous Minds, whoever those Christian prigs were, I find them absolutely loathsome.
Maybe Heaven has free will, but better enforcement of the rules of behavior than Earth. Like Larry Niven’s King’s Free Park. 😉
Ben,
I may certainly be having a brain-fart, but your question isn’t making sense to me. It currently reads:
Is there evil in Heaven? And also free will?
If yea and yea, free will engenders no evil. If yea and nay, what need we needless will? And if even Heaven has evil, why wish it?
But shouldn’t it read:
If NAY and yea, free will engenders no evil.
?
I read that line over and over confused as well. I think the NAY and yea (even if quoted correctly) makes a lot more sense to me…brain farting or not.
Oy — thinko! Yes, you’re right….
b&
A slight diversion, but as we are speaking of heaven . . . The death was announced today of the art critic Brian Sewell, I would like to share this clip where he talks about the Last Medici Grand Duke, “A sad reminder of how religion manages to spoil absolutely everything.”
This was of course a contribution to Talk Like a Pirate day
This was, of course, my tribute to Talk Like a Pirate Day
Of course Mark Graham’s great song has made it clear that there is no democracy in heaven.
That’s good. In the genre of “Heaven” songs, my favorite is this one by Loudon Wainwright
Well that was a great couple of hours (ended up with Rufus W singing HMS Pinafore)
The problem of heaven has always been fatal to the free will defense. The free will defense relies on the proposition that morally relevant free will logically necessitates the option of doing evil.
But Christians also hold to the proposition that a realm exists containing persons (souls) who have free will and yet there is no evil.
So on pains of contradiction their case for logical necessity is just broken right there.
No matter how they wriggle.
Can souls in heaven sin (do evil)?
If no, then the option for evil is not necessary for free will.
So souls in heaven have free will, but do not the OPTION to sin (e.g. no way of causing harm to others)? Then this option was available to God in the first place and this world represents gratuitous suffering/evil.
Do souls in heaven have morally relevant free will to sin, have the option to sin/cause harm, but never choose to sin, always choosing The Good?
If so, then this makes the case God could have created beings with morally relevant free will who do not sin, who always choose the good, hence God creating creatures with a predilection to sinning has caused gratuitous evil, and again God can not be All Good.
One typical move, which several Christians were trying to argue on the Uncommon Descent site, was that sure we don’t sin and require evil once we get to heaven, but it is required as a test to GET INTO HEAVEN.
But, again, they have to answer why this necessity? When they then fall back on exactly the same claim, that evil is NECESSARY for free will, that necessity is already broken by the concept of heaven, so they have no such principle to appeal to.
So the test God sets up for getting into heaven is, again, one of gratuitous evil and God can not be All Good.
That’s not to even mention that God Himself, like heaven, stands in for just the same problem: God is the ultimate moral Good, and therefore must have morally relevant free will. But God is a Being who never sins – who never CAN sin. So, again, the logically necessity is broken in the Christian free will defense.
corrected typos:
DO souls in heaven have free will, but do not HAVE the OPTION to sin (e.g. no way of causing harm to others)? Then this creation-option was available to God in the first place and this world represents gratuitous suffering/evil.
This is why I always encourage my Christian friends (in the Advice from an Atheist sense) to abandon the Omni’s. If God has limits then their story can make a lot more sense. Insisting on no-limits for God immediately puts them into all sorts of inescapable absurdities and a fatal moral deficiency on God’s part. If they wanted to take my advice it’d be easy to do because the Bible is pretty vague on the idea of omniscience and omnipotence (e.g. “most powerful” doesn’t need to imply “can do anything”). If God has actual limits, then they could see God as a noble character struggling with them, or on their behalf, against those limits. If he has no limits he’s simply a monster.
Getting rid of the Omnis…that’s interesting. But who/what would be creating the limits? And what are those limits?
But the whole reason the omnis exist in the first place is because of a game of one-upsmanship between the competing gods. Each new god must be more powerful that the older one; why would you bother with some puny third-rate god when you could hang out with the best of the best?
Which explains why retreat is impossible.
The only solution is to transcend all the gods, and recognize them as mere childish faery tales.
b&
My solution is to make it acceptable to have imaginary friends as an adult, but with the understanding that it’s not real. Kind of like a Ren Faire.
Who needs imaginary friends when you can have real ones? Or cats, for that matter.
b&
And why have imaginary gods when you can have real dogs?
Which is why Cantor thought that “above” the entire infinitely … infinite hierarchy in set theory was an “absolute infinity”.
(I am not sure such a notion is consistent with standard set theories, but it is bizarre to encounter theological considerations from mathematicians in such a strange way.)
Cantor invented the concept of transfinite numbers and was the one to figure out that, though there’re infinitely many counting numbers and also infinitely many irrational numbers, there’re infinitely many more irrational numbers than there are counting numbers.
But infinities are remarkably inert constructs, utterly impotent to actually do anything. And, for that matter, also apparently imaginary; nothing we’ve ever actually encountered is infinite. Even spacetime…it’s bounded in the past by the Big Bang, and may well be bounded in the future by the Big Rip. Even string theories put upper bounds on the number of actualizable universes….
Cheers,
b&
The test never really made sense to me, even before I realized I wasn’t buying what the theists around me were selling. If god created all that is, why would he have created agents that needed to be tested? Again, it goes to god’s moral failings if you claim he’s omnipotent: we’re created sick and commanded to be well, as Greville wrote.
Unrelatedly, god’s inability to sin chips away a little at the ontological argument. Even I have free will (at least according to theists); how can the “maximally great” being lack free will and still be maximally great?
I’ve always wondered about the claim by Christians that one *must* have evil to know what good is. By this claim, there must be evil in heaven or no one would know how great it was…..
According to Aquinas they know because they are able to see the sufferings of the damned in hell
‘Nothing should be denied the blessed that belongs to the perfection of their
beatitude…Wherefore in order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned.’ (Summa Theologica)
Which, when you think about it, means that sinners are essential to the divine plan, and we’ve been created explicitly so we can serve as squeaky toys for the righteous. Only what sort of righteous person would take pleasure in the suffering of others, no matter how allegedly deserving?
b&
Yes this rather sordid vision of ‘perfection’ is an interesting moral contrast with the Buddhist Bodhisattva vow:
“Not until the hells are emptied will I become a Buddha; not until all beings are saved will I enter Enlightenment.”
Quite a difference! And infinitely more morally defensible.
b&
Ah, yes, the fantasy that C.S Lewis also had. Thanks, I should have known that.
Is there evil in Heaven? And also free will?
So whose definition of evil do I use? Yours? Mine? Hitler’s? God’s who writes his Heaven’s Rulz?
Whatever person you’re conversing with prefers.
b&
an out:
God is not a linear-thinker or linear-knowerer. Humans think that they have to merely live their life on earth according to in order to get into heaven. In “reality” they have to live for all eternity according to . Therefore there is no evil in heaven since God has already judged you to be not worthy if you will *ever* commit an evil act.
However, free will exists in heaven since you wouldn’t be doing any evil while you were there, otherwise you wouldn’t be there. Of course that means that you aren’t free to commit evil while you are there since you wouldn’t be there if you did. Therefore we have to change the definition of free will for heaven inhabitants to exclude evil acts, unless they have the ability to be forgiven for those future acts by a heavenly priest, which God will have obviously taken into account otherwise you wouldn’t be there.
This is exhausting…
bah, forgot about html tags. There was supposed to be an ‘insert holy book name’ after the two ‘according to’.