Dedicated to Fr. Paneloux SJ
I find myself more and more convinced that in order for God to give us free will, he also had to create a world that we are unable to fully understand. To put it in existentialist terms: to give us free will, God also had to give us the absurd.
If the world was completely comprehensible, then we would be able to know what things are and how they work, completely. This would mean that the world would dictate to us what we should do, or that simply knowing enough would make it clear to us what we should do or even will do. In any of these cases, free will would no longer exist in any meaningful form. Choices would be obvious and we would always be convinced to make the right choice.
The complexity and irrationality of the world makes free will not only possible and unavoidable, but it makes it a burden. We (if not as an individual, at least as a society) create the paradigm or system that we use to make sense of the world. They are not given to us by God (though they maybe more or less inspired by the Divine), and they are not inherent in the world. They are human constructs that are limited and imperfect. There have been others than the one we find ourselves in, and there are others outside of the one we are in at any time. There will be others still, as the current ones adapt and adjust to a changing world.
Even when we come to know things there is always the problem of putting value on those things and deciding how to use them. Sometimes this is done after we come to know them. Sometimes values and use were part of discovering things and coming to understand them. Often it is a mix of both before and after. (And they-- both the things, and the values and uses-- can always change as we go.)
If any of those things-- the things themselves, the values or the uses-- were definitively and clearly determined, they would limit our free will by giving us information that we had to take seriously and act according to. If they all were, they would completely override free will.
It then seems obvious that the world can't be logical or comprehensible to us if we are to keep our free will and be able to exercise it. We can misunderstand, make mistakes, make bad choices and disagree with each other because things are not clear cut and obvious, and they never will be because by design they aren't.
1 comment:
I agree with you, but I'll take it a step further.
From my math background, I am convinced that humans are only able to "see" or understand patterns. We are unable to comprehend truly randomness, and we cannot create randomness-- our brains bias anything we create to have some pattern in it by definition. Even so-called "random number generators" as part of computers suffer the misfortune of being shaped by our inherent biases; as a result, anything coming from a human is patterned.
From a math perspective, pi or the occurrence of primes appear to be random; or are they so long and complex that they are beyond the limits of human ability to recognize the pattern?
But there must be randomness around us-- things are too perfect, too miraculous, too much of a longshot to be entirely patterned. Nature cannot explain it; both the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom are subject to the same limitations that humans are.
To me, this randomness and inability for humans to create or do random provides support for God. It adds the incomprehension component-- the invisible hand, perhaps-- overlaying our otherwise human world.
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