by Tony Dekker (Version 1.0, December 2003). Dedicated to the friends with whom I have discussed these ideas: friends are precious gifts too.
Copyright © 2003 by Anthony Dekker. Permission is given to distribute this review freely for non-profit use, provided that it is not altered and that this copyright notice remains intact. See also http://members.ozemail.com.au/~dekker/essays
English Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION ®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. See http://www.gospelcom.net/ibs/niv/
The Christian Church has always believed in Providence: that God not only created the Universe, but that he upholds and controls every part of it:
“He makes springs pour water into the ravines;
it flows between the mountains.
They give water to all the beasts of the field;
the wild donkeys quench their thirst.
The birds of the air nest by the waters;
they sing among the branches.
He waters the mountains from his upper chambers;
the earth is satisfied by the fruit of his work.
He makes grass grow for the cattle,
and plants for man to cultivate—
bringing forth food from the earth:
wine that gladdens the heart of man,
oil to make his face shine,
and bread that sustains his heart.
The trees of the LORD are well watered,
the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.
There the birds make their nests;
the stork has its home in the pine trees.
The high mountains belong to the wild goats;
the crags are a refuge for the coneys.
The moon marks off the seasons,
and the sun knows when to go down.
You bring darkness, it becomes night,
and all the beasts of the forest prowl.
The lions roar for their prey
and seek their food from God.
The sun rises, and they steal away;
they return and lie down in their dens…
These all look to you
to give them their food at the proper time…
Praise the LORD, O my soul.
Praise the LORD.” (Psalm 104:10–22, 27, 35b)
Indeed, it is impossible to separate God’s Providence from His Creation. From inside the Universe, we follow the sequence of events from Creation to the present, and on to the future; but from God’s perspective outside of Time, He created the Universe (in space and time) as a single four-dimensional entity. This view of the Universe (due to St Augustine) has been more recently popularised by Stephen Hawking.
Not only is God fully in control of the entire Universe, but He decides in advance what He is going to do. For example, before Jacob and Esau were born, God had decided that Jacob, the younger son, would be favoured:
“Isaac prayed to the LORD on behalf of his wife, because she was barren. The LORD answered his prayer, and his wife Rebekah became pregnant. The babies jostled each other within her, and she said, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ So she went to inquire of the LORD. The LORD said to her, ‘Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you will be separated; one people will be stronger than the other, and the older will serve the younger.’” (Gen 25:21–23)
How can this total control by God over Creation be reconciled with human free will? Each of us makes free choices every day. Even now, Gentle Reader, you can choose whether you will continue reading this essay, or whether you will abandon it. Yet none of us humble creatures can surprise God, or cause things to happen against His will. Nothing has the power to constrain God. Yet God can choose to constrain Himself as a loving gift to us. The greatest such gift was the Incarnation: God taking human form among us, and experiencing Death and Resurrection. In this essay we attempt to resolve the apparent conflict between Providence and human free will, by examining four special gifts from God to us: the gifts of Predictability, Reason, Free Will, and Prayer.
The gift of Free Will would be of little value without the gifts of Predictability and Reason, which inform our choices by telling us the consequences. The gift of Predictability means that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning just as it did today, that rain will fall only if there are clouds, and that plants will grow if they receive the right amounts of water and sunshine.
Science allows the gift of Predictability to be studied in more detail; and even in ancient times, the time of sunrise (and its position on the horizon) could be predicted mathematically with considerable accuracy. Scientists like Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton gave a tremendous boost to the understanding of this gift, making possible a range of technologies that could be used for great good (and also for great evil). Modern technology relies on scientific predictions being accurate to many decimal places. We use this technology—computers, satellites, radios, etc.—often without thinking about the incredible precision of the science behind it.
