Divine Freedom

C.S. Lewis writes in The Problem of Pain:

The idea of that which God “could have” done involves too anthropomorphic conception of God’s freedom. Whatever human freedom means, Divine freedom cannot mean indeterminacy between alternatives and choice of one of them.  Perfect goodness can never debate about the end to be attained, and perfect wisdom cannot debate about the means most suited to achieve it.  The freedom of God consists in the fact that no cause other than Himself produces His acts and no external obstacle impedes them—that His own goodness is the root from which they all grow and His own omnipotence the air in which they all flower.

This is a good articulation of something that I used to vaguely believe, but which I have come of late wildly to suspect is false, after all. I used to think that because God is perfectly good, He must always do the best thing, and that means that He has no freedom, or if you prefer, that He has freedom in quite a different sense than what we mean by it.  It followed-- and perhaps I found this unappealing-- that we, too, will have less and less freedom as we become perfectly good.  For a perfect mathematician, a problem in arithmetic can only be answered one way.  A beginner might answer the question-- "has the freedom to answer it," we may put it for the moment (though so to put it helps to suggest the fallacy here)-- in a dozen different ways.

Yet even in mathematics one can illustrate the fallacy.  To a beginner, the answer to "what is 2+2?" is "4."  A perfect mathematician, though he would hardly bother to exhibit his skills in such a frivolous way, could, if he liked, give a dozen different answers: two plus two equals the square root of sixteen, two plus two equals 2 sin pi + 2 cos zero, two plus two equals -2 times -2, two plus two equals the integral of f(x)=x from zero to the square root of eight, and so on.  The beginner might (if atypically stupid) answer "5," or "3," but to call these errors "freedom" is a bit misguided, for to be free is to do what one chooses, and the beginner presumably chooses to answer the question correctly but fails to do so.  If we move on to more difficult problems, say, determining the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle, a perfect mathematician may know a dozen different proofs of the Pythagorean theorem and choose between them at will, whereas the beginner is at a loss to answer the question correctly at all.

If we think of the art of living and the cultivation of the virtues, the same pattern holds.  The drunkard permits himself to take another drink; the sober man denies himself this freedom.  But, because he can trust himself to retain full command of his faculties, the sober man is free to marry, to hold a job, to start a business, or to accept a high-society dinner invitation, knowing that he will be in a fit condition to attend and not sprawling inert in a gutter.  Again, the liar permits himself to tell himself any tale that comes into his head, while the truthful man must reject many self-exculpating or romanticized variations.  But then, the liar will have trouble getting any tale believed, even if he does, on occasion, tell the truth.  Moreover, the liar will find that the resources of his imagination are, after all, limited, while the truthful man will find that the effort to prevent the inherent vagueness and tendentiousness of language from distorting his meaning, and the effort not to oversimplify or flatter himself or others, forces him to recognize subtleties and acknowledge mysteries that the liar will never discover at all.  In the end, he will learn that reality furnishes him with far more truths to tell than imagination furnishes the liar with lies to tell, and moreover, that truth is strange and interesting and varied and can be told in a thousand different ways, giving boundless scope for creativity and insight and inspiration.  Virtue superficially limits freedom but really expands it.

Might we not apply this, by induction, to God as well?  As there are more ways to be good than to be evil, as good is really interesting and evil really tedious, so might God not much freer than we?  I have never seen a person, through education or the cultivation of virtue, become less able to debate the ends to be attained or the means most suited to achieve them; it seems to me, on the contrary, that great minds differ in character more than small ones, and that the saints show greater variety than the sinners.  And does not God's creation exhibit just such a splendid variety of moods and colors (as I write this in autumn, colors are on my mind) and patterns?  I could be wrong... but if this is the "only possible world," how does it so persistently surprise us?

Comments

[kratom powder]

It's the most interesting read about liberation.