According to the mainstream conception of God and free will, humanity has been blessed with the ability to choose what they will according to their own volition independent of governing forces, but I believe this notion quickly reveals itself to be rationally impossible. In my last post, I explain Eric Weinstein’s layer cake of human existence and his observation that claims regarding free will often entail category errors in that they attempt to apply theories from one level to the phenomena of other levels. (If you haven’t read that post yet I’d suggest doing so before continuing this one.) I end the article saying that the jury’s still out in terms of whether or not we have free will since we haven’t even solved the problem of consciousness, the prerequisite of will. However, if you posit the existence of an omnipotent and omniscient God, consciousness is no longer a barrier to answering the question of whether or not we have free will, but this is to free will’s demise.
The problem posed by the layer cake is one of measurement and scale. Scientific fields at each level investigate phenomena that arise out of the phenomena investigated at the level beneath it. Because the metrics of each level are attuned to the phenomena of the same level, they prove insufficient for analyzing phenomena that occur in other levels. For example, psychological metrics cannot be used to thoroughly investigate neurological networks and neuroscientific metrics cannot be used to thoroughly investigate psychological states since they are measuring things that occur at different levels of existence. The problem of consciousness stems from a current lack of applicable metrics, metrics I argue would be best constructed by sciences at the Self Level like psychology and cognitive science as these fields analyze the phenomena that arise from organic structures like our brains.
However, if the popularly conceived omnipotent God exists, His power would be present at all levels of existence. He would control the quarks and atoms at the Atomic Level, the chemicals and processes at the Organic Level, the thoughts and emotions of the Self Level, and the institutions and movements at the Social Level. The metric problem in terms of its impact on the free will debate disappears if phenomena at each level can be theoretically explained using the same God Power metric. We can’t currently explain emotions at the Self Level using the metrics of the Atomic Level, but we can explain both emotions and atoms with God’s power. How are emotions produced? God’s power. How do atoms do what they do? God’s power. God’s power is an answer that “works” at any level, but the fact that it is an incredibly unfulfilling one for many people is the reason effective scientific inquiry into the actual material processes at each level of existence has historically shared an inverse relationship with religiosity in society.
This universal God Power measurement has devastating implications for the character of God and the nature of the belief systems that revolve in part around His being “good.” In order to get to these, we must first assess the confoundingly misleading claim that God does not directly make bad things happen, but rather “allows” them occur despite wishing they wouldn’t. An omniscient God knows that bad events will occur before they actually occur. If the bad events do indeed occur, it’s because God either chose for them to happen or chose not to change the course of events He initially chose to institute at an earlier point in time (time may not apply to God but the point stands regardless). If Superman shoots a gun at you, he can still choose to use his power of super speed to catch the bullet and save your life or he can choose to “allow” the bullet kill you, but, either way, your death or continued life is obviously completely up to him. Even if you take the “allowing” objection to the extreme and claim God merely “sets the world in motion” and then decided to be entirely hands-off, He would still control the occurrence of every single event in the universe from the synapses in your brain to the explosions of stars. If He’s all knowing and all powerful, God would know all of the future results of all the potential initial universe designs before He chose to utilize one in particular.
Imagine God is looking at a set of recipes trying to decide which cake of all existing things He should bake. Since He’s all knowing, He would know exactly how each possible cake will taste when it comes out of the oven. Since He’s is all powerful, He could make any cake He wanted to. So, if God goes on to pick one particular cake recipe over the others, it’s because it’s the recipe for the cake He wants to make. Since God had full knowledge of how the cake would taste before it came out of the oven, He’s just as responsible for how the cake tastes as He is for mixing up the batter. Since God had full knowledge every event that would go on to occur in the universe would occur before He chose to create the universe, He’s just as responsible for the way every event occurs as He is for the universe’s initial creation. In short, if God created the universe, He is responsible for everything that happens in the universe since He could have initially chosen to create a different universe where different things happen.
Since an omnipotent, omnipresent God must be responsible for everything that occurs by definition, He’s responsible for every bad thing that occurs from your feeling pain from stubbing your toe to political corruption to mass genocide. Of course, He would also be responsible for every good thing like the love of family and partners to the hilarity of house cats to the beauty of art and music, but, if you accept that God plays just as much of a role in the good and the bad, you will be hard pressed to square that with your religious beliefs like the fundamentally good nature of God and the efficacy, necessity, and mercifulness of salvation.
Invariably readers may wonder “If God is all powerful, why doesn’t He have the power to create free will?” The problem is that, if you have free will in this sense, you have freedom from God’s power over you. But, if God has power over everything and everyone, it is impossible for you to ever have the freedom to act according to your own volition independent of God’s governing power. You would have to possess at least the same amount of power God has in order for you to be free from His power over you in the same way a marionette must possess sufficient power to cut the strings that control him in order to even possibly be able to perform actions that are uncontrolled by his marionettist.
Thus the jury on free will may still be out for secular society, but, in theistic contexts, free will has been sentenced to death.