The predictability of the Universe does, however, have limits, and in the 20th Century scientists began to discover what these limits were. Chaos theory became popular in recent decades with the discovery that microscopic changes in some natural systems could be amplified enormously over time. This is often called the “butterfly effect” for the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could eventually cause (or prevent) a storm in Europe. This effect is the reason why even the best atmospheric computer simulations in the northern hemisphere can only predict the weather a week or so ahead.
Quantum theory, which describes the physics of atoms and subatomic particles, indicates that unpredictability exists at the atomic level. This unpredictability can be amplified by the butterfly effect. To some extent this is visible when tiny grains of pollen are placed in water under the microscope. The pollen grains move around in apparently random ways as a result of the varying impacts of water molecules—a phenomenon called Brownian Motion.
The apparent randomness of atomic motion means that many “laws of nature” are essentially statistical in form: they provide an indication of the average behaviour of large collections of atoms, while allowing for a tiny possibility of something unexpected occurring, and without specifying the behaviour of individual atoms.
For example, an electron, given the choice of passing through two holes (with detectors behind each hole), will pass through one or the other in an unpredictable fashion, rather like the toss of a coin. The laws of physics tell us that if the experiment is performed many times, about half of the electrons will pass through each hole, but the laws of physics do not tell us anything about what individual electrons will do.
This subatomic unpredictability is partly the result of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which says that it is forbidden to know both an accurate position and an accurate velocity for a subatomic particle. Not only is impossible to observe both at once: the laws of physics actually leave one unspecified if the other is known. This principle, like all the other laws of physics, has technological consequences. For example, a laser produces light of unusually precise frequency, only because the mechanism of producing the laser creates a small but significant time uncertainty (in the duration of atomic excitation).
Philosophically inclined scientists are sometimes unhappy with quantum theory, because it seems to describe events which occur without a cause or reason. For example, with the election given the choice of two holes, there is no cause or reason for it to go through, let’s say, the left one. The most bizarre solution to this philosophical problem is the so-called “many worlds interpretation,” which suggests that the electron goes through the left hole in one Universe, and through the right hole in a (newly-created) alternate Universe. However, a solution that postulates an almost infinite number of Universes (being constantly created) seems worse than the problem it purports to solve.
Christians cannot accept the existence of truly random (in the sense of being uncaused) events. For Christians, all events are caused directly or indirectly by God, and in the case of seemingly random events left unspecified by the laws of physics, God must be the direct cause, as the book of Proverbs says about throwing dice:
“The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD.” (Proverbs 16:33)
Indeed, for Thomas Aquinas, the idea that everything must have a reason or cause was the essence of his famous five proofs for the existence of God. It may seem that the movements of individual electrons are too unimportant for God to be concerned about, but Scripture emphasises that nothing is too unimportant for God:
“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered.” (Matthew 10:29–30)
Since the laws of physics turn out to have considerable flexibility, miracles can occur without breaking them, as in the episode of Matthew 17:27:
“But so that we may not offend them, go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours.”
This was an extremely low-probability event, but such miracles do not compromise the gift of Predictability. The gift of Predictability does not prevent God in His Providence directing the Universe down pathways that lead to His desired end. Once in a while, the gift of Predictability is over-ridden by another gift, such as the Resurrection, but the gift of Predictability still remains as a guide for action. It does mean, however, that bad choices will have bad consequences, just as good choices will have good consequences. The gifts of Reason and Free Will leave this choice up to us.
The gift of Reason is part of humanity’s creation in the image of God. St Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) in her Dialogue expresses it this way:
“You said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image and likeness.’ And this you did, eternal Trinity, willing that we should share all that you are, high eternal Trinity! You, eternal Father, gave us memory to hold your gifts and share your power. You gave us understanding so that, seeing your goodness, we might share the wisdom of your only-begotten Son. And you gave us free will to love what our understanding sees and knows of your truth, and so share the mercy of your Holy Spirit. Why did you so dignify us? With unimaginable love you looked upon your creatures within your very self, and you fell in love with us. So it was love that made you create us and give us being just so that we might taste your supreme eternal good.”
The gift of Reason (together with the gift of Free Will) allows us to comprehend and take advantage of the nature’s predictability. Reason is a gift: St Augustine (354–430) expresses it as a divine illumination which does for objects of the mind what sunlight does for physical objects. The Islamic philosopher Abu Nasr al-Farabi (870–950) echoes this idea.
This concept of Reason as a gift explains a serious problem in the philosophy of science, which the physicist Eugene Wigner in a famous 1960 article expressed as “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.” The article begins with a short story illustrating the problem:
“There is a story about two friends, who were classmates in high school, talking about their jobs. One of them became a statistician and was working on population trends. He showed a reprint to his former classmate. The reprint started, as usual, with the Gaussian distribution and the statistician explained to his former classmate the meaning of the symbols for the actual population, for the average population, and so on. His classmate was a bit incredulous and was not quite sure whether the statistician was pulling his leg. ‘How can you know that?’ was his query. ‘And what is this symbol here?’ ‘Oh,’ said the statistician, ‘this is pi.’ ‘What is that?’ ‘The ratio of the circumference of the circle to its diameter.’ ‘Well, now you are pushing your joke too far,’ said the classmate, ‘surely the population has nothing to do with the circumference of the circle?’” (Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol. 13, no. 1, or http://www.shef.ac.uk/~puremath/whymaths/Unreasonable.html)
And indeed, the number pi seems to crop up everywhere. Roger Penrose, in his 1994 book Shadows of the Mind expresses the problem in terms of three worlds (similar to the three worlds of Karl Popper):
“rests on the profound, timeless, and universal nature of these concepts, and on the fact that their laws are independent of those who discover them… It has always been true that each natural number is the sum of four squares [e.g. 100=64+16+16+4], and it did not have to wait for Lagrange to conjure this fact into existence.” (Section 8.7)
The mystery is then how these three worlds inter-relate. How do worlds 2 and 3 inter-relate, when we think about mathematics? How do worlds 1 and 2 inter-relate when our mind acts on our body? And why does the mathematics of world 3 explain the physics of world 1 so well? Why are, for example, imaginary numbers so useful in quantum theory?
Modern materialist philosophy explains the mental world 2 as essentially an illusion or epiphenomenon, produced by physical changes in our brains. But not only does this impose a crushing determinism which denies free will, it also fails to solve the problem of the mathematical world 3. Evolution cannot explain this problem: there is no reason why brains evolved on the African savannah should come up with exactly the right kind of mathematics for describing the laws of physics.
In contrast, the Christian perspective places the mathematical ideas of world 3 in the mind of God, who both created the Universe and gave us a gift of Reason. Since God cannot lie (Psalm 89:34, 2 Timothy 2:13), of course this gift matches the way the Universe operates!
The relationship between worlds 1 and 2 relates to the gift of Free Will, which we consider next.
We have already discussed the obvious fact that we have free will. As René Descartes (1596–1650) said, this is self-evident. Reconciling this with God’s omnipotence requires recognising that free will is a gift: that God has created the Universe in such a way as to allow us to make choices. One famous analogy is with a human father who allows a young child to choose a birthday destination (the zoo, the beach, the museum, etc.). In this case it is clear that the child makes a genuine choice, while at the same time the result is a loving gift from his father. Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) said that when we decide to move our arm, it is really God who moves it, and in at least some sense he was right. As the Apostle Paul says (quoting the Cretan poet Epimenides):
“For in him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28a)
Reconciling free will with God’s knowledge of the future is a little more difficult. St Augustine, in his City of God, discusses Cicero’s objection that, if the future is known, we cannot be able to truly make choices. Augustine resolves this dilemma by pointing out that God is outside of Time: that God does not so much foresee as simply see each detail of the four-dimensional Universe (past, present, and future) as “one eternal and unchangeable and ineffable vision” (On the Trinity, XV, 7, 13). For the Universe was “not created in time but with time” (City of God, XI, 6), and only at the moment of Creation did Time come into existence. The fact that God sees us making choices does not prevent us from making them. As the philosopher Boethius (480–524) in his Consolation of Philosophy puts it:
“Since then all judgment apprehends the subjects of its thought according to its own nature, and God has a condition of ever-present eternity, His knowledge, which passes over every change of time, embracing infinite lengths of past and future, views in its own direct comprehension everything as though it were taking place in the present. If you would weigh the foreknowledge by which God distinguishes all things, you will more rightly hold it to be a knowledge of a never-failing constancy in the present, than a foreknowledge of the future. Whence Providence is more rightly to be understood as a looking forth than a looking forward, because it is set far from low matters and looks forth upon all things as from a lofty mountain-top above all. Why then do you demand that all things occur by necessity, if divine light rests upon them, while men do not render necessary such things as they can see? Because you can see things of the present, does your sight therefore put upon them any necessity? Surely not.” (V, 6)
(The translation here is by W.V. Cooper (1902). For a more modern translation, see page 165 of the Penguin edition.)
The gift of Free Will makes possible love (one cannot love without free will), but it also makes possible evil: the gift can be abused to make bad choices, and so it has been. Indeed, human free will has become tarnished, so that, as Paul says:
“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do… For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.” (Romans 7:15,19)
What can we say about the problem of evil? First, God shares the pain. He is saddened by the damage to His Creation, including to people:
“Say to them, ‘As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, O house of Israel?’” (Ezekiel 33:11)
God has also shared the pain at a personal level, by taking human form, and experiencing not only human life “from the inside,” but also an extremely painful death. God understands the problem, and if there was easy solution, He would have chosen it, as the prayer at Gethsemane makes clear:
“Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, ‘My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.’” (Matthew 26:39)
Second, we should be glad that God has not responded to evil by destroying the human race. Nor has He withdrawn the gift of Free Will and turned us into mindless robots. Dorothy Sayers (better known for her detective novels, but also a great Christian writer and scholar), in her essay The Triumph of Easter (part of the collection Creed or Chaos? from Sophia Institute Press) provides an insightful perspective on the personal aspect of the problem of evil:
“‘Why doesn’t God smite this dictator dead?’ is a question a little remote from us. Why, madam, did He not strike you dumb and imbecile before you uttered that baseless and unkind slander the day before yesterday? Or me, before I behaved with such a cruel lack of consideration to that well-meaning friend? And why, sir, did He not cause your hand to rot off at the wrist before you signed your name to that dirty little bit of financial trickery? You did not quite mean that? But why not? Your misdeeds and mine are nonetheless repellant because our opportunities for doing damage are less spectacular than those of some other people.”
Third, as an old Portuguese proverb says: “God writes straight with crooked lines.” That is, God can incorporate evil human actions into His plan, and still produce a good outcome. As Paul says:
“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28)
Or, as Joseph said, after he was sold into slavery by his brothers:
“You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” (Genesis 50:20)
Fourth, God has provided a “long-term” solution to the problem, through the Incarnation, the most precious gift of all. Paul completes his discussion of the tarnishing of free will by exclaiming:
“What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24,25a)
Finally, when we despair because there seem to be no good choices to make, there is the gift of Prayer, which we examine next.
Prayer was given to us by God as a gift of love:
“This, then, is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one, for yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.’” (Matthew 6:9–13)
This gift shows that God cares for us like a perfect father:
“So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:9–13)
Our prayers are not always answered—sometimes this is not possible, given God’s plan—but we can be certain that God, in upholding the Universe, takes our prayers into account.
Prayer is not only a gift of love, but also a gift of wisdom, for when we do not know how to choose, prayer allows us to lean on God. Doing this helps develop and grow our relationship with the God who gave us all these precious gifts. As St Teresa of Avila (1515–1582) says in The Way of Perfection:
“And when I say, ‘Our Father,’ it will be an act of love to understand who this Father of ours is and who the Master is that taught us this prayer.” (24:2)